When the NCAA chose to hire Charlie Baker as its next president in March 2023, there was plenty of logic and reason behind this unprecedented decision.
Other than receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard and an MBA from Northwestern, he had no tangible experience inside higher education. Other than playing JV basketball, he had no experience in college athletics. The NCAA's previous presidents all had been in charge of major universities or their athletic departments.
Baker, though, had done decades of work in government, including two terms as governor of Massachusetts. And that’s where the NCAA appeared to need massive help, with consistent court defeats draining much of the organization’s authority and federal intervention the most obvious solution to these concerns.
Maybe those conducting the interviews should have asked a few more hoops questions.
Because basketball is where the NCAA makes its money, and Baker showed a profound lack of understanding about that fact in his comments following an appearance at the Big 12 meetings.
In acknowledging the NCAA should not abandon the automatic qualification process that grants March Madness entry to champions of each of 31 Division I conferences, he presented a ridiculous corollary to justify his preference for expanding the field beyond its current size.
“If you have a tournament that’s got 68 teams in it, you’re going to have a bunch of teams that are probably among what most people would consider the best 68 or 70 teams in the country that aren’t going to make the tournament, period, because you get a whole bunch of people who win their conference tournaments who aren’t in that group,” Baker said.
“So the point behind going from 68 to 72 or 76 is to basically give some of those schools that probably were among the best teams in the country a way into the tournament.”
In truth, Baker demonstrated a disturbing degree of fractured logic there beyond just demonstrating a lack of understanding about what makes March so popular (and lucrative) for the NCAA and its members. But let’s just stick to the hoops, because it ought to be a minimum requirement for someone running the organization to have a command of the event that generates nearly all of its revenue.
To suggest any teams that miss the NCAA Tournament are “among the best” is preposterous. There are 68 positions in the field. There is no “best” that is left unexamined and uninvited, especially now that the metrics and process employed by the NCAA men’s basketball committee (colloquially, the “selection committee”) have been refined in the current decade.
Last season, the committee identified West Virginia, Indiana, Ohio State and Boise State as the teams that came closest to March Madness inclusion. While any (or all, frankly) of them can argue they warranted a bid more than North Carolina in 2024-25, even most Hoosiers fans wouldn’t contend their favorite team ranked as one of the nation’s "best."
And speaking of UNC, does a 1-10 Quad 1 record really fit the definition of “best?"
Indiana played 17 games against opponents that were considered Quad 1. They lost 76 percent of those games. Ohio State won only two more games than they lost, and six of their defeats came against teams that did not make the NCAA field. Boise lost to the 202nd ranked team on a neutral court and ranked 50 or below in five of the six metrics on their official tournament resume.
It is pretty clear by now that the exclusion of any of these teams is, in fact, not a calamity. And there absolutely is no "public mandate" for their inclusion.
It’s not just that there are no “best” teams being excluded. It’s that those consuming the NCAA Tournament overwhelmingly are opposed to a bigger field. When I conducted a Twitter poll in March asking if readers preferred the current field size or an expansion, 91 percent indicated their preference for a 68-team tournament.
It is widely assumed among those following the sport that the push for expansion is about money, but it’s really not. Because the people with the money – the TV networks – have not been rushing to endorse this direction. Front Office Sports reported Friday that TV executives do not expect Turner Sports and CBS to be delighted about increasing the amount they pay for the tournament to cover the “units” that would be granted to the extra teams.
“I believe CBS and TNT will offer them zero – or a minus amount,” one executive told FOS. “They’re expanding the earliest round for no reason other than the powers that be think it’s worth more.”
It’s actually more about insecurity. With power conferences expanding to 16 or 18 teams, leagues initially worried there would not be room for all of their quality teams in the field. We see this reflected in the recent moves by the ACC and Big 12 to cut their number of conference games; they fear they are damaging their own cases by beating one another. And for Baker, it's the NCAA trying to hold the association together when there might be other options for power conferences in the future.
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The 2025 NCAA Tournament, though, showed there is plenty of room for qualified power programs – even if a huge chunk of them are in the same league The SEC broke nearly every conference bracket record there was by placing 14 of its 16 teams into the field.
And the Big Ten got 8 teams – the equivalent of five bids during its long period as an 11-team conference, or six when there were 14 members from 2015-24. On average in those seasons, they placed seven teams in March Madness.
It’s unlikely the SEC is going to be so good as to place 88 percent of its membership into the March Madness field on an annual basis. Whatever level that league reaches, though, or the Big 12 or ACC, it’s going to be acknowledged. And the rewards are richer than ever.
Turner and CBS will pay an average of $1.1 billion annually from now until the NCAA Tournament contract expires in 2032. That’s a lot of money for 67 college basketball games, but the size and loyalty of the audience have shown it to be a bargain. There’s zero need for them to invest even more to help create an inventory of games demonstrably fewer are eager to see, and that will make staging a proper NCAA bracket contest more difficult than ever.
One hopes Charlie Baker recognizes how essential that element of March Madness continues to be.
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