College Basketball – NCAA Tournament Expansion
After announcing in April that the ncaa-m-baskbl-body.html” target=”_blank”>NCAA men’s basketball tournament would be expanded to 68 teams, NCAA officials finally announced their plans for how the expanded field would be handled. Basically, this could be considered a mini round of “First Four.” This initial round will include the lowest seeds as well as the last at-large teams that qualified for the tournament.
Initially, the NCAA was considering going with the lowest eight seeds to comprise this new round but decided against this in the end. This is probably bad news for mid-major schools who have generally had too many schools represented in the first round of the tournament. As far as the bigger conferences, this could mean that two lower seeded teams could be eliminated in this early round.
This is the 2nd time the field has been expanded in the past nine years after one team was added in 2001. In 1985 the tournament had a major expansion going from 48 to 64 teams. Even though this new format will not please everyone involved, it will probably go over pretty well considering the other options that were being discussed. Most experts as well as fans hope that this will be the end of expansion for a long while but as long as TV revenues continue to rise, who really knows when it will end.
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