After years of debate, the NCAA Tournament is expanding.
The men’s and women’s tournaments will grow from 68 teams to 76 next season, the NCAA announced Thursday. The move is the most significant alteration to the men’s tournament’s format since 1984-85, when the field grew from 53 teams to 64, and to the women’s format since it grew from 48 to 64 in 1994.
That 64-team bracket has largely remained the basis for March Madness ever since, with small tweaks — a 65th men’s team being added in 2001, three more in 2011, and then the women’s expansion to 68 in 2022 — that created four games on the two days before the first round.
Those additions pale in comparison to the expansion next spring.
The 12 lowest-seeded at-large teams and 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers will play in what will now be called the “March Madness Opening Round.” In the men’s tournament, those games will be split between Dayton, Ohio (site of the First Four since 2011) and a to-be-determined site. NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said on a conference call Thursday that there will be an open bid process for the second opening round men’s site, with a decision covering the next two years expected to come in July.
The 12 women’s games will be played on the home courts of 12 of the top 16 seeds in the tournament. Only 52 of the 76 teams each season will be guaranteed a spot in the round of 64, down from 60 currently.
As part of the expansion, the total value of the tournaments’ television rights agreements will increase by roughly $50 million per year over the remaining six years of the existing deal. The NCAA projects it will distribute more than $131 million in added revenue to schools over that span — known as tournament “units,” which are paid out through the conferences— or roughly $21.8 million in additional unit distributions per year.
“I would say that expansion would not have happened without that agreement. There’s travel expenses. There’s per diem for the teams and game operations expenses,” Gavitt said. “The (value of the) basketball units that are distributed are not diluted.”
Based on the new 76-team format, six automatic conference qualifiers (likely outside the autonomy conferences) will play at least two tournament games each year, which guarantees those conferences at least one additional unit. Only two automatic qualifiers had that opportunity each year under the 68-team format.
But the expanded format also means that, for the first time in decades, four fewer automatic qualifiers from low- and mid-major leagues will participate in the first round (beginning Thursday).
A blank mockup of what the 76-team bracket will look like. (Courtesy of the NCAA)
Expansion has been seen as inevitable across the college basketball landscape since last summer, when there was significant momentum to grow the Big Dance ahead of the 2025-26 postseason, despite public sentiment indicating many fans were not in favor of the change. NCAA power brokers and their television partners ran out of time to implement the shift before the start of the athletic calendar. But the NCAA said last August that its committees would continue conversations about expansion for 2027, leading to Thursday’s approval.
Gavitt described expansion as a “proactive” way to meet the needs of member schools.
“There are 32 conferences in the NCAA, and not one of them is opposed to expansion at any level. That’s a pretty powerful statement,” Gavitt said. “While I know that there’s not excitement in some corners of the media and fan base, our schools and conferences are saying, ‘We need this.’ Things are changing. And this is being responsive to their needs and keeping what’s special about March Madness special for many years to come.”
Power conferences have been the largest drivers of tournament expansion, with NCAA President Charlie Baker also vocally advocating for it. Baker’s reasoning has been to allow more college basketball players to experience March Madness, a rationale that overlapped with power conferences’ push for more “access” to the postseason — especially as Division I men’s college basketball swelled to 365 teams.
The NCAA’s Transformation Committee recommended in 2023 that any sports with more than 200 sponsored teams allow 25 percent of them to participate in the postseason. The expanded 76-team field doesn’t get college basketball all the way there — that would require more than 91 teams in the Big Dance — but at 21.4 percent of teams, it is now much closer.
“Men’s and women’s basketball were among the lowest amount of (championship) access from a standpoint of number of teams,” said Keith Gill, commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference and Division I men’s basketball committee chair. “There are a lot of pressures out there as it relates to access, and I think it’s incumbent upon us to be responsive. I think we took a really measured approach in making sure that the tournament is going to be exactly the same when it starts on Thursday.”
The biggest holdup to expansion has been figuring out the finances. The NCAA still has six years remaining on its men’s and women’s tournament television contracts. CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery pay the governing body over $900 million annually for the men’s tournament rights, but those networks were under no obligation to increase their payout for an expanded bracket. That said, the NCAA long maintained that it could unlock more revenue through increased sponsorships and advertising sales, which would make up the financial difference associated with including more teams and hosting more games.
In a related development, the NCAA also announced it will open up new tournament sponsorship opportunities for previously restricted alcohol products, including beer, wine, spirits and hard seltzer.
Come 2032, though, when those television contracts are set to expire, a larger television inventory could mean a larger annual payout to the NCAA. Asked if that could lead to another round of expansion when the time comes, Gavitt indicated that it was unlikely.
“I think we can say with confidence that 76 (teams) is really maxing out the opportunity here, given the (three-week) time frame the tournaments operate in,” he said. “A larger field size wouldn’t be easily accommodated or even feasible to fit into that time frame. It also is expensive. We think we’ve optimized the media value with eight new teams and eight new games.”
As far as the updated broadcast schedule for the men’s opening round on Tuesday and Wednesday, Gavitt said the television partners will help make the final decisions, but he anticipates each night will feature six games as staggered tripleheaders geared toward primetime and tipping off in the late afternoon.
“We started those games in the First Four format at 6:40 (p.m. ET) and 9:10 (p.m. ET), so you can imagine those (opening round) game times in the evening will be similar, but we’ll have a third game to add, which will be in the late afternoon window.”
More games doesn’t mean more excitement — among fans or participants. The majority of men’s coaches The Athletic spoke to in recent weeks — as momentum toward expansion picked back up after this year’s Final Four — were against growing the field, arguing that it further diminishes the sport’s regular season, which has already struggled to maintain relevance against increasingly lengthy NFL and college football schedules. Coaches at all levels of DI men’s basketball were also against expansion because of its impact on mid- and low-major teams. Not only will four automatic qualifiers now miss the 64-team field, but some of the sport’s best teams from one-bid leagues will also face tougher paths as they’re pushed further down the seedline.
Some proponents of expansion have argued that a larger field means more mid-major teams will be included, but a recent review by The Athletic found that the majority of the additional eight at-large berths will likely go to high-major teams. One other benefit for mid-major teams could be increased revenue for their conferences by winning the opening-round games; conferences receive payouts — known as “units” — when their teams win a tournament game, and the prize for advancing out of the First Four is the same as the payout attached to every win in the tournament.
— Stewart Mandel contributed to this report.
