Iāve adjusted to the First Four. Itās helped that there have been a couple of good runs (and VCU being a mid major as the poster child), as well as success of generally 1 team each year making it past the first round.
Donāt think Iāll ever adjust to 76. Reward the conference winners. Donāt reward inconsistent P5 programs. Watering it down for clear money grab.
I think thereās a real risk of weeding out a lot of the casuals that follow along just for the tourney and the bracket pools by making the bracket too convoluted to follow.
The 64 team bracket was perfection. It was easy to follow and easily fit on a sheet or paper or displayed logically on a screen.
No one wants to have to flip out an appendix to the page, scroll left to right on their display, and/or shrink the zoom on the display to follow the bracket.
The tourney is less fun to follow when itās just the die hards. And a jacked up looking bracket is going to alienate us too ultimately.
Wonder if thereās some Vegas /Sportsbook math figured in here.
Early rounds getting far too chalk given NIL/transfers. More money also being made in Vegas/sportsbooks for individual game betting than brackets - why not add a few more and make him tighter.
Thatās not going to happen at 76. As long as 64 teams show up on Thursday, the bracket competitions start with the round of 64, and the round of 64 is marketed as round 1 it wonāt impact casual fan interest. They already ignore the first four
Expanding to 76 just gives the NCAA more incentive to eventually try and expand to 96 in 5-10 years. March Madness is a cash cow and theyāre gonna try to milk it for all itās worth if they can get away with it.
I agree with this one thing in particular, but thereās a sort of gradual degredation happening in a few places sort of all at once that I have to think is going to add up to a bigger impact on maintaining a pipeline of a hardcore fan base, starting with younger folks.
A lot of turnover at the top of the coaching ranks hasnāt helped (Tony, Jay wright, ol Roy), etc). Thatās my vote for others.
Yet TV ratings have never been betterā¦
I feels like this is just another thing thatās going to change and at the end of the day getting used to it will suck but eventually the dust will settle and either things are better or worse.
It kinda reminds me of the death of bowl games. 1st came the CFP, then came the Opt outs (CMC and Fournette being the big ones) and then the expansion to 12 teams but yet I was still locked in all season long for the Hoos.
I think despite all this change and my dislike for the landscape, when my team is good itās hard not to watch and tune in. Now on the flip side I guess itās also never been easier to check out on bad years though.
Feels more like those EPL tourneys where everyone gets to participate but the better teams start later. And huge divide between top and lower tiers.
Minus the 100% participation,
Nahā¦ this is different. What you are talking about would be if we didnāt have Division II and III tournaments and they would play for the chance to continue on when the big boys would enter and had the Division I teams that qualify enter in the round of 128. Then the Div II & III teams would show up with a reincarnated Gene Hackman and win a championship with undersized dudes from Indiana!!!
Oh 100%. And there is also the gradual decline of die hard sports fans in general playing out (with the NFL as the exception). But it seems that decline is a bigger threat to college sports than a decline amongst casual fans who only tune in for March Madness, the Masters, the Super Bowl, etc
I donāt see why adding teams would make the bubble harder to follow. It just changes where the bubble is and who is close to it. Perhaps the new bubble teams would have smaller fanbases than the old bubble teams so maybe fewer people would be engaging, but Iām not sure how following the conversation would be any harder.
For the record I hate this but the one benefit is that if 13 seeds will now be 12 seed quality, 14 seeds will now be 13 seed quality, etc. we may get some more upsets
12 games to start could be
4 - 16 vs 16 games
4 - 12 vs 12 games - last ones in
4 - top 8 regular season winners who didnāt win their conference tournament of smaller conferences
A classically gadfly take from Mr. Gasaway and Mr. Pomeroy (and actually done last year), but there are some arguments in here that land fine for me:
It doesnāt really convince me that this had to happen, but itās compelling for thinking that it wonāt be so bad.
Iām too lazy to figure this out, but would it be more upsets by mid/low major champs or by mediocre P5 teams?
Cinderella is fun when itās like Northwestern Illinois A&M knocking off a P5 team. I donāt get very excited about it when itās like a low seeded Oklahoma State team that underperformed their talent level all year but knock off a higher seed team in game one.
More regular season mid Major champions who lost their tournaments getting in: @Hooandtrue approves
16-15 Auburn and WVU taking those spots instead: Just might as well go ahead and launch the nukes and end this human experiment
Me too. But Iām now paying less attention to other teams. Player movement is the biggest cause for that: team turnover makes it too much work for me to follow rosters at other schools, so now theyre just the name on the front of the shirt, not the back. Conference expansion is another culprit, I canāt even easily focus on ājust the ACCā, each opponent is another game of strangers.
So even in just following UVA Iāve lost some context on opponents that once added more enjoyment.
The 76-team thing doesnāt bother me. Iāll get used to it pretty fast, and maybe Tuesday and Weds will be pretty fun. I do agree though that it very much matters who we expand to (good mid majors or crappy majors) and I probably wonāt like the answer to that.
Excellent description of many fanās dilemma