March Madness: A Couple of Crazy Ideas for Expanding the Tournament Field

The NCAA should expand its national championship basketball tournament to 345 teams.

It’s not as logically preposterous as you might imagine, heck it can be accomplished by adding a mere two rounds of play to the now seven rounds that cull a champion from 68 teams.

Though a multiple of five, the number 345 has not been selected at random here.

You see, NCAA Division I Basketball includes a total of 346 teams.

Then why not just include ALL the teams, Abacus hears you cry?

But including everyone would eliminate one crucial component of March Madness, whining about who got left out. The event wouldn’t be the same without all those Northwestern-trained talking heads crying in their imported beer.

Sure, there will be only one team not invited, but four or five dozen truly atrocious teams will be.  Breaking down the cons and the other cons of so many inefficient teams vying for one and only one spot will overwhelm a score of Gottliebs, Bilases and Vitales.

ESPN will have to expand its family of networks to handle all that buzz.

Uh-oh. Every silver lining does have a black cloud, doesn’t it?

Let’s scale back that expansion a bit, and attach a couple of conditions.

How about 72 teams? That requires 16 teams to participate in 8 “play-in” games to achieve a 64 team bracket.

A conference’s automatic qualifier, regardless to ranking or RPI, should never be required to play into the 64-team bracket.

Here’s the more important new twist. Every conference must receive an at-large bid, along with its automatic bid.

Now, this will greatly reduce the number of discretionary at-large berths, but might create greater urgency to win the league’s automatic bid in the power conferences.

Perhaps a bit of the “do-or-die” nature of the tournaments will be lost in smaller conferences, but the avoidance of a play-in game raises the stakes.

Since conference realignments seem inevitable, this system is flexible enough to work even with fewer leagues, the number of discretionary at-large bids will increase.

With the current line-up of 32 conferences, there would be only eight discretionary at-large bids.

Wouldn’t the talking heads have a field day with all those snubs, and wouldn’t the NIT love the table scraps?