NASHVILLE, Tenn. — SEC commissioner Greg Sankey does not view himself as commander of the Death Star with his finger on the big red button, ready to annihilate the NCAA Tournament as we know it. Despite recent comments by Sankey to ESPN that sounded some alarms around college basketball, he does not envision a future in which the national championship tournament includes only teams from power conferences.
“No, I don’t. No, no. That’s an overread of the comment,” Sankey told The Athletic on Saturday during his league’s semifinals. The comment in question, to ESPN’s Pete Thamel, came after Sankey pointed out that UCLA made a run from the First Four to the Final Four in 2021 and Syracuse went from the play-in game in Dayton to the Sweet 16 in 2018, demonstrating the potential of power-conference teams on the NCAA Tournament bubble.
“That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive,” Sankey told Thamel. “We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from smaller leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of (conference) expansion.”
Next year, the SEC and Big 12 will both be 16-team leagues. The Big Ten and ACC will have 18 each.
“I take the example of Ole Miss baseball — last team in, won a national championship — and baseball is different; it’s actually less random than basketball, since you have to win series and it’s double-elimination,” Sankey said Saturday. “It’s simply an observation that we leave some highly competitive teams out that can justify their participation. That’s part of the review. That should be part of the conversation. Because again, we keep adding teams — nobody seems to want to deal with the volume of Division I teams increasing (there are now 362 D1 teams) — so we’re going to have to continue to adapt. I think that’s healthy conversation. I don’t make that decision, but I certainly can make observations.”
Sankey does have a significant voice in this process, though. He runs one of the two most powerful leagues in college athletics and he co-chaired the NCAA transformation committee that last January recommended NCAA Tournament expansion from its current 68 teams to a still-unspecified number.
If Sankey doesn’t want to eradicate mid-major participation altogether, his interest in a larger field certainly isn’t about wanting more of them included. In fact, some in the sport fear that whatever play-in games exist in the future will only be those smaller schools fighting among themselves for spots in the traditional 64-team format.
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