The start of college basketball season never arrives with great fanfare. If you’re like most American sports fans, you haven’t even given it much thought since Connecticut cut down the nets seven months ago and I probably won’t think much about it again until it’s time to fill the office pool in four months.
But on Monday, you’re going to turn on your television and see quite a bit of college basketball even though there’s probably a better way to market the sport than an opening night party consisting of No. 1 in Kansas facing North Carolina Central or Duke goes through a glorified scrimmage against Dartmouth.
How softly college basketball presents itself in November, in the middle of football season and the start of the NBA and NHL, is one of the sport’s old battles. But this year, there’s real anxiety about a new, even bigger question: How much longer will the NCAA Tournament be the NCAA Tournament as we know it?
Or, put another way, how much longer can one of the most popular sporting events in the United States remain untouched by the legal and financial tides that are rocking all college sports?
Even as a billion-dollar annual enterprise and national institution, the NCAA Tournament will end up being collateral damage for the enormous ongoing fights over name, image and likeness, potential sharing revenue with athletes, possible Congressional intervention and ruthless money. a stranglehold which concentrates most of the power in the hands of a few conferences.
If you pay attention, the signs of trouble are everywhere.
Gonzaga, the largest and most successful mid-major brand of the last 20 years, is desperate to enter the Big 12 because it fears it will be on the wrong side of the divide if the power conferences eventually break away from the NCAA .
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Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner and arguably the most influential person in college sports, is increasingly shooting verbal arrows at NCAA governance and committees that he believes to be overweight and with little academic influence, which restricts his league’s ability to progress. This, too, seems to be an excuse for the SEC to either trample the rest of Division I or break away.
And if we dig even deeper, the NCAA’s recent decision to bring a big change to the NIT, which he owns and operates, tells the current state of mind in Indianapolis. They’re scared, and they probably should be.
The NIT itself is not the real problem. It’s a consumable event with a relatively small audience, and most casual fans wouldn’t notice if it disappeared tomorrow. But something happened a few months ago that clearly put the NCAA on alert.
In September, The Athletic published a report that Fox could partner with the Big East, Big Ten and Big 12 for a 16-team playoff tournament in Las Vegas for schools that are not in the field. NCAA. If this comes to fruition, it would likely siphon off some of the most valuable teams in the NIT.
In response, the NCAA announced on October 27 that the NIT would no longer hand out automatic bids to the regular season champions of a league that did not win their conference tournaments. Instead, the group that runs the NIT has changed the criteria and will guarantee two bids from the top six conferences (ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC) as well as the top two teams in the NET rankings who don’t. I will not be selected for the NCAA tournament. The remaining 20 applications will be selected by a committee.
High school and high school coaches and administrators erupted in anger. The old format was a playoff safety net for many mid- and lower-tier teams that don’t compete in March Madness, and now the NIT will be just another tool for kowtowing to power conferences .
In a briefing with several media outlets (USA TODAY Sports was not among them), NCAA vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt essentially admitted that the change was made because the new Fox tournament constituted a threat.
“The very viability of the NIT could be at risk,” Gavitt said, according to ESPN.
You might think, “Who cares? The NIT hasn’t been relevant in ages, and the audience for a new tournament as well is probably small. But there is a larger chess game here. If this Vegas event happens, it will offer the kind of competition that rarely works in the NCAA’s favor: a tournament run by three conferences in cooperation with their media partners while cutting out the middlemen – in this case, the NCAA – from the start. game exit. loop.
What does it look like ? This is essentially the College Football Playoff model, run by the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame. The NCAA and thousands of schools that don’t play big-time football all share in the wealth of March Madness, but they don’t see a dime of the billions generated by the CFP.
So think about all of this taking place in an environment where Power Conference schools are frustrated by the NCAA’s slow and ineffectiveness in enacting major changes because the majority of its governance is in the hands of administrators from small schools who want to be part of it. of Division I basketball but whose budgets are often only a fraction of those of the SEC and Big Ten.
Think of the power conferences bracing for the possibility of being forced by the courts to share their revenue with athletes and make them employees.
Consider Sankey in particular who has fought for the expansion of the NCAA tournament for the past two years and has suggested that he thinks Division I, which will have 362 teams this year, is too big to answer to the interests of everyone.
And think about how the major conferences have completely transformed so quickly and so dramatically in a short period of time, with an 18-team Big Ten soon to stretch from Piscataway to Seattle and a 16-team Big 12 stretching from ‘Orlando to Salt Lake City. .
Nobody knows what will happen in a year, let alone in the next five or ten years. But there is a very real possibility that all of these factors will destroy the current Division I structure in one way or another.
Although Gavitt rejected the idea that the NIT changes were a precursor to altering the NCAA Tournament in any way, it would be foolish to believe that March Madness is immune to get caught up in all these other problems.
And if there’s a big gap between the haves and have-nots, administrators across the country are wondering where that leaves the NCAA Tournament. Everyone recognizes the value of Cinderella and a school like Maryland-Baltimore County ($23.5 million athletic budget) getting into the same tournament as Virginia ($162 million athletic budget) and becoming the top seed seeded No. 16 to eliminate a seeded No. 1. .
But if we get to a point where paying players a salary is the new dividing line, does a program like UMBC appear or do they play like-minded and similarly resourced schools?
That’s why Fox’s playoff tournament is, in some circles, considered an existential threat. What you’ll essentially have is a major network and the three conferences under it building the infrastructure for an event where they choose who gets invited and who gets the money.
If the NCAA disappears, splits, or evolves into something different than what it currently is, the college basketball playoffs suddenly become the Hunger Games. And the competition between Fox and ESPN and perhaps other networks like CBS and Turner to win this battle – probably depending on which conferences they partner with – is going to be absolutely fierce. And as usual, the little guys who give so much flavor and character to the sport won’t come out on top.
Maybe none of this will ever come to fruition and the NCAA tournament will continue essentially as it is now until the end of time. But as the 2023-24 college basketball season begins, the future of the sport seems very much in the balance.
