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How to Fix March Madness

Watching a college basketball underdog dismantle a blue blood on a cold Thursday in March is electric. That feeling is the product March Madness has always sold—and it’s disappearing. Men’s tournament brackets are getting chalkier, meaning the favorites dominate. Thus, the chaos that fuels office pools and calls from your grandmother asking if you saw that St. Peter’s game is being systematically engineered out of existence.

But it’s not too late. A fix is possible—and it’s in almost everyone’s interest to make it happen. We’ve outlined it below.

Mid-Majors Make March

Cinderella teams are good business. A 2013 BYU study found that Final Four games featuring an underdog from a smaller school draw a 35% larger TV audience than matchups between two national powerhouses. Even in the opening rounds, upsets spike viewership and then sustain it, keeping fans locked in across the full game in ways chalk matchups simply don’t.

The NCAA should be engineering more of these moments. Instead, it’s presiding over their slow disappearance. Since adopting the NET ranking system in 2018—a key input in determining which teams receive at-large tournament bids—mid-major programs (e.g. Mountain West, Atlantic 10, America East) have steadily lost ground in the selection process, bottoming out at just 4 mid-major at-large bids in back-to-back years.

At-large Bids for Non-major Schools

An underlying problem is scheduling. Coaches from High Point and Miami (OH)—both of whom knocked off power conference opponents in this year’s tournament—have noted how difficult it is to secure meaningful non-conference matchups against major programs. When those games don’t happen, strength of schedule and strength of victory suffer. And strength of competition is baked into nearly every metric the selection committee uses to evaluate potential tournament teams: NET, Wins Above Bubble, KenPom Efficiency Margins. The logic is sound in theory—but only works with teams playing a cross section of conferences. In reality, it has produced a system where middling Power Conference teams with losing conference records, without any real incentive to schedule games against mid-majors, go dancing ahead of deserving mid-majors with great records.

It’s About to Get Worse

Tournament expansion to 76 teams is no longer a question of if, but when. For fans hoping more spots means more Cinderellas, the current trajectory offers a sobering reality check.

Look at this year’s First 4 Out—the teams the NCAA publicly acknowledged just missed the field. Three of the four are Power Conference programs with sub-.500 conference records. The one mid-major in that group, San Diego State, went 22-11 and finished 14-6 in competitive Mountain West play.

Without structural reform, mere expansion won’t produce more magic. They’ll select more Oklahomas (19-15, 7-11 in the SEC) and fewer San Diego States. The VCUs and St. Peter’s of the future will be replaced by bubble power conference teams that no one outside their alumni are rooting for. Fans will disengage. Brackets will go unfilled. And the NCAA will leave real money on the table––wondering what happened to the Madness.

So—how do we fix this?

Making March Mad Again

Imagine a world where the NCAA tournament expansion doesn’t dilute March Madness—it actually saves it. That’s the promise of our proposal, which we’re calling the Mid-Major Minimum.

To start; Expand the field to 76 teams, increasing at-large bids from 37 to 45, and mandate that a minimum of 8 of those bids go to mid-major conferences. Since 2018, mid-majors have averaged 5.6 at-large bids per year, just over 15% of the pool. A floor of 8 bids would push that to 18%—a modest correction with potential outsized payoff.

Here’s what our proposed structure would have looked like with this year’s tournament field. With just 4 mid-majors in this year’s field receiving at-large bids, the minimum mandates at least 4 more—plus 4 additional slots based on pure merit. Using the First 4 Out and Wins Above Bubble, a metric that measures a team’s resumé against a theoretical “bubble” team, those 8 new bids would bring in Oklahoma, Auburn, San Diego State, Indiana, Virginia Tech, New Mexico, Belmont and Stephen F. Austin—with four mid-majors securing spots over higher-WAB Power Conference teams like Arizona State, who went 17-16 and 7-11 in conference play.

Power Conference programs don’t lose here—they still pick up 4 new bids. But New Mexico (26-10), Belmont (26-6) and Stephen F. Austin (28-6) get their shot too, and that’s the whole point.

There are real tradeoffs worth acknowledging. A 76-team field works cleanest with a 12-game play-in structure, and some of those play-in games will inevitably pit lower-seeded mid-major autobid teams against each other—meaning a handful of smaller schools get eliminated before the bracket even opens up. Seed lines will shift too, potentially pushing traditional 12 and 13-seed mid-majors down a line to accommodate the expanded at-large pool.

The counterargument to both concerns: a play-in that weeds out the weakest autobids actually makes the first round more competitive — which is the whole argument for mid-majors in the first place.

New Seed Team Seed Change
12 Akron —
12 Oklahoma NEW
12 Auburn NEW
12 San Diego St. NEW
12 Indiana NEW
12 Virginia Tech NEW
12 Northern Iowa —
13 Stephen F. Austin NEW
13 High Point ⇩1
13 McNeese ⇩1
13 New Mexico NEW
13 Belmont NEW
14 Cal Baptist ⇩1
14 Hawaii ⇩1
14 Hofstra ⇩1
14 Troy ⇩1
15 Queens —
15 Tennessee St. —
15 Wright St. ⇩1
15 Kennesaw St. ⇩1
15 Penn ⇩1
15 North Dakota St. ⇩1
16 Siena —
16 LIU —
16 UMBC —
16 Howard —
16 Prairie View A&M —
16 Lehigh —
16 Furman ⇩1
16 Idaho ⇩1

The Future of March

The NCAA tournament became such an institution because it promised that any team from anywhere could show up in March and slay a giant. That promise is under pressure, and the NCAA—the organization set up to benefit most from it—is on the brink of trading it away.

The Mid-Major Minimum isn’t a sentimental gesture. It will produce more entertaining spectacle, increase fan engagement, and generate more advertising value. The Cinderella story is the purest form of the product. The NCAA can either act before expansion locks in a worse structure or spend the next decade wondering why March doesn’t feel like March anymore.