Why the Auto-Bid Should Never Leave the NCAA Tournament
Power Conferences want the Auto-Bids to the NCAA Tournament eliminated, but doing some will irreversibly change the landscape of college basketball forever.
With the talk and proposal to expand the NCAA Tournament from 68 teams to 72 or 76, there is of course the conversation around certain *cough cough* power conferences that wish to remove the automatic qualifier for all conferences with at least six teams to earn a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
Their argument often comes from, “Why should the 28th, 29th, 30th, etc. ranked conferences receive a bid when an 8th or 9th team from my conference is being left out.” These power conferences are essentially large corporations. They want to squeeze as much money out of their business as they physically can and will not bat an eye at squashing the lesser competition if it benefits them.
There are some obvious reasons that every conference should maintain the auto-qualifier bids, such as, small conferences can continue to survive (think conferences like the SWAC, Ohio Valley, NEC, etc.) because they’ll earn revenue from appearing in the tournament. The fun stories that come from schools of the small leagues, like UMBC, Fairleigh Dickinson, Saint Peter’s, etc. Essentially, if the auto-bids are taken away from all conferences that are eligible, these small conferences would disintegrate quickly because there is no way the selection committee would ever take a school from one of these conferences (unless there’s multiple future NBA players on multiple teams like the OVC with Murray State and Belmont in 2019).
Let’s take the obvious reasons to keep the auto-bids and push them to the side to think logistically why removing them makes no sense. The PAC-12 has crumbled and no longer exists. Over the last 10 seasons, the PAC-12 averaged four bids a year to the NCAA Tournament, including seven bids in the 2016 tournament. That’s four free bids that are going to go to at-large teams in the 2025 NCAA Tournament.
There’s also the chance that we see more conferences crumble as well. Look at the WAC. With Grand Canyon and Seattle U leaving for the WCC and others like SF Austin & UT Rio Grande Valley leaving for the Southland, the WAC is down to just 7 member schools. If they drop below the threshold for an auto-bid (six schools) then the WAC could permanently dissolve. That would be another bid. Outside of the WAC, there’s always the chance that within the next decade another conference falls as well.
With all of this in mind, there is guaranteed another 4+ bids on average that are opening up for at-large bids each season via the PAC-12, then another 1-2 that could open up within the next few years.
The Power Conferences chose to expand their leagues to 16-20 teams. They could have left every thing as is, but their greed led to them rapidly expanding their conferences to a staggering 68 schools between the Big Ten, Big Twelve, ACC and SEC. That’s over 18% of the eligible schools in the NCAA Division I ranks that are contained to just four conferences. Looking at their bids to the NCAA tournament over the last 10 years here’s what each of these conferences averaged:
SEC: 6 (8 bids in 2018, 2023, 2024)
Big Ten: 7 (9 bids in 2021 and 2022)
Big Twelve: 6 (8 bids in 2024)
AAC: 6 (9 bids in 2017 and 2018)
On average, these power conferences are controlling 25/68 bids to the NCAA Tournament. That means that the other 82% of the eligible Division I schools are receiving 43 of the other eligible bids. Of those 43, 27 are auto-bids for other conferences (excluding the PAC-12 and Power Conferences). This doesn’t include the basketball power house in the Big East (excluded them from the list above to represent the dynamic that football has had on college basketball) who has averaged 5 bids per year over the last 10 seasons. When you take that into account, a bit over 21% of the eligible Division I schools control on average 30/68 of the bids (44% of the total eligible bids). That leaves just 38 bids, in which 26 of those are auto-bids (excluding the same as above, but adding in the Big East). The remaining conferences have to fight over the last 12 bids, which will ebb-and-flow between the top conferences for extra schools and then the multi-bids for conferences like the WCC, AAC, A-10, etc.
All of this is to show that the Power Conferences get virtually all of the power as is right now already. Add another 4 bids on average each year from the PAC-12 and the 30/68 bids on average increases to 34/68 bids for the power schools (assuming these extra four bids will go to power schools more often than not). Then there are only 8 bids that are left over which will inevitably still ebb-and-flow between the power schools once you subtract the remaining multi-bids for some of the smaller conferences like the WCC, AAC, and A-10.
Eliminating the auto-bids would not only kill small conferences, it’d irreversibly change the landscape of college basketball forever. All so the power conferences can completely control the NCAA Tournament every season and allow sub-.500 schools to receive at-large bids. Keep in mind, these same schools are the ones that are terrified to schedule above-average mid-major schools and instead schedules schools that rank in the sub-300 of KenPom.
I’ll end this with the following memory of a power conference school that was given an at-large bid over a school like Indiana State just earlier this year:
What do you think? Do you believe that small conferences should no longer receive an auto-bid to the NCAA Tournament?
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