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I hope all of you enjoyed the first day of March Madness! I can’t say I’m a big fan of watching my alma mater lose in the very first game of the day, but everything else was excellent. You had a few upsets, a 16 seed putting the fear of God into Duke for 30+ minutes, some goofy crowd shots, an excuse to blow off an afternoon of work…everything you want out of March.
I understand that not everybody is thrilled with the concept of the tournament potentially expanding. My colleague over at NIL-Wire, Kyle Rowland, is deeply against the idea, for example, as are most of the college basketball scribes that I trust the most. I get that.
But you know who isn’t against that idea? NCAA President Charlie Baker!
In this interview with the FanDuel Sports Network (also: lmao), Baker notes:
“If you talk to most of the membership and ask ‘what percentage of the schools would you like to see in the tournament?’ Most people would say at least 20%. Basketball right now sits at about 19% and if you had four or eight teams to the tournament it sits at about 21%. … Division I is a lot bigger than it used to be. That 19%, 20%, 21% of schools in the tournament is a reasonable place to be. The other thing I would say is I think it’s really important for us to retain access to the tournament to the so called ‘mid majors’ and the non power conference schools. … If you look at what Miami (OH) went through trying to get some of the power conference schools onto their schedule, or some of the higher ranked teams onto their schedule this year after they won 25 games last year, it just sort of speaks to some of the challenges that are associated with that. I think if you made the tournament a little bigger, gave people a little more confidence, it would be ok to lose a game or two along the way. … I think if we can make the logistics work and the basketball committee sign off on it, I think it would be worth doing.
(transcription via D1.ticker)
I’m not normally in the business of co-signing what the suits in Indianapolis are saying, but I do think Baker has a point here. There are dozens more teams in D1 than there were back in the 1980s, when the 64-team bracket was introduced, and the NCAA shoots for a ~20%ish postseason rate for many other sponsored sports. And just ask 2013 Georgetown about whether any of those newer D1 programs are capable of winning a game or two in March.
I also agree with Baker in that it is very difficult for mid-majors to secure quality opponents out of conference. Our story about Miami (OH)’s struggles to schedule power opponents seems to have hit a nerve in college sports circles, and it’s a problem that’s hardly unique to the Redhawks. I don’t mind admitting… I’ve filed a similar FOIA for eight other mid-major programs, and I expect at least a few of them will return emails that are very similar to Miami.
But here’s the problem. If the only thing the NCAA changes is an expansion to the tournament, it won’t address any of the problems Baker is describing here. High majors won’t be meaningfully more likely to schedule quality mid-majors, and the expanded postseason slots will be unlikely to skew towards quality programs outside the P4.
In case we forgot, the First Four Out of this year’s NCAA Tournament field were Oklahoma, Auburn, San Diego State, and Indiana. Three power programs and another that you can hardly call a mid-major. Most of the other programs floating around the cut line this season were programs from powerful conferences, like Virginia Tech, Seton Hall and Stanford.
If you want to create an alternative pathway for mid-majors to the NCAA Tournament, I think the solution is clear. You either need to change how the NET is calculated, or you need to mandate that a particular percentage of the at-large bids go to conferences outside P4 + Big East.
I’m assuming the latter would be completely politically impossible, as the Big Ten and SEC are pushing for even more championship access, so agreeing to guarantee one or two more bids to an MVC or A10 program doesn’t seem especially likely. So the quants on the basketball committees need to figure out a way to tweak the formulas so that a major conference team isn’t deeply penalized for losing to a Belmont, Yale or Northern Iowa…or perhaps penalized more for losing to average power conference teams like Arizona State or LSU.
Personally, I don’t think expanding March Madness by another four teams or so would represent some unthinkable break from tradition that would torpedo a sacred American institution. The First Four in Dayton felt weird at first, and then everybody got used to it, and it even helps the lowest of the low majors make extra scratch. If we do another First Four in, I dunno, Sioux Falls or Boise or El Paso or something, I think we’ll all get used to it in two years.
But if the math doesn’t change, it won’t really matter where you play those extra games. They’ll feature some under .500 Big Ten team squaring off against the 10th-best Big 12 team all the same.
And that, in my humble opinion, would be boring.
Here’s what else we wrote this week:
Hey, did you know the WAC thought about becoming a Texas-only conference or maybe trying to recruit Oral Roberts? Those are just some of the things KC learned from digging deep into the legal battle between UVU and the rest of the league.
I FOIA’d every single public school athletic department budget I could. Then, I did a little #math and wrote about the FY25 operating budgets for nearly every women’s basketball program. The data I have shows that if you want to be competitive for an at-large bid, you need an operating budget of at least $7 million bucks. Check out how much your favorite team spent here.
I also did the same thing with the men’s basketball budgets. Indiana fans are very mad about this, because their huge number is in large part due to the school paying some massive buyouts in FY25. But even if you got rid of those, Indiana is still spending a lot of money to not make the NCAA Tournament. So are a bunch of other teams! You can look at all the math here.
Over at NIL-Wire, Kyle caught up with the GM of Howard Basketball to learn more about the team’s crazy travel plans to go from DC to Dayton to Buffalo, all in just a few days.
And oh yeah, we’ve added hundreds of other documents, from Kansas Football contract to play in England this year, to new basketball coach contracts, to all those budget reports, to the Extra Points Library.
I’m working on a few other reported stories at the moment, from basketball-season alcohol sales to college sports video game licensing updates to softball operating budgets and more.
You can make sure you get every story we write on Extra Points by subscribing right here.
Thanks for reading. Enjoy the basketball, and I’ll see you on the internet.
