NCAA College Basketball: Tournament Expansion
The NCAA has announced that they will be expanding the men’s basketball tournament from 65 to 68 teams. The new adjustment was much more manageable than the 80 and 96 team expansion that was proposed a few weeks ago. This announcement comes on the heels of the NCAA reaching an $11 million agreement with CBS and Turner Sports for the next 14 years.
Next Thursday, the Board of Directors will review the proposal before in goes into effect next March. This will add three teams to the opening round games, one team per region. The NCAA tournament will be televised on four different networks, CBS, TBS, TNT, and truTV. The semifinal rounds will be split between CBS and Turner Sports networks, while through 2015, the Final Four games will be televised solely on the CBS network.
The expansion of this tournament will allow approximately 400,000 “student” athletes to compete for the NCAA Championship. However, this has been developed strictly for the men’s division, although another committee for the NCAA is looking into expanding the women’s tournament as well.
Adding more teams to the March Madness brackets has generated much talk from college basketball fans and coaches alike, who fear that the addition of more teams will diminish the popularity of March Madness and create more guesswork to determine a winner.