The good news is that Sankey’s “suggestion” blew up in his face, when the SEC (he’s their commissioner) went 3-5 in the first round and only one of their eight “contenders” made it to the final four. Here’s just one of many push-backs (from a guy who covers the SEC for USA today
).
https://www.tennessean.com/story/sp...dness-upsets-sec-ncaa-tournament/73013728007/
I would really hope that the NCAA wouldn't be stupid enough to take away auto bids ... I believe even Charlie Baker [NCAA president] said he does not want to eliminate auto bids and if they were to expand the field, he would only be in favor of expanding it to 72 teams. I'd be curious to hear CBS and Turner's take on this as I wouldn't think they'd want a 17-17 Florida State team diluting the field over a 29-5 Indiana State team that everyone's gonna tune in to watch. Which of those teams do you think viewers would rather watch?
Greg Sankey is in the minority on this. He does not call the shots in the college sports world. Yes, he is a powerful voice, but 95% of college athletics and even TV executives I'm willing to bet disagree with him on this
Baker may favor an expansion to only 72, but my research suggests that the consensus among coaches and commentators is: If we’re going to expand, let’s go right to 80 bids.
I was curious as to what an 80-field setup would have looked like this year. Start with 11 top conference tournament seeds that also won their conference tournaments and got bids under the current system. There were also 6 that lost in the tournament and got bids anyway … all but one were from P5 conferences and were “locks” to get bids going in (the other was from the near-power Mountain West). That meant that 15 of the 32 #1 conference tournament seeds lost in the tournament. None of those got bids to the Big Dance … six accepted bids to the NIT (not sure how many might have been invited, but said “no” … I know there were some).
The “easy” expansion notion is to give regular-season champions an automatic bid. I see three problems with that notion. It starts with the fact that we have 15 teams on our list, but we need only 12 to get the proposed 80.
Second, it’s easy to see that some (many) teams that are confident of getting a bid (almost exclusively from P5 conferences) simply don’t play as hard in their tournaments. That’s just a fact … which could be made worse with “guaranteed” bids. On the other hand, it would make winning the regular season a big plus … a significant gain, and worth the downside, IMO.
Aside from that, some of the teams on that list really are total crap. Thus, you would need to impose a cutoff. Of course, I do not see that as a real problem. The easy call for this year would be a NET rank of over 200: Sorry Eastern Kentucky (17-13, NET 216), Norfolk State (21-10, NET 221) and Central Connecticut State (19-10, NET 253), but you’re gone. FWIW, EWU (21-10, NET 141) would have received a bid.
To maintain a semblance of the current schedule, they might need to have 32 games where they now have the “First Four.” However, since most would only be streamed, the networks would have more choices for picking a slate to draw viewers to actual TV broadcasts.
Likely to happen? I give it 50-50, at best.
