A case for tourney expansion, underrated transfers, and 2025's best roster flips

And much more in the latest Buzzer mailbag

Image credit: Alan Bykowski

So: tournament expansion.

As mentioned last week, I received a pretty interesting email from Alan Bykowski, resident bracketologist at old-school Marquette blog Cracked Sidewalks. Alan was responding to my piece from July 11 (and subsequent podcasts) when I surveyed the landscape for positive, proactive arguments in favor of NCAA Tournament expansion — searching for anyone who really thought expansion would be actively good rather than just OK in spite of itself — and drew blanks. No one loves tournament expansion, I wrote. Not true, Alan replied. Alan does.

In his 12-page pitch document for an expanded field, which he has sent to a broad swath of administrators and coaches, Alan assumes, as a premise, that expansion is inevitable, and that if you’re going to do a thing you might as well try to do it right. For him, that means skipping past 72 or 76 teams — which the author sees as intermediate and destined-for-further-expansion stopovers — and going straight to 80 in one fell swoop.

If the NCAA Tournament is to expand, it should not be in the piecemeal fashion that was seen from 1966 through 1985. It should be a lasting change that will stand the test of time. … There should be no half-measures like going to 72 or 76 and going beyond 80 is simply unnecessary and creates more complications than it solves. In the long run, 80 is as perfect as 64 was.

And you know what? He makes a fairly convincing case. Indeed, one key argument for his setup — which essentially blows out the First Four structure and puts new Tuesday and Wednesday games, a continued mix of 15/16 seeds and bubble teams, at each of the Round of 64 sites to minimize team travel — is his belief that it would make the Round of 64 better.

When the current field winnows to 64, there are 35 at-large bids and 29 automatic bids. On average, the metric team quality of the 35 at-large teams is better than the 29 automatic bids whether you use a predictive metric like kenpom.com or a resume metric like Wins Above Bubble. Metrically speaking, there are teams currently earning bids to the NIT, the Crown, or refusing postseason play altogether that perform better metrically than included teams at the bottom of the S-Curve.

A Field of 80 that eliminated the bottom eight from both the at-large and automatic pools, once arriving at a 64-team bracket of 41 at-large and 23 automatic bids, would be metrically stronger and provide better competition than the current 68-team field does. […] By eliminating more teams at the bottom of the S-Curve on Tuesday and Wednesday, the field quality on Thursday and Friday will improve, as opposed to the faulty conventional wisdom that says the field quality would be diluted by adding more teams.

Now this is how you make an argument! This takes dead aim at one of the strongest takes against expansion — that by adding mediocre teams you water down the field. It is very easy to make that argument. It feels straightforward. Casual fans get it easily. And it is still sort of true! (I actually watch and write about these soft bubble teams for three months out of every year I will spend alive on this planet. Truthfully, I begin to resent them.) The mediocre power league teams with sub-.500 conference records are always right there, staring you in the face, just as they are on the 80-team 2025 S-curve (including Cincinnati, Villanova, Nebraska, Wake Forest, blech) Alan created for the purposes of demonstration.

Still, people arguing in favor of expansion, even nominally — and there aren’t many of them! — typically admit adding a Villanova or a Cincinnati isn’t ideal, but that it’s worth it if you give a UC-Irvine or a San Francisco a shot, too. It’s always about accepting tradeoffs and minimizing damage. It is an inherently defensive pose. It eventually comes back to “hey, it won’t be that bad,” which won’t change anyone’s mind.

Alan, on the other hand, actually makes me think an 80-team tournament would be … OK? Maybe kind of great? No, seriously!