Admittedly, what I read from @medinabuckeye1 is also something else... It's that seed lines 1-4 largely get a glorified bye by taking on teams that legitimately shouldn't even threaten them. He'd rather see teams 1-16 in the seed lines play teams 49-64 in NET or whatever "power ranking" we choose than see them play teams that might be 100-250+. He views those as more compelling matchups to watch than the top 16 beating up on patsies.
(medina, hopefully I'm not misrepresenting you)
This is a big part of it for me and it is why I hope that any expansion involves making the truly awful 'tallest midgets' play an extra game to get to the 64 team field. With 41 tournaments since expansion now in the books, here are the figures:
- #16 seeds have 2 wins in 164 tries ~ once every 20 years.
- #15 seeds are 11-153 ~ once every four years.
- #14 seeds are 23-141 ~ once every other year.
- #13 seeds are 33-131, less than once per year.
Also, as discussed above, the #13+ seeds appear to be getting worse relative to the top-4. They are 0-32 in the last two tournaments and only 2-46 in the first round of the last three tournaments.
The performance of the #13+ seeds is plummeting and as it does the matchups unavoidably become less compelling.
I honestly don't care about the play-in games and if my team had to play one I'd only barely see it as a 'real' NCAAT game. To me, the 'real' NCAAT is the 64 team field that starts AFTER the play-in games. I want THAT to be as good as it can be and the improvement that could be had with expansion is to weed-out the worst teams by putting them into a play-in game.
And truth is, he's not wrong... But as you point out, it's a preference. Just as some people would prefer the tournament being the top 64 teams, others like the "Cinderella story". Both sides should understand that it's not black/white or right/wrong... It's preference.
The tournament has always been a mix of the best teams and charity bids for 'Cinderella story' tallest midgets. There are currently 31 auto-bids and 37 at-large slots. Obviously some of the 31 auto-bids are among the best teams so they do double-duty. This year:
- One of the six #11 seeds was an auto-bid (USF). The other five (VCU, Texas, NCST, SMU, Miami) were at-large.
- The 20 teams seeded #12 and below were all auto-bids.
The #12 seeds were, as usual, decent teams. They are still 'tallest midgets' but they are the very tallest of the tallest midgets and reasonably competitive:
- Akron: #54 NET, 70 KenPom, 72 Torvik
- McNeese: #56 NET, 85 KenPom, 67 Torvik
- Northern Iowa: #72 NET, 76 KenPom, 77 Torvik
- High Point: #75 NET, 85 KenPom, 86 Torvik
Those aren't as good as the best teams left out but they aren't awful. They went 1-3 in the opening round this year and, on average, they upset a #5 seed little better than 1/3 of the time.
From there the drop-off is precipitous. By the time you get to the #15 and #16 seeds they are flat awful. This year's six #16 seeds were:
- Siena: #183 NET,
- UMBC: #196 NET,
- Long Island: #198 NET,
- Howard: #203 NET,
- Lehigh: #275 Lehigh
- Prairie View: #300 NET,
I'm not going to bother to look up KenPom and Torvik for these teams, they suck and KenPom/Torvik would just confirm that.
The tournament is changing. Like it or not, NIL is widening the gap between the haves (top-4 seeds) and the have-nots (#13+ seeds). The gap is getting wider because the best teams are getting better AND the teams at the bottom are getting worse. Every time a power program poaches a player from a weaker league the future top seeds get better AND the future bottom seeds get worse.
I do think the reality of the situation will ultimately impact viewership. As I see it, people only get interested when there is something like a 1/3 chance of an upset. I base that not on personal opinion but on the observation that it seems everyone talks about potential 5/12 upsets but almost nobody talks about 4/13, 3/14, 2/15, or 1/16 upsets. The data (see above) shows that the talked about 5/12 upsets happen about 1/3 of the time while the 4/13 upsets happen about 1/5 of the time and the 3/14, 2/15, and 1/16 even less.
I think that there is a floor for interest and I think that floor is around 1/3. Ie, there is interest in 5/12 because upsets happen about 1/3 of the time but there isn't much interest in 4/13 and below because upsets are below the floor.
