NCAA Basketball: A look at a potential expanded 2021 NCAA Tournament

Possibility that an expanded tournament could lead to some permanent changes 

As I said at the beginning of this piece, the big argument against expanding the tournament, even for one season is that, after expanding it becomes increasingly more difficult to go back to a 68-team field. While that may be true, there are aspects of an expanded tournament that can be used going forward, whether or not the tournament has 68 teams or more.

The first thing I would like to see moving forward is all of the conference tournaments to finish up on Saturday, which would give the committee all of Selection Sunday to tweak and finalize the bracket without having to worry about contingency brackets and the like. This would also (hopefully) lead to less complaining as the bracket is revealed about why Team A got a bid but Team B didn’t, and why Team Y got seeded so high and Team Z so low.

The biggest thing for me would be something that many people have asked for since its inception in 2011, and that is to have the First Four consist of the last at-large teams in the field, moving all the 16-seeds to the main bracket, with the argument being those teams earned their spot when they won the automatic bid.

Another thing I would be in favor of seeing kept from my proposal is, instead of four games with four winners making up the first four, since it is a tournament, I would like to see two four-team tournaments to earn the last two spots in the bracket.

While the larger the tournament becomes, the logistical hurdles become more numerous and the quality of at-large candidates will likely decrease as well, there are some tweaks that can be made that would make the Big Dance even more enjoyable.