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As we look forward to the start of another college basketball regular season, we can’t help but wonder what the future of the sport’s postseason will look like.

NCAA Tournament expansion has become a hot-button preseason talking point, with notable figures like SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and his ACC counterpart, Jim Phillips, expressing support for the idea. Several prominent coaches have chimed in as well about 80-, 96- or even 128-team fields. While enthusiasm for going beyond the current 68 teams still appears low among fans and pundits, there is some real momentum behind the scenes for a bigger tournament — and potentially, bigger bucks.

So we decided to convene Eamonn Brennan and Brian Bennett, authors of The Athletic’s Bubble Watch and Bracket Watch, respectively, to map out what expanded brackets might look like and to offer their thoughts on what it all means.

Bennett: I think it’s instructive to examine which additional teams would have made an 80-team NCAA Tournament in 2022. The selection committee told us who the first four teams out of the field were, in order: Dayton, Oklahoma, SMU and Texas A&M. Using the same principles for our weekly mock brackets — and the NIT seeding as another data point — I think the rest of the 2022 field would have gone like this (record, NET and KenPom ratings as of last Selection Sunday):

So, Eamonn, what are your first impressions after seeing this group of alternate-universe NCAA Tournament squads?

Brennan: Where to begin. Remotely regular readers will know (and first-timers can go ahead and take a wild guess) that I’m not at all in favor of expanding the NCAA Tournament, and you can see the core reasons beginning right here. In the course of a Bubble Watch, you tend to get really familiar with the 10 or 12 or 15 “next teams out,” so to speak. Familiarity breeds … well, not contempt in this instance, necessarily, but often a very distinct sort of exhaustion. By the time Selection Sunday rolls around, these teams have had plenty of chances to get the job done bid-wise, and if they haven’t by then, they typically only have themselves to blame. Rarely are you worried the bracket is worse off without them.

There are maybe two teams in this list that I would have been really interested in having in the 2022 NCAA Tournament. The first is Dayton, which had a very solid season save the one week in November it lost three straight to UMass Lowell, Lipscomb and Austin Peay. Without that outlier, the Flyers would have gotten in, and arguably deserved to anyway. So, OK, sure. There’s one.

As for two — and again, I said maybe two — Texas A&M? The Aggies played incredibly well down the stretch. They were a super fun team late in the regular season and all the way to the end of the SEC tournament, playing well enough that they would have added some value in the bracket, at least in the First Four. But here’s the thing: The whole season counts. It should count. A&M scheduled like a young team that didn’t expect to make the field and then lost 9 of 10 in the heart of the season. It was hard to get too upset on their behalf.

If not A&M, maybe you’d say Wake Forest, but again: Theirs was more of a fun story than an overwhelming case that I need to see this team in a tournament field. And the rest of the teams here — having watched a lot of them all year — just, no. No thanks. And this is the smallest expansion structure people are discussing right now?!

What do you think, man? Is there anything here that really sticks out to you? Sure, I expected the bigger formats to be really bad, but I already feel like I’m going crazy at 80.

Bennett: So this list, other than the very principle of it all, doesn’t get my blood boiling. Could some of these teams get hot and win a couple games in the random number generator that is March Madness? Sure. Why not? Xavier did manage to win the NIT (or so I was told; I have no interest in that event). Texas A&M was playing great basketball down the stretch. Wake Forest had the ACC player of the year (Alondes Williams) and a first-round NBA Draft pick (Jake LaRavia). I also like seeing the (coughs loudly) “access” for non-power teams like Dayton, VCU, North Texas, BYU and Saint Louis.

But the bottom line is, as you said, these teams had endless chances to prove themselves worthy (or schedule well enough) to participate in the national championship tournament, and they didn’t get it done. Period. Why play a season if you can limp along like Florida and Virginia, never showing any consistent winning ability whatsoever, and still get in?

What impact, if any, do you think a field like this would have had on the sport? Would Travis Steele have kept his job at Xavier? Are we looking at Virginia differently going into this year?

Brennan: Xavier, ha. Never has an NIT win gone quite so far under the radar. Talk about a team that looked totally dead to the world by Selection Sunday. It seemed pretty clear they’d actually stopped trying altogether. Very odd.

Maybe Travis Steele sticks around if he makes it, but it depends on how Xavier actually does. One win in this format isn’t worth quite the same as one win in the current bracket, and we already devalue First Four wins (and, frankly, first-round wins that lead nowhere) pretty steeply in the high-major college basketball conversation as it is. Maryland fans were (understandably) mad that Mark Turgeon didn’t get to the second weekend more than once and never advanced past the Sweet 16. But, of course, if you’re in the field, you’ve got a chance to do exactly that, and that contract extension starts to take care of itself.

As for Virginia, maybe if Armaan Franklin gets hot and erases the memory of his horrendous shooting season you can start to see a longer-term case for reevaluating Virginia year over year — but I’m already reasonably high on them for 2022-23 without having to retcon their very average 2021-22 output because of a couple hot weeks in March (or especially just their inclusion in the bracket in the first place).

