It all could have been avoided if Fox and the NCAA had managed to work together.
It was first reported in September of 2023 that Fox was looking to create a new college basketball postseason tournament for teams in the three conferences that it has rights to: the Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East. The proposed tournament would have 16 teams and be played entirely in Las Vegas, and would effectively deprive the venerable NCAA-owned NIT of teams from those conferences. In response to the prospect of the new tournament, and with NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt acknowledging that “the very viability of the [NIT] could be in jeopardy”, the NCAA announced a series of sweeping changes to the NIT selection process, eliminating the automatic bids previously given to regular-season conference champions left out of the NCAA tournament and replacing them with a minimum two teams from each of the then-six major conferences with each of them guaranteed to host a game, which stood to greatly increase the number of spots going to power-conference teams at the expense of mid- and low-majors. Nonetheless, Fox and Anschutz Entertainment Group announced the launch of the College Basketball Crown that April with the first tournament to be held the following year, with a minimum of two teams from each of the three conferences Fox has the rights to and the remaining ten teams being chosen at-large.
After the first year, Fox and AEG announced they had “streamlined” the tournament by cutting it from 16 teams to eight, the likely reason for which was probably apparent when one looked at the inaugural bracket and saw three to five (depending on how you count Washington State and Oregon State) mid-majors included, including Boise State, which was actually the only team in the main NCAA tournament’s “First Four Out” to appear in any postseason tournament despite the other three coming from the Big 12 and Big Ten. Both years, though, the impact of the new tournament on the NIT has been evident and stark. In each of the last two years, only four out of 32 teams in the NIT have come from major conferences, including, oddly enough, Oklahoma State out of the Big 12 both years. Despite being entitled to two automatic bids, the SEC sent no teams to the NIT in 2025 and only one in 2026, though Auburn ended up winning the whole thing. But 2026 also saw perhaps the ultimate statement of the CBC’s triumph over the NIT: rather than going to mid-majors or the conferences that were contracted to it, the CBC’s two at-larges went to one team from the ACC and one from the SEC. The CBC had as many SEC teams as the NIT did, and they picked Oklahoma, who had beaten out Auburn as the first team out of the NCAA Tournament. After just two years, it was apparent that even for the teams that nominally should have been on the side of the NIT, the CBC had established itself as the more prestigious tournament, reducing the NIT to the status the CBI (seemingly fully killed by all this) once had: a third-tier tournament primarily for mid-majors.
On Thursday, the NCAA announced that its main men’s and women’s basketball tournaments will be expanding from 68 to 76 teams in 2027. The existing “First Four” format that has existed since Turner (now TNT Sports) joined CBS’ coverage of the tournament in 2011 will be expanded to twelve games across two sites, split half-and-half between automatic qualifiers and at-larges. This presumably means that all four 16 seeds and two of the 15 seeds will be determined in what will now be called “opening round” games; meanwhile the same teams that participate in the First Four today will be joined by the eight new teams opened up by the tournament expansion.
Pretty much all college basketball fans and even a fair few people inside the sport don’t want this expansion, feeling that the tournament was perfect as is and dreading the teams of questionable quality likely to make the expanded field, especially if nothing happens to ensure the new spots go to mid-majors. It’s easy to come up with cynical reasons why the NCAA would engage in this expansion: to wring more money out of the TV partners and/or to appease the SEC and Big Ten wanting to ensure even more of their teams make the field. But these reasons, which would ordinarily be obvious reasons to enact expansion, don’t actually make much sense (and not just because the SEC put 14 of its 16 teams into the 2025 tournament, which helps explain their absence from that year’s NIT). The NCAA’s press release announcing the expanded tournament notes that “As part of the agreements the NCAA will open up new, previously restricted product categories for the NCAA Corporate Champions and Partners Program, including beer, wine, spirits, and hard seltzer, and allows for expanded in-game advertising opportunities during the linear and streaming coverage of the tournaments.” Allowing makers of alcoholic beverages to advertise in the NCAA tournaments and increasing the ability to sell ads in-game are things that could happen regardless of tournament expansion, and it almost gives the impression that CBS and TNT (and ESPN on the women’s side) don’t actually want these additional games and are effectively being paid off to accept them.
