The 3 ways NCAA Tournament expansion will harm college basketball
What many college basketball adherents have long dreaded is now reality. The NCAA announced Thursday that it is expanding the mens’ and women’s basketball tourneys from their current 68 to 76 teams starting in 2027.
In a news release, the NCAA justified the move by saying that the expansion is “creating additional championship participation opportunities for student-athletes and more exciting matchups for fans. The NCAA also will provide additional financial support to participating schools, increasing the dollars available to both basketball programs and, through revenue-sharing, basketball student-athletes.”
According to the NCAA, participating schools will share “more than $131 million in new revenue distributions ... over the remaining six years of the NCAA’s broadcast agreements.” Much of that windfall is anticipated to come from the NCAA Tournament “opening up” to beer, wine and other alcohol sponsorships that have been previously restricted.
For those of us assigning blame for this move, the NCAA tourney expansion appears to be the work of the power conference commissioners. After creating gargantuan leagues for football, the leaders of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC apparently realized their super-sized conferences might sabotage their basketball fortunes.
Theoretically, hoops teams in massive 18- (the ACC and Big Ten) and 16-team (the Big 12 and SEC) leagues could beat up on each other. That could yield a lot of mediocre records, potentially sidelining schools previously used to sending teams to March Madness.
The idea that adding eight teams to the NCAA Tournament each year is going to ruin March Madness is overwrought.
But in at least three significant ways, NCAA tourney expansion is going to weaken college basketball as an overall enterprise.
1.) It will further diminish the regular season. The biggest problem in college basketball since the NCAA Tournament first expanded to 64 teams in 1985 has been the lack of consequential games in the regular season.
Simply put, good teams play almost no regular season games with anything at stake because they are assured, relatively early in their years, of playing in March Madness.
Lowering the standard to make the NCAA Tournament extends that dynamic to more teams.
2. It rewards mediocrity. The first four teams that did not make 2026’s 68-team men’s NCAA Tournament were: Oklahoma (19-15), Auburn (17-16), San Diego State (22-11) and Indiana (18-14).
With a 76-team bracket, not only are those four mediocrities in March Madness, so are four teams ranked ever lower.
The “soft bubble” this past season was not an exception.
In the 2024-25 season, the first four teams omitted from the NCAA tourney were West Virginia (19-13), Indiana (19-13), Ohio State (17-15) and Boise State (24-10).
Among the last four teams into the field were North Carolina (which was 1-12 vs. Quad 1 opponents) and Xavier (1-9 in Quad 1 games).
For 2023-2024, the first four teams out of the NCAA Tournament were Oklahoma (20-12), Seton Hall (20-12), Indiana State (28-6) and Pittsburgh (22-11).
In 2022-2023, the first four teams omitted from the NCAA tourney were Oklahoma State (18-15), Rutgers (19-14), North Carolina (20-13) and Clemson (23-10).
Other than Indiana State in 2024, not one of the combined 16 teams that were among the “first four out” for the previous four NCAA tourneys had a compelling argument for inclusion.
The expansion to 76 teams moves the NCAA Tournament even further toward becoming a power-conference participation trophy and further from being a reward for high-level success.
3. It mucks up the bracket. The plan for the 76-team bracket is to have 24 teams — the 12 lowest-rated conference champions and the 12-lowest-ranked at-large teams — face off in what will be called the “opening round.”
The winning team in those 12 games will earn spots with the 52 other teams in the bracket of 64.
That sounds like it is going to be complicated and hard to follow.
On the men’s side, the opening round will feature two days of triple-headers played at two sites, Dayton, Ohio, and a site still to be determined Those games will be played on the immediate Tuesday and Wednesday that follow Selection Sunday.
In the women’s tournament, the 12 opening-round games will take place on college campuses and apparently will be played on the Wednesday and Thursday of the initial week of March Madness.
Once the NCAA Tournament landed on 64 teams in 1985, a big part of its explosion in popularity owed to the simplicity and coherence of the bracket.
If you are a person who says you will not acknowledge the “play-in” games and will treat the bracket of 64 as the “true NCAA Tournament,” it is going to be hard for you to fill out brackets for tourney pools in a timely manner with the 76-team bracket operating within the existing March Madness time parameters.
Even for those of us unenthused about NCAA Tournament expansion, there’s something delectable about a college sports hierarchy that cannot solve any of its major problems instead “fixing” the one major thing they had that worked great.
