After years of anxious speculation, the inevitable went official on Thursday. The Division I men’s and women’s basketball committees formally voted in favor of expanding the NCAA Tournament from 68 to 76 teams, the NCAA announced. The inflation will take effect next year. CBS Sports first reported the news of the approved expansion earlier on Thursday.
The voting in favor of expanding March Madness was unanimous from the men’s and women’s committees, per a source.
An emergency joint meeting for the men’s and women’s basketball oversight committees was also called for Thursday afternoon, and the matter was also universally approved on that call, per sources. It was a necessary step toward ratifying the change. The same occurred with the NCAA’s Board of Governors and Division I cabinet.
By Thursday afternoon, the NCAA sent out two hearty press releases in order to dutifully explain why expansion was happening and detail the cluttered layout of the new March Madness bracket.
“Providing additional access to the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Championships for Division I programs will be incredibly meaningful, especially to the student-athletes of the eight additional men’s and women’s programs that receive these coveted bids,” NCAA Board of Governors chair/ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said. “The leadership by President Charlie Baker as well as Dan Gavitt, Lynn Holzman and JoAn Scott has been outstanding. We also appreciate the support of our broadcast partners and corporate champions and partners in making this a reality.”
In Thursday’s release, the NCAA cited more championship opportunities for student-athletes, better matchups for fans and increased investment in the sport as reasons for the approval.
This marks the third time since 2000 that the NCAA Tournament has escalated to a larger field. In 2001, it went from its idyllic 64-school template to a 65-team model after the Mountain West’s creation led the NCAA to keep 34 at-large bids, coercing the bracket to include a play-in game in Dayton, Ohio, throughout the 2000s. In 2011, the 68-team field materialized after approval of a 96-team tournament concept in 2010 was abandoned in the 11th hour due to significant outcry from the media and college sports fans. (Similar concerns were ignored this time around.) The “First Four” was created in 2011, effectively giving precedent for expansion in 2027 to an awkwardly shaped 76-team bracket.
CBS Sports previously reported, on April 28, the predetermined nature of today’s tournament expansion outcome.
And yes, this is dual expansion. The women’s NCAA Tournament is also going to 76 teams despite NCAA sources maintaining for years that there is no practical or realistic justification — either competitively or financially — to do so. The choice to expand by 16 total teams in both tournaments will come at significant additional costs for the NCAA, which already loses millions annually on the women’s tournament. The decisions on both tournaments contrast with public sentiment. Tournament expansion is widely unpopular.
Why NCAAs should stay at 76 for long-term
Critically, increasing the size of March Madness will not change the sport’s calendar. The NCAA Tournament will continue to start in mid-March, with the Final Four and national championship games played in the first week of April — right before the Masters.
The college basketball calendar won’t be adjusted to accommodate more teams. Adding eight additional bids for the men’s and women’s tournaments means those teams have to be squeezed into the three-week March Madness model that already exists.
Given how polarizing expansion of any kind is, the move to 76 is expected to be the long-term format, sources said. NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt echoed that sentiment on a media call late Thursday afternoon.
“I think we can say with confidence that 76 is really maxing out the opportunity here, given the time frame the tournaments operate in,” Gavitt 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.”
The tournament stood at 68 teams the past 15 years and was at 64/65 participants dating back to 1985. That’s 41 years at mostly the same size — the most popular era for the NCAA Tournament, to boot. With that in mind, going to 76 is a major stress test on the three days after Selection Sunday. From a logistics standpoint, going beyond 76 teams one day in the future might require disassembling the sport’s calendar — and the cadence of the tournament — in order to fit in more teams and games.
“This is the format that will be in place for 2032 and we think for a long time after that,” Gavitt said.
The move may not harm the tournament’s popularity, but it does stand to damage the urgency and relevancy of college basketball’s regular season. Teams on the tournament bubble will statistically and unavoidably have the worst résumés of any at-large candidates in history.
The “First Four” era is extinct and will be replaced by a 24-team, 12-game “opening round” that will feature six games on the Tuesday after Selection Sunday and six more the following Wednesday. The 12 winners from those 12 games will feed into the 52-team bracket to create a 64-team tournament that initiates the first round on Thursday as usual. That means 32% of the tournament field will not be in the main bracket when it’s revealed on Selection Sunday.
Every at-large team that plays in the opening round moving forward would not have been good enough to qualify in the previous model of a 68-team field. The opening round games will be aired as staggered tripleheaders, sources said, with specific broadcast windows still to be publicly disclosed.
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In the months leading up to Tuesday’s vote, the sentiment around college sports was that the committee would submit to the lobbying efforts of conference commissioners and NCAA president Charlie Baker, who were all too content to see the tournament increase to 76.
As for the money, the NCAA’s public reveal on Thursday ran contrary to years of speculation and reporting. The organization claims $131 million in revenues will come over the next six years, through the end of the TV contract with CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery. That equates to $21.83 million per year after accounting for the projected expenses (which will be in the tens of millions of dollars) for the next 12 combined men’s and women’s tournaments.
“Expansion would not have happened without that agreement,” Gavitt said Thursday. “There’s travel expenses, of course. There’s per diem for the teams, and there’s game operations expenses as well.”
This decision won’t be a fiscal bonanza, but it is a necessary boost. Beyond the money factor, sources long maintained that expansion was also done primarily to appease the power conferences looking for more bids. To justify expansion and the expenses that come with it, the NCAA will be relaxing some of its regulations on certain companies being advertising partners in order to meet the supplementary millions in costs that await. There will also be more commercials during NCAA Tournament games, sources said, which was a huge driver in getting to $131 million in projected revenue through 2032.
The value of NCAA Tournament payouts (known in the industry as “units”) will remain the same, Gavitt confirmed. That was one of the key sticking points over the past three-plus years of this process.
In addition to the consistent encouragement from power-conference commissioners and Baker, the group primarily who chose to dramatically change March Madness moving forward is the same committee that seeds and selects the men’s basketball tournament field every March; the women’s selection committee simply followed in-step with the lead from the men’s committee. That group is overseen by Gavitt, who also ultimately had to bless this change and navigate choppy NCAA political waters for four years.
The 12-person men’s basketball committee is comprised of league commissioners and athletic directors from across Division I. That group was the first formal NCAA trigger on the change. Here are the people collectively responsible for increasing the field to 76 teams and altering college basketball moving forward: Sun Belt commissioner Keith Gill (outgoing chair), Samford athletic director Martin Newton (incoming chair), Alabama AD Greg Byrne, Minnesota AD Mark Coyle, Manhattan AD Irma Garcia, WCC commissioner Stu Jackson, Temple AD Arthur Johnson, Abilene Christian AD Zack Lassiter, Georgetown AD Lee Reed, Oklahoma State AD Chad Weiberg, outgoing Syracuse AD John Wildhack and Big Sky commissioner Tom Wistrcill.
