The NCAA tournament expansion nobody wanted is happening — the latest example of college leaders abandoning the fans

Every single person who signed off on the decision Thursday to expand the NCAA basketball tournament to 76 teams understands they are doing something fans didn’t ask for and that nobody in a position of power can justify.

It is the Seinfeld of expansions — a decision about nothing, that gains nothing for college basketball, that exists mostly because the current leadership class led by SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti are bound and determined to wreck everything in college sports that used to make sense.

Advertisement

Faced with a choice between adding eight more teams to the tournament or starting a game of chicken between the velociraptors at the top of the food chain and the 200-plus schools that would be cut out completely if the Big Ten and SEC someday walk away, the NCAA has once again jumped into the cage and made itself the meal.

As we’ve come to expect in a college sports world led by Sankey and Petitti, there are endless solutions for problems that don’t exist. The stuff that really matters always seems to be someone else’s job.

Thank goodness college sports has such self-serving leadership. Without it, we’d be forced to endure another horror like 17-16 Auburn missing March Madness this year. We can all rest easy knowing that will never happen again.

In all seriousness, while the decision itself is a bad one because it will give us a watered-down bubble and lesser tournament than the one we previously enjoyed, my guess is that most casual fans — the ones who make the NCAA tournament one of America’s most popular events — won’t really notice. In the real world, it is already asking a lot of regular people with jobs to devote all day Thursday and Friday of the tournament’s first week to watching basketball.

Advertisement

They’re not going to do it on Tuesday and Wednesday to watch a bunch of power conference teams with sub. 500 conference records play each other. The previous First Four format, with two games on…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/mens-college-basketball/article/the-ncaa-tournament-expansion-nobody-wanted-is-happening–the-latest-example-of-college-leaders-abandoning-the-fans-205720436.html

Author : Dan Wolken

Publish date : 2026-05-07 20:57:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.