Imagine a March Madness team with a losing record. Plus: CFB's gambling legend

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I thought it was cool and fun to have everyone paying such close attention to my Atlanta Hawks last night. Talk of the town! Doesn’t matter why. OK, enough basketball. Let’s begin this college football newsletter … by talking more about basketball. By now, you’ve heard this week’s news that the NCAA’s hoops tournaments will likely grow from 68 to 76, the largest expansion for the men’s tourney since it moved from 53 to 64 in 1985. After years of everyone yapping about this inevitability, the governing body is hoping to make it happen for next season. The likeliest arrangement would expand the opening round (the First Four in modern terms, or the preliminary round back in 1984). It’d grow to 12 teams, and add a second host alongside the somehow-iconic Dayton, Ohio. “Which teams play in those opening-round games also still needs to be determined,” our Ralph Russo reported on Tuesday, “but the current mix of the lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers and the final at-large selections is the preferred choice of television partners.” To examine the list of teams that might’ve made a men’s 76-teamer this past March is to realize the NCAA’s timing is pretty brutal. Brendan Marks called this cutline “one of the weakest in recent memory,” since almost literally nobody would’ve been excited to watch more .500-ish basketball by Oklahoma, Cincinnati or Oklahoma State, let alone the Auburn team that served as the tourney’s Grinch, thanks to its former head coach. From Brendan’s 76-team projection, here’s the glass-almost-half-full upside that shatters into a nightmare: “Maybe a few true mid-majors — like the 26-win Belmont team this season, which was upset in the Missouri Valley tournament — will squeeze through an expanded bubble. If so, an optimist could argue that giving lower-level leagues more chances to win games (and earn the accompanying NCAA Tournament financial units) is actually a good thing. And that would be. “But all the data suggests the opposite will transpire. That most of the eight new berths awarded each March will instead go to high-major teams like Indiana, which simply didn’t win enough to get in by 15-year-long standards. “Building on the aforementioned Auburn example: How long until a high-major with a losing record gets in, saved by some sterling metrics?” No offense to my beloved NIT, but adding losers to a championship tourney just because they have famous logos would be extreme NIT behavior. Elsewhere, here’s our Jon Greenberg: “No one wants this. The NCAA Tournament works just fine. So of course, it’ll happen. … It’s good for the coaches of 17-16 teams and their fathers. For the rest of us, it’s another sign of the decline.” Tangent time, spinning off this specific expansion (and recalling those who forever want to cram uninspiring Power 4 teams into college football’s championship systems). I often think basically the same thing as reader John W., who commented under Jon’s annoyed story: “I would limit the tournament by prohibiting teams that cannot finish at least .500 in their league. I don’t care how strong your league might be; you chose to compete in that league.” Yes. In college football, we hear it all year long, during summer pre-politicking and on our own Selection Sunday and beyond, the same arguments as in basketball: Our conference is just so darn perilous. Woe is us. But thanks to the service we provide by absorbing the mighty blows of Maryland or Mississippi State, our teams should get to flood every tournament forever. It’s the least the world can do to reward our most disappointing teams for having bravely generated TV content against either Arkansas or Minnesota. But nobody forced your conference to make itself so top-heavy in the first place. At some point, each of your conference’s members chose to join. Each year, they choose not to leave. Having an ugly record because the rest of your clique is better than you is not the fault of a one-loss team that was never invited to join it. And a few years ago, when that rich conference ramped up its own difficulty by adding the richest schools from the Big 12 or Pac-12 or wherever, each conference member voted for that to happen. Of course they did! It made them a lot of money, and nothing matters more than that. But now that they’ve filled their own league with too many big-name teams, they want ever bigger tournaments so they can feel ever more appreciated for having to actually play those powerful opponents? (Same goes for difficult non-conference games, to be clear. Lose too many because they were too hard? Doesn’t sound like championship material. Got paid, though!) On the other hand, even if only one or two more mid-majors make it in, that’d still be millions of dollars up for grabs for leagues that actually need them, Ralph argues. 👴🏻 Indiana won the title because its roster was full of old guys, right? There’s a huge difference between age and experience. Important parsing by Seth Emerson. Includes quotes by probably the three most relevant people possible: Chris Weinke, Kalani Sitake and a gerontologist. ⏰ “Twenty-two tight ends were taken in the 2026 draft, the most since 2002. Nine were taken in the first three rounds, tying the 2023 draft for the most ever. NFL teams now prioritize having multiple tight ends, which could have a domino effect at the college level.” 🌸 Alabama’s roster is no longer weirdly skinny, why Miami could improve one step further and more from all around the country after spring ball, by Ralph and Bruce Feldman. 🤖 “We have some alums … they built out an (AI) agent that watches film.” AI in recruiting? Oh, this will go great. You know, if Florida State turned out to be letting HatGPT make its roster decisions, that’d explain a lot. As we wait to learn more about Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby and the NCAA’s investigation into bets he allegedly placed on his own team during his time at Indiana, I thought about the state of college football a century ago. It’s what I’m usually thinking about anyway, either that or the X-Men or Ecclesiastes. Look at this, from Murray Sperber’s “Shake Down the Thunder,” a definitive history of Notre Dame football. Beginning in 1916: “He immediately embarked on what one of his fellow students called ‘his own private job plan’ — earning money by playing pool and cards in downtown South Bend. He was so skillful a gambler that he … lived the rest of his N.D. years in the luxurious Oliver Hotel in South Bend, home to … high-stakes billiard, pool and poker games. … “The transcript of his Notre Dame academic record reveals that for two of his four school years, he received no grades whatsoever. … “He called himself ‘the finest freelance gambler ever to attend Notre Dame.’ He did not confine himself to games of chance but, as was the custom of the time in college football, bet on his team as well.” That talented gambler and non-academic was All-American halfback George Gipp, forever sainted by his alleged death-bed plea for a future Fighting Irish team to “win just one for the Gipper” — a plea likely invented eight years after his 1920 passing by his showman of a coach, Knute Rockne. An actor (and eventual president) named Ronald Reagan delivered that “Gipper” line in a 1940 movie, which also depicted Rockne forcefully ejecting an overeager bettor and declaring, “We haven’t got any use for gamblers around here,” all while basking in the free-wheeling Gipp’s football achievements, which the movie skipped over. Anyway. That’s not to say online gambling is wonderful for the adolescent mind, duh, or to say players should be allowed to bet on their own teams. It’s only to again nudge against the forever-popular notion that our current problems are new problems. But now we’re back to Ecclesiastes. One more off-topic read: how endless craving for more and more profit is ruining the card game Magic: The Gathering. I don’t play it, but found that post relevant to about half of today’s newsletter. Say hello at untilsaturday@theathletic.com about whatever. Let me know if you have any questions about college football that we can try to answer in this newsletter over the summer. Love Until Saturday? Check out The Athletic’s other newsletters, too. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms