For the University of Maine men’s and women’s basketball teams, the goal is always to just get to the NCAA Tournament, not win the whole thing. Maine’s women’s team has done that 10 times, most recently two years ago. The men haven’t reached the tournament yet, but one gets the sense that they’re trending in that direction, even coming off last season’s eight-win effort.

The Black Bears’ goal is one shared by dozens of other mid-major schools around the country. Win your conference title and get the automatic bid, then go play your best and see what happens. Upset are common. Maybe you can be the next team to ignite brackets. Maybe you can be the next Maryland-Baltimore County, the 16 seed that beat Virginia in 2018, or Farleigh Dickinson, the 16 that shocked Purdue in 2023.

It was already hard enough for the small schools to pull off those kinds of wins. Now, by expanding both the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments from 68 to 76 schools, the NCAA is asking the mid-majors to compete with bricks in their pockets. The NCAA took that goal of just making the tournament, and made it harder for mid-majors to accomplish much else.

“What about our job at mid-majors has gotten easier?” said Courtney England, the associate head coach of the UMaine women’s basketball team.

The answer of course, is absolutely nothing. It’s a cash grab by an organization that more than ever needs a serious cash grab. It’s basketball gerrymandering.

“It’s arguably the best sporting event in the world. They’re going to make more money off of it,” said Chris Markwood, the head men’s basketball coach at Maine.

The men’s tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, then 65 in 2001, 68 in 2011, and now 76. The women’s tournament first had 64 teams in 1994, and didn’t expand to 68 until 2022. The number of Division I men’s teams increased from 282 in 1985 to 365 last season, while the women’s Division I landscape grew from 291 to 364 over the 32 years between expansion from 64 to 68.

If the tournament had grown at the same pace as Division I, we’d see around 84 teams in the field. Thankfully we have not. There’s something to be said about a tournament that’s hard to qualify for.

Expanding the tournaments is a nod to the schools in the basketball power conferences: the Big Ten, the Southeastern Conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference, The Big East and Big 12. They run the show, and they need a revenue jolt in order to keep outspending each other.

Maine can, and does, offer some payment to student-athletes, but nothing like we see at the schools in the power conferences. Maine has already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through private donations in order to compete at the basic level in the new Division I sports landscape. Schools in the above-mentioned conferences are raising millions. The alumni and donors who opened their wallets to build a roster want a return on the investment. At the least that means spots in the NCAA tournament.

So we create eight new spots. If you think America East, the home of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and other small schools in the Northeast, suddenly has a chance to be a two-bid league, you are naive. It’s more likely the SEC just went from a 10-bid league to 12. The Big Ten went from nine spots to 11.

The First Four is now the 12-game Opening Round. After those 12 games — Tuesday and Wednesday for the men and Wednesday and Thursday for the women — we get into the field of 64 we’ve known for four decades.

The NCAA says the 24 teams that will play in the opening round will be the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers, and the 12 lowest-seeded at-large teams. A lot of mid-major teams are going to play each other in the opening round, thinning their ranks and making the upsets that make March Madness so much fun harder to come by.

The thing that makes March Madness the showcase event of the spring is the possibility that any team can have a great day and beat a stronger opponent. Any team can get on a heater and make a run. The NCAA doesn’t seem to want this anymore. It doesn’t want St. Peter’s making a run to the Elite Eight, like it did in 2022. It wants the power conference schools in complete control.

At least that’s what the cadre of power conference schools wants. To them, the randomness is an afront, not a feature.

Expanding the tournament will make more money for everybody, mid-major leagues included. It will also ensure that those mid-majors, which already had a steep climb to find March success, have an even harder path.

They’re not called the power conferences for nothing. They knew they couldn’t eliminate the automatic qualifiers from the mid-majors. With tournament expansion, they did the next best, self-serving thing.