The tournament is expanding. God help us all
Bubble Watch, like everything else, is about to get extra weird
In 2010, I started writing Bubble Watch. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. My editor then assigned it to me, explained the concept, said he thought I would do a nice job with it. He also warned me: It was a lot. The first one, when so many teams were in play, would take more time than I thought. There would be some late nights along the way. It was part of the deal.
I didn’t care. I was 25. At the time, I lived with college buddies in Chicago. I threw myself into it. I gradually realized it was a great excuse to write about every team that mattered, that the yes-or-no of whether a team would make the tournament was, at least until early March, only a fraction of its purpose. It wasn’t important. But it also kind of was.
A few years later, my wife and I started dating. I moved to D.C. We got married. We moved apartments. ESPN laid off hundreds of writers two weeks before our first child was born. My first child was born. My contract ran out. I started at The Athletic. Two years later, a couple months before the pandemic, our second arrived. We moved again. Our third. The Athletic laid people off. I started a newsletter.
We have done so many other things — those billions of milliseconds of life that you take for granted in the moment and then well up over when your iPhone serves you a cheesy photo curation years afterward — that have nothing to do with college basketball or media or TV rights or any of the stuff I wanted to be angry about Tuesday night, when it became clear the NCAA was going to expand its men’s and women’s tournaments to 76 teams after all. We have lived life.
All along, Bubble Watch has been a part of it. All along, Bubble Watch has been more or less the same. Now it will change, because the tournament is changing. This is not important. But it also kind of is.
The news from ESPN’s Pete Thamel was, frankly, anticlimactic. Of course, you know? It’s been talked about for years — more than a decade, really, in various forms — and we all assumed it was going to happen at some point, and now it’s here.
The expansion, which has been discussed for well over a year, is on track to be formalized in the upcoming weeks and would begin this coming season. Sources indicated mid-May as a potential timeline for an announcement.
Though there are still steps to take in terms of approvals via various NCAA committees, a source indicated “those are just formalities.”
“They have what they need to move forward,” a source said.
Heated reactions have ensued. Most people don’t seem to like it. You have to hand it to Matt Norlander — and I mean this sincerely — because he is perhaps the most visible critic of tournament expansion while also working for the same corporation that, as he and Thamel reported, has been discussing this move with the NCAA for weeks. He went off in the CBS podcast with Gary Parrish Tuesday night, and then clearly had a strong editorial hand on a piece reacting to the news, with this subhed: “The NCAA Tournament is set to soon get an official major makeover, despite being a widely unpopular idea, sources told CBS Sports.”
I used to be 100 percent of the way there with Matt, as strident as any critic of the idea. In many ways, I still am.
Here’s why: It is clear this change is happening for purely monetary reasons. There is no legitimate competitive or entertainment-related justification for the change. It is happening so the NCAA can make a little more money on its sole cash cow now, and also much more money later, while also (at least temporarily) defanging the ever-looming breakaway threat from the Big Ten, SEC, and whatever Brett Yormark dreams up in the rare moments when he’s not obsessing over, like, business card stock.
The people who don’t stand to make a buck off tournament expansion almost universally don’t want it to happen. There are very few strong arguments for it. That is a powerful argument against it.
There are a few good-faith cases in the other direction. Ken Pomeroy was the first guest on my podcast last summer, around the time this topic was popping up; he was and presumably remains a proponent. It’s fair. He makes fine points. I respectfully disagree, but at least he has consistently articulated a position beyond “don’t worry, it’s fine, you’ll still like it anyway.”
But Ken and a few selected others aside, there have been very few good, reasoned, proactive arguments for expansion. I know; I’ve looked. I’ve tried to talk myself into it. I’ve really tried. (One other notable exception: Alan Bykowski of Cracked Sidewalks, whose enthusiastic expansion proposal I covered last year.)
Even the NCAA itself hasn’t really made a pitch. Charlie Baker is a former politician well aware of the need to create popular consensus for policy proposals — and he has overseen a rapid increase in the sheer speed of NCAA rulemaking processes, for which he deserves credit — and yet in the past two years he has said far less about this generational change to his organization’s marquee event than he has about the NCAA’s new eligibility plan in the past two months.
