No one loves tournament expansion

If the best argument is "eh, it won't be that bad," it's probably not a great idea

Photo credit: NCAA

On Thursday evening, the verdict arrived. An email from NCAA communications staff titled “Statement from Dan Gavitt Regarding Expansion” promised a final decision on the topic that has animated the college hoops world for weeks, an implicit unheard drum roll playing as the iPhone notification was pressed:

Was the NCAA Tournament going to get bigger?

The verdict? Um … maybe.

“The NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Committees met this week, with the men’s meeting taking place in Savannah and the women’s meeting in Philadelphia,” Gavitt said in the statement. “The topic of expanding the field for each championship was discussed at length but no decision or recommendation was made. The still viable outcomes include the tournaments remaining at 68 teams or expanding the fields to either 72 or 76 teams in advance of the 2026 or 2027 championships.”

This was a funny, and fittingly anticlimactic, end to the week. After all of the online anger, all of the well-written columns beseeching the NCAA not to self-destruct its crown jewel, and all of the doomy predictions sure the guillotine was about to drop, the respective NCAA basketball committees just … didn’t do anything. All outcomes still viable. We’ll see. Hung jury.

It was an important week anyway, if only for showcasing how ambivalent the arguments for expansion really are.

On Monday morning, in advance of this week’s NCAA meetings, CBS’s Matt Norlander published a scathing and impressively researched column detailing why the common reasons given for tournament expansion — “access,” “participation,” whatever — were red herrings. Yes, Division I has expanded in the past few decades, but those new schools don’t meaningfully impact the postseason anyway, while consolidated conferences with mediocre high-majors would stand to benefit the most from a 72- or (gasp) 76-team field.

Elsewhere, Field of 68’s Rob Dauster ran a Twitter poll, unscientific but useful, that asked whether respondents were in favor of an expanded tournament or preferred to keep the (ahem) field of 68. After 11,942 votes, 93.5% of respondents had voted “no.”

Fans hate the idea. Media hate the idea. Some coaches like it, others don’t, others don’t seem to care. Meanwhile, the best outside arguments put forward in favor of expansion — the ones that didn’t originate from athletics administrators, the same people who gave us ACC stalwart Stanford, trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist — essentially boiled down to: “OK, fine, it’s not ideal, but maybe it won’t be that bad.”

It was a week that revealed how few people truly want this.