Jon Rothstein sounds off on NCAA Tournament expansion

Credit: CBS Sports

Few, if any, people on the planet love college basketball more than Jon Rothstein. So, it’s not a great sign for the sport when even he hates the reports that the NCAA is in the “final steps” of expanding the NCAA Tournament to 76 teams.

Rothstein voiced his concerns about expanding the NCAA Tournament during the latest edition of CBS Sports’ Inside College Basketball Now podcast.

“This has been a very difficult week for me,” Rothstein began on the subject. “And this has been something that I have kind of accepted as a fait accompli since last summer, when there was real, real movement towards the NCAA Tournament expanding from 68 to 76 teams. Now, last summer, I knew that it was a win for the 2025-26 college basketball season that the NCAA Tournament was only going to include 68 teams. But I felt last summer that college basketball had lost the momentum needed to keep the NCAA Tournament in its current form.”

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Expanding the NCAA Tournament might be the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas. And I am going to preface that with this statement,” Rothstein said, before using the Jurassic Park franchise to elaborate on his point. “In the movie The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park, circa 1997, Jeff Goldblum said that ‘taking dinosaurs off this island was the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas.’

“To me, the NCAA Tournament expansion that feels obviously inevitable right now, based upon final approval by a number of committees over the next couple of weeks, to me, will be something that college basketball will never, never recover from, in the sense of this: the NCAA Tournament, the rendition that we have all grown up with and made part of our fabric as part of being the greatest sporting event that we know in society, is not going to exist in the same form moving forward. Now, as you get a little bit older, and I am somebody who is now approaching his mid-40s, you understand that President Kennedy was right. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are almost certain to miss the future.”

While there’s plenty of talk about what the NCAA Tournament expansion means for March Madness, Rothstein’s bigger concern is what the expansion means for the quality of the college basketball regular season.

“But I think a lot of people, when they talk about the NCAA Tournament, they talk about what it’s going to do to March Madness,” Rothstein explained. “That, to me, is not the primary concern from where I sit right now behind this microphone. To me, expanding the NCAA Tournament tremendously dilutes college basketball’s regular season and waters it down. Those compelling bubble games that feel like they go on each and every night, from the ends of January up until Selection Sunday, those games are gone. Those games are finished. Those games are over and done with.

“And the fact remains this: when you evaluate what is going on right now in terms of adding more teams to the NCAA Tournament, we are minimizing the accomplishment that goes along with getting a bid to March Madness. Getting a bid to the NCAA Tournament should mean something. Getting a bid to March Madness should be a badge of honor. Instead, we are going to have some really mediocre teams making the NCAA Tournament. And we saw that last year when we saw the bubble be as weak as of a form as we have seen in quite some time.”

“And I said this repeatedly on social media, throughout last season,” Rothstein continued. “The one thing that nobody was saying, if he or she was intently following college basketball on a daily basis, the one thing that nobody was saying was, ‘Let’s expand the NCAA Tournament.’

“The on-court product in the sport, and this is reflected in the television ratings, has been as good or better than it’s ever been in 20 years that I’ve spent on this beat covering college basketball nationally,” Rothstein said. “But I’ve gotta tell ya, my livelihood hinges on college basketball flourishing. And that’s something, again, that goes side by side with the incredible passion I have for this sport. Expanding the NCAA Tournament is not a good thing for college basketball’s regular season, because it waters down the product. It waters down the importance of every game. It waters down the need for teams to move the needle.”

Rothstein also expressed concern about the influence that the power conferences have on college basketball going forward.

“And you can make whatever rationalizations you want when you talk about NCAA Tournament expansion,” Rothstein said. “You can rationalize whatever you want to. Here’s the bottom line: the people who control the keys, and the influence, and the pressure in the room, are the four power conference commissioners from the ACC, the SEC, the Big Ten, and the Big 12. And the bottom line is this: there has been a major, major fear, and a major, major cloud looming for a long time that those four conferences one day could go off and start their own NCAA Tournament. And if those four power conference commissioners want major access to the NCAA Tournament, then that access is what is going to be granted by the powers that be. The SEC has gotten 24 teams in the NCAA Tournament over the last two years. I have no idea why more access needs to be granted for a conference that is putting teams in the NCAA Tournament at that type of a clip.”

“But if you think that any other conferences, unless it’s a rare, rare situation, are going to be getting potentially at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament, because it expands to 76, well then I’ve got some swamp water to sell you in Florida, because it’s not happening,” Rothstein added. “Mid-majors, once in a while, out of the A-10 or the new Pac-12, maybe the West Coast Conference or the Mountain West, might get another bid to the NCAA Tournament. But if you think that this is going to benefit mid-majors again, you’re out of your mind.”

It’s one thing when someone like Colin Cowherd torches the NCAA Tournament expansion plan. But when Rothstein — one of college basketball’s great ambassadors — blasts the setup, that should sound the alarms.

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