NCAA Basketball: The potential disaster impact of losing autobids in NCAA Tournament
By Bryan Mauro
End of Mid-Major Basketball
It should come as no surprise that many of the mid-major and low-major schools that make the NCAA tournament do not have much of an operating budget and have to take buy games and the revenue acquired from the NCAA tournament helps their athletic departments thrive. However, let’s take this a step further. The NCAA tournament participants don’t just receive money for their school, they receive money for the entire conference in a revenue-sharing program that many small conferences live off for years.
When I say years, I do truly mean years. Let’s look at the revenue sharing for the NCAA tournament. Everything is broken down into units and each conference representative gets one unit for each game they play. Those units stay on the books for six seasons. The unit value for the 2022 NCAA tournament was $338,887 dollars and if they stay on the books for six years that means each conference would receive at least $2,033,322 overall for the one NCAA tournament game.
There is no stipulation for what that money must be used for. Many schools will use it for recruiting, arena upgrades, new floors, uniforms, and just general expenses associated with operating an athletic department.
This may also sound crazy it isn’t as easy for those schools to just go to a former rich alumnus and say please help us with a new arena. The key to remember here is that money goes to the conference. So, this year the Saint Peter’s Peacocks made $6,099.966.00 for the MAAC to be distributed among every team evenly. Yes, that money is distributed by the NCAA among every team evenly for 6 years. The NCAA tournament automatic bids are far more important to the small conferences, especially the one-bid leagues than they will ever be to the power schools.
Without the automatic bids into the NCAA tournament, another thing to consider is that there will be no more incentive for big schools to play smaller schools, thus eliminating buy games. If the power schools know that those teams are not going to make the tournament no one is going to schedule them because it would not be worth the investment.
These schools must have NCAA tournament money and they have to have buy game money to operate. They are not just able to get on a private jet and fly to go on recruiting trips. To be frank, neither are most power schools, but a lot of these low major teams can’t even afford to pay all their assistant coaches.
It isn’t always about winning a title, sometimes it is about getting to represent your league and make some money for the league to make things a little easier on them and yourselves. Every team should get that chance. That again is what makes this event the best event in sports.