The NCAA basketball tournament is probably getting bigger. It's unlikely to get better. | Opinion

CHARLOTTE — After more than 20 years, it’s time to admit defeat. The NCAA men's basketball tournament is never going back to 64 teams.

The most beautiful and symmetrical playoff bracket in all of sports has been on life support since the first play-in game in 2001, further wonked and weirded up in 2011 when the NCAA increased the number of teams to 68.

Those of us who longed for the days between 1985 and 2001 when it was was a numerically perfect 64 teams never really embraced 68, but we could tolerate it. At least the office pool bracket still fit on one sheet of paper.

Unfortunately, though, the future isn’t looking good. Not only is the pristine 64-team bracket about to be shoved into the dust bin of history, one of America’s most iconic sporting events is likely headed for a massive overhaul.

“This is a great time for us to look at and study it,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told USA TODAY Sports at his league’s preseason basketball media event Wednesday.

When the college sports muckety-mucks start talking this way publicly, things are already afoot. It won’t happen tomorrow, and maybe not even within the next year. The details and logistics are going to take a while to hash out.

But in the big picture, those of us who would fight to keep the men's tournament the way it is are going to lose. It’s just a matter of how badly and when.

“We have this compression that I feel we have to address,” Phillips said. “You have a lot of schools that are spending a tremendous amount of resources in sports and not having a chance to access those championships.”

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This year, the number of men’s basketball teams competing in Division I will balloon to 363, which means roughly 19 percent of the sport will end up in the 68-team tournament. Just last week, the NCAA’s transformation committee — which has been given the latitude to recommend a host of Division I governance changes — floated a concept that championship tournaments could include up to 25 percent of any sport’s membership.

Obviously, this would mean potential expansion of tournaments in other sports, too. And of course that idea appeals to power conferences like the ACC and SEC, which sometimes argue that deserving teams miss out because so many bids go to conference champions of smaller leagues that have automatic access.

In certain sports, they may be right. In baseball, for instance, Mississippi was the last at-large team selected last season and went on to win the national championship. The first team left out was North Carolina State, which had a top-35 ranking in some key metrics. Though it's highly unlikely any team left out of the NCAA basketball tournament could win a national title, bubble teams have frequently made deep runs, including some advancing all the way to the Final Four.

“Do you realize how much of an opportunity it would be for all these youngsters to have an opportunity to participate in the NCAA Tournament?” said Florida State men's basketball coach Leonard Hamilton, who thinks the field should be doubled in size. “What you don’t understand is the joy, the sense of accomplishment, the growth that goes along with people who have those unique opportunities. The memories those kids will have outweighs anything that’s negative.”

That’s a convenient, heart-tugging argument. But it’s also about money.

As colleges look for ways to generate even more revenue, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is an obvious area that does not produce as much as it could. The primary reason for that is the disastrous decision outgoing NCAA president Mark Emmert made in 2016 to re-up with CBS and Turner through 2032 rather than taking the television rights to the open market in 2024.

Though the contract is worth $1.1 billion annually, some television analysts now consider it significantly undervalued. Locking that deal in for the next decade instead of putting the rights up for bid will go down as arguably the biggest unforced error of Emmert’s tenure.

More teams means more television inventory, which means more revenue — particularly for the power leagues whose 10th, 11th and 12th-place teams will suddenly be viable candidates to get in.

That would be great news for coaches and administrators whose jobs and bonuses are tied to getting in the tournament. But is it even good for the rest of us? That’s an existential question college athletics leadership will need to carefully consider before adding to the field.

And what makes it difficult to answer is the duality of college basketball, which is kind of a niche sport during the regular season but overwhelms everything during the three weeks of the tournament.

There are lots of reasons for that. A big one is the diversity of the field, which includes 32 conference champions and gives every corner of the country a story to latch onto. There’s also long history of first-round upsets and small schools being able to compete with the big boys, giving the tournament a unique aura that isn’t replicated anywhere else in sports.

If you mess with any of that, you risk losing what makes the tournament magical. That’s why Phillips has no interest in eliminating the automatic qualifiers or casting small schools to the side if they meet the requirements for Division I membership. Nobody thinks it’s a good idea to exclude a bunch of St. Peter’s in favor of more Wake Forests or Texas A&Ms.

“When you compete during the season and earn a championship, it should allow you access to the greater championship,” he said. “That’s sports. Middle school, high school, college, professional. That’s the structure that is equitable and fair and what people expect.”

But they also expect a bracket that is easy for anyone from child to senior citizen to fill out and immediately get invested in schools and players they would otherwise have no interest in following. Would casual fans look at a larger bracket and decide it looks more like a trigonometry exam than a basketball tournament they want to watch?

That's a risk college sports might be willing to take, even if it creates some headaches. Maybe it’s a smaller expansion to double the number of play-in games. Or maybe, as Miami’s Jim Larranaga suggested, you could build a 96-team field where the 32 conference champions get first-round byes and the remaining teams play one round against each other on Tuesday and Wednesday to get into the main 64-team bracket.

“You wouldn’t even have to add any days,” Larranaga said. “It’s perfect.”

Well, no. Perfect was the beautifully balanced 64-team bracket without play-in games or byes that so many of us grew up with. But those days are over. The NCAA tournament isn’t going back to what it was. It’s almost certainly going to get bigger, but bigger isn’t always better.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NCAA Tournament expansion in college basketball won't make it better.