Is NCAA Tournament Expansion More Or Less Pressure On Marquette Basketball?

LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 21: A basketball with the March Madness logo sits on the court prior to the Oklahoma State Cowboys versus the Princeton Tigers NCAA Women's Championship first round game on March 21, 2026, at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles, California.

On Tuesday, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported that the NCAA was on the verge of expanding the men’s and women’s basketball national championship tournaments from their current size of 68 teams to 76 teams. In the wake of that story, CBS Sports, specifically Matt Norlander and Gary Parrish, did the actual work involved in breaking that story and laid out exactly what that eight team expansion would look like:

The move will create eight additional at-large bids, all of them to worse teams (per the cut line’s standard) than those that have qualified for every previous NCAA Tournament. Per sources, the NCAA will be adopting an expanded model for its opening-round games that matches what it had been doing with the First Four. The move to 76 will mean 52 teams auto-slot into the main bracket (first round starting on Thursday and Friday), with the 24 leftover teams filling up 12 game slots for that Tuesday and Wednesday immediately after Selection Sunday.

Instead of four games with eight teams in Dayton for the men’s tournament, there will be 12 games with 24 teams at two sites. That will initiate the start of March Madness. Dayton will stay on as one of the sites, but the second hasn’t been determined yet for the men’s tournament. The sites for the women’s opening round also remain unclear. One source told CBS Sports that it will for sure be in either the Central, Mountain or Pacific time zones and that a decision won’t happen until either this summer or in the early fall.

The expanded opening round will be split between at-large teams and teams that have won automatic bids by winning their conference tournaments. All No. 16 seeds and half the No. 15 seeds will slot into those play-in games on Tuesday and Wednesday of the opening round. The other half of the games will be a mix, depending on team quality, comprised of No. 11 seeds, all No. 12 seeds and potentially a game that will feed into the No. 13 line for the first round that Thursday or Friday.

This would also mean a new TV lineup. While exact tip times and format for the opening round on Tuesday and Wednesday have not yet been determined, the broad template will be to have the first games tip in the late afternoon on the East Coast, sources said, and to stagger the tip times in a tripleheader format on multiple networks. The first window would be somewhere in the 4 p.m. ET slot, then the second closer to 7 p.m. ET, the third pair of tip times slated between 9 and 10 p.m. ET.

If the text based explanation of the seeding doesn’t quite come through for you, head over here, as David Cobb made sure that CBS Sports had a visual representation of the four regions for the 2026 tournament if the 76 team rules had been in effect last month. It’s really quite helpful.

With that said, I do want to point out something about how this is going to work if you compare the actual 2026 regions to the 76 team projection, specifically on the back end of the bracket. On the left is what 2026 actually looked like, on the right is what 2026 would have looked like with 76 team bracketing procedures. I went with only the 12 seeds and lower just because the First Four was in the 11 seed line and I didn’t want to make this more confusing.

Here’s where I remind you that High Point beat Wisconsin in a 5/12 game, and I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to think that HPU could have pulled a 4/13 upset. Siena, Cal Baptist, Kennesaw State, and Wright State were all within 10 points of their opponent when the horn sounded. In history, both 16 over 1 victories came after the expansion to 68 teams in 2011. Seven of the eleven 15 over 2 victories have happened since the expansion.

Pushing teams down a seed line is going to result in more outlandish upsets on a long enough timeline. There had never been a 16 over 1 win in the men’s tournament, now there’s been two in the last seven tournaments. 15 over 2 hadn’t happened since 2001 before Lehigh and Norfolk State both did it in 2012, then it happened in three straight tournaments, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Sure, maybe the advent of better analytics is getting us a better seeded bracket, and maybe that stems the tide of these upsets…. or maybe they will start being more frequent because the 13 seeds are supposed to be on the 12 line and so on. Hey, cool, neat, way to go conference commissioners who were whining about their .500 teams not getting into the field, good job, you got them in…. at the expense of your actual national championship contenders suffering horrific first round losses more often. We can’t even say it’s unintended consequences because we already have 15 years of proof that it’s going to happen!

ANYWAY

None of that is what I wanted to actually talk about relative to this news. The NCAA will tell you that this isn’t finalized, it’s not done. However, if they didn’t want to do it, it wouldn’t have gotten to this point in the first place. On top of that, if you’ve been paying attention to how the NCAA operates on these things, the way it goes is “committee that actually pays attention to a sport says a thing should happen, the tippy top committee rubber stamps their recommendation.” We’re at the rubber stamping stage and just waiting for the meetings where the guy with the stamp is in attendance.

That means we can safely and logically presume that the 2027 NCAA tournaments, both men’s and women’s, will have 76 teams participating. Both events will have eight at-large teams in the field that would not have made it in 2026. Next March will showcase the lowest bar for entry in NCAA tournament history.

As it happens, Marquette has two basketball teams that didn’t clear the 2026 bar, neither of which were remotely close.

Shaka Smart was in charge of a men’s basketball season that finished with a record of 12-20, which is the fewest wins for the program since 1991 and came just one short of tying 1963-64 for the most losses in program history. I’ve already written the column pointing out that Smart should be coaching for his job next season. Since that was published on March 12th, it would certainly seem that Smart has made roster decisions and additions that will point his program back towards the NCAA tournament.

I wrote that under the presumption that the Golden Eagles would be aiming at a 68 team field. If Marquette makes the adjustments that they appeared to need and misses a 76 team tournament, a field that has eight extra rope ladder rungs dangling off the bottom? You can do the math here, and on top of that, ask yourself how you’ll feel about Smart following up 12-20 with playing at 4pm Central on Tuesday in an opening round 12 seed game in, I dunno, let’s say The Pit in New Mexico.

Cara Consuegra has posted back to back winning seasons in her first two years on the Marquette sidelines. Her first season was a perhaps slightly surprising 21 win campaign, but because MU suffered some nasty losses as they found their legs under Consuegra’s direction, they were never close to an NCAA tournament bid. This past year, her squad went just 18-12 and whatever narrow tournament odds they had went out the door with a wretched home loss to Georgetown on January 17th. I’ve already outlined where things may have gone wrong for Consuegra and her team in Year Two, and Year Three is clearly going to be a dramatic shift for the program as Consuegra returns just four players, only two of which had a rotation job last season.

There was obviously some questions to be asked about whether or not her Golden Eagles could compete for her first NCAA tournament bid in Milwaukee even if the roster hadn’t emptied out to the degree that it did. Now Consuegra has to reset things, but she gets to do it in a world where there are going to be eight extra NCAA tournament spots available for her team to grab onto as the season slides into March. Big of a good news/bad news situation, I think.

It’s an interesting spot to be in for both programs, as well as for the administration that has to make the judgment calls as to how both outfits are operating. Fingers crossed that the Golden Eagles don’t have to worry about any of these problems 11 months from now and we’re just watching successful basketball cleanly in the field anyway…….

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