The debate over expanding the NCAA men’s basketball tournament isn’t really a debate.
It’s just a math equation.
While the consensus in college sports is that expansion from 68 teams to 72 or 76 is inevitable – largely because the commissioners of the SEC and Big Ten want it – NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt has gone on a media tour recently insisting that the issue is far from settled.
‘I couldn’t predict as I sit here today what the outcome is going to be,’ Gavitt told CBS Sports last week.
There’s a good – and simple – reason for that.
Expanding the NCAA Tournament is going to be expensive. Unless you can guarantee that schools and conferences won’t lose money by expanding, what’s the point?
And that’s where the math comes in.
Let’s say the tournament expands to 76. That means four additional games, likely played on Tuesday and Wednesday before the quote-unquote ‘real tournament’ starts on Thursday.
Keep in mind: We already have two play-in games on Tuesday and Wednesday, broadcast on TruTV. So essentially, expanding the tournament means that you’ll have four games instead of two on each of those days.
There’s only one question that matters here: What’s that worth to the television networks?
According to the NCAA, last year’s four play-in games drew ‘a total of 6.2 million viewers,’ which is pretty good for a normal college basketball audience and especially on TruTV, the relatively obscure channel where Turner Sports has parked those games. Still, it’s well short of the 8.53 million average for the Thursday and Friday first-round games.
What that means is the general public – the folks who don’t really watch much college basketball but enter their bracket in the office pool and pump up the ratings for March Madness – still considers Thursday the real start of the tournament. Which it is.
What CBS and Turner need to assess is whether fans and viewers will change their habits and migrate to the Tuesday/Wednesday games or whether they’ll continue to treat them like play-ins. In some ways, it’s a test of the NCAA Tournament as a cultural institution. That Thursday start is so ingrained in American life – almost like an unofficial national holiday – that unmooring it might not be so easy.
Yes, you can put competitive matchups with big brands on Tuesday and Wednesday, but that also means six straight full days of college basketball programming. Is it overkill? Will the audience be there to support CBS and Turner paying many millions more for those four extra games?
And make no mistake: It’s going to cost a lot of money to make expansion worth the NCAA’s while.
Let’s get into some simple math. Every team that makes the NCAA Tournament earns a so-called ‘unit’ of revenue for its conference and then earns subsequent units for each round it advances. Those units are worth about $2 million apiece.
If you add eight teams to the field, you need to generate $16 million right there, not to mention the millions in extra costs for facilities, travel, food, staff and so forth that you inherit by adding more games and more teams.
If that endeavor doesn’t add to the bottom line, it cuts into the revenue pie that everyone else is splitting. It’s hard to imagine broad support for an expansion plan that decreases the average value of a unit. Especially right now, when power conference athletic departments are scrounging for any new revenue to fill the $20-million-plus hole in their budgets brought by the House vs. NCAA settlement.
That’s really the entire discussion.
All the conventional arguments against expansion are valid. They’re also kind of irrelevant.
Yeah, the bubble is already weak enough and it’s silly to reward more mediocrity. Yeah, the more the bracket expands, the more confusing it is for your office pool. Yeah, most of the extra spots are probably going to power conference teams with very ugly résumés.
None of that matters anymore. If you can figure out how much CBS and Turner are willing to pay for those extra games, you can figure out whether the tournament is going to expand.
You can safely assume that’s why a significant expansion to 96 teams, which has been floated in the past, is now pretty much off the table. The math just doesn’t math.
But going to 72 or 76 is a different calculation. It’s doable – if the TV partners are on board.
‘The committees are giving it more consideration than at any time in my 10-plus years at the NCAA,’ Gavitt told Field of 68. ‘At the end of the day, there’s no intended outcome here. One outcome is no expansion at all and if there is a recommendation to expand, it would likely be modest in nature.’
The big expansion talk started in 2022 when the SEC got a disappointing six bids and Greg Sankey started to rattle the saber about automatic qualifiers from small conferences taking away opportunities from power conference teams, especially as his league and the Big Ten expand.
But as we’ve seen this season, that isn’t really true. As of today, the SEC and Big Ten are poised to combine for more than 20 and perhaps as many as 25 teams in this year’s field. They don’t really need to engineer more spots for themselves.
Everyone involved needs to be careful. Adding eight teams wouldn’t ruin the tournament, but it would change it. If you want people to watch those Tuesday-Wednesday games, you can’t give them a bunch of Grambling State-Montana State playing for the right to be the 16 seed.
At the same time, do two struggling name brands like Texas and Villanova playing for a 13 seed move the needle much either? Both of those schools are likely to miss the tournament this year. If it expands by eight, they’d both likely be in.
If you’re an executive at CBS or Turner, how much is that game really worth and how quickly can you get America to start watching the tournament on Tuesday?
Smart people are undoubtedly working on those answers right now. They’re the ones who will ultimately decide whether expansion happens or not.