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Purdue basketball team leaders wary of NCAA tournament expansion

VaselineJuly 19, 2024

0 3 minutes read

Purdue basketball team leaders wary of NCAA tournament expansion

There are currently 68 teams participating in the NCAA Tournament, including 36 at-large bids.
ESPN reported in March that talks were underway to expand to up to 80 teams.
Purdue’s streak of nine consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances is the third-longest in the nation.

WEST LAFAYETTE — Purdue basketball teams have spent much of the past decade unaware of the insidiousness of the NCAA Tournament bubble.

The program’s nine consecutive NCAA appearances ranks a distant third behind Michigan State (25) and Gonzaga (24) as the longest streak in the country. The Boilermakers have held a 5-seed or higher in the past eight tournaments.

(Pause for the important caveat that the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 tournament and kept this streak alive. What happened to Purdue in the subsequent four tournaments, however, only amplified the feat of both building a resume and defending it in every corner of the bracket.)

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So if the NCAA Tournament expansion goes ahead — and especially if it adds a whole round of teams and nearly reaches triple-digit attendance — Purdue will not support the tournament.

Coach Matt Painter, who serves on the board of directors of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, believes the expansion would only affect four to eight teams. Not that he sees the need for it.

“My first reaction is, don’t mess with something that’s pretty special,” Painter said.

Athletic director Mike Bobinski once judged bubble resumes as chairman of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee. He knows it’s a thankless, stressful job that by its very nature can crush the hopes of teams that have spent the entire season fighting to face a subjective fate.

Still, Bobinski is “not a fan” of expansion. He knows that the wishes of media rights holders can ultimately be decisive. More games means more inventory means more advertising revenue for rights holders and more money back for conferences and sports programming.

For that reason, he is prepared for a ‘minimal’ expansion: a few teams.

“These 96, 120 — no way,” Bobinski said. “To me, that’s ridiculous. You can’t turn that event into a watered-down all-comers tournament.

“There’s a magic to why it’s so highly anticipated and expected and people take those first few days off from work. There’s something very powerful about that. I think you run the risk of solving a problem that doesn’t exist at this point.”

Last March, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported that discussions were underway to expand to as many as 80 teams. SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey co-chaired the NCAA Transformation Committee that recommended expansion a year earlier. He stirred debate and emotion when he told Thamel that giving tournament berths to automatic qualifiers over power conference teams hurt the tournament’s competitiveness.

Those comments have been poorly preserved thanks to the SEC’s abrupt first-round upset, with 6-seeded South Carolina losing to 11-seeded Oregon, 4-seeded Auburn losing to 13-seeded Yale and 2-seeded Kentucky losing to 15-seeded Oakland.

Even without those examples of instant karma, Bobinski, a former athletic director at Xavier and Georgia Tech, can’t relate to the plight of high-profile teams hoping their bubble doesn’t burst.

“I’ve been in that room with the committee six times, and I can remember in each of those six years, when you’re picking the last at-large teams, you’re looking at teams whose performance throughout the year is suspect,” Bobinski said. “Their resumes already have a lot of holes and a lot of question marks.

“That last group, five or six of them, you look at it like, ‘Eh, did they really do enough to earn a spot in this tournament? If you expand that by more, you’re looking at more teams that are going to look like that. And there’s still going to be the next team that says, ‘What about us?'”

Painter has sympathy for mid- and low-major teams that win their leagues in the regular season but lose in the conference tournament. He believes the tournament is strengthened by using the regular-season champion. He was reluctant to advocate for both teams to participate — something that would almost certainly not find support in the power conferences anyway.

“To get more people out there — as long as it doesn’t take away from the beauty and the structure of it,” Painter said. “Obviously we’ve had some really tough losses, but that’s the NCAA Tournament. It’s part of it. You’ve got to play better. You’ve got to be able to do it.

“That’s the magic of it.”

Both Painter and Bobinski used that word: “Magic.” They experienced it both through a crushing upset and a long-awaited Final Four run.

Which begs the question: If a program that got beat up as badly in the NCAA Tournament as Purdue doesn’t want to change anything, why would anyone else?

Follow IndyStar Purdue Insider Nathan Baird on X at @nwbaird.

VaselineJuly 19, 2024

0 3 minutes read

Vaseline

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