Rick Barnes explains his 'concern' with possible NCAA Tournament expansion

Rick Barnes said he didn’t know what the number is for potential NCAA Tournament expansion, but he just can’t envision it happening. The tournament is hard enough as it is for the eventual champion — six straight elimination games over three grueling weekends.

“I think it’s awfully hard to ask a champion to win more than six games over three weeks, at the level that you go,” Barnes said this week at SEC basketball media days.” That would be my biggest concern.”

It was reported earlier this month that the tournament could be expanding to 76 teams, with 12 play-in games instead of the four games in the First Four.

“I understand allowing people to play into it,” Barnes said, “but I just don’t know how a team that has fought hard, number one, all those seeds, asking to go more than six games. That’d be my biggest concern. What number it would be to get there, I don’t know where you ever cut it off.” 

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The tournament expanded from 64 teams to 68 in 2011. It started at eight teams in 1939, went to 16 teams in 1951 and then to 32 in 1975. It doubled to a 64-team bracket in 1985. A 65th team was added with a play-in game in 2001 then three more teams were added, along with the addition of the First Four in Dayton, to get the field to 68 teams in 2011.

“For as long as I’ve been in it,” Barnes said, “there has always been one or two teams that, man, it used to be the first team out and it didn’t go beyond it.

“Now it’s now three or four, but I don’t know what the number is. I just don’t see it ever going beyond three weeks, either.” 

Rick Barnes has been to 29 NCAA Tournaments as a head coach

Barnes has been to the NCAA Tournament 29 times as a head coach, with four teams over five decades dating back Providence in 1988-89. 

Tennessee has been to seven straight NCAA Tournaments under Barnes, seeded no lower than No. 5, with two Sweet Sixteens and back-to-back Elite Eights.

Whatever the field looks like in the future, Barnes doesn’t want the feel of the tournament experience to change for teams that make the bracket. And the path to a national championship shouldn’t get any harder than it already is. 

“I’ve heard some stories about how hard it is on those teams that play in  (the First Four) and have to rush somewhere to get somewhere the next day,” Barnes said. “That doesn’t seem like a fun experience either. And you’d like to think that teams that do get there, that they can look back on that experience as being one of the great experiences of their life, being a part of it. 

“But with that said … I just don’t think the champion should have to play more than six games.”