Considering that University of Denver coach Joe Scott and Northern Colorado’s Tad Boyle coach in “mid-major” conferences that almost always receive only one bid to the NCAA Tournament, one would think they ought to, well, feel like dancing at the prospect of the bracket expanding next year from 65 teams to 96.
Well, not exactly. They definitely have reservations.
“I think what you’d see is, it’s going to help get in more teams from BCS conferences,” Boyle said of the rich getting richer.
A recent Washington Post article, written on the final day of the recently completed regular season, surmised that if the 2010 NCAA Tournament had 96 teams, it might have included a top-heavy field of 13 teams from the Big East Conference, 10 from the Atlantic Coast Conference, eight from the Big 12 and Southeastern Conferences and seven from the Big Ten.
Non-power conferences that might have benefitted most would be the Atlantic-10 (seven bids), Conference USA (five) and Colonial (four). In this year, the Mountain West would have remained at four bids. No additional invitations for the Big Sky or Sun Belt, according to the article. Those conferences, and many others, would still be one-bid leagues.
“Yeah, it’s going to help the Virginia Techs of the world more than the Northern Colorados of the world,” Boyle added.
Rumors of bracket expansion began surfacing a month ago, and last week the NCAA held a media briefing during the Final Four in Indianapolis. For a field of 96 teams, the NCAA favors a format in which the top 32 seeds would receive first-round byes.
The lower 64 teams would play first-round games on a Thursday or Friday, with the survivors advancing to second-round games against the top 32 seeds on Saturday or Sunday. Sweet 16 games would be held the following Tuesday or Wednesday, allowing for the tournament to catch up and remain three weeks of madness.
The National Invitation Tournament, now owned by the NCAA, would be folded, presumably with teams that ordinarily would have received NIT bids now being absorbed into an expanded NCAA Tournament.
Tournament expansion is now considered a probability, and the impetus — no surprise — is money. Three years remain on the NCAA’s 11-year, $6 billion contract with CBS to televise the tournament. But the NCAA has an option to opt out of those years and put the tournament back up for bid. The downturn in the economy has caused CBS to lose money on the deal. Speculation has the NCAA seeking a secondary broadcast partner for the tournament, perhaps Turner Broadcasting. Look for something to happen by July 31.
“Personally, I’m like a lot of people and wonder, ‘Why fix something that’s not broken,’ ” Scott said. “I think going to 68 teams, 72, something like that would be a move for expansion. Then it would be the same tournament, basically. I think 96 makes it a little different animal.”
Boyle and Scott both have a problem with 32 teams playing one fewer game. What if mid-major George Mason had been required to play one more game in 2006? Would the Patriots have reached the Final Four if they needed to win five games instead of four?
Under the proposed NCAA model, 32 teams would need to win six games to win the national championship, while 64 would need to win seven.
“What has made the tournament so great is that, other than the play-in game, everybody has the same shot,” Boyle said. “This year’s tournament, especially, showed that some of the seedings weren’t right. Remember all the hype the Big East got going into the tournament? It’s a good conference, but they weren’t as good as they were touted to be. And you could say the Big Ten was probably not seeded high enough. Going in, you just don’t know. The tournament sorts that out.
“But those 32 teams that get a bye, that’s a huge, huge deal.”
With so many teams from power conferences almost assuredly getting in, the kingpins may lose their incentive to schedule challenging nonconference games other than marquee matchups set up by television.
“Why would a team want to play a (good mid-major) like Northern Colorado and risk losing, if they knew they were going to be in the tournament by just playing it safe,” Boyle said. “That’s going to make scheduling at a place like our school much, much more difficult. And it already is difficult.”
Weakened schedules will attract fewer fans for all but the traditional powers, Boyle said. Scott has a solution that would maintain interest throughout the regular season — especially among non-power conferences.
“If they go to 96, I think all 31 regular-season conference champions should get an automatic bid and every conference tournament champion receives an automatic bid,” Scott said.
“If you did that, you just made the regular season be really competitive. Your regular season would be unbelievable because whoever wins is in the tournament. And the conference tournaments also would be as important as they have been.”
Colorado coach Jeff Bzdelik said whether it’s 65 teams or 96, it’s all relative and there are going to be happy teams with NCAA Tournament bids and disappointed teams without them.
Bzdelik said he certainly would not scale back his nonconference scheduling because the strength of schedule factors into RPI power rankings, and those are among the data used by the selection committee.
“I don’t worry about things I have no control over,” Bzdelik said. “My only focus is with my team to control what we can, and that’s to take a challenging schedule and winning as many games as possible.”
Tom Kensler: 303-954-1280 or tkensler@denverpost.com
