Change is coming to the NCAA; does that mean the NCAA tournament will change?

Even with all of the NCAA’s errors, stumbles and misjudgments, ranging from policy to strategy to messaging, there is one thing it has avoided screwing up: the three-week spectacle of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

And even with regular-season college basketball fading in the public’s consciousness the past 15 years as the one-and-done era wreaked havoc with continuity within high-profile programs, one thing has persevered: the tournament captivating the sporting world.

But across college athletics, change is afoot. NCAA president Mark Emmert said last month that it’s time to consider deregulating college sports, shifting more power to conferences; a constitution committee has been tasked with reinventing the collegiate model; and conference realignment could in a few years usher in the era of super-conferences. While almost all the focus has centered on football ramifications, what does this mean for the valuable property of the NCAA tournament?

More pointedly, is the current structure of the event in jeopardy in the next decade? Could four 16-team super-conferences break away from the NCAA, stage their own postseason tournament strewn with only high-major programs and slam the door shut on the best mid-majors?

Whether it’s UMBC shocking top-seeded Virginia in 2018, Loyola-Chicago crashing the Final Four party that same year or schools like 15th-seeded Oral Roberts enjoying a moment in the spotlight this past March, the mere possibility of the upset is one of the prime ingredients that makes the event so irresistible to viewers. Would a field of all major programs — some middling, some elite — still be alluring? Would a bracket with only familiar brand names still entice everyone from middle-schoolers to grandmas to throw a few dollars into a pool?

“I think there is going to be some type of breakaway,” a high-ranking conference official, unsure of what exact structure may emerge, told On3. That official said the notion that the future structure of the NCAA tournament could potentially exclude smaller leagues has increasingly become a hot topic of conversation among officials from various conferences. 

“In the tournament, if the same Power 5 schools played each other and they already play each other during the regular season — who cares about it?” the official said. “You see regular-season TV ratings already falling off in many sports the last five to 10 years. I’ve been working in college basketball a long time. I don’t know if I’d have interest in watching a 64-team power conference tournament.”

Current NCAA tournament TV deal expires in 2032

The NCAA’s current media-rights deal with CBS and Turner expires in 2032. In 2010, the NCAA announced the original 14-year contract ($10.8 billion); in 2016, opting against waiting to take it to market, it secured an eight-year extension. TV industry sources told On3 that the current deal markedly undervalues the property. 

The networks paid a combined $850 million to carry this year’s tournament, a total that represents the vast majority of the NCAA’s total annual revenue of some $1.1 billion. The per-year average network payout will rise to $1.1 billion starting in 2025. The bulk of that revenue annually flows back to conferences and schools. 

One prominent college athletics official said to expect a so-called breakaway from current governance in the next 10 years but not anytime soon. In that scenario, the official said, the structure of the NCAA tournament doesn’t necessarily have to be re-imaged. Instead, the leadership of the new college sports governance could also invite some basketball-playing conferences (those that don’t field FBS teams) under the auspices of an associate member, adding, “They could say, ‘This is what you have to do and agree to, and understand that if you wake up a year from now and go, ‘We don’t like it,’ you can’t call for a vote to change it.’ ”

The NCAA tournament czar, Dan Gavitt, the association’s senior vice president of basketball, is well-respected in the industry and certainly mindful of the secret sauce that makes the event a one-of-a-kind tradition. But if the most powerful conferences assume control — and they are the same conferences driving realignment machinations — will they have like-minded philosophies regarding basketball’s postseason?

It’s not a universal belief that a breakaway would lead to excluding small schools or, even if it does, that it would spell doom for March Madness. ESPN analyst Jay Bilas told On3 that if the Power 5 conferences did break away, they could stage a postseason tournament that includes a wide swath of schools beyond the Power 5.

“But it’s similar in football — nobody is clamoring for Boise State to be included in the playoff,” Bilas said. “They don’t care. They never did. And they don’t care in basketball, either. People aren’t going to turn away from it if you have a 64-team field that is more limited in scope and doesn’t have the same sort of automatic qualifiers as it has now. The overwhelming majority of small conference teams lose in the tournament. Every once in a while, you get an outlier that wins, but it’s not very often.”

To that point, the double-digit seed that garnered the most attention this past season was UCLA, one of the most decorated programs in history, which masqueraded as Cinderella. Emerging from a play-in game, the 11th-seeded Bruins authored a classic against Gonzaga, losing in overtime on a near-halfcourt shot in a Final Four game that earned the ESPYS award for “Best Game.”

The little guy leads to March madness

That said, only an event that includes schools both big and small can generate juicy storylines like this one from this past season: No. 14 Abilene Christian 53, No. 3 Texas 52. Entering the tournament with the lowest athletic budget of any school in the field ($20 million), it toppled the state’s flagship school that boasts a budget of more than $200 million. A Division II school less than a decade ago, Abilene Christian’s home court has been an indoor tennis facility (capacity 2,000) while its arena is being remodeled. 

Other than adding a play-in game in 2001 and three more in 2011, the NCAA tournament has not undergone major restructuring since it expanded to the modern 64-team format in 1985. 

Tom McMillen, a former U.S. Congressman and Rhodes Scholar who now is CEO of LEAD1 Association, said the current structure of the tournament works and it remains “such a brand that it is hard to imagine trying to poach that.”

Mit Winter, a Kansas City-based college sports law attorney who played basketball at William & Mary, agrees, saying that “the way the NCAA is trending — lessening its role and power — (a power conference breakaway) is definitely something I think could happen in the future. But if the conferences did something like that, I think they’d be careful to try and not take away what people enjoy about the tournament, which are the upsets. But with the amount of money involved, you never know what could happen.”

After seeing Texas and Oklahoma bolt to the SEC in a money-driven move to make the rich richer, that’s what concerns many in the industry: No tradition may be safe from disruption, not even March Madness. 

The next few months will be critical in beginning to shape the contours of the new landscape, the conference official said, adding, “Do you continually let those four or five conferences have all the say in the NCAA and end up shoving some conferences out in some ways? If you want to go out and do your own thing, go do your own thing. 

“There’s a lot of conferences, a lot of institutions out there that have college athletics as part of the educational experience, not necessarily to be a minor-league system for the NFL and NBA. It would be terrible in many ways, but in the future (smaller leagues) may have access to the tournament at a different level.”