PROTECT MARCH MADNESS IN ITS CURRENT FORMAT AT ALL COSTS

There is a weird obsession in sports right now with making everything bigger, and it’s that time of the year when the conversation comes around expanding the NCAA basketball tournament, which would be the biggest casualty of the greatest sporting tournament.

Expanding the tournament would only dilute it.

What makes March Madness special is that it feels earned, and expanding it just to allow every borderline power-conference team to secure a seat at the table would be a giant mistake.

And just as important, the NCAA must protect the automatic bids for conference tournament champions.

That is non-negotiable.

Those bids are what keep the fabric of the tournament intact. They are what create the Cinderella stories that casual fans latch onto every March. The sport needs those moments. It needs the 13-seed nobody saw coming.

Take that away, or water it down, and you do not improve the tournament. You turn it into a more predictable, more corporate, less memorable version of itself.

Nobody remembers March because a ninth Big Ten team got another chance. People remember March because a team they barely watched all year suddenly becomes impossible to stop, like St. Peter’s a few years ago.

They remember the buzzer-beaters and upsets.

Sometimes it needs to stop being about money and protecting the fabric of what makes your product great.

Protect the bracket as it is. Protect automatic bids because the NCAA Tournament, in its current form, is not broken, and that is something every American on the right or the left can actually agree on.