By EDDIE PELLS AP National Writer
The NCAA announced Thursday that it will expand its two March Madness tournaments by eight teams each next season, a long-expected move that will drop more games into the first week of the highly popular and lucrative showcase without substantially changing its overall form.
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The new, 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games – for a total of 12 involving 24 teams – into the front half of the first week of the men’s and the women’s tournaments. It will turn what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair that will now be called the “March Madness Opening Round.”
The 12 winners will move into the main 64-team bracket that will begin, as usual, on Thursday for the men and Friday for the women.
It is the first expansion of the tournaments in 15 years, when they were bumped from 64 to 68 teams each. The expansion from 68 teams to 76 marks the men’s tournament’s largest increase since it moved from 53 to 64 teams in 1985. It went from 64 to 65 in 2001 and then added three more teams in 2011 to form the First Four.
The NCAA said it will distribute more than $131 million in new revenue to schools that make the tournament. That money will come via expanded TV advertising opportunities for alcohol, the likes of which were previously restricted. It said the value of the rights agreement will increase $50 million each year on average over the course of the six years.
Most of the eight new slots are expected to go to teams from the power conferences that were already commanding the lion’s share of entries in the bracket. Two years ago, the SEC placed a record 14 teams in the men’s bracket. Last season, the Big Ten had nine.
Keith Gill, the chairman of the Division I men’s basketball committee, called the expansion “a nice way to create some access but make sure we have the bracket we all love when we start Thursday at noon.”
The move is a product of the times, which includes massive expansion – the Atlantic Coast Conference, for instance, has grown from nine to 17 teams since 1996 – and the reality that mid-major schools with top-notch players will often see them plucked away by programs with bigger budgets and the ability to pay them through revenue sharing.
Cinderella? There will still be room for those stirring runs in the tournaments, though not a single mid-major advanced past the first weekend of either tournament the last two seasons.
This is hardly a concern of the decision-makers anymore, who will point to TV ratings that traditionally spell out fans’ preference for the likes of Duke and North Carolina over St. Peter’s and San Diego State, especially once the Sweet 16 starts.
What matters more to the biggest schools is that their teams have a chance to compete in what remains the best postseason in college sports and that they aren’t iced out by lower conference champions who earn automatic bids.
“You’ve got some really, really good teams who are going to end up in that 9, 10, 11 (seed) category that I think should be moved into the” 64-team bracket, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last year in discussing how he favored expansion.
Also, the money. The new beer and wine money will add to what the NCAA can distribute in “units” that are earned for placing teams in the bracket and then for every round those teams advance.
Last year, that amounted to about $350,000 per unit for the men’s tournament. The Big Ten made nearly $70 million from both tournaments, won by conference members Michigan (men) and UCLA (women).
Leaders in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC have all acknowledged that smaller programs help make March Madness what it is, all the while steadily expanding their own power in NCAA decision-making. That brings with it the tacit threat of fracturing the single thing the NCAA does best – the basketball tournament.
This move might forestall that. What it isn’t expected to do is drastically change the TV deal beyond the advertising.
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The current deal for the men’s tournament is worth $8.8 billion and runs through 2032. Adding a few extra games between mid-level Power Four teams on Tuesday and Wednesday won’t change that much.
One of reason this took as long as it did was the NCAA negotiations with CBS and TNT, which themselves have been in negotiations over their own ownership.
The more drastic option of expanding the tournament to 96 teams or beyond would involve adding an extra week to a tournament that has thrived in part because of the symmetry of a six-round bracket that gets whittled down over three weeks.
That basic shell began in 1985, with only slight tweaks along the way.
Movement toward expanding the tournament has been ongoing for more than three years, as the College Football Playoff expanded and college athletics contended with conference realignment and the growth of the four biggest conferences. In January 2023, the NCAA Division I board of directors approved a transformation committee’s recommendation to expand all sports’ championship events to include 25% of teams. The men’s basketball committee began discussing expanding the field that summer.
The NCAA presented expansion plans to Division I conference commissioners in the summer of 2024, including options to increase the fields to 72 or 76 teams. NCAA president Charlie Baker publicly endorsed the move in the spring of 2025 and reiterated his support on multiple occasions – pointing to access as the biggest reason for expansion.
“From my point of view, the more teams we can get into the tournament and make it work logistically and mathematically, the better,” Baker said in February. “It gives more kids the opportunity to experience that.”
Although potential expansion for the 2026 NCAA Tournament was tabled last summer, momentum among decision-makers and conference commissioners was clearly headed in the direction of expansion.
The various committees that needed to approve the decisions – the Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Committees, the Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Oversight Committees, the Division I Finance Committee, the Division I board of directors and the NCAA board of governors – officially voted to expand on Thursday.
HOW IT WORKS
The lowest-seeded 12 automatic qualifiers as seeded by the selection committees will play in half of the opening round games and the other six games will match the 12 lowest-seeded at-large teams.
Teams will continue to be paired to face the opponent nearest to them on the committees’ overall seed lists. For example, seed 75 might play seed 76 in one opening round game, while the lowest-seeded at-large team might face the second-to-lowest-seeded at-large team.
Exceptions could be made, for example, to avoid a regular-season rematch or for geographic purposes.
The opening round men’s games will be the Tuesday and Wednesday after Selection Sunday in a location to be announced later (reportedly west of the Eastern time zone to help with logistics) and in Dayton, Ohio, which has been the traditional home of the First Four. There will be three games each day at each site.
Among at-large teams, two games will match No. 11 seeds and four will match No. 12s. Among the automatic qualifiers, two games will match No. 15s and four will match No. 16s.
The details are the same for the women’s tournament except that opening round games will be held the Wednesday and Thursday after Selection Sunday on the campuses of 12 of the top 16 seeds selected to host the first and second rounds.
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