YES, a 96-team NCAA Tournament is a bad idea in normal circumstances. We had this debate a few years ago, and thank goodness the 96-team field was not approved by the NCAA.
Moreover, I certainly don’t want to live in a world where a 96-team NCAA Tournament is part of a long-term reality. College basketball fans and journalists agree that having 96 teams in the Big Dance is absurd…
in normal circumstances.
Guess what, though? We don’t live in normal circumstances. You might have figured that out by now.
With college sports budgets getting hammered left and right due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and with fans not likely to attend college football OR basketball games in regular numbers through the spring of 2021 — provided we even play games of any kind — the college sports industry is going to take a massive hit. The severity of the damage is hard to fully comprehend right now. We might have a much clearer sense of the carnage in April of 2021, especially if we are unable to have an NCAA Tournament for a second consecutive season.
It’s a sad thought, but it is certainly possible.
Let’s go there. Let’s say that there isn’t a 2021 NCAA Tournament.
While college football might have to consider a 16-team playoff to recover revenue, college basketball would certainly have to consider a 96-team NCAA Tournament — not as a permanent change, but certainly for 2022 and maybe also 2023.
Again: None of us would want a 96-team NCAA Tournament if we could help it. None of us would want this bloated monstrosity with a bunch of NIT-caliber teams if there wasn’t a compelling, overwhelming reason to resort to such a plan.
Well……….
Dramatic financial shortfalls — a budget crisis at nearly every athletic department in the United States — would represent in many eyes a compelling, overwhelming reason to have to resort to a 96-team NCAA Tournament.
We’re not truly discussing the basketball-specific merits of a plan. The point of a 96-team NCAA Tournament in 2022 (and maybe 2023 as well, before returning to 68 teams in 2024) would not be to produce a pure basketball tournament in which all the teams earned their way into the field. The point would be to make a lot more money and boost budgets.
We don’t live in normal circumstances, so before you get angry about a 96-team NCAA Tournament, realize that normal solutions aren’t going to fix these anything-but-normal problems.
Yes, we don’t want this to be a permanent change, but as a short-term measure, it might happen.
Don’t laugh.