NCAA Tournament Expansion – What a Sham
The NCAA has announced its plan to expand the men’s basketball tournament to 76 teams, and if you’re looking for a novel way to screw the mid‑majors with their pants on, congratulations — you’ve found it.
In the current 68‑team format, the bottom three seeds in each region are always automatic qualifiers: the champions of the one‑bid leagues. That’s twelve conferences whose best team — teams that spent four months showing that they can play – gets tossed into the bracket as a formality. Miami of Ohio is the rare exception that proves the rule – the Redhawks’ undefeated regular season was rewarded with the last at large bid. This year, Ivy League Champion Penn was a fourteen seed, despite an amazing run through Ivy Madness. In fact, over the last five years, Ivy Champions have been seeded fourteen or lower four times.
Let’s look at the new format. Sure, half the play-in games are for bubble teams. But six of the additional games are for the twelve lowest ranked teams in the tournament. And that means that twelve mid-majors will need to play-in to the field of 64.
The NCAA has essentially created a First Four for twelve mid-major conferences, a velvet‑gloved way of saying: “Congrats on your great season. Now win an extra game just to reach the round everyone actually watches.”
Meanwhile, the expansion conveniently opens the door for a dozen more mediocre power‑conference teams. At this rate, we’re a few seasons away from the entire SEC or Big Ten making the field. Meanwhile a 27–4 MAAC champion has to survive a Tuesday night coin‑flip just to earn the right to be fed to a 3‑seed. And don’t think for a moment that the Ivy League might get a second bid with the new format – the NET eliminates the mid-majors by January.
And this is happening in the same era when the transfer portal already tilts the sport toward the giants. Rick Pitino said the quiet part out loud: Why recruit high schoolers when you can just raid the portal for ready‑made players?
Translation for mid‑majors: Go scout the high schools, find the gems, develop them, and then we’ll steal them when they’re good enough to matter. One mid‑major coach was even told he’d “done a great job getting his players ready for the next level.” He didn’t know whether to say thank you or take a swing.
Greed doesn’t bother me. Shortsightedness does.
We love the mid‑major that crashes the Sweet 16 — Princeton, St. Peter’s, Loyola, George Mason, pick your Cinderella. Those runs are the lifeblood of March. They’re the reason we watch. They’re the reason the sport still feels fair.
The NCAA just made those runs harder. Not by a little. By adding a whole extra layer of bureaucracy disguised as basketball.
At some point, the tournament risks becoming a closed ecosystem: the same four conferences, the same sixty teams, the same predictable bracket. And when that happens, when the charm and chaos drain out of March, when the little guys stop showing up in the second weekend, the question becomes unavoidable:
Will people still watch?