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Football may reign supreme in the world of college sports, but there’s not a single event that’s capable of drumming up the kind of hype March Madness is able to generate each year. The relatively wide-open nature of that tournament is one of the biggest aspects of its appeal, and it’s subsequently hard not to be worried about a new development concerning a power grab involving the country’s biggest conferences.
The College Football Playoff has injected a new level of intrigue into that particular pastime, but the tournament still has plenty of work to do when it comes to matching the drama and excitement associated with the NCAA Tournament—the beloved annual tradition more commonly referred to as March Madness.
There are plenty of reasons to love March Madness, but it’s hard to top the many Cinderella runs we’ve been treated to courtesy of the dozens of automatic bids that ensure largely unheralded teams belonging to smaller conferences will have the chance to win a national championship or, at the very least, make a name for themselves by pulling off an upset (or a few).
The NCAA has historically relied on March Madness to generate the bulk of its revenue (around $1 billion of the close to $1.3 billion it rakes in each year can be credited to The Big Dance), and it’s only natural the conferences that get a share of that sum based on how their schools perform want to get the biggest piece of the pie possible.
According to Yahoo Sports, the SEC, ACC, Big Ten, and Big 12—the members of the influential quartet of conferences known as the Power 4 (or P4)—are angling to do exactly that based on a document the outlet obtained concerning a plan to restructure the current model of college athletics to gain more power than they already have—which includes a proposal to force the NCAA to cede control of March Madness and other championship tournaments and give the P4 the right to call the shots.
While those conferences already wield plenty of influence thanks to the amount of money they’re able to generate, the plan in question would result in them “controlling concepts like tournament format, revenue distribution, and selection committee process” for the postseason, which could obviously have plenty of ramifications for the schools belonging to conferences that are already limited in their ability to throw their weight around.
The outlet notes every P4 conference it contacted verified the legitimacy of the document it obtained, with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey stressing it is meant to serve as a “conversation starter” and the ACC’s Jim Phillips adding it “is part of the ongoing evolution of college athletics.” However, both men asserted they respected the sanctity of March Madness and downplayed the risk of a dramatic overhaul that would alter the fabric that makes it so beloved.
As much as I would love to take them at their word, I think it’s fair to be skeptical of the potential fallout stemming from what would be a fairly seismic shift in the current landscape. It does seem like there are plenty of hurdles that would need to be cleared before the vision becomes a reality, but this will certainly be a situation worth keeping an eye on as it continues to develop.