Bennett: Yeah, coaches probably think this would be good for job security. But I doubt a whole lot of high-major ADs would be impressed with getting in as the 75th team and then losing right away. Maybe a run keeps Steele in Cincinnati, but Xavier probably still fires him for the chance to bring Sean Miller back. I mean, Steele got canned the day after the Musketeers won their first-round NIT game. That was some Corleone-level settling-of-family-business stuff. I guess teams like Saint Louis and North Texas could hang a banner. Woo!

My biggest issue — you know, beside the whole ruination of the world’s most perfect sporting postseason for unseemly and unnecessary reasons — is how an 80-team tournament even works. You could seed the whole thing 1-80 and have the bottom 32 teams play, feeding into the top 48. But that means pretty much every one-bid league auto-qualifier is stuck in that first round, and you risk cannibalizing Cinderellas. (Does Saint Peter’s happen if the Peacocks had to play an extra game? Who knows?) You could make that initial round of 32 all at-large teams, but I doubt the power brokers want to see their high-major programs in that spot. You could do a series of play-in games, but that gets unwieldy fast and would be hard for the casual fan — you know, the one that basically supports the entire NCAA enterprise by tuning in during March — to follow who’s where.

So how would you handle a Field of 80? (Gosh, that sounds so wrong on the tongue).

Brennan: I would simply not.

Seriously, of the ideas you listed, the all at-large first 32 is the most palatable option by some distance. If the high-major conference commissioners of the world want to crowbar more of their mediocre teams into a Frankenstein field, they should expect the price is that more of them will be in this area of the weird bracket that ensues. But you’re right that there are no graceful ways to actually set this thing up.

Bennett: Well, how about a 96-team field, as some have suggested? It’s an easier format to figure out — an extra round of 32 that leads into the traditional 64-team bracket. It just requires you to squint and find 16 more teams worthy of inclusion. Here’s how that might have looked last year:

And … look who’s here with a question for you:

Brennan: HahahahahahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Sorry. That was me becoming the Joker.

As we’ve sort of alluded to already, a really smart defender of tournament expansion would lean heavily on the “but look at all the mid-majors we could squeeze in!” line of inquiry. Frankly, I shouldn’t even say this, because I don’t want to give the Jim Phillipses of the world any actually potentially effective public relations work in this space, but that angle would at least be an interesting take to make to the die-hards. Belmont and Missouri State and Furman and so on had pretty nice seasons, relative to their leagues’ positions in the college basketball pecking order, and it would hardly be the worst thing in the world to see them in the sport’s marquee postseason at the end of the year.

Unfortunately, that still wouldn’t be enough to win me over, because just look at the rest of this nonsense. Oregon, Brian. Oregon. We watched Oregon play a lot last year. They were on the Bubble Watch for a good long while before they totally melted down at the end of the season, and frankly, I probably gave them a bit of an easy ride for a couple of weeks because I just assumed Dana Altman would figure it out and get them playing well in time. Never happened, and in fact they were probably the worst team I regularly watched, just a totally dispiriting mess of individuals wearing the same clothing, sure, but remotely resembling an actual team. Oregon was not just a bad basketball team; the Ducks were actively depressing to me. And that’s what these guys want to see when the CBS theme hits full volume on the first 12:10 p.m. ET time slot of the first day of the NCAA Tournament? That’s what will get the blood pumping? It’s a farce.

The simple-seeming structural “benefits” of this formula — such as they are — are totally outweighed by the fact that to get there you have to include some truly bad college basketball teams. Who wants to watch any of this?!

Bennett: Sickos and gamblers, would be your answer. Heck, I admit I would watch all of it, including No. 1 seed Gonzaga vs. No. 24 seed Texas A&M-Corpus Christi or whatever. And look, every one of these teams had some moments. My final team in, Florida State, beat Duke and Notre Dame and swept Miami. Of course, the Seminoles also went 13-14 in the rest of their games and got annihilated by Syracuse in their lone ACC tournament contest. And, hey, the 62-win Pittsburgh Pirates swept the 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers in a three-game series in L.A. this year. I don’t recall a lot of people arguing that baseball should have added 10 more teams to the playoffs.

Not only would this create some bad basketball, but it drains drama from the sport. The regular season, obviously, suffers. But maybe more importantly, what brings eyeballs to college basketball in February and early March are arguments over who is on or off the bubble. You lose almost all of that when anyone with a pulse gets in. Why watch conference tournaments? Is CBS going to have cameras on the teams hoping to sneak into 96th place during the selection show? Can you even imagine doing Bubble Watch with this format?

Brennan: It is very, very difficult to imagine. I would definitely have to try a 96-team Bubble Watch once, just to do the bit and see how absolutely awful it would be, but in reality the whole column would obviously have to change, or maybe just get put out to pasture altogether. Beyond the joke of the first one, it would be pretty hard to stomach. South Carolina vs. Florida State on the bubble. Wow. Who even cares?

