Point me to the thread, happy to join in the talk but I think in the basketball tournament is applicable in the realignment thread, we commonly talk about the Big 12 adding Gonzaga in here…
Again, to reiterate, I love the current tournament setup, but the data shows it’s not as profitable as a P4/5 only tournaments see recent changes to NIT and the new FOX tournament (https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2023/09/11/college-basketball-las-vegas-fox-postseason-tournament-replacing-nit.aspx)
IIRC only about 1/3rd of the tournament revenue goes to the men’s DI basketball programs, much more of it goes to pay for non revenue sports and championships for DII and DIII.
If you exclude all except the P4, G5, Big East (or whatever combo they decide) and remove it from under the NCAA, while the overall tournament may be less profitable, the shares of profit going to the schools would increase since they would keep more of the money (100% of $500mil > 30% of $1bil). Again, I’m not advocating for this change, but logically see this as the next step. Once major fb realignment is settled and the CFP has been renegotiated, I can easily imagine the SEC/B1G/B12/ACC looking deciding a bigger split should be in the works.
The NCAA itself has already laid out a plan for larger schools to pay players and breakaway from the fringe DI schools that are barely funding their athletic departments.
I think the P4 schools see the tournament as a money maker and great advertising that they can run. An easy miscount solution is breakaway from the NCAA and run it themselves and allow any conference that wants to participate with them to do so with an entry fee of (making up a number here) $20 million a year. Each round of participation gets the conference a return of $8 million. Meaning you either need 3 bids to the tournament to not lose money without winning a game, or a single bid and 2 wins. Something like that would make some of the fringe one bid league drop out and allow more participation from P4 teams on the bubble.