The Wednesday Wizengamot exists to make declarations of right and wrong in sports, basically. So far, each issue has been about professional baseball. But what about the other athletic endeavors? The world is full of options, of course, and ideally, we’d like to explore a new one each week. Sometimes, current events will present one, and other times, it will be a historical issue that we feel needs addressing in the present day.

Today, we want to look at the NCAA Championship tournaments for men’s and women’s basketball. This season, 364 men’s teams and 362 women’s teams play Division I-level hoops, and tournament invites go out to 68 men’s teams and 68 women’s teams. That means that slightly more than one sixth of teams get the premium reward for a good regular season. There is no need to expand the tournament at all in this day/age.

None.

A “championship” tournament should not be open to “everyone”—in theory: 18.7 percent of men’s schools and 18.8 percent of women’s school have a chance to win it all. They are the elite, in essence, of the entirety. The primary reason for expanding any playoff situation is simply about money and nothing else. Compare these percentages to professional sports leagues and their current allotment of access to the postseason:

  • MLB: 40 percent (12 out of 30 teams)
  • NBA/WNBA: 67 percent (20 out of 30, including “play-in” games) & 67 percent (8 out of 12)
  • NFL: 44 percent (14 out of 32)
  • NHL: 50 percent (16 ouf ot 32)

Pro basketball has been out of whack since we were kids, when 16 out of 23 teams would make the playoffs. We can look at those data points above and realize that it is an extreme situation there (NBA and WNBA) where it’s financially beneficial to keep more teams in competition longer, in order to maintain fan interest. Baseball and football postseason expansion has been gradual in our lifetimes, too, but they’re acceptable.

Recently, too, of course, we’ve seen college football moving into the twenty-first century with its adoption of a 12-team tournament finally and talk already of expanding it to 16 teams soon. That represents the lower end of the spectrum, in terms of involvement (12 out of 134; nine percent ). The idea the schools want more fans to stay engaged in their teams’ seasons isn’t as problematic as it is for the pro sports, really.

The bottom seeds in the NCAA Tournament almost never win more than a game or two, unlike in the NFL where the worst team to qualify for the postseason has won the Super Bowl (somehow), for example. The lowest-qualifying teams in MLB and the NHL have won league titles in recent years. This is because the pool of available teams overall is smaller, making the gap between No. 1 and No. 10 in pro sports a lot slimmer.

In college sports’ already diluted field of endless teams, in either football or basketball, the same realities are not in place. This comes down to greed and nothing else; this is why we say no. It’s already bad enough that college sports have chucked the “student” part of the student-athlete role. There has to be a point where academic administrators just say enough is enough. That time is now for college basketball, for sure.