Expanding the NCAA Tournament honors college sports' tradition of fixing what's not broken
Expansion has always been a power play for two things: money and access. In this instance, the goalposts are moving for Cinderella's value.
BLOOMINGTON — Nothing so adequately fixes what isn’t broken as college sports. On Thursday afternoon, the NCAA’s Division I men’s and women’s basketball committees voted in favor of expanding their respective postseason tournaments from 68 to 76 teams. Unanimously, in fact, according to a report from CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander .
There are more bureaucratic and administrative hurdles to clear, but this was the one that counts, and it came without apparent dissent. The news is and should not be surprising. Charlie Baker, the association’s president, has been pushing for tournament expansion for months , at least.
The topic has gained traction in some fashion seemingly annually for more than a decade. Still, it’s happening — this expansion will be the most substantial since the tournament moved to 64 teams in 1985 — whether we like it or not. In this, college athletics is no different to the world around it.
Realistically, it never has been. Nearly every major decision taken in the college sports space in living memory can be traced back to the same root causes: money and access. Sometimes, they are separate.
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