NCAA March Madness is staying put, at least for now, at 68 teams.
NCAA SVP/basketball Dan Gavitt said Monday that the annual Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments will remain at 68 teams for the upcoming season, but conversations on potential expansion to 72 or 76 teams for 2027 and beyond will continue.
According to reporting earlier this summer by ESPN’s Pete Thamel, the NCAA had been in discussions for months with its television partners — CBS and TNT Sports for the men and ESPN for the women — about potential expansion.
The current 68-team format has been in place since the 2011 tournament for the men and since 2021 for the women. In both cases, expansion was incremental — an increase over 65 teams for the men and 64 for the women, necessitating three new play-in games for the former and four for the latter.
An expansion to 72 or 76 teams would expand that play-in round to eight or 12 games, as Joe Lunardi of ESPN outlined earlier this year, making for a potentially unwieldy schedule if the play-in round was to remain a two-day event.
It is also worth noting that expansion would create far less valuable inventory for ESPN than for CBS/TNT Sports. While the First Four has been a healthy draw in the men’s tournament, the women’s edition averaged just 177,000 viewers on ESPN2 and ESPNU this past March.
The 2011 expansion to 68 teams came after initial discussions of expanding to 96 instead. There is no indication that 96 is on the table in this round of expansion, but the more teams added, the more likely it becomes that the number will eventually reach that mark.
Expansion has been the rule in pro and college sports of late. The NHL is set to expand its regular season from 82 to 84 games per team after this season, the NFL expanded its season from 16 to 17 weeks in 2021, and the College Football Playoff is entering the second year of its expanded 12-team format.
