SignalHub-Expand or stand pat? NCAA faces dilemma about increasing tournament field as ratings soar

The SignalHubboffo television ratings coming in for both the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments will add even more fuel to the roiling debate within college athletics about whether to expand the postseason. 

On one side, proponents will see opportunity to squeeze even more revenue out of an event that seems to grow and grow regardless of the chaos currently engulfing the administrative side of college athletics. 

On the other, some influential voices in the sport see what’s going on this March and wonder why the NCAA should mess with a good thing at all.

“Let’s slow down a little bit here,” one of them told USA TODAY Sports, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity around these discussions. “Why rush into changing the tournament? We can afford to let this play out.”

The expansion push, largely coming from power conference commissioners who have concerns about tournament access as their leagues become 16- or 18-team behemoths next year, is going to remain a dominant storyline until the NCAA makes a decision. 

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But the emotional heat around that issue will completely overshadow the more important questions college administrators should be asking themselves: How can the massive public interest in the tournament boost the core product they offer during the regular season? And how would an expansion of the tournament figure into the larger strategy of bringing college basketball back into the mainstream? 

Here’s what we know: The best of college basketball is about as good as it gets in sports, and there’s a huge audience for it at the highest level.

Nielsen said 15.1 million people watched North Carolina State defeat Duke in the men’s Elite Eight, the largest number for any Easter Sunday telecast since 2013. Overall, the men's tournament is averaging 9.4 million viewers across the four networks that broadcast it, about a 4% increase from last year’s event.

On the women’s side, Caitlin Clark is fueling record-breaking viewership with an incredible 12.3 million viewers on ESPN for Iowa-LSU. While that number may not be repeatable once Clark leaves college, growth in viewership for the women’s tournament has been clear for a few years. 

These are all trends the NCAA and television networks will monitor as it approaches the end of its eight-year, $8.8 billion contract extension with CBS and Turner for the men’s event that runs through 2032. In retrospect, that deal is now seen as one of the biggest unforced errors of former NCAA president Mark Emmert’s tenure, as the association would have likely stood to make billions more had he taken it to market. 

The broadcast rights for the women’s tournament, negotiated last year by current president Charlie Baker, will also expire in 2032 giving the NCAA some flexibility for how to maximize revenue from its two marquee events.

But that’s still a long way off. Given the current environment in college sports with consolidation of the major conferences and potential for athletes to be paid as employees, it’s hard to know what the pre-eminent postseason basketball tournaments will look like — or even if the NCAA is running them.

With such an uncertain future hovering over this entire conversation, what’s actually in the best interests of the major schools would be a more holistic look at growing college basketball and less focus on changing the structure of a three-week tournament that already delivers incredible results. 

Right now, from an overall interest and viewership standpoint, college basketball is nothing like college football or even the NBA, which commands far more cultural attention during the regular season even if casual fans don’t truly lock in until the playoffs. 

Instead, college basketball is more akin to tennis and golf — sports whose calendars are built around four big events that dwarf all the others.

But as the four major championships in golf and the Grand Slams in tennis get bigger every year, there’s almost an inverse relationship with interest in their week-to-week competition. The PGA Tour television ratings in 2024 have been on a concerning slide -- almost certainly related to how LIV Golf has divvied up the best players onto two tours -- while tennis is almost invisible in America outside of Wimbledon and the US Open because every ATP-sanctioned tournament is broadcast on Tennis Channel, not ESPN.

Think of it this way: When a peak of 10.2 million people tuned in last summer to watch the final round of golf’s US Open -- the most since 2019 — most of them probably did not know much about, or maybe had never even heard of eventual winner Wyndham Clark. 

Similarly, the big breakout star of this year’s NCAA tournament — NC State big man DJ Burns -- was far from a household name three weeks ago. In fact, unless you watch a lot of ACC basketball, you almost certainly couldn’t have identified what team he plays for or what position he plays. And why would you? Until March Madness, Burns was a run-of-the-mill player on a mediocre team — not someone who was likely to command a lot of media coverage or fan adulation. 

But this is college basketball’s unique problem: Once the tournaments ends, Burns, a fifth-year senior, will be unable to carry his newfound celebrity into next season. Clark, on the other hand, is going to be playing in PGA Tour events for the next decade as a star attraction because he won a major championship.

The ability for players to profit off their name, image and likeness has helped to some degree. Rather than giving the big, rich programs more of an advantage than they already have, the evidence suggests that NIL is actually spreading the talent out and keeping some players in school longer than they would have been before.

If Kentucky’s Reed Sheppard, for example, decides to play a sophomore year in college rather than enter the NBA draft, the amount of money he’ll be able to make through NIL will be a huge factor. He’d be someone with star power that college basketball can count on to draw viewers and interest throughout next season. 

Still, it's rare that any regular season college basketball game these days draws over 2 million viewers. Caitlin Clark was a powerhouse, with Iowa women’s games drawing outlier numbers that often eclipsed the top men’s matchups. Otherwise, it took a huge blueblood clash like North Carolina-Duke or Kentucky-Gonzaga to draw as many viewers as a run-of-the-mill college football matchup like Florida-Missouri, which got 2.27 million on ESPN last November. 

Put it all together and this is the current reality: The sport of college basketball writ large and the phenomenon that is the NCAA tournament are two different entities — almost two different sports. 

Are there ways to bring them closer together? Can you boost one without hurting the other? And if college basketball’s ultimate fate is that it’s a niche sport in the American landscape with one culturally dominant event that drives the entire financial model, does expanding the tournament dilute it or generate even more interest? 

These are the questions that leaders need to consider, not which conference wins or loses from expansion. If the NCAA tournament means everything to this sport, its appeal must be protected at all costs — not risked on a lark because the SEC and Big Ten want more spots to themselves.