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Wichita State, featuring JT Durley and Graham Hatch (4), is a team that would benefit from an expanded NCAA field, no matter how it's done.. (AP Photo/Jeff Tuttle)

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Back on Monday, which seems like it was about a month ago at this point, rumors of NCAA Tournament expansion started to swirl again. 

Over on SB Nation, I laid out a simple plan to expand the tournament, one that keeps both the regular season and conference tournaments relevant and gives the mid-majors a better shot at making an expanded field.

It turns out that this idea may not be as much of a non-starter as I thought, at least according to an AP story posted on ESPN.com Friday afternoon.

Another argument is that a larger field would give teams from smaller conferences a better chance of getting in. Giving automatic bids to the regular-season and conference tournament champions would reward consistency while still allowing for surprise.

I've spent much of the last two evenings building a pair of 96-team brackets based on this season. The first simply adds 31 at-large teams, the overwhelming majority of the NIT field, to the current 65-team Tournament. Each conference keeps their single auto-bid. I've labeled this one the NIT Option.

The second gives each conference two automatic bids, for 62 total, leaving 34 at-large spots. I've named this one the Auto Bid Option. Since conference tournaments haven't started yet, I simply entered the top two teams in each league into this field.

In constructing both brackets, I tried to keep as many of the current procedures in place as I could. In theory, teams from the same conference can meet as early as the second round today, but the Committee does a good job of keeping them separated until the regional final.

With an additional round thrown into a 96-team field, I've tweaked things so that teams from the same conference can meet in the regional semifinals.

Click here for the NIT Option bracket.

Click here for the Auto Bid Option bracket.

After the jump, I'll take a look at which conferences are getting the most bids in each field and some of the matchup difficulties a 96-team bracket poses.

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In my previous entries in this series, I've focused on keeping the 64-team NCAA field, or (gasp) shrinking it.  This piece represents a turning point, as from here on out, I'm going to look at several different ideas for tournament expansion.  

The Opening Round is the simplest place to start this exercise for several reasons.

• Logistically, an expansion of the Opening Round would be far easier to fit in the current Tournament format and schedule, compared to a more comprehensive expansion (16-64 teams).
• An expanded Opening Round allows for more at-large bids, something that would be popular with most conferences.
• Teams who could gain at-large bids through an expansion of the Opening Round would fit on the 11-13 lines.  Teams slotted here are perfectly capable of winning one or more games in the Tournament.  It's very possible that the first few teams left out of the field in any given year could have done just as much damage as the teams that actually did advance in their place.
• I haven't yet put together an expanded bracket in Excel to illustrate more complicated expansion proposals.

But before you find out about how I'd expand the Opening Round, you first need to know why the Opening Round exists.  More on this after the jump.

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Champions League Trophy (Courtesy flickr user eldan90 via Creative Commons)

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You may be wondering why the trophy for the biggest club soccer competition in the world (Sorry FIFA, the Club World Cup doesn't count.) is at the top of a blog on college basketball.  Don't worry, the NCAA isn't taking a page from the NFL's apparent playbook and thinking of taking the Final Four international.  Nope, all that's going on here is that I'm looking across the Atlantic for the next piece of my tournament reform series.

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In my previous two entries in this series, I've concentrated on the past, when the only way into the tournament was to win your conference's championship.  This time around, I'm taking the opposite approach.  Taking the lead of a blog post Jay Bilas put up on ESPN.com back on March 5, this bracket illustrates what the tournament would look like if the NCAA scrapped automatic bids and really made the Committee work.  It features 64 at-large teams.

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In Part 1 of this series, I looked at what the NCAA tournament would have looked like had selection focused solely on the regular season conference champions or auto bid winners.  In this new--yet slightly unplanned--entry, I'm going to combine these two brackets into a larger "field of champions."

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It's been a busy post-Final Four week for me, thanks to a visit from one of my friends from my undergrad days at UF.  I'll be back posting more regularly on the college hoops topics of the day on Monday.  In the meantime, I'd like to make the first post in what's going to be a series here on Blogging the Bracket over the next few weeks.  

Now that we're just out of the postseason, it's time to take a rather in-depth look at a topic that's often talked about, reforming March Madness.  It's something that, like I said, people love to talk about, but you rarely, if ever see what the reality of these tournament reform proposals would look like.  This is the void I intend to fill as I kick off my offseason coverage here on the site.  More after the jump...

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