Thinking your team qualified for the NCAA Tournament, only to find out they’ve earned a spot in a play-in game, is like being told your MLB team is headed to the World Series, but then you discover they’ve actually won a spot in a stick ball game in the parking lot.
Nobody cares about the play-in games. March Madness is, and always will be, about the 64 teams who make the tournament.
Rather than expand to 68 teams or beyond in future years, what the NCAA should really do is shrink the first field to 60 teams, then take the next best 16 teams who are all on the proverbial bubble and enter them into…ready… The Bubble Bracket.
The Final Four teams who survive the Bubble Bracket are then entered into the tournament as 12 seeds in each different region (presuming that the auto bids from small conferences still get the majority of 14, 15 & 16 seeds).
The Final Four teams in the Bubble Bracket are actually the final four teams of the 64 team March Madness field and they earned their way in through their play, not by arguments in a selection committee.
No more ‘on the bubble’ talk. No more sad Larry Brown interviews about SMU getting hosed. No more bubble at all. People might care a little about the 65th team getting left out… But nobody will care about the 77th team getting left out (60 + the Bubble Bracket 16).
The NCAA can get the whole thing sponsored by Dubble Bubble and make even more money. And we can all fill out another bracket…like a warm-up bracket. Or, the NIT can take it over and actually be slightly relevant. Either way, it bursts the bubble team bubble, which is a good thing.