It definitely has its problems. But are you really going to have a league with 36-40 teams in it? At some point you’ve just got to split it up into two leagues. Or you just don’t expand.
That seems like a reasonable number to me? It’s not like we’re talking about 80 teams here.
Say you have 36 teams in the league. Now 20 of the 36 aren’t in the playoffs. And for that, only half of those teams even get a top-10 pick.
28 of the 36 teams (78%) aren’t making it past the first round. I think the NFL can work with those odds, but not the NBA.
Expand to 40 and you’re now talking about 24 teams missing the playoffs and 32 not making it past the first round. The more teams you have, the worse each individual team’s odds become. If fans don’t have much hope for their local team, it’s easy for them to tune out.
i mean, major league baseball had 28 teams in 1996, and one half of those teams had literally no chance of playing the other half unless they made the world series! in one sense it was “one league,” in another it was “two leagues,” but it all seems like semantics. your “league” just becomes the teams you play a lot, and you can make the playoffs a little bigger for each of those leagues if you have 40 teams or something
(i see dylan’s responding so: when do we get a 2023-24 discussion? isn’t 2022-23 over?)
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Well the obvious option is to expand the playoffs. Which they’ve already done.
But this whole thing is really the same thing that’s happening in CBB. More teams, more teams in big leagues, same number of spots.
As someone who primarily watches college sports, those percentages all look pretty high to me 
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I am an absolute sicko for staying up to watch every second of this Kentucky game. I miss college bball LOL
44%
First 6 years it was 59%, last 6 years 29%
I will say that figuring out how to put in regular season league winners would make the NCAA Tournament early rounds better if they did it right. It would also ruin championship week a bit … And it probably wouldn’t actually be what happens to expand the tourney.
A ton of great MM/LM teams with awesome players just miss out on playing in the tourney.
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I don’t think it’s a nitpick and that’s a very real concern. The logistics behind how they make this happen is a real concern. If people want it’s easy to take 2 days and a long weekend for that first weekend. Now are we starting the tournament mid-week? Going to a 4th weekend? Either way I just can’t see the engagement being there. It really is the perfect size right now.
The ONLY way I see this being anything other than an attempted money grab would be to include more MM/LM but I just don’t see that being what they would do with the extra slots.
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I don’t see how a doubling in size makes sense but I could see adding 8 teams or something (an additional play-in spot per region) with the caveat that regular season conference champions get auto bids
But I agree that a world where we add 8 teams like last years Michigan, Rutgers, Wisconsin, Vanderbilt doesn’t strike me as awesome
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To take a dunk on Mr. Gasaway and KenPom who think expansion = more MM, the top 4 seeds of the NIT, which are determined by the Selection Committee as the last 4 out were: 18-15 Ok St, 19-14 Rutgers, 19-14 Oregon, 23-10 Clemson
Wow love that!!!
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Don’t they want that? Not think that?
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I think adding the rule that conference regular season champs get auto bids would largely accomplish the MM thing
I mean, not if you go to 128
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Well they both said they are glad the NCAA is considering expansion. They have both said so many times and both implied its a good things many times. They seem to think that it will result in positive change based on my reading
Interesting, I think I’ve just heard KenPom talk about it on Jordan’s podcast and basically say “this is going to happen based on current NCAA policies” … here’s how I think it could work and not suck.
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I haven’t really looked at it all that closely or thought about it much. I think the much bigger concern for the sport is mega conferences squeezing out all of the MM and even separating via football.
EIther way, I feel like the years there are good MM leagues, there are usually several that get squeezed. Some of the most notable just missed the tourney teams have been MMs – thinking like MWC type teams.
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Yeah, that’s what I see happening too. Football will push the top conferences into a super-league and then the rest of the sports will have to sort out the carnage.
I could see something interesting in a super-league situation where the MM conferences do their tournament a little earlier and then the top teams after their tournament get put into the super-conference march madness bracket or something weird like that. It isn’t relegation/promotion, but it gives you a fun MM tournament to watch for 3-4 weeks and then you get the big conference tournament where a bunch of mediocre teams are in it and they invite the best MM to participate sort of like it is a champions league style of tournament.
Anything that splits high majors and mid majors will damn near ruin CBB just for more football bucks.
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