The more we’ve heard this week from the leaders of college athletics about their urgent need to expand the College Football Playoff and the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the less clear it becomes why they’re expanding in the first place.
It would be one thing if there was an obvious business case why it’s necessary for March Madness to go from 68 to 72 or 74 teams, as NCAA president Charlie Baker suggested could be imminent Thursday in comments at the Big 12’s spring meetings. The same goes for the CFP, whose format was a major talking point every day at the SEC’s meetings, with a looming decision about whether to expand from 12 to 16.
But after months of debate on both fronts, what’s become clear is that expansion is going to happen for no reason other than a vapid sense of inertia sprung from the bruised egos of sports executives – who subconsciously understand their own fundamental weakness and ineffectiveness are to blame for the spiral of chaos that college sports can’t seem to escape. At least when they push a button to expand a postseason, it feels like they’re doing something.
That’s an explanation. It’s not a reason.
When the NFL expanded its playoffs from 12 to 14 in 2020, changing its format for the first time in three decades, the obvious factor was an influx of money: Hundreds of millions of dollars, in fact, half of which gets split with players. When the NBA shook up its postseason and created the play-in tournament, the primary motivation was to keep more teams competitive late in the season and discourage tanking.
Those are sensible reasons everyone can understand.
But neither Baker nor one of the prominent conference commissioners like the SEC’s Greg Sankey or the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti have been able to articulate a clear and concise mission statement for what expansion of either tournament is supposed to accomplish.
They just want to do it.
Here’s how thin the rationale is regarding March Madness: Speaking with reporters in Orlando, Baker cited the committee snubbing Missouri Valley Conference regular-season champion Indiana State in 2024 despite a 32-7 record, suggesting an expansion would get the NCAA tournament closer to including the ‘best’ 68 teams.
Of course, the NCAA tournament has always worked this way. Excellent mid-major teams that lose in their conference tournament often don’t get in. And as the track record of the tournament clearly shows, the vast majority of bids in an expanded field would go to power conference teams with questionable records.
The push to expand March Madness precedes Baker’s tenure, which began in March 2023. In fact, you can trace the momentum back to March of 2022 when Texas A&M was left out despite a late-season surge to the championship game of the SEC tournament, converting Sankey into a public proponent of expansion.
But the idea that tournament spots are being filled by automatic qualifiers from mid-major conferences with less chance to do damage in the tournament than Texas A&M’s 2022 team, for instance, isn’t new. It’s part of the deal, and there’s no real demand to move the cut line other than from those who are inconvenienced by it.
In fact, one of the big obstacles to March Madness expansion – and the reason it didn’t happen years ago – is that there’s not a huge pot of television money out there for a few more games between mediocre basketball teams on Tuesday and Wednesday of tournament week.
Not only is expansion unlikely to boost profits in a significant way, it’s an open question whether the NCAA can expand the tournament without diluting the shares of its revenue distribution model, which are worth about $2 million per team per round.
A similar dynamic is at play in the CFP debate.
12-team CFP worked; trashing it makes no sense
There were clear incentives for the conference commissioners when they first floated expanding the football tournament from four to 12 teams back in 2021. Not only had TV ratings leveled off, perhaps due to many of the same programs populating the field year after year, but going to 12 would both guarantee access for all the power conference champions and set the table for a $1.3 billion per year contract with ABC/ESPN beginning in 2026 – nearly triple the original 12-year deal that established the CFP.
But that’s where things get murky.
Even before the first 12-team playoff last year, conference commissioners were *already* batting around a 14-team model for 2026. That has now morphed into a likely 16-team bracket. The financial terms of the TV deal, however, will not change in a significant way, whether they land at 12, 14 or 16.
So why do it?
Not because it’s a great business proposition – in fact, there’s a legitimate concern about playoff oversaturation and potential second-order effects – but because the more you expand access, the more access everyone wants.
That’s what we have seen over the last week, especially from the SEC meetings as Sankey and others in the league launched a breathtaking, shameless propaganda effort attempting to rewrite recent history. Getting a mere three teams into last year’s 12-team playoff while the Big Ten won its second straight title seems to have done a psychological number on those folks.
Rather than admit the truth – the SEC didn’t have an amazing year in 2024 and the playing field nationally has been leveled to some extent by NIL and the transfer portal – they are arguing to shape the next CFP format based on a level of conference strength that certainly existed in the past but hasn’t in the NIL/transfer portal era.
One prominent athletics director, Florida’s Scott Stricklin, questioned whether the football bracket should be chosen by committee. Another unnamed administrator went so far as to muse that the SEC and Big Ten should think about just holding their own playoff, according to Yahoo! Sports.
If you take a step back and look at what’s happening from a 30,000-foot view, it smacks of famed political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History,” where he writes about how the triumph of Western liberalism and consumerism has unwittingly created this kind of regressive condition that shows up in so many facets of life and culture.
“If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation,” he wrote, “then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.”
That kind of feels like what’s going on here. Aside from a small adjustment in how it was seeded, nothing about the 12-team playoff seemed problematic. If anything, it was widely praised for delivering what the original expansion proponents wanted: Geographic diversity, representation for the four power conferences and the Group of Five, first-round playoff games in college venues and a lot of interesting games from the quarterfinals on.
In other words, it worked. And there is no obvious reason – financial or otherwise – to have chucked it in the trash already while the four power conferences launch a war amongst themselves about how much access gets allocated to each conference, and by whom.
The angst is especially confusing from the SEC, which just got a record 14 bids to the men’s basketball tournament (including national champion Florida), has eight of the 16 national seeds for the baseball tournament and five of the eight teams in the Women’s College World Series. They’re doing just fine, and there is a long track record of being justly rewarded when their teams perform at the highest level.
There’s little doubt that will happen again in football regardless of which playoff system gets implemented. It just didn’t happen last year because the SEC, for once, did not deserve it.
But the Big Ten and the SEC are, as Fukuyama wrote, struggling for the sake of struggle. The more power they have amassed by reshaping the landscape through realignment, the more they claim the system is broken.
Some believe their end game is a separation from the NCAA, creating a world where they don’t have to share a business partnership with conferences and schools they believe aren’t bringing as much value to the table. The reality, though, is that any such move would draw a level of scrutiny – legal and political – they are not currently prepared to handle, not to mention the arduous work of building out the infrastructure for all kinds of unglamorous stuff the NCAA already provides.
So instead, they wage war against problems that don’t really exist, reach for solutions that create actual problems and then fail to solve the problems right in front of their face. The push to expand the NCAA tournament and the CFP are merely symptoms of an affluenza swallowing the highest levels of college sports.
Knowing they’ve failed miserably to execute on the important issues they truly need to solve to ensure the long-term health of their business, the likes of Sankey and Petitti and many others have elevated tedium to a crisis. So a crisis is what they shall have.