Wetzel: NCAA tournament expansion is bad, but it's happening. Here's how to lessen the damage - ESPN

John Calipari has led four schools to a combined 25 NCAA tournaments.

He has been a mid-major underdog and the No. 1 overall seed. He has reached six Final Fours, won a national title and been bounced in the first round as a massive favorite. He has even found himself on the wrong side of the bubble a time or two.

He has known March in all of its Madness.

«This thing is special,» said Calipari, now Arkansas' coach and former coach of Kentucky, Memphis and Massachusetts. «This thing is unique.»

It's why, on Thursday, Calipari found himself expressing a bewilderment shared by many fans when the NCAA announced it was officially expanding the tournament again, this time to 76 teams, a move that requires more «play-in» games on Tuesday and Wednesday.

«I don't know why you mess with something that's working,» he told ESPN.

The stated reasons about increased participation ring hollow. The real motivation, as just about anyone in college athletics will tell you, is to appease the Big Ten and SEC, which want to assure their teams get in even as they've expanded their own ranks to 18 and 16 teams, respectively.

They got bigger, mostly for football, so now everything has to get bigger, even the hallowed basketball tournament. Commissioners were originally worried that having so many league teams meant that they would knock each other out during the regular season.

That hasn't borne out — the SEC got 14 of its 16 teams into the 2025 tourney, after all — but here we are anyway.

The move doesn't appear to be with the public, nor many of Calipari's coaching peers, who worry about the calendar, the importance of the regular season or the risk of tinkering with the special chemistry, however hard to define, that makes this pursuit so