Not a huge fan of Dana but she kills it here. 

Greg Sankey is not the first person to pitch expanding the NCAA Tournament, as the SEC commissioner suggested to Sports Illustrated. He’s not even the first Greg. Back in 2010, Greg Shaheen, then the NCAA vice president for men’s basketball, filibustered his way through an unpopular argument for bloating the bracket to 96 teams. It did not go well. Shaheen torpedoed so harshly at the Final Four that year that the NCAA backed off, and instead offered the First Four as a compromise.

Now, Greg Sankey is a smart man. Brilliant even. And the answer should be the same to him as it was to Shaheen’s pitch for 96, and delivered with equal force: n and o. He and his colleagues already have ruined much of college sports in their power-hungry drive to own the world. Leave the NCAA Tournament alone. It’s not hurting you. Back off. Stay away. Shoo. Git. You don’t care about college basketball, anyway. Go back to your bunker and screw up more rivalries, ask more Olympic sports teams to travel 3,000 miles for in-conference competition, rewrite the very topography of college athletics, but for the love of all that is holy, stay away from the NCAA Tournament.

For anyone unable to read between the lines of what Sankey is arguing, let me help. Here’s what he said to Sports Illustrated: “If the last team in can win the national championship, and they’re in the 30s or 40s from an RPI or NET standpoint, is our current approach supporting national championship competition? I think there’s health in that conversation. That doesn’t exclude people. It goes to: how do we include people in these annual national celebrations that lead to a national champion?” That sounds good, doesn’t it? Even altruistic. Kumbaya, more is better, let’s make sure everyone who deserves a shot at a national title gets a shot.

Please. Ever heard of the wolf in sheep’s clothing? This is a pack coming at you. “Just to take a fresh look at all of it,’’ he said. “As we think collectively, everyone goes to the corner and says, ‘I have to hang on to what’s mine.’ But how do we contribute and build together?” Um, I don’t know. You tell me, Greg. Or wait, I’ll ask the Big 12 about how we should work collectively together. I’m sure folks there are thrilled at the collective effort to disband their conference.

Sankey’s altruism for the NCAA Tournament is about as genuine as it was for the Big 12. We’ll do it for the collective good … of us. He does not mean more teams from the Missouri Valley. He doesn’t think the SoCon should get an extra bid. He means the power leagues, the ones that have every viable opportunity to bolster their resume by doing that crazy thing — winning games! — should have more bites at the apple. “I thought Texas A&M should have been in the field in basketball (last season),’’ he said. That would be the SEC member Aggies, who finished the regular season at 20-11, who given the chance to boost their resume against top-ranked Auburn instead lost by 17, who at one point lost eight games in a row, who played a rousing non-conference schedule that included North Florida, Abilene Christian, Houston Baptist, New Orleans, Northwestern State and Central Arkansas. That team, per Sankey, deserved to be in the tournament.

Why? Truthfully? Because the SEC has expanded, and thereby more of his teams need to get in (Of note, the SEC hasn’t won a national title since Kentucky in 2012, which is now either a basketball school or not, depending on who you ask). More bids equate to more NCAA units which means more money. That’s all that this is about — money and more, more greed, more attempts to quench what’s already been proven to be an insatiable appetite. Expanding the tournament does not make the tournament better. It waters down the product. Yes, the beauty of the tournament is that anyone can win it — that Saint Peter’s can beat Kentucky — but there is a difference between Saint Peter’s earning its way via an automatic bid and A&M getting a hall pass.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey wants to take “a fresh look” at the NCAA Tournament. (Dale Zanine / USA Today)

The scary part in all of this is that Greg Sankey is not Greg Shaheen. He is arguably one of the most powerful players in college sports, and he also happens to be heading up the NCAA transformation committee. When he speaks, it’s not off the cuff. This is not the idle ramblings of a man without an agenda. Sankey was not just ruminating — on the record — about an expanded college tournament because he was bored. This is a test balloon, just as it was for Shaheen, and don’t be at all surprised if some sort of similar “compromise’’ is reached. Maybe not 96 teams. How about we try, say, 80? The NCAA is exceptionally vulnerable right now, as an entity and a necessity. Sankey’s very charge with the transformation committee is to imagine new ways for it to exist and function. Much of it is necessary. The rulebook is antiquated, the enforcement process useless and even the governance structure unwieldy and messy.

But who’s complaining about the NCAA Tournament? No one. It is the one thing that the folks in Indianapolis don’t have to defend. But if Sankey is riffing on change, who’s going to stop him from making it happen? The exiting and feckless Mark Emmert? Dan Gavitt, one would hope, would be consulted, as the person who holds the same title Shaheen once did. But if the threat is our way or the highway, what choice does the NCAA have?

Already commissioners and athletic directors at smaller leagues and schools are legitimately worried about automatic qualifiers disappearing, the entirety of the field selected based on NET rankings and such. Sankey did not make any mention of that seismic shift, but the anxiety is understandable. There are only a very few seats at the table, all of them occupied and none by the commissioner of the Big South — or the Big East for that matter. Since college expansion began, decisions have been made for college basketball, but never with college basketball in mind. This is no different. He’s talking about college basketball in general — but he’s talking specifically about a small cabal of schools (his mostly) that could benefit from expansion.

And it needs to stop before it starts.

Post-pandemic Sankey waxed poetic about the word cloud search result his office kept coming back to after the league decided to play football during the COVID-19-challenged season of 2020. “Hope,’’ he said was the word he saw over and over again. Here’s hoping somewhere in Birmingham people in the SEC office are doing the same exercise today.

Because the word he will see isn’t “hope.” It’s no.