Mandel’s Mailbag: Amid March Madness, CFP expansion chatter, could popularity of

There was a time when I skipped writing Mandel’s Mailbag this week because I figured everyone would be focused on their brackets. I’ve subsequently learned that, no, people like reading about college football 52 weeks a year.

But I love March Madness too much to waste an opportunity to combine the two for just this week. Thanks to those of you who submitted crossover questions.

(Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Stewart: With the College Football Playoff at expanding the field from 12 to 14 teams before ever seeing how well (or not so well) a 12-team playoff works, and with (SEC Commissioner) Greg Sankey’s comments about reviewing how team selection is done for the men’s NCAA Tournament, do you foresee a situation in which the greed of a handful of schools and/or conferences hurts the overall popularity of the sport? — Kevin R.

I can tell from many of the questions I received that a bit of news from late last week went largely unnoticed. While the conferences signed off on extending the CFP through 2031-32, the talk about 14 teams has (mercifully) been put on the backburner for now; in fact, Sankey made televised comments about pumping the brakes. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead. I’m of the impression the Big Ten, for one, is still hoping to push it through sooner than later. We shall see.

To your question: The football and basketball tournaments are very different. There’s never been much of a Cinderella component with football, and whatever the format, we know the SEC is likely going to dominate it. Which is why, if it does go to 14, the proposal to put it in writing that the Big Ten and SEC get more automatic berths would be such a stupidly alienating thing. It wouldn’t kill college football’s popularity, in part because most of the biggest fan bases in the sport are within those two conferences. But it could certainly turn off factions of the public.

March Madness, on the other hand, is more delicate. I’ve always felt like it’s actually two tournaments within one. The first weekend is entirely about upsets and buzzer-beaters. Then, over the second and third weekends, we get down to the business of determining a national champion.

I can’t state this strongly enough: If the power conferences do anything that sucks the magic out of that first weekend, it will absolutely destroy their marquee event.

As I wrote in a column Monday about Sankey’s increasingly alarming comments, the nightmare scenario in a 76-team field would be the Cinderellas that comprise most of the bottom 24 slicing themselves in half before the Round of 64 even begins. You’d lose everything that makes the first weekend special, which would in turn diminish interest in the rest of the tournament.

Unlike the CFP, which is run by the conferences themselves, the NCAA’s Men’s and Women’s Basketball committees govern the tournament. At this point, expansion to 72 or 76 seems inevitable, but hopefully…