Barnhouse: March Madness 2024 & The End of College Sports As We Know Them

Seeing and/or predicting the future has never been a skill for Your Veteran Scribe. If it was, he wouldn’t have spent 45 years in sports journalism connecting nouns and verbs to describe the perspiring arts and instead would have invested wisely in Nike or Apple. (No complaints. Also, no summer house in Carmel.)

YVS, though, is 100% certain in this prophecy: The current 2023-24 season is the last version of college sports as we know it. 

March Madness is knocking on the door and the college football season culminating in a real playoff (12 teams) will be ringing the doorbell in just over six months. And 2023-24 will be the first with four leagues – Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Southeastern – housing 68 schools. The ghost of the Pac-12 will exist with two schools.

That’s not breaking news, but here’s the cold, hard math. Sixty-eight schools. In four conferences.

Mo’ money, mo’ problems?

Naw, this is mo’ teams, mo’ problems, mo’ unintended consequences. The insane conference realignment and growth over the last couple of years provides the first glance of some monumental changes.

The year’s March Madness is fast approaching and, for now, the bracket field is holding steady at 68 teams. NCAA president Charlie Baker has said the NCAA Tournament basketball committee is discussing expanding the bracket to an absurd 96 teams. 

As ESPN analyst Jay Bilas put it: “Never underestimate the NCAA’s capacity to do something stupid. And, if they did this, it would be profoundly stupid.”

Bilas also pointed out that every Division I team has access to the bracket via winning their conference tournament and automatic bid.

There is no rational reason to expand beyond 68 teams unless the rationale involves money and power. More on that later; keep reading.

With 36 at-large bids available (for now), expect the bloated Big Four leagues to benefit from incestuous scheduling. The Big Ten and ACC will probably play 20 league games next season with the SEC and Big 12 playing 18. 

The NCAA’s Net Rankings will calculate those conference games and the internal competition will benefit the top half of the teams in those four conferences. Strength of schedule will be “baked in.” More teams from the Big Four will benefit from Quad 1 and Quad 2 contests.

That could mean fewer at-large bids for the eight to 10 “mid-major” conferences.

Also, because of the increased number of conference games, “buy” games and special cross-league “challenges,” there will be fewer (if any) non-conference games between teams in the Big Four and mid-majors. That could further limit the opportunities for mid-major leagues to enhance their NET Rankings.

College football, aka The Massive Money Maker, also has a massive scheduling problem thanks to swollen conference ranks.

When the 10-team Big 12 played its last nine-game league schedule in 2022 it marked the end of sane conference scheduling – every team playing every other team.

In 2024, the 18-team Big Ten will play a nine-game schedule. The 16-team SEC will be play an eight-game schedule. And with no divisions, there will be teams finishing 16^th and 18^th in the standings of the Big Four. Fans of those schools will be sooooo proud.

Sympathy for the basement dwellers won’t matter as much as deciding the two “best” teams to play in the league championship games that will determine an automatic bid to the College Football Playoff. Determining those top two teams will likely be messier than a pre-school finger painting session.

As the estimable and knowledgeable Pat Forde of SI.com put hammer to nail:

“The other complication that the mega-conferences have brought upon themselves is their own difficulty in objectively declaring who its best teams are. The more teams you have in a league, the harder it is to play comparable schedules. Which makes it harder to crown deserving champions.”

Teams in the Big Four will miss playing nearly half of their league brethren. There are real possibilities that three teams might finish undefeated or with one loss, or one team finish undefeated and three (or four) finish with one loss. Head-to-head tiebreakers are unlikely to be applicable for all the deadlocks. Plus, the one-loss teams will bicker that the other one-loss teams played schedules chockfull of the league’s weak sisters.

With the expanded playoff and at-large bids, there’s another potential scenario. If three teams finish in second with one loss, would the team selected by tiebreaker to play in the league championship game want to play in that game.

Why risk a second loss and maybe lose out on a CFP at-large bid?

With all the damnable dilemmas facing college sports – transcontinental conferences, name/image/license rules, the transfer portal – the move to a more inclusive CFP was hailed as a sane solution.

Twelve teams, automatic qualifiers, at-large bids, first-round games on campuses. All in all, a clear-headed and sensical evolution for college football’s post-season.

The 12-team CFP was approved in late 2022 – prior to the insanity of realignment that has occurred since. There are two years remaining on the current CFP contract. Without even a test drive of the 12-team format, there are rumblings that the plan will be swapped for a newer model. 

Earlier this month, the Big Ten and the SEC admitted their champagne wishes and caviar dreams. They announced the two conferences had formed an “advisory group” to “address the significant challenges facing college athletics."

In this case, “advisory group” translates to greedy bastards.

The Big Ten and SEC are hinting that because they have the “best teams” (their perception) and the biggest market share (fact) that they deserve “most favored nation status.”

Their message is “nice CFP ya got there, be a shame if something happens to it.”

They’re hinting at wanting the bracket expanding to 14 or 16 teams. (And never mind extra games for the “student-athletes” or the problem of avoiding head-to-head scheduling with the NFL.) 

“Great,” you might think. “More teams. Inclusion is good.”

Wrong, bracket breath. 

The Big Ten and SEC want an expanded playoff to come with multiple automatic bids for their conferences – not just for their league champions, but for teams that are guaranteed bids because they conquered an unbalanced league schedule with just one or two losses.

The Big Ten and SEC are also hinting that because they’ll have more teams in the bracket, they deserve bigger slices of the CFP revenue pie. Because of course. Those two conferences consider themselves The Big Brands.

And, look around fellow citizens – we have four major airlines, four companies handling rail shipping, four major meat producers, one monster on-line sales company.

Market share, baby. Eliminate the competition by making it less competitive.

Enjoy 2024’s March Madness. Savor it. Changes in college sports are hooked up to the hyper drive. The only thing that never changes is change itself. Prepare yourselves, college sports fans, to assess and argue if the changes are for the better.

Prediction: They won’t be.