yeah I have read there is consideration for a 96-team field and to that I scream "No!". Leave it at a 68 team field. The tournament could be expanded to a 136-team field and there will always be teams that felt they were snubbed. Teams feeling snubbed will always occur no matter how big or small the tournament field is.
Tournaments have two different philosophy’s
Exclusive or Inclusive . College BB has always been exclusive
I pretty much lived in KY for a couple of years .
They have a successful all inclusive tournament
They break the State down into 16 geographic regions . Each region had its own tournament with every HS is represented without regard to size . The winners of each region participate in a blind draw to see who plays who. A smaller school from a rural region or from the poorer eastern mountains can draw a large Louisville Catholic school . I believe Indiana has a similar set up . The NCAA tournament use to actually have a true regional concept at one time . . That ended up with a FF from the each section . But like its predecessor the NIT is was limited by invitations.
Can the NCAA adopt the Ky model ? I believe yes, an very
easily by eliminating conference tournaments and have all inclusive geographical regional tournaments instead. You could have 4, 8, 16, or even 32 regions. No seeding in the finals tournaments just a blind draw .
The World Cup the biggest tournament started out by inviting all soccer playing countries . By the sport’s expansion required regional qualifiers. and that generates $ 400 billion in revenue but technically no country is excluded . You have countries like Croatia with 4 million people in the finals
The NCAA men’s BB is the best annual tournament in the world .So one thought is you don’t fix what ain’t broken or maybe you can possibly even make it better. I remember when it was a smaller field and expansion has only made it better .
