College Basketball: Should we shrink NCAA Tournament teams to 64?

The NCAA Tournament is at sixty-eight teams, but it does not have to stay that way.

The NCAA Tournament is a long way away, but there is some discussion going on about what should happen to it. Joe Lunardi of ESPN is in favor of increasing the tournament from sixty-eight teams to seventy-two (and not ninety-six) in order to save coaches’ jobs and increase opportunities for mid-majors.

The problem is that Lunardi is wrong. The problem with the NCAA Tournament is that it is too unwieldy, not too slim. The solution is not to grow to seventy-two teams, but to shrink the tournament back down to 64 where it should have been all along.

The first problem with the NCAA Tournament is the First Four in Dayton. I would scrap it entirely. Alternatively, I would reseed the games in Dayton, because they punish teams that earned their bids (usually the 16 vs 16 matchups) by making them play an extra game before the main event. I would like to see the First Four be a matchup entirely of at-large bid teams.

More appropriately I would dump it all together. There are thirty-two conferences. That leaves thirty-two at-large spots in a sixty-four man field. Instead of reaching deeper into the pool of participants, there should be more confidence in the strength of the last teams in the field. There will always be the sixty-fifth team that will complain just as the sixty-ninth team does now and the ninety-seventh team would at that extreme. In a smaller field, they would have less of a case to make.

Then there is the issue of coach retention. The theory is that more tournament openings give more coaches the NCAA appearances they need to keep their jobs. Except that the more the field widens, the more watered down of an achievement that becomes. On the other hand, shrinking the NCAA pool would force athletic directors to reconsider how much importance they put on the NCAA Tournament. It would lose some of its viability as the deciding factor.

Finally, there is the issue of mid-major schools. The problem that mid-major programs have had is the conference expansion and realignment. Former mid-major powers are now joining power conferences. Therefore the schools participating in the tournament have not changed very much, just the conference logo on their uniforms.

It is hard to argue that shrinking the field will be better for mid-major programs. One advantage they would receive is getting the low major champions out of the first four games. If one is going to advocate for the mid-majors, then it has to be toward scheduling reform and selection reform. The committee is experimenting with the latter as they will consider weighing road wins higher since mid-majors have trouble scheduling home and homes.

Scheduling interventions would have to occur at the conference and media level. The conferences could impose scheduling requirements to play a mid-major or two in a series, but schools jealously guard the revenues from playing at home. Alternatively, mid-majors could play each other in the ESPN bracket buster games that they used to do and try to get other games.

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Mid-major participation remains a stumbling block even in the current sixty-eight man bracket, and, therefore, streamlining down to sixty-four would only lose you the occasional VCU and Dayton. Drop the First Four, and make teams really earn it. Raise the bar. Don’t lower the entry requirement if you want the most exciting basketball.