In news that was expected to be announced last week, the NCAA announced the format for the Opening Round for the newly-expanded Men's Basketball Championship on Monday afternoon.

For starters, the "Opening Round" is no more. Instead, eight teams will play in a revamped First Round or "First Four," referring to the number of games, naturally. The old First Round is now the Second Round, and the old Second Round is the Third.

The "First Four" will be played on the Tuesday or Wednesday after Selection Sunday (maybe both), most likely in Dayton.

As for who will be involved, instead of the last eight at-larges or final eight automatic qualifiers being assigned to these games, the Division I Men's Basketball Committee split the difference.

Two games will feature the last four at-large teams in the field. So, the Committee will officially announce the "last team in" for the first time ever. The teams in each game will be evenly matched and playing for the same spot in the bracket, likely somewhere between a 10 and a 12 seed. However, both games won't necessarily feed to the same line. One game could be for the 10 seed in the East, while the other for the 11 in the Southeast.

The other two games will feature the same format as the current Opening Round, with the winners advancing to be demolished by a number one seed. However, the winners' conferences will get an extra tournament share for the victory.

As for television coverage, better find out where truTV is on your cable or satellite lineup before mid-March.

While I still feel expansion was a completely unnecessary innovation, a three-team jump was certainly the way to go, and this format, even though it smacks of trying to please everyone involved, should work well.

What do you think about this new format for March Madness?

Breathe easy, college basketball fans, as the NCAA announced today that there will indeed be a new television deal and tournament expansion. However, expansion won't happen in the way many feared, at least for a few years.

CBS and Turner will, as expected, be the television home for the Tournament for the foreseeable future. This means that every game will be nationally televised, with no special pay-per-view package required. The only potential downside to this deal is that the Final Four (and half of the regional finals) move to cable in a few years.

That, and you'll have to figure out where TruTV (which oddly enough, used to be known as Court TV) is on your channel lineup.

As for expansion, 68 looks to be the likely number for the start of the contract, though the NCAA was careful to say that 96 could happen at some point during the life of the 14-year pact (which is a fairly long term as these things go). I'll have more about this limited expansion after the jump.

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With each passing day, it's looking more likely that the 2011 NCAA Tournament will feature 96 teams instead of the 65 invited since 2001. This means a return to cable for a bigger part of the action, including the Final Four in alternating years. Based on CBS and Turner's plan, it looks like the days of having to purchase Mega March Madness to get all of the early round games could be coming to an end.

While there's been some talk about where the extra 31 teams will come from (either via the old NIT field or a second automatic qualifier for each conference), conversation about how this revamped Tournament, particularly the first three rounds, will unfold has been lacking.

After the jump, I'll take a look at some ideas that may or may not be on the table for the 95 games on tap for the next Men's Basketball Championship.

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Hi. I know I haven't been posting as much as I probably should be during the closing weeks of the season. Real life has basically chosen a bad time to get crazy, but that's a discussion for later (maybe even the end of this post).

Today, the NCAA held their annual pre-Final Four press conference, featuring Men's Division I Basketball Committee chair Dan Guerrero and Greg Shaheen, who is the NCAA's full-time point man for the sport. 

That's where the stink bomb was set off. The NCAA has decided that if expansion does happen, it will be to 96-teams.

Beyond that, as the transcript of the presser shows, the Association really has no clue how this will actually happen (making me wonder how much actual "studying" was actually completed by the powers that be). My former SB Nation cohort Eamonn Brennan, who now works for the company who could benefit most from this ESPN, highlighted a lengthy exchange between Shaheen and John Feinstein, which surrounded the schedule of the expanded event and how it would impact academics. 

Now, I'm going to qualify this next statement by reminding/informing you that I spend my days editing complicated, often poorly-written technical documentation.

There have been very few times in my life where my head has been in more of a fog after reading something than it was after reading that transcript.

More after the jump.

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Back in February, I projected a couple of 96-team brackets, using two radically different formulas to reach this number of participating teams for the NCAA Tournament. After the most exciting first weekend of March Madness that I can remember, I decided to go back and reformulate these brackets based on the NCAA field and who would have qualified with the regular season and Championship Week complete.

The two formats are the same as they were in my original post:

The NIT Option basically folds the 32-team NIT field into the NCAA Tournament. I do NOT hand out automatic bids to regular season champions who fail to win their conference tournaments. That means a few teams who are in tournaments like the CBI and CIT (or not in the postseason at all) appear in this bracket. With 31 automatic bids, 65 at-large bids are available. 

The Champions Option gives two bids to each conference. In some cases, the regular season champion and tournament champions appear. If a team swept the two titles, I gave the second bid to the regular season runner-up. With 62 automatic bids, 34 at-large bids are available.

The top 8 seeds in each region receive byes to the Second Round in each field. To make things easier, the top 11 lines are the same in both brackets, matching the current 65-team bracket. Sites remain the same.

Teams from the same conference may meet as early as the Third Round (32 teams) in these fields, so don't be alarmed to see two teams from the same league in a six-team pod.

After the jump, I'll take a look at both fields.

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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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