Three weeks of sports nirvana commenced at 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, when CBS unveiled this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket. The beauty of March Madness is knowing that some team is about to become this year’s Florida Gulf Coast or Fairleigh Dickinson, while accepting it’s impossible to predict who it will be.
Or at least I thought it was impossible — until I read a couple of recent interviews with Greg Sankey.
The SEC commissioner has been leading the charge over the last two years to expand the NCAA Tournament beyond 68 teams, and the movement is gaining steam. The Athletic’s Dana O’Neil reported earlier this month that “a 72- or 76-team field seems the most likely outcome.” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said last week, “I think 76 is a number that’s been floated.”
“You have to give credit to teams like Saint Peter’s a couple years ago, Florida Atlantic’s (Final Four) run,” Sankey told The Athletic’s Kyle Tucker on Saturday. “There are great stories and we certainly want to respect those great stories, but things continue to change. There’s nothing wrong with a review.”
That’s right, folks. We need to review the most wonderful, magical sporting event in the country to be sure we aren’t leaving out behemoths like 18-15 Villanova and 19-14 Kansas State, the kind of teams likely to earn one of those eight extra spots.
We know why Sankey, Yormark and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips want tourney expansion: They know their schools will be the most likely to benefit. Which becomes even more paramount starting next year, when their leagues are all expanding to 16 members or more. But Sankey in particular is trying to sell us with a straight face this is something that would actually make the tournament better.
In an interview with ESPN.com last week, Sankey cited UCLA’s 2021 run from the First Four to the Final Four and 2018 First Four team Syracuse making the Sweet 16 as evidence there are many more of those power-conference feel-good stories being denied their One Shining Moment because they have to save a spot for A-Sun champ Stetson.
“That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive,” he said. “We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from smaller leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is complete hogwash. How do we know this? For one thing, actual on-court results from Sankey’s own conference.
From 2013 to ’17, the SEC averaged just 3.8 tournament berths per year, much to the chagrin of the conference. But a concerted effort by the league’s schools to revamp scheduling and invest more in the sport paid off. Over the next five tournaments, from 2018 to ’23, the SEC jumped to 7.0 berths per year.
So what happened when the committee started taking more teams from farther down the SEC standings? The conference’s winning percentage in tourney play dropped from .655 to .539.
Highly competitive? More like highly mediocre.
But it’s not just the SEC that has performed worse in recent years. The ACC (from .663 to .568), Big Ten (.605 to .563) and Pac-12 (.574 to .571) all saw their numbers drop in that span, too. Only the Big 12 (from .500 to .631) improved among the power football conferences. Those numbers match the popular perception that the sport is not as talented at the top as it used to be.
Meanwhile, over that same time period, those cute little Cinderellas at the bottom of the bracket got better.
From 2013 to ’17, automatic qualifiers seeded No. 11 or lower combined to win 16 games, with just one, No. 15 seed Florida Gulf Coast in 2013, reaching the Sweet 16.
From 2018 to ’23, that win total rose to 24, highlighted by No. 11 seed Loyola Chicago’s run to the Final Four in 2018 and No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s Elite Eight appearance in 2022. In the first 33 years since the field expanded to 64 teams, no No. 16 seed toppled a No. 1 seed, but since 2018 we’ve now had two (UMBC over Virginia and Fairleigh Dickinson over Purdue). A No. 15 seed has reached the Sweet 16 in each of the last three seasons (Oral Roberts in 2021, Saint Peter’s in 2022 and Princeton in 2023).
Sankey is making his case on behalf of the big boys at a moment in time when the little guys are beating the big boys more frequently than ever.
The most legitimate point he and others in the sport make is that the number of tournament berths has increased by just four over 40 years while the number of Division I schools has swelled by nearly 60. It’s now at 362. In January 2023, the NCAA Transformation Committee (co-chaired by Sankey) recommended that the postseasons of all D-I sports sponsored by more than 200 schools include at least 25 percent of the participants. Men’s basketball is currently just under 19 percent.
So, let’s do it. Let’s grant those commissioners their wish and expand the field by eight.
But let’s use it to reward the top teams from outside the power conferences.
The NCAA selection process is already stacked against those teams as it is because they get so few chances to prove themselves during the regular season. By mid-March, the committee has four months of resumes to tell them that Oklahoma (4-12 in Quad 1 games) and Virginia (2-6) aren’t deserving of a bid. Whereas Indiana State, the 28-6 Missouri Valley Conference regular-season champs, played just two power-conference foes all season and therefore had only a narrow shot at an at-large berth.
But the Sycamores were good enough to finish 29th in the NET rankings, higher than several at-large teams the committee ranked as high as a No. 8 seed. They’re exactly the kind of team that might go on a run if given the opportunity. Ditto for Sun Belt regular-season champ Appalachian State (27-6), Ivy League regular-season champ Princeton (24-4) and Big West regular-season champ UC Irvine (24-9).
No one has yet articulated how a 76-team tournament would work, but presumably the bottom 24 would play a “first-round” game for the right to join the top 52 (the No. 1-13 seeds) in the main field. If so, that group would include nearly all the one-bid league representatives, thus slashing the Cinderella schools in half before they’d even get a chance to knock someone off.
Because why would America want to watch a 4 vs. 13 game between Duke and Vermont when they can get one between Duke and Oklahoma?
I’m not here to argue March Madness has to forever stay exactly the way it is today. As Sankey said, “There’s nothing wrong with a review.”
Hopefully that review concludes that the last thing March Madness needs is more underwhelming power-conference teams.
(Photo: Christopher Hanewinckel / USA Today)
