A few comments on the field of 64 (now 65)

ESPN analyst/consultant Bobby Knight recently put out the idea of expanding the field to 128 teams. Knight claims that such an expansion would allow all the deserving teams to get a bid to the tourney. Maybe.

Knight argues that some "bubble teams" are left out of the tourney because their spots are stolen by undeserving automatic bid teams (presumably, he's talking about teams like Coppin State, Mount St. Mary's, Georgia, etc.). By expanding the field, you can easily include Va Tech, Arizona State, Mississippi, Illinois State, UMass, etc. Or, in previous years, maybe Knight would have been in the tournament a few more times.

As you increase the number of teams you include in the tournament, you decrease the likelihood that you will leave a team out that is capable of making a long run in the tournament. This is one reason I'm still in favor of including all the teams in division 1. If you include everyone, you give everyone a fair shot (or as fair as you can get) in a single elimination tournament. It would add an extra week, but you could accommodate the extra week (3 extra rounds) by eliminating conference tournaments.

What happens if you expand the field to 128? The same thing that happens now. There will still be bubble teams. There will still be the last four in and the last four out. There will still be spots "stolen" by undeserving automatic bid teams. As long as you have at-large bids decided by a panel of people comparing resumes, people will feel slighted. If you can create criteria (such as winning your conference tournament) to define the field, then coaches and players would know what they were shooting for. But, that said, I'm not sure how you can do that. If you limit the field to teams with winning records, you'll have people scheduling easy non-conference games to bolster their win-loss record. That's not productive. You could use the RPI or some other such ranking and take the automatic bids and the next however many at-large teams are needed off the RPI list. But, I think you would need to make the RPI formula public so coaches knew what was being asked of them.

Eliminate the mess by including everyone. Then, the only question is how to do the seeding. Sometimes, coaches feel a little shafted by seeding. But, I think the pain of being left out of the tourney is much worse. Teams could be seeded using the RPI list (or some other index) with a little bit of tweaking to avoid certain matchups. The first round wouldn't be complete, as you just need to cut the field to 256 at that point. Then, you have 8 full rounds to determine a national champ. So, you have to win 8 games in a row to win it all, but the first two rounds should be no problem for the legitimate title contenders.