I just think we need to be honest about what college basketball is, why people are interested in it, and what really matters to them. Frankly, the number of casual sports fans that tune into college basketball before March is pretty small. And the number of even serious fans of college basketball that regularly watch two teams outside the top 50 in the regular season — let alone outside the top 100, or 150 — must be vanishingly tiny. The stakes of the dance, the stories that emerge, are fueled by the fact that every team has had to earn their right to be there across an entire season and/or a diamond-pressure conference tournament. People want to watch Cinderella because of the way the tournament is set up, because it’s so hard to get there, because every possession matters so much. Nobody wants to watch the ACC tournament’s Tuesday afternoon fixtures and be told they are actually the most important competition in college sports. Nobody is going to pretend. They’ll just think the NCAA Tournament changed too much, lost what was special about it, and doesn’t deserve their attention beyond being anodyne content fodder for people who’ll bet on anything that moves.

Hmm. I wonder how many locks the first 96-team Bubble Watch would have in it …

Bennett: My 96-team Bracket Watch would just be: Eff, it, everybody’s in.

Oh, but we’re not done yet. Some, like Baylor’s Scott Drew, say they want a 128-team tourney. Missouri’s Dennis Gates advocated for doubling the field which, if my math is correct, means 136 teams. That would have looked a little something like this last year …

Nah.

I simply don’t have the stomach to bracket that many teams. Let’s just concede that outfits like Drake, Wichita State (15-13!) and Washington (17-15!) would likely have gotten in. I suppose regular-season conference champs who didn’t win their league tournament would have to be appeased, so say hello to Toledo, Iona, Liberty, Cleveland State, Towson, Alcorn State and the like. And if officials are willing to go this far, maybe they’d drop the requirement to have a winning record, so we could have gotten Kansas State (14-17), West Virginia (16-17), Syracuse (16-17) and other flailing high-majors in the dance. Obviously, Syracuse would then have gone on to the Sweet 16 somehow.

How many times have you thrown up, Eamonn?

Brennan: Several. This is actually the sicko stuff. It’s almost not worth discussing. It really does get close to the point where you just throw your hands up, invite all of Division I and throw the rest of the season away. What’s the point anymore?

It can’t be said enough: This wouldn’t just make the tournament bigger. It would make it bigger and worse. That’s the key that I want to drive home: This isn’t just more teams in the field, or more inventory for TV, and everything else stays the same. It would screw with the schedule of the regular season and the tournament (which is perfect and important to the whole vibe in and of itself, too) and most of all it would water down the entire event to the point that it would become almost unrecognizable from what we know and love. We joke about Syracuse, but yeah: Some of these teams would win a few games. They always do. And instead of being fun stories one or two wins away from playing on the biggest stage in college sports, they would be just another couple of random results in the endless yearly churn of massive NCAA Tournaments. A 28-seed won again? Ho-hum. Meh. The whole thing would become bloodless and sterile, even when it was doing the exact thing (crazy upsets in early rounds!) the current tournament does better than anything else in sports — or entertainment of any kind.

Bennett: The scheduling problem is a big deal. The Masters isn’t moving (those dudes seem to like their traditions), so college basketball would have to squeeze another weekend in somewhere on the calendar to accommodate extra rounds. Does that mean starting the season in October, when the sport is already wildly overshadowed by football and, like, pumpkin patches? Or beginning the tournament the first week of March and bumping back conference tournaments to February? Ugh. A field of 80 or 96 could conceivably begin the same day as the First Four does now at the pod sites, but that would a quick turnaround for a whole lot of teams — and give you precious little time to fill out a bracket for your pool, which is like 90 percent of the fun of March for lots of folks.

I can only hope the jokers who want to befoul the tournament for a few extra nickels actually look at what kind of teams would make it in this format and recoil in shame. But I fear they have no shame, and if they’re going to keep expanding Division I to infinity — seriously, 363 teams is an absurd amount — then tournament expansion is probably also inevitable. If they wanted to add play-in games for all the 16 and 12 seeds, I suppose I could tentatively climb on board. That gets you to 72 teams and doesn’t really change much substantially (except I guess the First Four becomes the Early Eight? We need to workshop that).

Is there any NCAA Tournament expansion you would accept?

Brennan: I’m convinced the 96-team and beyond talk is a psy-op to get me to accept any expansion whatsoever, so that I can feel grateful it’s only a few teams bigger than the tournament I actually liked. In retrospect, 80 didn’t seem so bad! I’m sure a mild expansion would be amenable in the long haul, but honestly: Can we just keep the thing the way it is? It’s really, really good. Like, amazing. Would be hard to improve it, short of a return to 64. So … maybe don’t?

Some family brought my wife and me some chocolate from their trip to Switzerland last week. It’s been made the same way for hundreds of years. It was incredible. Perfect, maybe. Some of the best chocolate I’ve ever had. There are lots of things in this world that reached their peak form a long time ago — people who figured out the optimal way of doing things and then stuck to that way for as long as other people were interested in exchanging marginally more money for it.

In a world of unthinking sports bloat, can the NCAA Tournament please be one of those things? Just … don’t do anything. It’s not a lot to ask.

(Top photo: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)