The NCAA announced Thursday that it will expand its two March Madness tournaments by eight teams each next season, a move that will drop more early-round games into the first week of the highly popular and lucrative showcase without substantially changing its overall form.
The new 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games — for a total of 12 games involving 24 teams — into the front half of the first week of the men’s and the women’s tournaments, turning what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair. It is the first expansion of the tournaments in 15 years, when they were bumped to 68 teams each.
The 12 winners will move into the main 64-team bracket that will begin, as usual, on Thursday for the men and Friday for the women.
Most of the eight new slots are expected to go to teams in the power conferences that were already commanding the lion’s share of entries in thebracket. Two years ago, the SEC placed a record 14 teams in the men’s bracket. Last season, the Big Ten had nine.
The move is a product of the times, which include massive expansion — the ACC, for instance, has grown from nine to 17 teams since 1996 — and the reality that mid-major schools with top-notch players will often see those players plucked away by programs with bigger budgets and the ability to pay them through revenue sharing.
Cinderella? There will still be room for those, though not a single mid-major advanced past the first weekend of either tournament the last two seasons.
This hardly registers as a concern of the decision-makers anymore, who will point to the TV ratings that traditionally spell out fans’ preference for Duke and North Carolina over St. Peter’s and San Diego State, especially once the Sweet 16 starts.
What matters more to the biggest schools is that their teams have a chance to compete in what remains the best postseason in college sports and that they aren’t iced out by lower conference champions who earn automatic bids.
“You’ve got some really, really good teams who are going to end up in that 9, 10, 11 [seed] class that I believe needs to be moved into the” 64-team bracket, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey stated final yr in discussing how he favored growth.
There may be additionally cash at stake: Conferences earn “items” — which amounted to about $350,000 per unit for the lads’s event final season — for putting groups within the bracket after which for each spherical these groups advance. The Massive Ten made almost $70 million from each tournaments, received by convention members Michigan (males) and UCLA (girls).
Leaders within the SEC, Massive Ten, Massive 12 and ACC have all acknowledged that the smaller groups assist make March Insanity what it’s, all of the whereas steadily increasing their very own energy in NCAA decision-making. That brings with it the tacit menace of fracturing the one factor the NCAA does greatest — the basketball event.
This transfer would possibly forestall that. What it is not anticipated to do is generate rather more income.
The present deal for the lads’s event is price $8.8 billion and runs by means of 2032. Including a couple of further video games between mid-level Energy 4 groups on Tuesday and Wednesday will not change that a lot.
One cause this took so long as it did was the NCAA negotiations with CBS and TNT, which themselves have been in negotiations over their very own possession.
The extra drastic choice of increasing the event to 96 groups or past would contain including an additional week to a event that has thrived partially due to the symmetry of a six-round bracket that will get whittled down over three weeks.
That fundamental shell started in 1985, with solely slight tweaks, the newest of which got here in 2011 when it was upped to 68.
Reporting by The Related Press.
