In case you haven’t heard the news, the NCAA Tournament officially expanded from a 64- to 76-team field, adding eight more games to the first four. While I would argue it’s bad for the sport (something I’ll touch on below), corporate greed says otherwise.
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On the surface, you might think it’s good for mid-majors across America. More teams equate to greater opportunity, thus meaning more mid-major bubble teams that could potentially unseat the power programs as the proverbial “cinderella story.” However, that’s not necessarily the case, let’s dive into it!
Why the mid majors will be fighting an uphill battle:
Instead of just four at-large programs competing for just two spots, 12 will be playing for six spots. The other six spots will be for the lowest seeded automatic qualifiers, a nifty opportunity for those conferences to secure more units. But the overall gain is a net negative, not a positive.
As we’ve previously outlined, the teams who have benefitted the most from the current era of college basketball is the power programs. If the NCAA was its own individual stock market, the SEC, Big Ten, Big East, ACC and Big 12 would easily have the most shares. Those conferences wield the most power; they bring in the most money, and the NCAA, at the end of the day, is a business. And who better to call the shots than the biggest kids at the table.
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NIL has recklessly spread throughout college athletics. But the programs in those aforementioned conferences have, rightfully, benefitted the most with the use of the transfer portal. The Mountain West is a stepping stone. Long gone are the days where mid-major programs would have four-year college players who were perennial all-conference players. Now, they see greener pastures — figuratively, and financially — elsewhere, capitalizing monetarily. That has worked for several players.
The same goes for the tournament. An increased tournament only benefits those renowned programs, who play a bulk of its games against Quad 1 opponents. They receive a sufficient amount of credit by just showing up; as long as they keep it competitive, the NET — the primary metric to evaluate where teams nationwide are ranked — won’t penalize them more than, say, a program thrashing Quad 2 or 3 opponents. Point differential will always matter; the biggest wins against the biggest teams take precedent.
But now, the Mountain West and other mid-major programs will receive the short end of the stick. In the Mountain West’s case, their conference prestige gets deducted with San Diego State, Utah State and Boise State all departing — it won’t take an expanded tournament field to confirm that hypothesis. Though now the American Athletic, Missouri Valley, WCC (without Gonzaga) and A10, among others, will be fighting an uphill battle.
Fiscally, if those conferences aren’t able to generate enough units, the tougher it will be to keep those conferences together. Units in college basketball have a six-year timeframe. But at some point, something will have to give. And it’s not going to be power conferences — which made up for 36 of the 40 programs in the final NET rankings — bending the knee at the NCAA’s behalf. It’s going to be the rest of us sitting at the dinner table, fighting for the final scraps while the other five eat their four-course meals with some Ice Cream sundaes and Chocolate Mousse Cake to top everything off.
