Count the Southern Conference among those interested in expanding the NCAA tournament.
The SoCon released a statement on Tuesday, voicing support for potential NCAA tournament expansion, which is expected to be revisited this offseason.
The mid-major is the first to publicly release its support for a potential expansion proposal, putting in writing that a larger field should be governed by three core principles.
Principle 1: Significantly Increase Access
The SoCon is pushing for NCAA tournament expansion due to the fact that the Division I membership has grown significantly since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985. For context, there were 361 full members in Division I college basketball last season, a large jump from the 282 schools eligible for the tournament when expanded to 64 teams in ‘85.
“The NCAA transformation committee established that approximately 25% of teams should participate in postseason championships,” the SoCon said in its statement. “Just under 23% of 282 schools participated in March Madness when the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. Today, 18.6% of Division I schools participate. Critically, expansion must preserve automatic qualification for all conferences.”
Principle 2: Competitive Integrity
The SoCon called for an expanded opening round of the tournament to include the lowest-ranked teams in the NET to better balance the field.
“The First Four in Dayton [currently] features two games between the four lowest-ranked automatic qualifiers, and two with the four lowest ranked at-large teams,” the conference’s statement said. “The primary purpose of March Madness is to crown a champion. Opening round participation should be based on merit, not the method of qualification, with the lowest NET teams playing in these games. Teams with a statistically better chance of reaching the Final Four should play fewer games. March Madness formats should utilize complete bracket integrity. If this is not achievable, the bracket should have all teams on a seed line playing the same number of games to reach the Final Four.”
The SoCon makes a compelling argument here for a revamped opening round. With that said, I don’t think anybody was expecting a Final Four team to come out of last season’s First Four. Texas made it the furthest, reaching the Sweet 16 before falling to Purdue by two. And while the Longhorns’ chances of making it to the Final Four were better than that of a 16-seed, is it really harming the integrity of the tournament for a power conference 11-seed to be playing in the First Four?
Principle 3: Transparency
The SoCon called for transparency around the calculation of a program’s NET ranking, which has become an integral part of the selection committee’s criteria.
“Schools spending millions of dollars annually on their basketball programs shouldn’t have to speculate about math informing selection metrics,” the SoCon said. “The NET is the committee’s foundational resource to rank teams, establish quadrants, and determine the cut line in the Wins Above Bubble (WAB) metric. Unfortunately, NET calculations remain unknown. Describing its formulas as ‘too complicated’; concerns coaches will ‘game the system’; and describing the NET as ‘only one tool’ in an attempt to minimize its importance are not defensible rationales for withholding selection formulas. Metric transparency is crucial for trust and better decision-making by coaches and administrators across Division I. Disclosing NET and other selection metric formulas, while also revising the quadrants and WAB cutlines to align with a bigger tournament field, should be part of expansion.”
Most basketball fans would certainly be in support of this. The NET becomes a critical talking point deep into conference tournament play, but nobody really understands how the calculation actually works. A transparent look into the background of the calculation would inform scheduling decisions and how teams structure their seasons in an attempt to make the NCAA tournament. It would be particularly impactful for mid-majors, especially when some of the top lower-tier programs are looking to schedule up and improve their metrics in non-conference play in hopes of a potential at-large bid or better NCAA tournament seed upon automatically qualifying by winning their conference tournament.
The SoCon’s support of an expanded tournament field is intriguing
The NCAA NET, a key tournament metric, tends to favor high-major teams who play a tougher schedule than mid-majors. There is no greater example of this than Auburn, who played around .500 basketball this past season (17–16, 7–11 SEC) and was one of the first teams out of the NCAA tournament field in March.
The prevailing thought is that NCAA tournament expansion would benefit the high-majors more than the mid-majors, with more high-major schools with mediocre tournament résumés earning a bid in a larger field. There are simply more high-major schools to choose from that are ranked higher in the NCAA NET than mid-major schools, so it would make sense for a larger field to skew heavily toward power conference schools. Further, if the expanded opening round of the tournament featured seeding based solely on NET ranking, it would mean the high-majors have an inherently easier path to the field of 64, while the mid- and low-majors would mostly be facing off against each other on the Tuesday after Selection Sunday.
That makes the SoCon’s argument very interesting. On one hand, the league is a proponent of tournament expansion, which could hurt it. On the other hand, the SoCon is calling for better transparency around NCAA tournament metrics, which would certainly make the path to the tournament make more sense for conferences like the SoCon. At the very least, there would be an understanding of what it would take for mid-majors to build a résumé worthy of making the Big Dance.
Time will tell where all of this actually falls. But momentum has been on the side of expanding the field, with committees set to meet in person this week to determine the future of the NCAA tournament.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as A Mid-Major Conference Has Voiced Its Support of NCAA Tournament Expansion.
