College Coaching Confidential: What One Change Would You Make To The NCAA Tournament?

Most of the coaches I talked to want to change the format of the NCAA Tournament to a 32-host model. The next most popular answer was tournament expansion. No other idea got more than one vote.

32-host model	54.5%
Expansion	22.7%
Other	22.7%

While the 32-host model was more popular than tournament expansion, a larger NCAA Tournament has more high-level support. The NCAA’s Division I Transformation Committee last year recommended tournament expansion for all sports to create postseason opportunities for 25% of teams in a given sport. In baseball, that would mean adding about 12 more teams to the NCAA Tournament.

But baseball coaches seem more enthused by the 32-host model, which has been mulled for several years but never formally proposed. The idea is simple: instead of holding 16, four-team, double-elimination regionals as has been the case since 1999, the model would instead call for the first round of the tournament to be best-of-three series held at 32 sites around the country.

This is now the second time in five years that a survey I have conducted has shown a widespread support for the change. In 2020, during the throes of the pandemic shutdown, I conducted a larger survey of 90 head coaches and included a question asking whether they would prefer the current NCAA Tournament format or a 32-host model. Fifty-eight percent of the coaches preferred the 32-host model.

The advantages of having 32 hosts are primarily with its ability to grow the popularity of the sport and the way it would align the postseason format with the regular season.

The double-elimination format regionals use has largely been unchanged since 1975. Regionals have at times been four times and at times six teams, but they’ve always been double elimination, the same format used in the College World Series.

But in the nearly 50 years since, much has changed about college baseball. Today, conferences play their regular season schedules with three-game weekend series and teams are built accordingly. The NCAA Tournament has also built some best-of-three series into its format—first in 1999 with the creation of super regionals and again in 2003, when the CWS championship was changed from a one-game, winter-take-all format to a best-of-three series.

The other benefit of a 32-host format is that it would give more programs a chance to host regionals. Over the last eight NCAA Tournaments, the ACC and SEC combined to host 73 of 128 regionals (that number does not include South Carolina in 2021, as in a more normal year it likely would not have hosted as a No. 2 seed). The Big 12 and Pac-12 combine for 31 more, meaning college baseball’s four biggest conferences accounted for 81.25% of all regional hosts.

That 81.25% figure is remarkable sticky, incidentally. It’s the exact same as it was from 2015-19. And it means that in any given year there are only three host sites up for grabs for teams from the other 26 conferences. To earn a home regional from a conference outside the big four, just about everything must break right for that team.

Recent first-time regional hosts like Louisiana Tech and Maryland put on incredible events with great crowds. Postseason baseball can energize a fan base in new ways. A 32-host site format would allow more fan bases and programs to experience that for themselves.

“It would grow the sport, no question,” one coach said.

The format is not without its own downsides. It would require adding a week to the NCAA Tournament, which either would require it start Memorial Day weekend or end in July. More hosts could increase costs for the tournament, which currently is profitable, and would increase costs for ESPN, which would need more crews.

But, on the surface at least, college coaches are in favor of finding a way to push the tournament to the 32-host model. It would mark a big change, a total overhaul of the sport’s postseason, but it’s an idea that remains very popular.