The unpopular idea of expanding the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is no longer a distant possibility.
College sports administrators appear determined to ram a bigger tournament down fans’ throats as soon as the 2026 season.
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NCAA president Charlie Baker said Thursday that talks are underway with March Madness media rights holders CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery about expanding the NCAA tournament from 68 teams to 72 or 76. Expansion could come in 2026, Baker confirmed, if a deal is struck between now and early summer.
“That would be the goal — to try and do this for next year,” Baker told reporters on Thursday at the Big 12 spring meetings.
“We’ve had good conversations with CBS and WBD. Our goal here is to try to either get to yes or no sometime in the next few months, because there’s a lot of logistical work that would be associated with doing this, if we were to go down this road.”
Whether the NCAA tournament actually expands is likely to be determined by the same thing as every other major decision in college athletics: money.
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How much more cash could the NCAA extract from its TV partners if it was able to offer 2-4 more NCAA tournament games to air? Would that influx of TV revenue outweigh the travel and staging expenses of sending more teams to sites around the country?
NCAA president Charlie Baker says talks are underway with NCAA tournament TV rights holders about expanding March Madness. (AP Photo/George Walker IV,File)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
In a conference call with reporters last March, executives from CBS and WBD struck a cautious tone about the idea of expansion.
“No one wants to do anything that’s going to negatively impact the tournament,” said David Berson, president and CEO of CBS Sports.
Added Luis Silberwasser, CEO of TNT Sports, “If it’s something that makes sense for the fans and the tournament, we’ll be supportive.”
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The NCAA tournament last expanded from 65 to 68 teams in 2011 after CBS and WBD agreed to pay $10.8 billion to carry the men’s tournament for the next 14 years. CBS and WBD later signed an eight-year, $8.8 billion extension to continue to broadcast the tournament through 2032.
The drumbeat for further NCAA tournament expansion has grown louder over the past few years. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark have come out in favor of including more teams. Prominent coaches have sided with them, no doubt influenced by the money and job security that comes with lowering the bar to make the NCAA tournament.
A few years ago, former Miami coach Jim Larrañaga suggested a 96-team NCAA tournament with the 32 conference tournament winners earning a first-round bye. Around that same time, Missouri’s Dennis Gates went even farther, telling reporters that he’d like to see the size of the NCAA tournament field “doubled.”
When asked Thursday what the benefit was to expanding the NCAA tournament to 72 or 76, Baker argued that there are deserving teams left out every year. He specifically cited an Indiana State team that won 28 games during the 2023-24 season but was among the last teams to miss the field after losing in its conference tournament title game.
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“So, the point behind going from 68 to 72 or 76,” Baker said, “is to basically give some of those schools that probably were among the … best teams in the country a way into the tournament.”
The problem with Baker’s argument is that a 68-team NCAA tournament already includes every realistic national title contender. Nearly 98% of KenPom top-30 teams have made the NCAA tournament since 2015. Teams ranked 31-40 in KenPom have earned NCAA tournament bids 75% of the time.
No team seeded lower than a No. 8 has ever won the national title. Do we really need to expand the NCAA tournament to ensure that the 47th-best team in the country gets in?
It’s also disingenuous of Baker to cite Indiana State as the type of team that would benefit most from NCAA tournament expansion. Few would complain about an extra mid-major or two snagging a bid. The problem is that NCAA tournament expansion would mostly reward middling power-conference teams who finished .500 or below in their league.
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Do you know who would have made the 2025 NCAA tournament if it expanded to 76 teams? An Indiana team that fired its coach midway through the season. An Ohio State team that went 17-15 overall. A Nebraska team that didn’t even qualify for the Big Ten tournament.
An expanded NCAA tournament detracts from the regular season and rewards big-conference mediocrity.
Bigger isn’t always better.
