I'm not necessairly against scrapping them, but it is ridiculously unfair to mediocre power conference teams that ~20 tallest midgets that are vastly inferior to them will dance every year while they watch on TV.
Additionally, auto-bids for crap conferences make exactly half of the first round games into ridiculous mismatches in which those tallest midgets win less than once in five tries (that is for the 13's against the 4's and it gets worse from there).
I feel that the tournament should be expanded by 12 teams (to 80) such that those tallest midgets (roughly the bottom four seeds) effectively have a play-in against a superior but yet beatable opponent. That way there would be more upsets, better games, and less mismatches.
So, this is the way I kinda approach it. Rather than say, this is a field of 64 which must be more inclusive, what if it instead is actually a field of about 44"
I did the math on the 2019 NCAA tournament. If you're a team in the top seven league, you had like a 45 percent chance of getting in (that might be a little muddled because 22-13 Oregon was an auto bid). This, this seems fair. If you're in a better league, you've got a 60-65 percent chance. If you're in the Pac-12 or something, less than 25.
So you assemble your field with like six non-top-7 league teams in that top 44 (Belmont was a generous add). You have four leagues that snuck in second teams, maybe one as a non-bid thief. This feels right. I don't know that I need 17-15 IU.
Now, if we just went small boat, we have some byes, get to 32, then go from there. But instead of byes, we get byes were you have to play someone bad. It turns byes into TV content. Some of it isn't good, but occasionally it is. If you got a bye and didn't win, well that's on you. You give two thirds of the sport a feeling of having a seat at the table. You create some other questions of unfairness, but in the end "I went to a school where being slightly above mediocrity gets me in" and not making it, the unfairness toward that group is not so concerning, at least to me. (On the mid-major side, you have those rare, two good enough team small conferences or one powerhouse squeezing out some solid 8-seed type strength team)
If those kids or their coaches wanted to take advantage of the lower level of competition offered at mid-majors, they likely had the option and still could have the option. It just all kind of fits.
