How Will Expanding To 68 Teams Affect The NCAA Tournament?

While hoops heads waited with bated breath the past several weeks as rumors swirled that they was considering expanding the NCAA tournament to 96 teams in the near future, the news that -- at least in the interim -- the tournament will only add three more spots for a field of 68 generated enormous relief. But what’s still unclear is what, if any, impact this will have on our beloved rite of spring, aka March Madness.

Let’s get this first bit out of the way: even though it hasn’t been announced yet, the opening round games will pit No. 16/17 seeds against one another for the right to play the 1-seeds. The NCAA did not effectively add three more spots for the also-rans of the power conferences for those teams to knock each other out before the actual tourney gets going. So while the idea of having the last bubble teams square off for the right to play the 5-seeds might seem attractive out of fairness to the automatic qualifiers -- although it would create its own inequities, in that 5-seeds would arbitrarily get to play fatigued opponents -- it’s a non-starter. And besides, as Basketball Prospectus’ John Gasaway explains, the goal is create the most balanced, objectively seeded tournament, not scintillating opening round: