The NCAA Tournament is staying at 68 teams. For now.
After months of debate, the NCAA men’s and women’s Division-I basketball committees announced Monday they will not recommend expansion in advance of the 2026 postseason.
“Expanding the tournament fields is no longer being contemplated for the 2026 men’s and women’s basketball championships,” Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, 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.”
With the start of the 2025-26 season in less than three months, it had become less likely that expansion would be implemented in time for the 2026 tournaments.
While many power-conference commissioners — and high-major coaches — have advocated for growing the current 68-team fields, public opinion has been markedly against expansion. A vote on expansion was initially expected earlier in July, when the men’s and women’s basketball committees met for summer meetings in Savannah, Ga., and Philadelphia, respectively, but no count materialized. That signified that expansion momentum had slowed, while widespread backlash from fans and prominent media members grew louder.
This round of NCAA Tournament expansion talk dates back to January 2023, when the NCAA’s Transformation Committee recommended increased “access” to the postseason in any sports sponsored by over 200 Division-I institutions. But the committee’s recommended postseason threshold — 25 percent of teams — would have bloated March Madness to 91-plus teams, given the 363 schools that currently play men’s DI basketball. There was never much public or internal appetite for such a large field. But in the era of conference realignment, high-major commissioners eager for more of their schools to go dancing latched onto the expansion concept. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has been one of the movement’s driving forces, doubling down on his sentiment at the conference’s football kickoff event in July.
“Nothing in college basketball is static,” Sankey said. “So tournament expansion is certainly worth exploring.”
The pro-expansion argument is that since the NCAA Tournament’s last major expansion — in 1985, when the event grew to its longtime 64-team iteration — Division-I has grown by over 100 new programs. There’s also the belief that adding more March Madness games would yield more revenue for teams who make the field, although that financial reality has yet to bear out behind the scenes. (The NCAA has been working with its TV partners, CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery, to find the revenue — namely through sponsorship — to offset adding more teams and staging more games.)
The NCAA’s current deal with CBS and WBD runs through 2032 and pays $1 billion annually, but the networks do not have to increase that payout for a larger field.
Those who wish to see the tournaments remain at 68 argue that while Division I has expanded dramatically since 1985, any additional bids that result from expansion are unlikely to go to the lower-level schools from one-bid leagues — where most of that expansion has taken place. Instead, opponents contend, expanding the field would result in bids for more mediocre high-major teams, enriching conferences with additional TV distributions while watering down the quality of postseason play.
To that point, the first four teams left out of the men’s NCAA Tournament last season were West Virginia (Big 12), Indiana (Big Ten), Ohio State (Big Ten), and Boise State (Mountain West). Sankey’s SEC, meanwhile, set a March Madness record when 14 of its 16 members made the field.
If tournament expansion does happen in 2027, it will most likely result in an expanded “First Four,” doubling (or tripling) the number of games on the Tuesday and Wednesday after Selection Sunday. In a 72-team field, for instance, there would be four games apiece on Tuesday and Wednesday rather than two — likely at a second site in addition to Dayton, Ohio, which hosts the First Four annually.
Now, discussions about what an expanded format might look like — and whether it’s worth exploring at all — will continue into another season … at least.
(Photo: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
