A bigger March Madness? Many obstacles stand in the way

NEW YORK (AP) — The number was supposed to be 96.

The last time the NCAA seriously considered expanding the men’sDivision I basketball tournament a plan emerged to add 16 moregames and 32 more participants to grow that symmetricallysatisfying 64-team bracket.

The backlash that followed from college sports administratorsback in 2010 was strong enough to scrap the idea. A modestexpansion to 68 teams was approved in 2011.

“At the end of the day, membership sentiment was that they werenot unified in wanting to expand the tournament beyond 68,”recalled Greg Shaheen, the former NCAA vice president forchampionships.

For the first time in more than a decade, NCAA and collegesports leaders are committed to a serious examination of increasingthe number of teams allowed to compete in an event that has becomeone of the crown jewels of American sports.

The mere suggestion of messing with March Madness, whichgenerates hundreds of millions in revenue annually for the NCAA andits 1,100 member schools, is still met with skepticism by a lot ofbasketball fans and some within college sports.

Making significant changes in the near term will be difficult,if not impossible. There are logistical, financial and evenpolitical obstacles.

“That’s not to say we won’t give it it’s appropriate level ofanalysis and consideration, but there’s a lot of factors to beconsidered,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA vice president forbasketball.

Chatter about tournament expansion started more than a year ago,when the NCAA assembled a committee to look into the how DivisionI, the highest level of college sports, operates.

After more than a year of work, the committee’s finalrecommendations included expanding fields for all NCAA championship— not just basketball —- with a high level of participation toaccommodate 25% of competing schools.

The 25% recommendation is just that. Whether it is implementedwill be a decision made on a sport-by-sport basis. Committeeco-chair Greg Sankey, the Southeastern Conference commissioner, hastried to avoid being seen as pushing for expansion while alsopointing out some of the reasons to do so.

“You have teams that have been the 11-seed in the First Four,make it to the Final Four, the Elite Eight, the Sweet 16,” Sankeysaid in January. “We’re excluding highly competitive teams, becauseof the structure. Now what does that expansion or thoseopportunities look like? I have ideas, but I’m not going to throwthem out now since I don’t want to make headlines.”

Current selection protocols provide an automatic berth to thechampions of all 32 Division I conferences, plus 36 at-large bids.Those are mostly scooped up by the six strongest and richestconferences: the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12and Southeastern.

The Big Six secured 31 of 36 at-large bids on Sunday.

Along with prestige and opportunities to advance, bids havemonetary value. The NCAA distributes revenue to conferences basedon tournament performance, with conferences earning a unit for eachround one of its teams advances.

In 2023, a basketball unit will be worth approximately $2.04million over the six-year period in which it is paid out. So ifyou’re the SEC or Big Ten, each with eight teams in the tourney,seeing all of them advance a round means more than $16 million.

Coaches, whose job security often depends on making thetournament, have typically supported a bigger field.

“Since I coached at Valparaiso University I always was in favorof tournament expansion, because I thought there’s enough qualityteams,” Baylor coach Scott Drew said.

Drew’s magic number is 128, which would add another full roundto the tournament and include more than one-third of the 358Division I basketball teams.

Tom Burnett, the former Southland Conference commissioner whoalso served a stint as the head of the men’s basketball selectioncommittee, said he was open-minded but cautious when the topic oftournament expansion would come up.

“If there were a practical expansion plan that addressedwhatever needs to be addressed — except here’s where I draw theline: It can’t expand because my team didn’t get in,” Burnett said.There will always be teams that feel slighted if they don’t getin.

There is some concern outside the power conferences thatexpansion will result in even more at-large bids going tomiddle-of-the-pack teams from those leagues with strong mid-majorteams still getting squeezed out.

“If you’ve got a seventh- or eighth-place team in over aregular-season champion in a conference, from our perspective,that’s not the way to expand,” said Northern Arizona athleticdirector Mike Marlow, whose team made an unlikely run to the BigSky Tournament championship game before losing.

If the Lumberjacks (12-23) had beaten Montana State (25-9) towin the conference, the Bobcats — with 13 more wins than NAU —would be heading to the NIT instead of a first-round NCAA gameagainst Kansas State on Friday.

A-10 Commissioner Bernadette McGlade said she’s not concernedabout expansion favoring certain conferences.

“I think that everybody has a fair opportunity to share in thoseadditional opportunities. You just have to go after it, just liketeams and schools are going after it now,” McGlade said.

McGlade stopped short of saying she supports expansion, but sheenthusiastically supports doing a deep dive into thepossibility.

Others are open-minded, but will enter the discussion moretentatively.

“Let’s be careful because it’s really, really good right now,”Mountain West Commissioner Gloria Nevarez said. “So make surewhatever we do is additive, and not just doing something for thesake of expansion that might somehow take the tournament a stepback.”

The calendar alone is likely to limit expansion options. Anyplan that requires the NCAA Tournament to start earlier than italready does —- the First Four games tip-off Tuesday —- would alsorequire conference tournaments to end sooner and maybe even theregular season.

“We already start the regular season in early November wherehistorically some conferences have said it’s too early with allthat’s going on with college football and the like,” Gavittsaid.

Any expansion of the men’s tournament will almost certainly needto be done to the women’s tournament, too. The NCAA was slammed in2021 for not providing a similar experience for the men’s andwomen’s teams. An independent review concluded the association hadnot done enough to invest and promote the women’s tournament.

The women’s field expanded from 64 to 68 last year. While thedepth of competition in women’s basketball has unquestionablyimproved, has it done so enough to justify a large and costlyexpansion?

But the same thing can be said for the men’s tournament. Moreteams adds expenses for travel, lodging and possibly runningadditional sites.

Plus, it would almost certainly decrease the value of thoseperformance units, money that is is often the main revenue sourcefor mid-major conferences that don’t play major collegefootball.

“Cutting that by 10 or 11%, or whatever the differentcalculation could be, that’s actually really important. And it’svital to the stability of Division I,” Shaheen said.

When Shaheen led the last expansion effort, the NCAA was headingtoward the end of a media rights deal with CBS. A new format waspart of negotiations for the next deal.

That’s not the case now. The current $8.8 billion contract withCBS and Warner Bros. Discovery, part of an extension the NCAAsigned in 2016, runs through 2032.

“What role would broadcast partners play?” Gavitt said. “Wedon’t do anything without respect and communication with ourbroadcast partners, who we value significantly.”

While CBS and WBD will not publicly insert themselves into anyexploration of tournament expansion, their opinions are key andthey hold the rights to any men’s tournament games for nine moreyears. The NCAA cannot seek another partner for newly createdgames.

Contracts between the NCAA and the networks are not made public.But if the networks are under no obligation to pay up for moreinventory — and nothing indicates they are —- then all thisexpansion talk might be nothing more than preparation of the nextTV deal.

“It’s a complicated thing,” Shaheen said.

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AP College Basketball Writer John Marshall contributed.