NCAA Tournament expansion to 76 teams in final steps of approval Thursday

NCAA Tournament expansion to 76 teams in final steps of approval Thursday

After years of debate, the NCAA Tournament is on the cusp of expanding.

The NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball committees approved growing the field from its current 68-team format to 76 ahead of the 2026-27 season, a person involved in the discussions said Thursday. The DI cabinet and board of governors are expected to vote later Thursday.

The move to expand would be the most significant alteration to the men’s NCAA 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, known as the “First Four.”

However, those additions pale in comparison to the expansion next spring. Instead of four games over two days, the expectation is that 12 games will now be played in a supersized opening round — likely featuring the final 12 at-large selections and the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers from low- and mid-major conferences. In the men’s tournament, those games are expected to be split between Dayton, Ohio (site of the First Four since 2011) and another to-be-determined site outside of the Eastern time zone, to ease logistics and travel. The women’s First Four has traditionally been held at the home courts of four 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.

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.

The NCAA said last August that its committees would continue conversations about expansion for 2027, leading to Thursday’s votes.

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 78-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.

The biggest holdup to expansion has been figuring out the finances. The NCAA still has six years remaining on its men’s tournament television contracts with CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery — which pay the governing body over $900 million annually — 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 (airfare, lodging, meals, etc.) and hosting more games (arena usage fees, referee payments, etc.).

Expansion would not have been approved if those costs had not been covered, and/or if there had been any hit to the revenue distributed to the 32 DI conferences.

Come 2032, though, when those television contracts are set to expire, a larger television inventory could mean a larger annual payout to the NCAA.

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. Four fewer automatic qualifiers will make the 64-team field because of the expanded first round, while 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.

This story will be updated.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Men's College Basketball, Sports Business, Women's College Basketball

2026 The Athletic Media Company