Kevin Keatts and North Carolina State reached the NCAA Tournament the old-fashioned way. The way that existed before the bubble. Before bracketology. Before NET rankings, KenPom, the transfer portal, name, image and likeness and all the rest. Before the tournament field grew (and grew some more), when the only way to punch your ticket into March Madness was by winning your conference tournament.

North Carolina State's NCAA Tournament Journey

N.C. State earned the Atlantic Coast Conference’s automatic bid by ripping off five victories in five days to capture the conference tournament title. The 11th-seeded Wolfpack pushed their postseason winning streak to seven and are now in the Sweet 16 for the first time in nearly a decade. It's been a thrilling if exhausting ride, the kind of run that saves jobs. It has also done little to alter Keatts' view about whether the tournament should expand beyond its current 68-team format:

Kevin Keatts on Tournament Expansion

"We talk about the student-athlete experience, and the only thing that really, in my opinion, that has not changed is expanding the tournament," Keatts said. "And I don’t have a number. I don’t know what that should be. But I do think we should give more schools opportunities to be able to get in the tournament."

Discussions on Expanding the Tournament

The NCAA committee has discussed all of this at length in the wake of the organization's transformation committee suggesting that NCAA-sanctioned championships in larger sports be open to a quarter of the teams participating in it. In Division I men's basketball, that breaks down to around an 88-team field, which would make for an unwieldy option to the (nearly) perfect 68-school bracket that's been an office pool staple the morning after Selection Sunday since 2011.

Potential Challenges of Expansion

Going that large seems unlikely. CBS and Warner Brothers Discovery have no interest in moving the Final Four past its current end day the first weekend in April. And beginning the tournament earlier to accommodate massive expansion would cause a ripple effect that would force the regular season to start even earlier at a time when attention is focused squarely on football in most places.

Considerations for Expansion

Atlantic 10 Commissioner Bernadette McGlade, who spent 10 years on the men's tournament selection committee, has become a strong advocate for expansion if it's done the right way. That means not predicating expansion on the idea that the extra 4-8 at-large bids automatically go to mid-tier schools from a power conference.

Impact of Expansion on Tournament Dynamics

What could shift if the field expands is how those units are allotted. One option could be to weigh the units, meaning having them grow exponentially through each round, thereby decreasing the value of simply making the field. It's a setup that could further exacerbate the already widening fiscal gap between super-sized conferences like the Big Ten and SEC and everyone else.

The Essence of March Madness

To survive and advance in a sport where the tectonic plates are in perpetual shift, the tournament may have no choice.