Coaches want NCAA tournament field expanded again

The other tourney champs

Remember when a team won the NIT Tournament you could make the “We’re #65!” joke? Well, because of greed, we now have to say “We’re #66”. (This year, that honor goes to the South Carolina Gamecocks again. But with the NCAA tourney being as great as it has this year, the NIT champions don’t even merit their own blog entry.)

Back to the topic at hand, some coaches, most notably Jim Boeheim, want the NCAA tourney field to be expanded by “about 4 to 6” teams.

One of the most interesting parts of the book by John Feinstein called Last Dance is how the tournament went from 64 teams to 65. When the Western Athletic Conference got too big, 8 of the teams broke off to form the Moutain West Conference. Since the MWC met the criteria for an automatic tournament bid, there were going to be 31 conference bids in 2001, which would mean the at-large bids would go down by 1 to 33. However, money is always the most important factor and each at-large bid was worth at least $300,000 to a school.

The power conferences didn’t want to lose an at-large bid so they pressured the committee into coming up with a terrible solution. The NCAA decided to keep all 34 at-large bids and create a “opening round game” for 2 of the automatic conference bid teams. This results in a crappy opening round game between two small schools every year and the winner is then lead to slaughter against a #1 seed.

The current push by coaches is also money related. Because of the popularity of the tournament, coaches are judged on how often they make the tournament and how far they get. Well, an expanded field means more coaches can hang their hat on getting into the tourney. This results in better job security (if there is such a thing in college basketball) and also better contract negotiating leverage.

Of course, the tournament has been expanded in it’s history but going above 64 (65) teams is a terrible idea. Too much of a good thing.

Links:
[AP]: Coaches hope NCAA will expand tournament field