NOBODY WANTED THIS.

According to Reason's Jason Russell, the collegiate sports cartel made an unpopular decision at the wrong time.

March Madness is growing from 68 teams to 76 teams for both men and women, even though no one asked for this—not fans, anyway. The vast majority of public sentiment has been against expansion, while conference leaders and coaches have pushed for expansion (it's a lot harder to get fired if your mediocre team somehow slides into the tournament).

It's not as if the cartel managers are doing everything they can to keep the four or five power conferences from bolting, which comes as no surprise.  "How long have I been carrying on about College Sports, Inc. realigning until there are four major conferences of sixteen teams each and the National Collegiate Athletic Association becomes irrelevant?"

It's not enough that the round of sixteen has become a de facto "Best of the Power Conferences," never mind that the betting interest in the Big Dance often reduces to who most accurately predicts the path by which the participants in the round of eight get there.  The revised tournament format looks to be the first step toward concentrating the minds of coaches of mediocre teams in the power conferences and excusing the automatic qualifiers from the likes of the Mid-American before the serious betting begins.

In the new format, the 12 worst at-large teams and 12 worst automatic qualifiers will all play in the "March Madness Opening Round" (who can resist sexy branding like that?). That doesn't just mean teams that had been left out will now make play-in games; it also means teams that previously would have started in the round of 64 will now have to go through a play-in to make the "real" bracket. Under the most recent format, 60 teams started in the round of 64—the new format lowers this to 52, putting more teams in play-in precarity and forcing them to streak to seven wins for a national championship instead of the typical six. Also, more mid-major schools will swallow each other up in play-in games instead of getting to face off against higher seeds in the "real" bracket.

High Point might have exactly the same chance of ousting Wisconsin in that opening round as they took under the existing format, in which the stigma of automatic qualifiers from conferences that ought be relegated facing off for the right to face a top seed is mildly diluted with the occasional tilt to determine who gets an eleventh seed, and sometimes that's an automatic qualifier getting a mediocre next-four-out opponent.  Under the new format, the universe of conferences that really ought be relegated expands, as, if Mr Russell has described it correctly, twelve conferences are on the ought-be-relegated list.  That's got to help recruiting in the Mid-American or the Horizon.