NCAA Basketball: Is NCAA Tournament expansion past 68 teams a good idea?

At the end of last week, the NCAA senior vice president of Basketball Dan Gavitt announced that the Tournament expansion talks have resumed. The committee is kicking the tires on a possible expansion, but Gavitt wanted everyone to know that nothing is yet imminent about the expansion.  The next time the NCAA tournament committee meets will be in late October and new committee chair Charles McClelland, who is the commissioner of the SWAC, will be tasked with opening this discussion back up

Why has there all a sudden been talk about a possible NCAA tournament expansion?  I say don’t fix what is not broken. Well, the NCAA tournament committee may not have much of a choice in the matter. In January, another committee, the Transformation Committee released a report with a slew of recommendations to make college sports better. One of the things was allowing 25% of the teams in sports with at least 200 participants to compete for the National Championship. College Basketball had 363 eligible teams last season. If they are going to utilize the 25% rule for the NCAA tournament that means that 91 teams would need to participate to satisfy that requirement.

There are a lot of college basketball coaches and fans who have many strong opinions on this subject. We all knew expansion was going to eventually happen because there is just too much money to be made.  I worry about the low and mid-major teams as it feels like this is a way to make sure they are less represented in a bigger tournament. I do have strong opinions on this topic. My thoughts and the thoughts of other basketball fans and writers are going to be reflected below. I was not able to get in contact with any coaches to interview but they have all strong opinions on this in the past.

I have provided you with an unbiased view of the opinions of many writers and fans as well opinions of coaches. My own thoughts will be included as well. Tournament expansion is going to be a hot topic forever and even though it is inevitable that the NCAA tournament will eventually expand but now doesn’t seem like the best time, especially after what we all just witnessed in March. I tried to make sense of every opinion in the paragraphs below. As you read this continue to keep in mind that the expansion is not imminent, so nothing has happened yet. As of now, the tournament is still 68 teams with 32 Auto Bids to the conference tournament winners.