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Message: [QUOTE="billybud, post: 4915253, member: 3850"] Sankey is the Borg...after destroying football, basketball could be his next target. [I]In a recent phone interview, Sankey acknowledged the tournament is one of the few things that bonds the disparate world of Division I together. "Nothing remains static," he told ESPN. "I think we have to think about the dynamics around Division I and the tournament." He added that recent runs by UCLA from the First Four to the Final Four in 2021 and Syracuse's run to the round of 16 beginning with a play-in game in Dayton in 2018 show the caliber of power-conference teams on the fringe of the NCAA tournament. "That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive," Sankey said. "We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers [from smaller leagues], and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion."[/I] [/QUOTE]