Every college basketball fan knows the story of the first trip from the First Four to the Final Four.
In the spring of 2011, VCU went on one of the greatest runs in NCAA Tournament history, beating USC in Dayton before taking down No. 6 seed Georgetown, No. 3 Purdue, No. 10 Florida State and No. 1 Kansas en route to a national semifinals appearance in Houston. Along the way, VCU’s school website crashed, as casual basketball fans raced to Google for the basics: where it was, how many people were enrolled there and how the heck its men’s basketball program had taken March Madness by storm.
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The Rams retain a prominent place in the pantheon of Cinderella stories, and their run was only made possible by the expansion of the tournament from 65 to 68 teams. The First Four games, which most sports fans considered play-in games, were brand-new. VCU, out of the Colonial Athletic Association, was one of the last four at-large teams into the field.
“Whether it’s us or Butler or George Mason or Loyola Chicago, this doesn’t happen if the NCAA Tournament doesn’t expand a while back from 32 teams and then from 48 teams,” VCU athletic director Ed McLaughlin said. “It gives the opportunities for kids to have those special moments, and that’s what we want the NCAA tournament to be.”
As the NCAA’s college basketball committees and leaders across the country debate the next steps for the tournament, they must reckon with what a further round of bracket expansion could do to Cinderella. More at-large spots could mean more potential Cinderellas. But if more teams make the field, then it will necessitate more rounds, and how those rounds are structured will determine just how steep the path is for those with a long way up.
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The contentious future of NCAA Tournament expansion
Last March, a small Jesuit school from New Jersey became a household name across America. It upended brackets. It slayed giants. It participated in two of the five highest-rated college basketball games of the season.
As Saint Peter’s beat Kentucky and Purdue to make a memorable run to the Elite Eight, the Peacocks became the archetypal Cinderella story. A David so small its whole campus fits in one Jersey City block crushed a few Goliaths in its path.
It is understandable, then, that those at Saint Peter’s are uneasy about NCAA Tournament expansion. They know firsthand what happens when an underdog grabs a country’s attention.
“I wouldn’t want to see a format where that could potentially change or that could be negatively impacted,” Saint Peter’s athletic director Rachelle Paul said. “Because now you’re having all of these other teams that compete at a higher level that may sort of water down, for lack of a better term, the ability for an underdog to sort of make a run in the tournament.”
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The basketball tournament’s influence and value are key reasons the power conferences have not broken away from their peers to form their own governance structure centered on football. Any dramatic changes to the organization of college sports could loosen the tethers connecting schools like Stony Brook to schools like UCLA.
Ivy League executive director Robin Harris, who served on the NCAA’s Transformation Committee, believes that the most important piece of a new structure would be preserving automatic qualifier access for every Division I conference.
“When you think about what binds Division I together, it’s our national championships,” she said. “That is fundamental — because we’re all striving for the same thing. … The idea that every conference that qualifies has at least one participant is what makes it truly a national championship.”
Although automatic qualifiers ensure one spot per conference in the dance, the path for everyone else who doesn’t win a non-Power 5 conference tournament has been squeezed by conference expansion. Every time a power conference gets larger, it has trickle-down effects on mid-majors, from scheduling to economics.
The selection committee rewards teams for winning Quad 1 and Quad 2 games but doesn’t ding them much for losing them, and those games have been harder to come by for mid-majors. Dayton athletic director Neil Sullivan said that when he calls Big Ten teams about scheduling a matchup with his school, they often have just four to five games available as opportunities.
Teams in the biggest conferences can play a disproportionate number of Quad 1 or 2 games, Sullivan pointed out. The margin of error, he said, is thinner for schools in Dayton’s position.
“That’s really hard for a lot of college basketball to be able to do that outside a handful of conferences,” Sullivan said. “The committee behavior, and I think they say this, too, I don’t think I’m like breaking trade secrets or anything, they reward quality schedules, quality wins. And in order to get those, we got to get them.”
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Scheduling issues will continue to get worse for schools outside the Power 5 and Big East. Any further conference expansion may cause the biggest and most of the best schools to be hoovered up, and conference schedules could still get larger. That would leave even less room for out-of-conference tests.
The stories of successful mid-majors only reinforce the power of conference membership. Butler made two title games in the men’s tournament and then left the Horizon League for the Big East, with a one-year stopover in the Atlantic-10. Wichita State leveraged a Final Four appearance amid a multi-year stretch of tournament contention into a leap from the Missouri Valley Conference to the AAC. Gonzaga has become one of the top programs in the country regardless of conference but still might jump from the West Coast Conference to the Big 12.
The stronger the presumption that the top conferences hold all the good teams, with dwindling chances for a rebuttal from low- and mid-majors, the more difficult it gets for Cinderellas to make the dance via at-large bid.
“How do you build that resume that a committee could sit in a room and have enough data to say that University of Vermont is as good as Rutgers without having the opportunity for Vermont to actually play a Rutgers-like institution?” America East Conference commissioner Brad Walker said. “Or even a Rutgers to play anybody — name the best team in America East, the Colonial, the OVC. If you don’t get those opportunities on the court, how are you going to make the comparisons?”
An expanded tournament could alleviate Cinderella’s problem if it is built the right way. A bigger field could include more automatic qualifiers, possibly allowing more schools from smaller conferences to get in. Or it could flesh out a way to reward great low- and mid-major regular season teams to keep dancing into March even if they don’t win their conference tournaments. A larger bracket can be as kind to potential Cinderellas as its architects want it to be.
But conference commissioners and school athletic directors across the mid- and low-majors agree: The variance of possible outcomes is a reason to be careful. If the tournament does change, the rest of college basketball will change with it.
“It’s not the same,” Western Athletic Conference commissioner Brian Thornton said. “It’s not what we’ve known. It’s different. Does that mean it’s automatically worse? Not necessarily. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s automatically worse. It certainly is different. Just because there’s more teams doesn’t mean it’s a worse process, as long as there is an understanding or there’s a desire to reward success and reward excellence.”
(Photo: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)