Subscribe
Follow Us
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has never had much interest in making friends out of college sports fans, and his latest March Madness expansion take won't help matters.
Sankey appeared on the Dan Patrick Show on Monday where he made his pitch for a 76-team NCAA Tournament — an eight-team increase from the current 68-team format.
“My view is I think we should be exploring tournament expansion,” he said. “Whether or not it happens is actually another point of evaluation. Have the conversation, deep dive, figure out if it works practically, competitively, economically. I think the one issue for us is if it is expanded, let's pick the number of 76.”
Sankey broke down how he sees a 76-team field working. It would essentially mean sending 24 teams to a First Four-like play-in round.
Article Continues Below
“I’ll do quick math for you,” he continued. “So 52 of the 76 teams would be like in that traditional first round. The other 24 would play in 12 games, and the 12 winners would meet up with the 52, and there is your 64 team bracket right.”
Fans will of course note that the suggestion is coming from the commissioner of a conference that just sent 14 teams to the tournament. In men's basketball (and soon to be in women's basketball), conferences have a direct financial benefit to placing teams in the tournament and seeing them advance.
Every game a team plays in the Big Dance earns an NCAA Tournament distribution unit for the team's conference. Conferences then distribute those units to its member schools.
The question has never been whether the talent pool in college basketball is deep enough to justify a tournament of a given size. Plenty of mediocre teams already make the field. Expanding the tournament will only create more inventory for the network carrying March Madness (Turner for the men, ESPN for the women), and as a result, more money.
That's what it always comes down to in college sports.
