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[QUOTE="607FBL, post: 3715932, member: 6815"]
Auto-bids aren't put in place to make the best tournament. They are in place to make sure every team has a route to a championship. Schools aren't going to sponsor a sport if there is no way to compete to win the championship. One of the biggest recruiting tools the mid-level teams have is "we are competitive in our conference, and once you win the conference tournament, you're in the NCAA tournament". If you take that from these programs, it shifts all the balance to only the top programs. Look at the college football playoffs right now that has no auto-bid. Almost every year it is: Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State (+ 1 other team). You'd have almost the same top 10-15 teams every year, and then a few "surprise" teams to fill in the rest of the tournament. And when you'd get down to the last picks, you'd still have to decide something along the lines of: do you take a Big 10 team with a losing record but played top competition or do you take the ASUN team that went 12-2 but didn't play anybody? (And in both cases, the teams outside the top 10-15 are typically not a huge threat to win the championship anyways)

For the comments based around number of teams in the playoffs, I'm pretty sure the size of the tournament is based on a percentage of how many D1/D2/D3 teams there are (Something like ~25% for D1, ~20% for D2, ~15% for D3, not completely accurate numbers but a guess). So the tournament size couldn't be increased unless more teams join.
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