How NCAA Tournament Expansion Could Impact MSU Hoops

College basketball is set to go through a seismic shift.

On Tuesday, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported that the NCAA Tournament, both men’s and women’s, is expected to formally move toward a 76-team format next season, up from 68 teams. It would be the most radical change to the format since the tournament went to 64 teams in 1985 and would open up eight more at-large spots.

Under the 68-team format, there were four “play-in” games during the “First Four” round. Two of those games were between the bottom four at-large teams, and then two were against the bottom four automatic qualifiers. Now, according to Thamel, there will be 12 games with spots in the Round of 64 on the line. It’ll still be split down the middle: six games between the 12 worst at-large teams, six games between the 12 worst auto-bids.

In the eyes of the NCAA, nobody in the sport has a longer March Madness streak than Michigan State. The Spartans got into the dance for the 27th consecutive time this past season. Here are a few ways that this change to the sport could have an impact on MSU:

Easier Path In

There is no obvious sign that MSU’s tournament streak is in jeopardy, but extending the streak just got easier. Of those eight new spots in the NCAA Tournament, there is a pretty good chance six or seven of them will go to high-major programs, including teams from the Big Ten.

Let’s just look at the “First Four Out” that the selection committee pointed out after the 68-team bracket was unveiled this season. These teams would have made it into March Madness next year, and then — keep in mind — four teams below them would also have gotten in: Oklahoma (7-11 SEC record), Auburn (7-11 SEC record), San Diego State (14-6 Mountain West record), and then Indiana (9-11 Big Ten record).

That’s now the bar to feel relatively comfortable about an NCAA Tournament bid these days in the Big Ten: just nine conference wins (IU also lost to Northwestern in its first Big Ten Tournament game). Michigan State got into the First Four with that conference record and without a BTT win back in 2020-21, but the Spartans picked up three wins versus eventual top-2 seeds in the final weeks of the regular season, plus the pandemic threw a big wrench into everything. It was a bit of an anomaly.

Besides the COVID season, MSU hasn’t had a losing record during Big Ten conference play since the 1992-93 season, when the Spartans went 7-11. Jud Heathcote was the coach then, and he was on the sidelines for another two seasons after that. The concept of the NCAA Tournament being 64 teams was less than a decade old at that point.

Unknown Matchups if Higher Seed

If Michigan State keeps playing up to its standard, it can also introduce a new, interesting dynamic where it will only have one dedicated day of prep for its first-round opponent. This is already a thing for two No. 1 seeds and usually two No. 6 seeds under the current format, but it’s gone from a bit of a novelty to something that higher-seeded teams should expect.

Now, you can expect every No. 1 seed and two No. 2 seeds to deal with a team that is coming off a preliminary round victory. The at-large play-in games will probably feature games for the right to be a No. 11 seed, a No. 12 seed, and maybe even a No. 13 seed. That means teams that receive seeds 4-6 might not know the first team they face until there are, at most, 48 hours to tip-off.

Basically, seeds 1-2 and 4-6 will fall within this possibility. Michigan State has gotten seeded on one of those lines 15 times during its active tournament streak. That means Tom Izzo and his staff would have to prepare for an additional fourth team that they might face during the first weekend, rather than the traditional three. It stretches your resources a bit thinner during the season’s climax.

The quality of the average first-round opponent will also be going up. Even if you’re dealing with a lowly 16-seed as a top seed, that 16-seed might have been a 15-seed in the past, and that team is guaranteed to have a ton of momentum from a conference tournament championship and an NCAA Tournament victory while you were idle. Don’t be surprised if first-round upsets become a bit more common during this format.