Nathan BairdIndianapolis Star
- The NCAA Tournament currently includes 68 teams, including 36 at-large bids.
- ESPN reported last March conversations about expanding to no more than 80 teams were ongoing.
- Purdue's streak of nine consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances is third-longest in the country.
WEST LAFAYETTE — Purdue basketball spent most of the past decade oblivious to the treachery of the NCAA tournament bubble.
The program’s nine consecutive NCAA appearances rank a distant third behind Michigan State (25) and Gonzaga (24) as the longest streaks in the country. The Boilermakers held a 5 seed or higher in the past eight tournaments.
(A pause for the important caveat that the COVID-19 pandemic which canceled the 2020 tournament and kept this streak alive. What happened to Purdue in the following four tournaments, though, only reinforced the achievement of both building a resume and defending it in every corner of the bracket.)
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So if NCAA tournament expansion moves forward — and especially if it adds another entire round worth of teams and approaches triple-digit entrants — it will not have Purdue's support.
Coach Matt Painter, who serves on the National Association of Basketball Coaches board of directors, believes expansion would only involve four to eight teams. Not that he sees the need to do so.
“My knee-jerk reaction is, don’t mess with something that’s been pretty special,” Painter said.
Athletic director Mike Bobinski once judged bubble resumes as chair of the NCAA tournament selection committee. He knows it’s a thankless, stressful job which by its nature crushes the hopes of teams who fought all season to face a subjective fate.
Yet Bobinski is “not a fan” of expansion. He knows, practically, the desires of media rights holders may ultimately win out. More games equals more inventory equals more ad revenue for rights holders and more money back to conferences and athletic programs.
For that reason, he is prepared for “minimal” expansion — a few teams.
“This 96, 120 — under no circ*mstances,” Bobinski said. “To me, that’s ridiculous. You can’t turn that event into a watered-down all-comers tournament.
“There’s a magic to why it’s so heavily viewed and heavily anticipated and people take off work those first couple of days. There’s something to that that’s really powerful. I think you run the risk of fixing a problem that doesn’t exist at this point.”
Last March, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported conversations continued for expansion to no more than 80 teams. SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey co-chaired the NCAA transformation committee which recommended expansion over a year earlier. He stirred debate and emotions when he told Thamel giving tournament berths to automatic qualifiers over power conference teams was hurting the tournament’s competitiveness.
Those comments aged poorly thanks to the SEC’s abrupt first-round face-plant: 6-seed South Carolina losing to 11-seed Oregon, 4-seed Auburn losing to 13-seed Yale and 2-seed Kentucky losing to 15-seed Oakland.
Even without those examples of instant karma, Bobinski — previously the athletic director at Xavier and Georgia Tech — does not empathize with the plight of name brand teams hoping their bubble does not burst.
“Having been in that room six times with the committee, I recall every one of those six years, when you are picking the last at-large teams, you are looking at teams whose accomplishments during the year are suspect,” Bobinski said. “Their resumes have lots of holes and lots of question marks already.
“That last group, five or six of them, you’re looking at them like, ‘Eh, did they really do enough to warrant a spot in this tournament? If you expand that by more, you’re looking at more teams that are going to look like that. And there will still be a next team that says, ‘What about us?’”
Painter feels sympathy for mid- and low-major teams who win their league in the regular season but lose in the conference tournament. He believes putting in the regular-season champ will make the tournament stronger. He stopped short of advocating both should get in — something which almost certainly would not find support among the power conferences anyway.
“To get more people in there — as long as it doesn’t mess with the beauty and the structure of the thing,” Painter said. “Obviously we’ve had some really tough losses, but that’s the NCAA tournament. That’s part of it. You’ve got to play better. You’ve got to be able to do it.
“That’s the magic of it.”
Both Painter and Bobinski used that word: “Magic.” They experienced it both via crushing upset and a long-sought Final Four run.
Which begs the question: If a program that has been beaten up in the NCAA tournament as much as Purdue doesn’t want to change a thing, why would anyone else?
Follow IndyStar Purdue Insider Nathan Baird on X at @nwbaird.