And then there’s the number of teams the tournament is being expanded to. Normally, if a single-elimination tournament isn’t a power of two, it’s the sum of two powers of two, allowing first-round games to be balanced fairly evenly throughout each section of the bracket. That’s never been something the NCAA has adhered to for the First Four – it’s always been possible for one region to be fed by two First Four games and another none – but it still seems like relatively common sense. If the NCAA couldn’t expand to a 128-team tournament, it was expected that it would expand to 96, or 64+32. If not that, then 80, or 64+16. If not that, then 72, or 64+8. If expansion was just about making more money or allowing more major-conference teams to make the tournament, why wouldn’t the field go to a full 80? That would lead to the full bottom two seed lines being filled out by opening-round games, which would make for a more intelligible bracket; allow the two sites hosting opening-round games to be split 50/50 between automatic qualifiers and at-larges on both days as is the case for Dayton’s First Four games now; and allow each site’s games on each day to be balanced between two doubleheader sessions, similarly to how the first round proper works.
But instead of taking a 64-team bracket and adding eight or 16 games to it, which would imply adding four or twelve teams to the existing tournament, they’re taking the existing 68-team tournament and adding exactly eight teams to that. And I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that that exactly matches the number of teams in the College Basketball Crown.
Even this doesn’t completely explain why the tournament isn’t expanding to 80 teams, especially since as much a driver of the disappearance of major-conference teams from the NIT as anything else is the growing tendency for teams that miss the NCAAs to opt out of postseason play entirely (as evidenced by the SEC failing to use both of its automatic NIT spots each of the last two years and the CBC never scoring a First Four Out team from any of its contracted conferences so far), but the most obvious, if not only, way to make sense of the 76 number is that the NCAA is effectively trying to kill the CBC by bringing in the teams that would otherwise be participating in it. Again, not all the teams that appeared in this year’s CBC would make a 76-team NCAAs, but the best way for me to make sense of the NCAA’s logic is “there’s interest in a neutral-site NCAA Tournament-like format with eight additional teams, and we’re not getting a piece of that action, ergo we should expand the tournament by eight teams and co-opt those spots”. If the NCAA can’t have a good base of major-conference teams in the NIT, they’re going to take the CBC down with them. The expansion to a number that the NCAA couldn’t possibly have arrived at naturally gives away the game to me, and makes it hard to argue that it doesn’t have something to do with the CBC. I’d honestly have more respect for tournament expansion if it did go all the way to 80 teams.
If I’m right, it suggests that the expansion of the NCAA tournament, and accompanying dilution of the regular season and possible ruination of what’s often called the best tournament in sports, could have been avoided if the NCAA had taken a different path two years ago. Finding a way to offer an NIL package to student-athletes participating in or at least advancing in the NIT, comparable to that earned by CBC participants, would have been a big help, though it’s not clear that it could have coaxed enough money out of sponsors and networks. But perhaps the broadcast rights themselves could have been a point of leverage. Between the first reports of the potential formation of the CBC and its official announcement, the NCAA and ESPN announced an eight-year extension of their agreement encompassing various Olympic sports championships, the women’s basketball tournament, and the NIT and its Johnny-come-lately women’s equivalent the WBIT. The deal attracted criticism for the NCAA deciding not to separate the women’s tournament rights from the rest of the package, but in retrospect, it may have been the decision not to separate the NIT that was more damaging, even if it likely wouldn’t have attracted as much revenue.
What if the NCAA had decided, instead of trying to coax the Fox conferences not to defect to another tournament, to instead take on the supply side and effectively try to bribe Fox into not competing with the NIT by selling them the rights to it (or at least sharing with ESPN), possibly at a discount? Fox might not be interested in a tournament with a significant number of mid-majors that would bring with it higher production costs by holding the first three rounds on campus sites, so at minimum they might still lobby for changes to put more power-conference teams in the NIT, and it likely would have made the criticism over not separating the women’s tournament rights worse, but perhaps if Fox and the NCAA had found a way to work together, we wouldn’t be subjected to an NCAA tournament expansion that seemingly no one wants.