College basketball coaches react to NCAA Tournament expansion, focus on how field should be picked

When the news broke this week that the NCAA Tournament is closing in on expanding from 68 teams to 76, most coaches were like fans.

“My knee-jerk reaction is you shouldn’t do it,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. “I just think we have something that’s pretty special.”

Not every coach is against expansion. Some follow the NCAA’s company line that college basketball has the smallest percentage of its teams playing in its postseason tournament of any Division I sport, so increasing the percentage of participation made sense. But the strongest opinions from coaches are not about the actual change; it’s the methodology for how the NCAA got to this place and how it selects the field.

This was a decision made largely for monetary reasons, with pressure from power conferences that want more inclusion for their teams, which gives those leagues a bigger slice of the pie. And while the added games will not immediately lead to more revenue for the NCAA in the middle of its television contract, the expanded tournament will give the NCAA a bigger inventory when that deal runs out in 2032.

That’s why coaches are frustrated. Much like other changes that have happened recently in their sport, they expressed that they don’t seem to have much of a say.

“I think right now we have a laundry list of issues in college basketball, and rather than adjudicate them one by one, independent of each other, I think we perhaps could optimize our model if we had a commissioner and a governing body to look at things holistically,” Santa Clara coach Herb Sendek said. “Because often one decision affects another. … If you try to adjudicate them independently, I don’t know that you come up with anything other than a coat full of patches instead of a seamless garment.”

The beauty of the NCAA Tournament is the ability for David to beat Goliath and for David to even get invited to the party.

The optimist view of expansion is that a few more mid-major teams could earn an at-large bid each season. Using Bart Torvik’s projections, San Diego State and New Mexico would have been two of the eight teams added to a 76-team field this past year. Among the 10 teams after that, five teams outside of the power structure are in that group.

But the advantage still lies with the high-majors, who have a built-in advantage with the metrics that are used to select the field and a selective bias when it comes to optics.

One such example: In 2024, Indiana State was held out even though its NET ranking (29) was better than 14 at-large selections and its Wins Above Bubble ranking (39) was better than five at-large teams. The reason the Sycamores were held out of the field was a 1-4 Quad 1 record, but four of those Q1 games were on the road and one was a 4-point neutral loss in the Missouri Valley tournament final to Drake.

“I understand resumes, but if you’d watched Indiana State play, there’s just no way you can keep them out of that tournament,” Painter said. “We got to have the right metric, we got to have the right feel combination. There has to be, ‘this is what we’re going off of.’ The thing that always puzzles me is the reason why you use a variable to keep somebody out has got to be the same variable why you put somebody in. I just don’t like the selective picking of variables to send it one way or the other.”

To illustrate Painter’s point, in 2025, North Carolina was included in the field with a lower NET (36) than Indiana State, a similar WAB (37) and the same number of Q1 wins (one) — only the Tar Heels went 1-12 in Q1 games.

In the new format, both teams would have been included, but …

“You’re just pushing it down is all you’re doing,” Painter said.

Expansion also likely reduces the percentage of mid-major teams that get in the field of 64. If the NCAA follows the First Four model, the new format would include the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers and the 12 lowest-seeded at-large selections.

That will mean that four more teams from one-bid leagues will not make the 64-team field. Plus, it will make it more difficult for some of the best teams from one-bid leagues to advance because their seeding will suffer. In the current format, the two at-large play-in winners occupy the 11-line. In the new format, the entire 11-line will likely be play-in winners and two of the No. 12 seeds will also likely be play-in winners, pushing down two of the auto-bid teams that would occupy that line traditionally ripe for upsets.

“We’ve got to find a way to not penalize, but be able to project and help the mid-majors,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said. “They’re the ones that I worry about. Because they’re getting hit left and right.”

Not only are the high-majors taking their best players from the transfer portal, but they’re also typically refusing to play the best mid-major teams in nonconference games, which boxes them out from getting the games they need to build tourney resumes.

This became a hot-button topic this year when Miami (Ohio), which went undefeated in the regular season and lost in its conference tourney, was considered a bubble team and ended up the last team in the field. The RedHawks did not play one Q1 game and were not able to schedule one high-major opponent.

Painter has pushed back on coach Travis Steele’s claim that no one would play the RedHawks — the MAC’s other best teams (Akron, Kent State and Toledo) played Big Ten teams — and the smart schedule-makers at the high-major level will drive up their strength of schedule with a few games against mid-majors they project will be good. But those teams can only get road games against high-majors.

“I think one of the really cool things that could happen is if you had a couple of bids set aside as at-large mid-major bids,” said St. Thomas coach Johnny Tauer, whose team plays in the one-bid Summit League. “You would see that ease a lot of the scheduling pressures because you would see many of the top mid-majors now wanting to schedule each other, and it would be good for the fans. It would be good for schools, and I would think at the end of the season, it would allow access to the tournament for a couple of really deserving teams.”

The NCAA would help itself from a public relations standpoint to embrace this sort of idea, but that would not be in line with how the field has ever been chosen. The expansion also is not likely to help the true low- and mid-major conferences get more teams, but it will be beneficial for likely one to three mid-major-plus programs each year. That group is mostly made up of schools from the Atlantic 10, American, Mountain West and new Pac-12.

While not one team outside of the five high-major leagues has made it past the first weekend the last two years, programs like Saint Louis are proving they can hang. In the 2026 tourney, the Billikens beat Georgia by 25 points; Utah State beat Villanova; VCU upset North Carolina; High Point upset Wisconsin and Kentucky needed a buzzer-beater to force overtime and eventually knock off Santa Clara.

“There’s a competitive inequity in the current way the system is designed in terms of NIL and portal and all that stuff. You can’t really do anything with that,” said Saint Louis coach Josh Schertz, who also coached the 2024 Indiana State team that narrowly missed the tournament. “But I do think that you do have good mid-major teams that certainly got in and showed well.”

What those programs usually have in common is that they’ve made strong investments in basketball. Saint Louis, for instance, will have a NIL budget this season in line with some high-major programs. That doesn’t mean the Billikens can get on high-major schedules, but the best mid-major-plus programs are starting to work together to help their numbers.

“But that’s not a huge number of teams,” New Mexico coach Eric Olen said. “And we’re trying to get six or eight games out of that. I feel like if we don’t work together, we’re all gonna come up short.”

Sampson, at 70, was the oldest of the seven coaches interviewed for this piece, and while he said he wished expansion would not happen, he understood change was inevitable. He has watched the introduction of the 3-point line, the shot clock (which went from 45 seconds to 35 to 30) and the expansion of the tourney from 53 teams to 64 to 65 to 68.

“It’s not going back,” Sampson said. “Figure it out. It’s going to help save jobs. Coaches are going to be able to get in the tournament that probably wouldn’t.”

But even though Sampson and the other high-major coaches interviewed for this story (Painter and Illinois’ Brad Underwood) will see the schools in their leagues benefit the most, they do not like seeing what the changes in the sport have done to the mid-major.

“Cinderella is what helped make the tournament what it is,” Sampson said. “I hope we don’t lose that piece of it. But going to 76, somebody’s going to benefit and somebody won’t. And the way the power structure is set up, the schools that are going to benefit is the mid-to-lower teams in these power conferences, and one-bid leagues will probably still remain one-bid leagues.

“That’s part of it, whether it’s fair or unfair. As Bob Dylan said, ‘the times, they are a-changin’.’ When in doubt, think of Bob Dylan.”