At the risk of sounding snobbish, is it fair to ask whether high-profile sports championship tournaments are becoming too inclusive?
The trend is everywhere in the land of fun and games. Major League Baseball this year invited 12 teams to compete for a World Series title, 10 more than its original format used until 1969, and one result was that a team (Philadelphia) with the sixth-best won-lost record during the regular season wound up playing for all the marbles.
The NFL, since its first Super Bowl in 1967, has gone from four to eight (1970) to 10 (1978) to 12 (1990) to 14 (2020) playoff teams. The NBA, which had six playoff teams in its first 30 years, grew to 10 in 1975, 12 in 1977 and 16 in 1984. The NHL presently advances half of its 32 teams to the so-called second season, which is 10 teams more than made up the entire league in the mid-60s.
That’s nothing. College basketball grandees are expressing support for bulking up the men’s March Madness from 68 teams to as many as 80, 96 or even 128. That would be approaching half of the total—358—in Division I. And college football’s upper echelon, already awash in 43 annual post-season bowl games, has announced it will enlarge its championship playoff format from four teams to 12 after the 2024 season.
Likewise, the quadrennial men’s soccer World Cup, now in the process of whittling down a 32-nation field in pursuit of the big prize, will reappear in 2026 with a field of 48. “If you don’t make that expanded field,” The Athletic declared, “fire everyone on the staff.”
Amid this Mae West take on post-season play—that “too much of a good thing can be wonderful”—perhaps it is a bit curmudgeonly to ponder the potential drawbacks of overabundance. Might the bar-lowering of post-season qualification reduce regular-season competition to a mere limbering-up exercise?
In a lengthy discussion between basketball authors Eamonn Brennan and Brian Bennett, posted on The Athletic, Bennett asked, “Why play a season if you can limp along….never showing any consistent winning ability whatsoever, and still get in [to the championship tourney]?”
Participation trophies all around? During an HBO interview not long ago, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie suggested that missing out on a championship event as a consequence of too many in-season losses might be a good life lesson. “I made sure that my kids were Mets fans so they could understand adversity,” Christie said.
Is the point of a more-the-merrier post-season meant to give teams a second chance after they have failed—maybe because of injuries or other not-their-fault challenges—to dominate the regular season? Provide another bite at the apple? Is it really a matter, as the NCAA’s National Football Playoff executive director, Bill Hancock, put it, a way of assuring that “more teams and more access mean more excitement for fans, alumni, students and student-athletes”?
Or is it just a money grab for the sport’s poohbahs, since such expansion of the College Football Playoff reportedly is expected to bring about $450 million in additional gross revenue for the conferences and schools that participate? The CFP’s current 12-year contract with ESPN runs through the 2025-26 season and CFP officials want to explore adding multiple broadcast partners in the next cycle.
This is happening barely more than a decade since Graham Spanier, then president of Penn State and chairman of the college presidents’ Oversight Committee, proclaimed that a football playoff of any size in college’s top division was “just not going to happen. The presidents of our universities are not going to go for it. We’re the ones who have the say.”
Sure. And barely one year later, in 2012, Spanier was dismissed by Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal and the Oversight Committee voted to implement the four-team playoff in 2014—which two years hence will have three times the participants.
Among the observers not offended by such inflation is Slate’s Alex Kirschner, who happily accepted that baseball’s inflated post-season “is not a foolproof way to find the best team.” Because considering the early playoff elimination of two MLB division champions and a third 100-game winner to be a crisis was “at odds with a fundamental point about what we’ve decided sports are on this continent: an entertainment product designed more to be fun than to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Kirschner contended that we should not be “asking for sports to be something that most American fans have never wanted them to be: more predictable. Most people do not want to get rid of the potential for magic.”
The cliched Cinderella Story, the shocking playoff upset by the Little Guy, indeed continues to play well to wider audiences and, in fact, is a core element of the bracketed, knock-out progression of post-season play. Over and over, it has been proven that such unexpected events hold significant appeal to viewers beyond the hard-core fan.
So: The potential for more spectators. More money, more television, more playoff teams. Wonderful?