ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips encourages NCAA Tournament expansion discussion

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about expanding the College Football Playoff. However, there has not been much talk in recent years about expanding the highly profitable and popular NCAA Tournament for college basketball. ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips wants to change that, though, as he is encouraging a discussion about expansion.

While speaking at ACC Media Days, Jim Phillips said that it’s time to start looking at expanding the field of teams in the NCAA Tournament. In particular, he pointed out that the current field has nearly the same number of automatic qualifiers as at-large bids.

“It’s time to look at that. It’s time to look at the expansion of all conference championships — not conference championships but National Championships,” Jim Phillips said.

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However, Jim Phillips doesn’t think the basketball tournament is the only one that should be expanded. He feels that deserving teams are being left out of all the NCAA athletics tournaments.

“I think where we’re needing some dialogue is in not only looking at the men’s basketball and women’s basketball tournament, but some of the other tournaments that have fewer opportunities. When you have this compression that I feel that we have to address in the sense that you have a lot of schools that are spending a tremendous amount of resources in sports and not having a chance to access those championships, I certainly felt like we deserved more than five ACC teams last year on the men’s side, and I felt like we deserved more than eight on the women’s side.”

Jim Phillips used baseball as the example of a sport where he felt deserving schools got left out, using NC State as an example.

“But the numbers are the numbers. Again, my perspective and our perspective of the ACC, not interested in cutting back those AQs [automatic qualifiers]. Those AQs matter. That’s part of the broad-based opportunities we have in Division I sports is the lower resource conferences and the higher resource conferences can all gain access.”

Jim Phillips did express caution about how expanding the postseason affects the regular season. However, he also insisted that the time is now to discuss expanding these postseason tournaments, including basketball and more.

“The time is now. The time is now as we’re looking at the overall structure of the NCAA, and one of their responsibilities has been championships. So I’m in favor of looking at it, and I really would like us to expand.”