I'll preface this article by saying that the Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament is one of the best — if not the best — postseason events in all of sports. It always has the perfect amount of parity to generate an upset, yet still allow the best teams to thrive.
But while it might come as a very unpopular opinion for many fans, the automatic bid for conference champions should be done away with.
On the surface it provides excitement for some schools who capture that "March Magic". But in reality, there are so many instances of the best teams in smaller or mid-major conferences missing their chance to compete on he big stage.
Take for example Indiana State.
The Sycamores became the sweethearts of the mid-major fans this season, behind the online popularity of center Robbie Avila (prominently known as Cream Abdul-Jabar). The Sycamores went 28-6 and won the regular season title outright, but fell to Drake in the finals of the Missouri Valley Conference tournament.
So instead of Indiana State, we got Michigan State, which robbed the fans of seeing a a top mid-major being on the big stage.
Then you have the Big East, who had three 20-win teams (St. John's, Seton Hall and Providence ) get left out in the cold this March.
While the selection committee tried to play the blame game, by saying that five bids were stolen due to teams like Drake beating Indiana State in the MVC tournament. It still doesn't justify the Spartans or Texas A&M sliding their way in.
And while many of the top teams in the conferences do end up winning their postseason tournament, there is always a handful of programs that end up missing their opportunity to elevate their program much like Gonzaga or Creighton did with several deep runs in the tournament.
Now one solution is to expand the tournament to 452 teams. Yes, I know that's not a real number, but there's talks of expanding it out to over 80 teams. So, maybe if we give it a couple more years, that first number won't be too far off.
The second second solution would be to not hand out so many bids to the top conferences. While sometimes deserved because of the heavy level of talent at the power conferences. Sometimes a team winds up in the tournament and doesn't belong. That's mostly because the committee may decide the Big 10 or the SEC should always have 6-8 teams.
A third option might be to just do away with the conference tournaments and let the regular season determine the champion. And if there's a regular season tie at the top? Then play a one-game playoff to settle it.
But the reality is there's a ton of money and TV time pushing the conference tournaments to happen. So that won't be going away soon.
So maybe expanding to 52 teams is the best solution.
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