No one in power has attempted to argue this would be a better product. It is far more likely to be worse. The question is not whether, but how much. Hell, for sheer bracket legibility purposes — the thing that drives so much interest in the tournament in the days after Selection Sunday for casual fans especially — the First Four (er, “opening round”) is already a slightly awkward fit. Now it’s a total mess. Can you even fit the thing onto one 8 x 11? Where do all these extra games go? How much do they matter? How much will people care? Does anyone — other than a handful of conference commissioners — actually think this will be an improvement over what we currently have?
How much can you change a thing without fundamentally degrading it? How much mild long-term annoyance will your customers accept? Where is the balance between immediate financial gain (and, in this case, forced self-preservation) and organic health?
(It is also, not for nothing, frustrating timing: College basketball is in its best shape in decades, and very few coherently run organizations would be looking to make huge, potentially alienating changes right now. College sports are not coherently run, of course.)
Then, of course, there are the teams. This is the world we will now live in:
This is what a 76-team field’s bubble would have looked like in 2026. What do you see? Mediocre high-major teams. Expanding the tournament by eight teams might occasionally benefit the odd mid-major Indiana State, but more likely than not it is going to benefit teams like the ones you see above. As Will Warren noted Tuesday night:
Last three years combined using Bart’s 76-team model (which he would admit is makeshift but is likely pretty close to the truth): a combined 5 mid-majors added to the field with 24 additional spots. It’s not gonna help Tulsa and Belmont. It’s gonna help 19-13 Virginia Tech.
That’s the first point to hammer home: This is not a change being made to help plucky little guys get in the field. The tournament will be agnostically larger, but the same at-large trends we’ve seen in recent years will continue. The only differeAn nce is bubble teams will be (even) worse.
And, let’s be real, that last part is what I really care about. While the rest of the world frets about what this will do to the bracket, the strange and slightly damaged part of me that has been doing this ridiculous column for a decade and a half is more preoccupied with the process of figuring that bracket out in the first place.
Seriously: What the hell does Bubble Watch look like now? In a 76-team field, how far down this list do you go before you cut things off?
Wake Forest? Colorado! Arizona State?! The same Arizona State whose coach knew he was getting fired and giving existential press conferences in mid-January? That’s a Bubble Watch team now?
This is obviously ridiculous. It’s also — I’ll admit it — a tiny bit exciting. The idea of Bubble Watch is already inherently goofy, something you should take only so seriously. But the possibilities for chaos just burst wide open. It’s like the classic Darren Rovell tweet: I feel bad for the tournament. But this is tremendous content.
Or is it? I don’t know. We’ll find out together.
What I do know is that despite all of the things I’ve written about tournament expansion in the past, and all of the very obvious reasons it seems like a bad idea, and how grating the prevailing counterarguments have usually been — it won’t be terrible, and you’ll still like it because it’s still the tournament so just suck it up and stop freaking out — I wasn’t as angry as I thought I would be Tuesday night. I wanted to be angry. I felt like I should be angry. But I wasn’t, not really.
Maybe it was the inevitability; this was hardly a surprise. Maybe the long lead time removed the sting.
Or maybe it was just the passage of time. You get older. The world changes. Your life changes. Your plans change. Eventually you get used to it all — with the feeling of “thrownness,” as Heidegger called it, which is pretty much just how it feels to be alive right now — and eventually the things that once really animated you slide further back in the queue.
You engage strategically. You protect yourself. You ration feeling. You pick your spots. You spend your energy on what you can control and let the things you can’t — at least some of them, sometimes — wash over.
The NCAA Tournament is not going to get better. It will probably get worse. It will still be one of our favorite things in the world. It is annoying that these sentences are all true at once. This is not a cathartic reaction. It would be more satisfying to say the whole thing was ruined forever. It would feel better to be angrier.
But, strangely enough, we’re not. It’s just another change. 76 teams. Sigh. Fine. Bubble Watch — this consistent thing in my life for 16 years, this thing we do together here in our little corner of the Internet, this that is important, but also kind of not — will change along with it. Sure. Whatever. That’s life. Let’s go.