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There has been a lot of chatter about potential College Football Playoff expansion, but let's not forget about March Madness. There have been some rumblings about it in the past, but it was unclear how much support the idea was getting. Well, NCAA president Charlie Baker says that expansion could be coming sooner than people thought.
According to Charlie Baker, March Madness expansion could happen as early as next season. The NCAA president wants to expand the tournament to 72 or 76 teams, and he wants it to happen as soon as possible.
“That would be the goal, to try and do this for next year, which is why the window to actually negotiate it will probably end sometime early summer,” Baker said, according to an article from Front Office Sports. “We've been talking about 72 and 76.”
If March Madness is going to expand, there is obviously a lot of work that has to be done to get ready for the changes. Because of that, it won't be long before we know whether or not this change will be implented ahead of next season.
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“We’ve had good conversations with CBS and WBD,” Baker said at the Big 12 spring meetings on Thursday. “Our goal here is to try to either get to yes or no sometime in the next few months, because there’s a lot of logistical work that would be associated with doing this, if we were to go down this road.”
So, you might be asking why the NCAA would do this. After all, 99% fans love March Madness exactly the way that it is, and not a lot of people want to see it expand. Well, the point is to be able to include teams from smaller conferences that had great seasons but missed out on the big dance after not winning their conference tournament.
“If you have a tournament that’s got 68 teams in it, you’re going to have a bunch of teams that are probably among what most people would consider be the best 68 or 70 teams in the country that aren’t going to make the tournament—period—because you get a whole bunch of people who win their conference tournaments who aren’t in that group,” Baker said. “So, the point behind going from 68 to 72 or 76 is to basically give some of those schools that probably were among the best teams in the country a way into the tournament.”
College sports are going through big changes right now, and despite the fans being satisfied, it sounds like March Madness is going to be different sooner rather than later.
