The NCAA Tournament won’t be expanding beyond its already established format, at least for the upcoming 2025-26 season.
NCAA SVP Dan Gavitt released a statement on Monday announcing that March Madness will remain at 68 teams in 2026, although he also emphasized that conversations regarding the tournament’s expansion will continue next offseason. Gavitt suggested that tournament committees would continue to recommend a structure that includes up to 76 teams in 2027.
“Expanding the tournament fields is no longer being contemplated for the 2026 men’s and women’s basketball championships,” Gavitt said. “However, the committees will continue conversations on whether to recommend expanding to 72 or 76 teams in advance of the 2027 championships.”
NCAA president and former Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker is far from neutral on the issue, positioning himself as perhaps the leading pro-expansion voice alongside SEC commissioner Greg Sankey. Baker explained last month that instituting an expanded tournament would be a logistical challenge ahead of the 2025-26 season, but his stance on the issue indicates that momentum is gaining toward a tournament expansion for 2027.
Support From The Top
“The tournament has to start after the conference championships are over,” Baker said while speaking at the National Press Club in July. “Right now, Selection Sunday happens like two hours after the last tournament game ends and has to finish by the Tuesday before the Masters. There’s not a lot of room there. Any expansion, we’re going to have to figure out how to put it in and then logistically how to make it work.”
The fear among many around college hoops is that an expanded tournament would result in a diminished opportunity for automatic qualifiers from outside the power conferences. Unlike his counterpart Sankey, Baker at least believes that expansion shouldn’t come at the expense of the teams cutting their teeth at the mid-major level.
“There are, every year, some really good teams that don’t get into the tournament for a bunch of reasons. One of the reasons they don’t get in is because we have 32 automatic qualifiers. There are 32 conferences in D-I, and their conference champion gets into the tournament. Now, I love that. I think it’s great and I never want that to change. But that means there’s only 36 slots left for everybody else and in many cases there are teams that are among the 50 or 60 best teams in the country.”
Next year’s Final Four is set to take place at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The 2027 Final Four will be held in Detroit, which would be the first Final Four in a potential 72-to-76 team format.
