The case for expanding the men's NCAA tournament to 80 teams - ESPN

COLLEGE BASKETBALL HAS been here before.

Exactly 50 seasons ago, the late Lefty Driesell's Maryland Terrapins were one of the best teams in the country. They rose as high as No. 2 in the national rankings and played NC State for that year's Atlantic Coast Conference title in Greensboro, North Carolina. They dropped that game in an epic overtime struggle, 103-100, to the eventual national champions.

But that generational Maryland squad featuring the likes of Len Elmore, John Lucas and Tom McMillen would never face the other powers of the day--UCLA, Marquette, Notre Dame, etc. — in the NCAA tournament because there were no at-large invitations to what was then a Not-Nearly-As-Big-A-Dance. Never a fan of NCAA bureaucrats, Driesell groused that no way would seven-time defending champion UCLA be excluded from the 25-team field under similar circumstances (the Pac-8 had no postseason tourney, so the point was moot).

Four years earlier, another iconic coach, Marquette's Al McGuire, told the NCAA to take a hike when tournament organizers slotted the No. 8 Warriors for the Midwest Region in Fort Worth, Texas, instead of the Mideast Region in much nearer Dayton, Ohio. Marquette opted instead to play in the equally prestigious NIT, knocking off St. John's at Madison Square Garden to win that title.

The sport's power brokers were facing an existential crisis in the 1970s. How could the NCAA rightly crown a champion when its own tournament didn't include all the best teams? One immediate remedy was the creation of a rule that banned any school invited to an NCAA postseason championship from participating in a competing event.

The rest of the NCAA's answer came in the form of incremental change. The 1975 tournament grew from 25 to 32