The men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournament fields will not be expanding beyond 68 teams this season, but future growth is a possibility, NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt announced Monday.
“Expanding the tournament fields is no longer being contemplated for the 2026 men’s and women’s basketball championships,” Gavitt said in a statement.
“However, the committees will continue conversations on whether to recommend expanding to 72 or 76 teams in advance of the 2027 championships.”
Fans, Prominent Media Members Opposed NCAA Tournament Expansion
The NCAA had been mulling over the decision to expand March Madness to 72 or 76 teams for the 2025-26 season. Widespread backlash from fans and prominent media members led to this news, per The Athletic’s Brendan Marks.
According to ESPN’s report, NCAA president Charlie Baker said last month that the biggest obstacle for expedited tournament expansion ahead of the upcoming academic school year is logistics.
“The tournament has to start after the conference championships are over,” he said. “And right now Selection Sunday happens like two hours after the last tournament game ends and has to finish by the Tuesday before the Masters. There’s not a lot of room there. Any expansion, we’re going to have to figure out how to put it in and then logistically how to make it work.”
Baker has said adding teams could make the tournament more interesting, and he said the NCAA already has had “good conversations” with TV partners CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).
The NCAA’s current deal with CBS and WBD runs through 2032 and pays $1 billion annually, but the networks will not have to increase that payout for a larger field.
Expansion Would Give More Opportunities To Worthy Teams
Baker indicated in May that the current March Madness format has flaws, adding that expansion would lead the NCAA in the right direction by giving more opportunities to deserving teams.
“If you have a tournament that’s got 64 or 68 teams in it, you’re going to have a bunch of teams that are probably among what most people would consider to be the best 68 or 70 teams in the country that aren’t going to make the tournament, period,” Baker said then.
“The point behind going from 68 to 72 or 76 is to basically give some of those schools that were probably among the 72, 76, 68, 64 best teams in the country a way into the tournament.”
The NCAA Tournament expanded from 64 to 68 teams in 2011. The change introduced the First Four round, a set of pre-tournament games in which the four lowest-seeded at-large teams and four lowest-seeded conference champions compete for spots in the standard 64-team bracket.
