There’s a reason it’s called March Madness.

For one thing, it’s a phenomenon that dominates the entire month from start to finish. 

From Championship Week when the little guys take center stage, to Selection Sunday, Cinderella stories and subsequent rounds that progress from sweet to elite, the NCAA Tournament has a way of engaging people like no other event in sports.

And not just those who know how to spell Krzyzewski without Googling it.  

Folks who are oblivious to college basketball the rest of the year are just as enthusiastic about filling out their brackets and following along as the games progress. Even though, like my wife, they pick Gonzaga to win every year because its name makes them giggle.

The Super Bowl might be the greatest one-day happening on the annual sports calendar. But when it comes to drama, surprises, intensity and emotion over an extended period of time, nothing comes close to the Madness of March.

Even the bracket itself, a spidery diagram that fills up the page with arms branching out in every direction, is as symmetrically close to perfection as it comes.

That explains why there was such a visceral reaction on social media last week when the NCAA Division I Transformation Committee came out with a proposal to include 25% of teams in sports with at least 200 sponsored participants to be included in championship events.

Such a change, if adopted, would expand the NCAA’s men’s and women’s basketball tournaments from their current 68-team field to as many as 90.

Such blasphemy!

Among the arguments raised against the idea are a watering down of the field, the time it would take to play the extra rounds and the old standby of “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.”

They’re the same reasons the skeptics used to express their concerns when the tournament expanded from its original 8-team bracket in 1939 to 16 in 1951, 32 in 1975, 64 a decade later and its current 68-team format in 2011.

“It’s only natural that you would expand the tournament,” said Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, who advocated for expansion on the ACC’s weekly coaches teleconference with his usual trademark curmudgeonly flair.

“People say so many stupid things: ‘It dilutes the tournament.’ But the teams that get in that are bad, they’ll be out right away. It actually gets more good teams in the tournament because you have the qualifiers who wouldn’t get in if they weren’t automatic. … People want to say it’s mediocrity, but it’s not. There’s just good balance. There’s a lot more teams that deserve to be in the tournament.”

Wake Forest’s Steve Forbes can attest to that, and not just because his Deacons were left out of the field last year despite winning 25 games and going 13-7 in the ACC.

In 2020, the season before coming to Winston-Salem, his East Tennessee State team won 29 games but went into its conference tournament knowing that a loss would almost certainly cost it an NCAA bid.

“I think that’s objectively wrong,” Forbes said. “Those (mid-majors) are really good basketball teams. Everybody was talking about my situation last year and yeah, we could have won games in the tournament. But I look more for the mid-majors, giving those guys a chance to have really good basketball teams that are not (currently) going to get an at-large bid.”

In a perfect world, that would be the case. But even with an expanded field, there’s no guarantee the selection committee would do the right thing and reward the East Tennessee States, UNC Greensboros and Murray States of the world by including them in the field as at-large selections.

They’re just as likely to fill out the new bracket with name-brand programs that finish 9th or 10th in their Power 5 conferences with overall records barely above .500.

Even then, Forbes said, the tournament wouldn’t lose any of its popularity

“If it stays the same, it stays the same and it’s great,” he said. “If it goes to 90 or whatever the number is, it will still be great. People will watch it. I hear a lot of people saying ‘Oh, you’d ruin it.’ What people aren’t going to watch the NCAA Tournament?”

That interest is why, like it or not, there’s almost certain to be more madness added to March at some point in the near future.

But it won’t be the NCAA that decides when it happens. 

It will be the consortium of organizations that actually make the decisions about college sports these days. When it comes to college basketball, that means CBS and Turner Sports.

“I’m not sure it’s going to be realistic because of what CBS pays us, quite frankly, and they control the event,” Notre Dame coach Mike Brey said. “Business is business. It does sound good and I think it would be awesome. (But) March Madness is CBS’ thing and it pays a lot of bills. Can we really pull that off at the end of the day? I wonder?”

Obviously money would be the issue. How much more would CBS be willing to pay for the added inventory? Or perhaps ESPN might be invited to the dance to help offset some of the added cost.

Logistically, the obstacles are much more easily addressed.

The bracket could easily be expanded to either 88 or 96 teams by adding just 1 more round. And it wouldn’t even be a full round, since play-in games – disguised as the cleverly branded “First 4” – are already being played prior to the tournament proper.

It can be done simply by playing the 1st-round matchups at the same sites as the rest of the opening weekend games. 

Does that mean it should be done?

There’s not a lot of middle ground to the discussion. Most either love the idea or hate it.

As for me, I’m not a big fan of tournament expansion. But I’ve been around college basketball long enough to listen to those who have forgotten more about it than I’ve ever known. So in this case I’ll defer to Wake’s Forbes.

If the NCAA decides to stick with its current 68-team format, great. If it decides to expand the field, as it inevitably will, that’s fine too.

Because contrary to popular belief, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.