Ryan Glasspiegel
Videos by OutKick
The NCAA Tournament met its untimely demise at the hands of the coronavirus this past March, and ACC coaches want to compensate for that in part by making EVERY TEAM in Division-1 eligible for the 2021 Tourney. Jeff Goodman of Stadium first reported:
BREAKING: The ACC coaches will propose an all-inclusive NCAA tournament, sources told @stadium. The coaches just finished the call and voted unanimously on this.
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) September 9, 2020
Goodman adds that there are would be 346 teams eligible for this tournament (there are 357 D-1 teams, but Oklahoma State is banned for infractions related to the FBI college hoops investigation, three teams are ineligible for academic reasons, and seven are “reclassifiers”).
This would be a wild scene. Perhaps not coincidentally, it would provide extra television tonnage for CBS and Turner Sports, which were left without the games this past year. Their coffers and thus the NCAA’s may not be fully recouped by this expanded tournament, but it would presumably soften the blow.
What this would mean for the regular season of college hoops, which already struggles to maintain casual interest before March, remains to be seen. But it would be an incredibly frenetic several weeks.
Would be very hard to roll this back in 2022. But whatever, NCAA basketball long ago gave up any relevance to its regular season and its ratings have fallen along with it. The NCAA basketball season has become a 3 week season…..I suppose by adding more teams to the tournament they hope to push it to a whole 4 weeks!
I have issues with the NCAA basketball tournament, but it isn’t the size of the field or tourney structure that concerns me. 64 teams is perfect. However, the method of seeding teams is ridiculously subjective.
For example, why do we watch polls all year that rank teams 1 to 25 only to totally ignore them when we seed for the tournament? If the polls don’t matter or factor then get rid of them. What use are they any more than me doing my own personal poll? If they do matter, follow them! The moving target decision making process of who makes the tourney and where they are seeded is rife with contradiction. How many times have we seen a mid major who won 27 games and lost in their conference title game miss the tournament in favor of some 13-loss major conference team who have the luxury of a difficult schedule being built in for them each year Because they’re part of a major conference? Or the scenario where a team is ranked in the top 10 in polls then gets seeded 4? Huh? If a team is deserving to be ranked number 5 in the poll, then they should be the 5th seed overall, right? Why not? Fix THAT, not the tourney.