As a kid, the NCAA Tournament was one of those events that just felt like such a perfect sports event on the annual calendar. 64 teams, single-elimination, three weekends in March. Eventually they would add a play-in game, which everybody more or less treated like it didn’t exist because it was between a couple of 16-seeds nobody was going to watch. Then that expanded to the First Four, which… “learned to live with it” is an apt description. There have been some good games, there have been some great runs out of the First Four, and there’s also been some absolute swill particularly in the games between the final at-large teams.

(Am I referring to Vanderbilt’s completely mailed-in performance against Wichita State in 2016, in what would be Kevin Stallings’ final game? I’ll let you be the judge of that.)

And then there’s this proposal to expand to 76 teams. The key to understanding this proposal is that the NCAA’s network partners aren’t even asking for this. Expanding to 76 would actually reduce the amount of revenue that’s distributed to the participating teams, because even CBS and Turner are like “yeah, nah, we’d rather just show Seinfeld reruns.”

If this were a money grab, I’d hate it but I would also at least understand it. But if you’re telling me that we’re watering down the NCAA Tournament while also not even getting more money out of the deal… uh, what’s even the argument for this?

Seth Davis on Twitter has made something of a case for it, but the case for it sounds very stupid: the NCAA Tournament has to expand to keep up with the expansion of Division I. In 2005 there were 330 schools in Division I and in 2025 there were 364, which makes some amount of logical sense that you’d want to expand the tournament so that the proportion of Division I teams making the tournament stays constant but the logic falls apart when you consider who those additional 34 teams in Division I are (mostly low-major conference members who haven’t done much of note since joining Division I) and who the additional eight bids would go to (the 12th-place Big Ten team.)

The actual impetus for it appears to be this:

It’s about:
1. The insecurity of some high major commishes that there won’t be enough bids for their expanded leagues. (Sankey led the way on this, ironically).
2. The fantasy of some mid major commishes that there will be more bids for their leagues.

— Michael DeCourcy (@tsnmike) June 25, 2025

And, yeah, that’s probably it. One consequence to megaconferences is that somebody has to lose the conference games, and for as much as people talk about strength of schedule, the fact of the matter is that the NCAA Selection Committee has typically frowned upon putting in too many teams with a big number in the loss column. You can somewhat get away with it if you’re the 2024-25 SEC and implement a leaguewide policy of “don’t anybody lose nonconference games,” but if you look over at the Big Ten, big ugly numbers in the loss column probably kept some teams out. And if you’re like me and you’re a nerd about this stuff, you noticed that in 1995 48 of the 64 teams in the tournament entered with fewer than 10 losses (including 29 of 32 teams seeded 1 through 8) and in 2025 just 37 of 68 did, with 12 of the 32 teams seeded in the top half of the bracket having 10 or more losses. Not because the NCAA stopped caring about wins and losses, but because there are just fewer power conference teams finishing their regular season schedule with those records.

The 1995 tournament also had 6-seed Tulsa and 8-seed Western Kentucky, and at-large teams from the MAC and MAAC. I am not a crank, I promise.

Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, conference commissioners are ruining the sport. This is going to become the new mantra of Anchor of Gold during the “Tom is perpetually cranky” era of college sports:

College sports, at least at the top level, is run by people who know as much about sports as the Olive Garden knows about Italian food. They know how to squeeze the most profit out of it, but as far as what makes the average Anchor of Gold reader reliably show up in the comments section during a midweek baseball game against Indiana State… well, that’s a complete mystery to the people running college sports, and it’s why we’re where we’re at.

Because this applies here, too. It’s why nobody can figure out where this proposal to expand the NCAA Tournament is coming from. It is a thing that almost no one who cares about college basketball wants to happen, and hell, a lot of people who don’t care about college basketball want it to happen either. Again, I can at least somewhat get it, however much I hate it, if this is “let’s find money under the couch cushions wherever we can now that we have to pay the players,” but this isn’t even that. Given the amount of interest in the College Basketball Crown, adding half of those teams to the NCAA Tournament is… uh, maybe going to draw some interest from the most degenerate gamblers out there? Hell, they probably won’t even have the decency to put this at a time where it will distract me from work on a Tuesday.

This, in fact, might be the worst proposal anyone has ever had. And it’s probably going to become a thing.

(Okay, okay, this almost certainly isn’t the worst proposal anyone has had this week, but this is not a politics blog.)