Hate or love NCAA Tournament expansion, understand that Cinderella needs the money

The future of the NCAA Tournament underdog has received a lot of attention in the past couple of years as the longest of long-shot upsets have dried up.

Is Cinderella dead?

As NCAA Tournament expansion to 76 teams looms, mid-majors face a more pressing question: Do they want more opportunities to pull a first-round stunner or a better chance to earn some extra cash?

Storybook performances are the heartbeat of March Madness, but unlike the actual Cinderella, college basketball teams with aspirations to make a splash in the Big Dance don’t have fairy godmothers to cover the costs of running a basketball program.

Nobody associated with mid-major conferences outwardly roots for their representatives to be placed in First Four play-in games. But winning a Tuesday or Wednesday game in Dayton, Ohio, does come with a nice payday. The cash a conference receives when one of its teams wins to advance out of the First Four, known as a “unit” in NCAA parlance, was worth about $2 million in 2025-26; the same payout is attached to every win in the rest of the tournament. That system is not expected to change with the expansion of the opening round. In fact, it was essential to the endeavor that no one would take a financial haircut by adding more teams to the field.

That unit is loose change for power conferences that earn hundreds of millions annually for their television rights. For mid-major conferences, that’s real money.

“It is meaningful from a standpoint of earning that unit, because now you have the ability to use those funds to help try to enhance initiatives throughout the conference,” MAAC commissioner Travis Tellitocci said. “So it benefits everybody in that aspect. But I wouldn’t say we set (playing in the First Four) out as the goal.”

Though the exact format has not been settled, tournament expansion is expected to grow the First Four into a 12-game opening round that will pull more one-bid conferences out of the traditional 64-team bracket and lead to fewer David versus Goliath matchups in the first round.

If the current selection and seeding process continues, those 12 games would be equally split among the 12 lowest-seeded at-large selections (which typically come mostly from power conferences) and the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers (which would pull exclusively from mid-major conference tournament champions).

But one idea floated last week would essentially turn the Tuesday and Wednesday of an expanded men’s tournament into a 24-team mid-major showcase. The Southern Conference provided a window into the “conundrum” — as Tellitocci called it — mid-majors face when it released what amounted to a suggestion for how an expanded opening round of the NCAA Tournament could be populated.

In voicing public support for expansion, the SoCon suggested the teams that would play in Dayton and a second site that is still TBD should be determined by the NCAA’s NET power rankings.

“Opening round games should be based on merit, not the method of qualification, with the lowest NET teams playing in these games,” the SoCon’s statement read.

Using this selection process, all the 14, 15 and 16 seeds in the 64-team men’s bracket would be determined Tuesday and Wednesday, and more mid-major automatic qualifiers would be pushed down the seed lines.

To get a feel for how both formats would play out, The Athletic added eight more at-large selections to this year’s field using the committee’s first four out (Auburn, Indiana, Oklahoma and San Diego State) and the next four teams with winning records in the NET rankings (New Mexico, Cincinnati, Tulsa and Seton Hall).

Using the current selection process, the opening round for a hypothetical 76-team would have looked something like this:

Using the SoCon’s idea and seeding by NET, that opening round would have included just one team from among the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Big East. (Asterisks denote at-large teams; all others are automatic qualifiers.)

More than a few of the teams included in that hypothetical opening round are from conferences whose champions have pulled off NCAA Tournament upsets in recent years.

This year, No. 12 seed High Point of the Big South knocked off fifth-seeded Wisconsin of the Big Ten. The season before, McNeese of the Southland beat Clemson of the ACC in a 12-5 matchup.

Still, it’s impossible to ignore that the real stunning upsets have dried up over the past two seasons as the transfer portal and new rules that allow schools to pay players have turned mid-major programs into a feeder system for bigger schools. The 13, 14, 15 and 16 seeds over the past two tournaments have not won a single game in the round of 64.

The upside to seeding the opening round this way for mid-major conferences is it would give more of them an opportunity to earn a unit, plus the valuable exposure that comes from playing two NCAA Tournament games.

The First Four started in 2011, famously launching a Final Four run by mid-major VCU, then of the Colonial Athletic Association. Widespread conference realignment has reshaped the mid-majors since then, especially the basketball-focused ones. Cinderellas such as George Mason, VCU and Butler all moved up in the conference pecking order after breaking through in the tournament.

In the last 10 years, the SWAC (nine), MEAC (six) and Northeast Conference (six) have the most appearances in the First Four. The SWAC (six), Northeast Conference (three) and MEAC and MAAC (two) are the only conferences with multiple First Four victories during that span.

The current selection process provides more potential for financial rewards to the conferences with the lowest-ranked teams and more opportunities for the power leagues to accrue units. Being placed directly into the 64-team bracket and getting a taste of the full NCAA Tournament is the preferable experience, but it makes earning a unit much tougher for most mid-majors.

Tellitocci has lived both experiences the past two seasons. Mount St. Mary’s earned the MAAC a unit in 2025 with a victory in Dayton over American of the Patriot League. The Mountaineers then went to Raleigh, N.C., where they lost to top-seeded Duke. In the 2026 tournament, MAAC champ Siena avoided Dayton and played one of the most exciting games of the first round, pushing top overall seed Duke for 40 minutes in a 71-65 Blue Devils victory.

The First Four has been successful because the city of Dayton embraces college basketball and has given the event a big-time vibe. Can another site re-create that?

“The experience from Dayton to Raleigh was the same,” Tellitocci said. “And that was always, I think, a worry of any athletic administrator, coach or student-athlete is, does the First Four feel different from the first and second rounds, right?”

And, relevant to the SoCon’s suggestion for how the teams are seeded, what would both midweek atmospheres look like if most or all of the teams involved are mid-majors, many with small fanbases?

“I don’t want these additional games to feel like any tiered version of the tournament,” Big South commissioner Sherika Montgomery said.

And then there is the likely deal-breaker for the SoCon’s idea: television.

“There’s definitely financial opportunities attached to that,” said Missouri Valley commissioner Jeff Jackson, whose league champions have generally landed on the 10 to 12 lines in recent years but could get pushed down and into the opening round with a straight seeding model. “However, I think you also have to look at this thing globally, because I’m not sure the television partners are going to be as excited about 16-16, 15-15, 14-14 as opposed to having name brands.”

An expanded tournament won’t come with a windfall of new revenue for the NCAA and its more than 350 Division I member schools. The power conferences pushed for expansion because they know their schools will benefit most from more at-large bids. Tournament television-rights holders CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery are under no contractual obligation to pay more for the new inventory the NCAA is creating, but unlocked ad and sponsorship revenue is expected to cover the costs of more games so that nobody involved takes a haircut.

Money is tight everywhere in college sports, and mid-majors are doing the best they can to keep up with the rising cost to compete.

Everyone is striving for NCAA Tournament success however they can get it because it comes with a lot more than just bragging rights.

“I will take a win,” Montgomery said. “A win is a win, to be clear, from a financial opportunity.”