The seemingly inevitable change that absolutely nobody wants appears to be closer to happening.
According to a report from On3’s Ross Dellenger, executives are “inching closer” to an agreement to expand the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to 76 teams beginning with the 2026-27 season. The expansion would feature a 12-game “opening round” played at two different sites.
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The news, while not unexpected, remains inexplicable and indefensible.
Outside of a handful of head coaches, athletic directors and television executives who stand to personally (but not sizably) benefit from this, nobody associated with college basketball wants this to happen.
Fans of the sport absolutely despise the idea. Media members who cover the sport mostly feel the same. The NCAA Tournament is already the most popular postseason in American sports. There’s no obvious competitive reason for the change. And in an era where massive change is driven by money and virtually nothing else, the financial implications of expansion would seem to be minimal when put up against the pushback from just about everyone who cares about March Madness.
There is simply no logical defense when it comes to messing with one of the few things in sports that just about everyone agrees shouldn’t be messed with it.
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Side note: The irony of all ironies here is that if you polled every college basketball fan in the world and asked them what they would do to change the NCAA Tournament before the better, the most common response you would undoubtedly get would be to DECREASE the field back to 64 teams like it was from 1985-2001.
Despite its best efforts over decades littered with ineptitude and head-scratching decisions, the NCAA has consistently done one thing well: Organize a tournament that captivates the American public like few other things can for three weeks ever March/early April. The event brings in about a billion dollars a year for the NCAA, a total which accounts for right around 90 percent of the entity’s annual revenue.
You would think those two sentences would be more than enough reason to leave well enough alone, and yet here we are.
The most logical explanation for why, despite everything, expansion seems inevitable revolves around greed. No amount of money is ever enough, which is why college basketball fans are going to be force fed multiple tournament games featuring power conference teams with losing conference records playing ugly basketball in front of small crowds starting in March of 2026.
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The problem with this argument is that the financial benefits of tournament expansion really aren’t that great.
The current television rights agreement between CBS Sports/Turner and the NCAA runs through the 2032 tournament, and the addition of any early round games would have little to no bearing on that deal.
“Right now there’s no guarantee there’s any additional revenue,” one commissioner told CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander. “One of the main sticking points is that without more revenue, how do you pay for more games? How do you pay for more travel? How do you pay for more expenses of an expanded tournament? And on the flip side of it, if you expand, you’re devaluing basketball units at that point. Without more revenue it creates more problems.”
Adding to the point: The current television ratings for the four “First Four” games that are played in Dayton each year on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the “real” tournament starts are … not great. The numbers belabor the point that the 2001 move from 64 to 65 teams — a move made because power conference officials didn’t want to lose an at-large bid after a handful of teams left the WAC to form the Mountain West Conference — was the original minor sin that is now on the verge of blossoming into a deadly sin.
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March Madness fanatics are willing to ignore the TruTV contests, and will even fill out brackets on Sunday-Wednesday of tournament week without knowing (or caring) who is going to win the four games in Dayton, but the early round becomes almost impossible to ignore if the number of teams participating jumps from four to 12.
The biggest argument in favor of tournament expansion surrounds the idea of access.
There are 364 teams in the sport.
Great power conference teams are left out every year.
Look at UCLA in 2021 and VCU in 20111.
This will get more mid-majors into the field.
Why are people so mad about more basketball?
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Let’s be clear: This has never been about access.
No major American sport has greater access to its ultimate postseason than college basketball does. The reason? Conference tournaments.
Almost every team in Division-I college basketball automatically qualifies for its conference tournament, which means almost every team in Division-I college basketball has the opportunity at the end of its season to play until it loses.
Had an injured star player in the first half of the season that tanked your tournament resume? You can win your conference tournament and make the Big Dance. Had some chemistry issues early on that got fixed in the second half of the season? You can win your conference tournament and make the Big Dance. Played horrible basketball for absolutely no logical reason for the first three months of the season but are now playing splendidly? You can win your conference tournament and make the Big Dance.
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The power conference head coaches and administrators who seem to be the only ones in favor this will tell you that this is a numbers game. More and more teams keep making the jump to D-I, and because of that, bids are being taken away from some of the best power conference teams in the sport. Oh, and those mid-major Cinderellas you guys love so much? They’re also getting less of a chance to shine.
It’s a disingenuous argument on both fronts.
Sure, the Division-I level of college basketball has been adding teams on a consistent basis for decades now (364 teams are set to participate in 2025-26), but over that time, the stranglehold that power conference teams have had on bids to the Big Dance has only grown stronger.
Over the last 10 years, a total of 362 NCAA Tournament at-large bids have been handed out. Out of those 362, 304 of them went to schools in a power conference. That’s 83 percent. If you can’t get your power conference program into the field of 68 over the course of 3-5 years, you probably deserve to have your job performance questioned.
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Three of the first four teams left out of last year’s NCAA Tournament were power conference squads Indiana, West Virginia and Ohio State. The fourth was the Mountain West’s Boise State, a team from the best conference outside of the sport’s Power 5.
Make no mistake about it, these new early round games will be loaded with power conference teams that have records right around .500 and have spent the previous four months proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that they are too average to compete for the sport’s biggest prize. We didn’t need to see Indiana versus Cincinnati in March last year. We saw more than enough from both teams between November and February to know exactly who they were.
No one is claiming that this is a change that’s going to make college basketball diehards or casual March Madness bracket fillers abandon the event entirely. It’s just going to make every aspect of the event a little bit worse. The build-up to March will be a little bit more dull. The two weeks of conference tournament action will be a little less exciting. Filling out a bracket will be a decent bit more tedious. The added games themselves will be overwhelmingly forgettable. And all this will happen for no justifiable reason.
For years, college basketball fans have fretted over the powers that be within the NCAA eventually screwing up the one and only thing they consistently get right. We appear to be on the precipice of their latest attempt to do just that.
