MORGANTOWN — Expansion is inevitable at this point in college athletics. More teams mean more sponsorships and broadcasting rights, which all come back to more money. It doesn’t matter the sport.
Since talking to West Virginia athletic director Wren Baker earlier in the spring, the NCAA Tournament for men’s and women’s basketball has already expanded from 68 teams to 76. The number of play-in games went from four games to 12, allowing for more teams to make the Big Dance. Which, in theory, should be better for men’s basketball coach Ross Hodge to make the tournament since last year the team was on the bubble. The year before, head coach Darian DeVries had WVU on the bubble, too.
During his spring press conference, Baker talked about the positives of NCAA Tournament expansions and the positives of having more chances to get his team in the field, but he knows there are drawbacks.
Baker was a basketball coach before being an athletic director, so March Madness is one of his favorite times of year. He’s also been an athletic director at multiple different levels, including at non-Power Four conference schools, and was most recently at North Texas.
One of his favorite things is seeing a mid-major school make a run in the tournament, who received an automatic qualifier for winning the conference championship.
“I would not be in favor of pulling AQs away from the mid-major leagues,” Baker said. “I think that’s part of what makes the tournament special, because everybody who goes to the conference tournament goes with the hope that they can catch lightning in a bottle, be a Cinderella, and play in the Big Dance.”
This new format wouldn’t give out more automatic qualifiers to those schools. It’d instead provide more opportunities for an at-large team in the Power Conference, which would include WVU.
Baker acknowledged that one of the main reasons for expansion was to get more of those bigger-name schools, including itself. But, he still wants the smaller schools to be well-represented and not have opportunities taken from them.
Baker is in favor of expansion as long as those teams remain untouched.
“Let’s just see how it works and how it’s evaluated, but generally I’m in favor of opportunities for young people, and so you add more teams, you give more young people opportunities.”
Baker’s stance on the College Football Playoff expansion is a bit different since there are not as many teams. But that could change with a new 24-team format that was voted on by the American Football Coaches Association. The AFCA includes multiple Power Four coaches, including the Big 12’s Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire.
They voted in favor of a new 24-team format, which moves up the postseason, eliminating conference title games. Their vote doesn’t have any impact on its ratification. That’s up to the SEC and Big Ten. But their vote brings up the discussion of doubling the field.
This new format has received a lot of pushback from the main broadcast company of the playoffs, ESPN, and the SEC, who were both in favor of the current 12-team format or expanding a little more to 16 teams. But the Big 12 and ACC are in favor of the 24-team format because more of their schools would make it in. This season, each of those leagues just had one bid each, Texas Tech and Miami, and the new format would have added five more teams for those two leagues.
Baker, like the Big 12, is in favor of more teams for the CFP.
“I think it’s a little different because right now that’s a relatively small field,” Baker said. “I do think it needs to be enlarged, just for representation generally. I think there are teams being left out who could win games and perhaps advance to the championship.”
However, it’s finding out what the right number of teams that’ll be, and that’s what everyone is trying to figure out. That’s why a new format is thrown out during the offseason to see what sticks and appeals to the vast majority of conferences.
Baker also likes the fact that there’ll be more opportunities to host a postseason game on the Morgantown campus. After seeing what women’s basketball did when it hosted the NCAA Tournament Regional this spring, Baker can only imagine what it’d look like in Milan Puskar Stadium.
“I think those opportunities for campuses, there’s something special about the pageantry of having those events on campus,” Baker said. “I think giving more people those opportunities is a good thing.”
But, then there are the weeds of moving the schedule, playing on the same day as the Army-Navy game and removing the conference title games, which this new format would do. There’s still a lot of logistics to figure out if this new format could become a reality.
So, like the NCAA Tournament expansion, Baker wants to gather more information before deciding whether or not he’s fully set on these new ways to showcase the postseason.
“I’d like to know more of the details as we get there,” Baker said. “But definitely in favor of expansion.”
