NCAA men's and women's selection committees agree to expand NCAA tournament to 76 teams

NCAA men's and women's selection committees agree to expand NCAA tournament to 76 teams

The NCAA believes bigger is better when it comes to March Madness. The organization will expand both the men’s and women’s college basketball tournament to include 76 teams, according to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger.

Both the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball selection committees have approved the move, per Dellenger. The motion still needs to be approved by the basketball oversight committees and the Di Board of Directors and Board of Governors, but that’s expected.

The report ends months of rumors suggesting tournament expansion was on the horizon. In early April, a source told Dellenger tournament expansion “will happen.” On Thursday, that proved to be true.

While those rumors were rampant for months, the NCAA released a statement in late April throwing cold water on reports suggesting expansion was finalized. In that statement, the NCAA said any expansion would need to be approved by multiple committees, and that no decisions had been “made at this time.”

“Expanding the basketball tournaments would require approval from multiple NCAA committees, including the men's and women's basketball committees, and no final recommendations or decisions have been made at this time.”

Following Thursday’s report, it appears the NCAA was able to get those committees on board with the idea.

Early proposals of expanding the NCAA tournament involved adding eight more games to the “First Four” round, per Dellenger. Under this proposal, the “First Four” round would include 24 teams playing 12 games over two days. It’s unclear if this framework is part of the expansion proposal approved by the NCAA on Thursday.

The idea of expansion received support from the Big 12, ACC and NCAA president Charlie Baker, who said too many good teams were being excluded from the tournament under the previous format.

“There are every year some really good teams that don’t get to the tournament for a bunch of reasons,” Baker said last fall. “One of the reasons is we have 32 automatic qualifiers [for conference champions]. I love that and think it’s great and never want that to change, but that means there’s only 36 slots left for everybody else.”

This story will be updated.