Buzzer Mailbag: Submit questions here!

Soothe the offseason dog days with hoops Qs and As

Photo credit: Marcin Wichary, Flickr

August has only just arrived, and the biggest — and quite possibly only truly meaningful — college basketball news of the month has come and gone already.

On Monday, NCAA Senior Vice President of Basketball Dan Gavitt announced the NCAA was no longer talking about expanding the NCAA Tournament in 2026, but that it would continue mulling the idea in advance of the 2027 event:

“Expanding the tournament fields is no longer being contemplated for the 2026 men’s and women’s basketball championships,” Gavitt said in a statement. “However, the committees will continue conversations on whether to recommend expanding to 72 or 76 teams in advance of the 2027 championships.”

Much like in July, when the NCAA basketball committees met in Savannah, Ga. to chew on expansion, only to decide they’d made no decision and would keep talking about it in perpetuity, the news is both anticlimax and relief. The groundswell of popular opinion that mobilized against expansion this summer surely had something to do with the NCAA’s ambivalence, and news that the NCAA isn’t charging headlong into a bigger field feels like a victory of some kind. But the organization is hardly ruling out expansion in the future, either. People can always change their minds, particularly if the pay-fors become less opaque.

Speaking of expansion, last week (during the annual Brennan Family beach trip) I received an interesting email from Alan Bykowski, a bracketologist for stalwart Marquette blog Cracked Sidewalks, who has created a 12-page plan for an 80-team tournament that represents probably the best full-throated articulation of what an expanded tournament could or should look like — and why it might actually be a good idea.

Rather than simply write about Alan’s plan (and the positive feedback he says he’s received from a variety of college athletics administrators and coaches), I figured it would be fun to roll his proposal into a mailbag alongside any other expansion-related topics you guys might be interested in, as well as the usual run-the-gamut hoops thoughts.

So, as is tradition, consider this your formal invitation to submit your mailbag question in the comment section. (Reminder: Paid subscribers can comment on posts, and thus participate in the mailbags — please consider a paid subscription today!)

Last but not least, this week’s episode of the Basket Under Review Podcast (presented by Homefield!) featured analyst Matthew Winick, whose transfer portal rankings have become one of the best and most in-depth pieces of offseason content around. I talked to him about the art of assessing transfer classes, his sicko origin story, and why he’s so high on Iowa (among many, many teams discussed).

The feedback on the early podcast episodes has been really encouraging and steadily gaining steam. Check it out at your usual podcast places or on YouTube:

See you in the comments, and I’ll be back with a mailbag in the next couple of days. Thanks as ever for your support!