Like it or not, expansion is coming to the NCAA Tournament.
The NCAA officially announced Thursday it will expand the men’s and women’s Division I basketball tournaments from 68 to 76 teams in 2027.
The possibility had been talked about seriously for months, and the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball committees, the basketball oversight committees, the Division I board of directors and the NCAA board of governors voted Thursday to make it official.
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“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,” said ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips, chair of the board of governors.
Here are the details of the new-look tournaments.
What’s the new format?
Both the men’s and women’s tournament fields will consist of 76 teams: 31 automatic qualifiers as conference representatives and 45 at-large teams.
Each tournament will have a 24-team opening round. Those 12 games will consist of the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers playing one another and the 12 lowest at-large teams playing one another.
On the men’s side, the opening-round games will be played on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the first week of the tournament. Three games each day will be played in Dayton, Ohio, and three more each day in another city to be named.
On the women’s side, the opening-round games will be played that Wednesday and Thursday at 12 of the schools that also will host first- and second-round games.
The 12 winners will advance to the first round of the tournament, which will be played Thursday and Friday on the men’s side and Friday and Saturday on the women’s side.
In a mock-up of the new bracket, the NCAA has the opening-round games above the 64-team bracket. Four of the winners in the opening round are No. 16 seeds, two are No. 15 seeds and the other six are No. 11 or No. 12 seeds.
How is this different from the previous tournaments?
In the 68-team format, eight teams played in the First Four games. The four lowest at-large teams played in two games, and the teams seeded 65th to 68th — typically the lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers from smaller conferences — played in the other two.
The winners of the 65-68 games received No. 16 seeds, while the winners of the at-large teams were seeded between 10th and 12th.
What’s the history of NCAA Tournament expansion?
This will be the biggest expansion since the men’s field moved from 53 to 64 teams in 1985 and the women’s field expanded to 64 in 1994.
In 2001, the men added a 65th team with the addition of an automatic bid for the Mountain West Conference. The men’s tournament went to 68 teams with the inception of the First Four in 2011. The women expanded to 68 in 2022.
Which teams would have gotten into the 2026 tournaments with this new format?
On Selection Sunday, the NCAA declared Oklahoma (19-15 before the College Basketball Crown), Auburn (17-16 before the NIT), San Diego State (22-11) and Indiana (18-14) the first four out of the men’s tournament. Four more teams behind them also would have made it.
CBS Sports reported New Mexico, Seton Hall, Virginia Tech and Stanford were next in its bracketology on Selection Sunday. Sports Illustrated had Cincinnati instead of Stanford among its final eight out.
Why is expansion happening?
The NCAA is promoting the fact more teams will receive the exposure and monetary benefits of playing in the NCAA Tournament. In a release, it said it will award more than $131 million in new revenue distributions to member schools participating in the basketball tournaments over the remaining six years of the NCAA’s broadcast agreements.
And while teams that make the opening round will have to win a game to get into the first round, the NCAA says that will help the winners because they will receive one additional basketball fund unit, financial support that it said is big in the revenue-sharing era.
It’s about money for multiple parties, of course.
The NCAA is opening previously restricted product categories — including beer, wine, spirits and hard seltzer — to corporate sponsorships. It projects the value of its current broadcast rights agreements to increase $50 million annually over the final six years The NCAA said it plans to invest its surplus back into the tournament and championships for other athletes.
The NCAA said all of the men’s tournament games will air across CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV, and every game in the women’s tournament will air on ESPN networks.
What is the reaction to the expansion?
It seems there isn’t a consensus among coaches, even if many will have a better chance to add tournament appearances to their resumes.
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The National Association of Basketball Coaches declined to offer a formal stance on the expansion. In an open letter to members, executive director Craig Robinson said D-I coaches have been consistent in wanting equitable and transparent selection criteria and inclusive automatic qualifiers for all D-I conferences. But the perspectives on expansion “have remained quite diverse,” he wrote.
“Some coaches have expressed support for a modestly expanded field, while others have equally supported preserving the event’s popular current structure,” Robinson wrote. “The NABC seeks to operate as a unified national voice for coaches — a voice on your behalf. In the absence of unanimous sentiment among the coaching community either favoring or opposing expansion, the NABC has ultimately opted not to issue a formal position on the topic.”
NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said in a statement that he considers the expansion “a wise and proactive measure to meet the current and future needs of NCAA schools and conferences without reducing the value and importance of the regular season and conference tournaments.”