It's embarrassing/infuriating that there is even a whisper of changing the tournament.  It would be akin to lighting your own house ablaze. 

If you are in a power 5 and don't make it, that is on you.  Power 5 teams already have huge advantages playing in the power conferences which pad all the metrics.  

Tourney Adjustment priority:

1. Only at-large teams should be playing in the First 4

2. Do nothing.  Nothing at all.  Play it exactly as is.

-----------Huge drop----------------

3. Expand the field but all conferences still get at least 1 automatic qualifier no matter what.  

@tobias-funke agreed.  We’re going into this in a bit more detail in an upcoming episode but if the Tournament moves away from its current format, it’s hard to see how there won’t be damage done. 

The NCAA tournament will have to change whether it makes sense or not. The greed of the Power 5 schools has set that in motion. There is no way you can have P5 schools put so much into basketball and be left out of the tournament while small schools like St Peters cash in and do it on the cheap. Big business will use all of its advantages to take a bigger piece of the pie. It’s not if the tournament will change it is when will it change. It doesn’t matter about whether we see the down side it’s about the money. The P5 will present the change that “it’s for the better” and they will control the tv content. 
I would like to see football only break away but I’m afraid the money will be too much and basketball will break away with football. Thus the change is coming. Enjoy college basketball while you can. We’ll soon be cheering on teams that are affiliated with our school but won’t be part of the athletic department or the NCAA

Employees of the school aren’t required to be students. Teams can play on campus but aren’t required to be part of the university. 

It would certainly satisfy Title 9 since their not part of the university and no other athletes need to be paid. Trades could occur and no time limits on how long someone could play for a team. Hunter Dickinson could retire from UM and have his statue next to Bo’s!

 
It all sounds crazy but greed will always take you down a crazy path. Kevin Warren has already said more expansion is coming and players will be paid. He has not said anything about staying in the NCAA nor how all the sports are going to benefit besides athletic departments will have more money. Apparently he thinks money will fix everything. Maybe someone needs to get him on record what his ultimate goal is with the NCAA and revenue sports. 

@beans77 I agree with some of this, but the point about the downside IS in fact about the money.  The money is the end result of the interest level in the product and in college basketball, the product IS the Tournament...the regular season is, to most of the sporting world, a minor sideshow in terms of interest level. That's just reality.

If you have an event with less appeal to an audience, at some point you are going to be talking about less money being generated.  That's the issue Power 5's have relative to basketball.  Of course, the problem is that basketball considerations don't really matter all that much, which means we may well see an ultimate end point where basketball is generating less money because there is less interest in the one facet of the sport which demands the critical mass of attention.