Why March Madness expansion is really happening: NCAA unnecessarily folded to a bluff from power conferences

David Cobb

NCAA Transformation Committee laid the groundwork

The other reason expansion is coming is the Big Reason, perhaps better framed as The Unspoken Threat. It's the lurking worry that's hovered at every committee meeting and on every Zoom call in which this topic has been discussed over the past three-plus years.

To know why the NCAA is going to go through with this, it's crucial to go back to why expansion became a topic altogether. Who asked for this? When did this ball get rolling? Well, in 2021 then-NCAA president Mark Emmert and others lobbied for a "Transformation Committee" in Division I to look at every issue affecting high-level college sports. The committee was formed after the NCAA took a lashing in the watershed Alston case, which infamously ended with a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling against the NCAA.

That transformation committee had two chairs: SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and then-Ohio athletic director Julie Cromer (who is now a colleague of Sankey's in the SEC, as she's the No. 2 in LSU's athletic department). Less than a year after it formed, the committee recommended that every Division I sport with at least 200 teams should seriously explore expanding its championship events.

The lede to my story on Oct. 5, 2022 read: "Should the NCAA Tournaments in men's and women's basketball ever expand again, the Division I Transformation Committee will be remembered as the catalyst."

Those recommendations didn't only come from the Transformation Committee. Power-conference commissioners were priming the pump for years. These are the same leagues, with many of the same primary actors, who at that point were also in the midst of expanding their own conferences in an effort to make as much money as possible because of football.

In 2022, one power-conference commissioner gave me this quote on background, and it's downright spooky how accurate these 19 words became: "By 2026 college football is going to look very different and it's going to trickle down to other sports."

That's why we're here.

Power conferences flexed their muscles

In the early 2020s the SEC and Big 12 expanded to 16 teams. The ACC and Big Ten bloated to 18 schools each. They redefined the landscape of the NCAA and then used the blood of the old Pac-12 to draw the lines and borders on the new map of college athletics.

Even then, with their superconferences and mega-rich media deals, the commissioners, university presidents and athletic directors at the high-majors weren't satisfied. Everything comes at a cost. Expansion of a league means it becomes statistically more difficult for average teams in the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC to qualify for the NCAA Tournament — while at the same time ensuring, across the board, that those conferences would hoover up more bids.

Sixty-eight was no longer enough. There just aren't enough bids! Won't you think of the 11th-place team in the Big Ten!

The Unspoken Threat was: Expand the tournament or else.

Or else what?

Or else the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC could eventually consider starting their own national basketball tournament? That was The Unspoken Threat. This unhealthy velvet-hammer sentiment was shared to me by various NCAA and conference sources across the past three years. The NCAA felt it had to work its way to expansion, eventually, to get the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC to put down their swords.

"Do you get out ahead of this potentially and try to do something that might be helpful and meet the needs of the landscape that's changing?" one high-ranking source told CBS Sports in 2025. "It does potentially guard against you in a proactive way. Those four, and perhaps two conferences, saying at some point, 'You know what? We're done with this. We're just gonna go do our own thing.' Is that likely to happen right now? No, but in 2032 and it's the end of this CBS/Turner contract, and given what they're doing with CFP and all that, you just can't be tone deaf to the reality. The overall greatest part of the value of the tournament — in addition to the David vs. Goliath, which is certainly a significant part — is having those [power-conference] teams involved."

You see what those leagues have done, based on a massive Supreme Court ruling in the 1980s, that's allowed them to run and profit off the College Football Playoff (and the BCS prior to that). The NCAA lost control of college football's primary postseason years ago. Because of it, billions of college football-generated dollars didn't go to the NCAA, with the overwhelming amount of that money mainlined to leagues, schools and bowl industry executives.

The men's basketball tournament is the only thing that makes money for the NCAA. You lose that, you lose everything. The NCAA dies. That's the power of The Unspoken Threat.

If, theoretically, the power conferences went off on their own to make a new national basketball tournament, it would burn down March Madness and destroy one of America's greatest institutions. Instead, the NCAA could expand its March Madness fields order to appease the most powerful people in college sports and keep the enterprise together. To avoid a civil war.

And I'm here writing this column to tell you that this ever-lurking threat is and was bullshit.

It would never happen.

The most powerful people in college football's "Power Four" do not carry the collective guts, gumption nor stupidity to actually go through with such a doomsday act. To leave the NCAA Tournament and start your own would mean to leave the NCAA altogether. All the other sports have to come with you, and all those sports cost a lot of money. What do you even do with the Big East, which doesn't have football but boasts three of the most historically significantly programs in the sport's history? Do you have a national tournament with UConn? Get all the way out of here with that.

In this apocalyptic scenario, the defecting power leagues wouldn't get the naming rights to March Madness and everything else that's built up cultural equity over more than 60 years either. They'd deplete the value of college basketball's biggest event by losing the Cinderella aspect and not porting over most other conferences and there would, ironically enough, be a smaller tournament and a less valuable as a product as a result. The power leagues would have to start everything from scratch.

The idea of the power conferences breaking away from the NCAA is an easy/lazy talking point. Many who go there don't understand the gigantic risks, the endless legal ramifications and everyday logistical nightmare that would come with building up two new national basketball tournaments from scratch — and a new NCAA in the process.

To do all of that because you couldn't get two of your 18-win teams into the Big Dance? Fantasyland. Was not going to happen. But that's just my opinion; people charged with making the big decisions here don't carry that same viewpoint.

"I'm not dismissive about things that I didn't think could happen, which can and did happen, like the Pac-12 going away," one NCAA source told CBS Sports. "We can't be cavalier about the potential for dramatic change for teams continuing to be part of the NCAA Tournament."

If you leave the NCAA Tournament to make your own, you leave all of your other sports on an island. Dan Gavitt, who is the top boss of college basketball, should have called the bluff. The basketball selection committees should have stood firm, but then again, people on those committees are torn because they too are dreaming of an extra bid or two for their own leagues. An additional problem is too many have bought into the lie that expanding the tournament will bring more "access" to any and all schools. That's not how this is going to go.

Why expansion isn't what it seems

The general sports public has showed little-to-no appetite for watering down the field, reducing the relevancy of college basketball's regular season in the process. Nevertheless, for the past three-plus years, NCAA president Charlie Baker and conference commissioners successfully lobbied for a change that promises to primarily benefit the high-major programs that are destined to populate the final at-large bids, with uninspiring résumés to boot.

Understand this: By moving every No. 16 to the opening round and half of the No. 15 seeds, than means the No. 12 seeds in the old model become No. 13s. The 13s become 14s and the 14s become 15s. This is only happening because the tournament is expanding to make more room for middling power-conference teams that will slide into the No. 11, 12 and 13 lines. By bumping the mid-majors down a seed line, they of course will have to play teams that are one seed line better as a result.

Instead of a No. 13 seed playing a No. 4, we'll now see that same team become a No. 14 that has to play a No. 3 — all to appease the power conferences that refuse to be satiated.

Extrapolate that out and the odds will overwhelmingly tell you that mid-major upsets will become less likely.

There's your "access."

As this topic has drawn out over three-plus years, the arguments for expansion have been thinner than the worst bubble résumé you've ever seen. The bubble is never good, but we are indisputably about to have The Worst Bubble Ever in 2027. The very meaning of what it means to be an "NCAA Tournament team" will warp for the worse.

A decision that has not technically been made is already generating widespread backlash, which tells you all you need to know. The unfortunate outcome for the majority of college hoops fans is this: The people who have the least to lose with expanding the tournament will ultimately be the ones responsible for changing it thanks to a chaos theory that was never going to be reality.