NCAA Tournament Expansion: Is Moving to 68 Teams an Opportunity Lost?

The big news of the day for fans of college basketball is of course the announcement of a new television deal between the NCAA and its broadcast partners, CBS and Turner.

The deal, which replaces the 11-year, $6 billion deal the NCAA signed with CBS in 1999, will run for 14 years and bring in more than $10.8 billion for the NCAA and its member institutions.

In what should be the major source of glee for hoops heads, the new deal allows for every single tournament game to be shown live, in its entirety, on either CBS, TNT, TBS, or TruTV (whatever that is).

Instead, much of the joy is being derived from the second piece of the announcement, namely that the expansion committee has decided that expanding to only 68 teams is the right number—this after we were all convinced that the NCAA was a lock for expanding to 96 teams.

Now, from a purely basketball perspective, avoiding the dilution of the tourney that 80 or 96 teams would have wrought is a good thing, but as the NCAA points out in their press release, 96 percent of all NCAA revenue is returned to its membership—either in direct payment to the member schools, or through programs and services for the student-athletes.

With the Division I Men's Basketball Championship (the full name for the tourney) accounting for 95 percent of all revenue that the NCAA receives, it was in everyone's best interest for the NCAA to get every penny they could from their new broadcast agreement.

The driving force behind the idea of expansion was always about maximizing revenue. The NCAA did not do a terribly good job of selling that idea—in fact, they tried to hide it—but it was still obvious.

Given that fact, what is the point of expanding to 68 teams? None that I can see.

Three extra teams, probably not even one extra night of play, can't possibly be generating the kind of additional revenue the NCAA was after. It certainly won't mollify the coaches who were clamoring for expansion as a means of protecting their own jobs. It doesn't add anything of value from a competitive standpoint.

So, again, what was the point?

Expanding to 80 or 96 teams was the right thing to do from the perspective of college athletics as a whole.

The men's tourney pays for all the softball tournaments, the swim meets, the soccer tourneys, the Div. II and Div. III men's basketball tourneys—basically all the great sports that student-athletes compete in while pursuing their degrees in college.

Should it matter that it gets harder for you to fill out a bracket?

I have read countless articles critical of expansion—none of them get the main point. All are very narrow in scope. All were focused on the competitive aspect of the basketball tournament.

We are talking about college athletics here. The NCAA is in the business of providing opportunities for all sports, not just basketball.

The anti-expansion arguments remind me of the people who don't think paying taxes is fair, the ones who expect the country to defend them, protect them, provide services—but don't want to pay for it.

Same here. Not everyone is the parent of a basketball star. Shouldn't their kids get to play sports in college, too? Somebody has to pay for it.

It is possible that the three extra teams were added simply because the NCAA had virtually promised expansion, so they had to deliver something.

Given how public the NCAA was about the 96 team proposal—to the point of having the proposed schedule on how the rounds would be laid out—I have to believe that they had a working deal in place, complete with dollar figures in mind—figures higher than the $10.8 billion.

It is possible that the broadcast partners backpedaled, refusing to pay for an 80 or 96 team tournament due to the near-universal public uproar about how damaging it would be to their precious field of 64(5).

If this is the case, then today's announcement is a kick in the gut for the rest of college athletics.