NCAA president Charlie Baker said Thursday that he thinks a decision on whether to expand the NCAA tournament will be made “sometime this fall,” making it less likely it would impact the 2026 men’s and women’s tournaments.
Baker, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., said the biggest challenge for tournament expansion – particularly one that would take place in less than eight months – is logistics.
“The tournament has to start after the conference championships are over,” he said. “And 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.”
Baker previously told Yahoo Sports, which first reported the diminishing likelihood of an expanded NCAA tournament for the upcoming season, that a decision would need to be made by August in order to take effect for the 2026 tournaments.
On Thursday, Baker also made the case for expansion, one that has been repeated by conference executives since SEC commissioner Greg Sankey first publicly broached the topic in 2022.
“There are, every year, some really good teams that don’t get into the tournament for a bunch of reasons,” Baker said. “One of the reasons they don’t get in is because we have 32 automatic qualifiers. There are 32 conferences in D1 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.”
He cited 2024 St. John’s and 2024 Indiana State as teams that should have been in the NCAA tournament field as at-large bids, specifically referencing the Red Storm’s close loss to UConn in that year’s Big East tournament.
“I don’t buy the idea that some of the teams that currently get left out aren’t good,” Baker said. “They are. And I think that sucks.”
The committees for men’s and women’s Division I basketball met separately earlier this month to discuss expansion, but no decisions were made at the meeting. The NCAA’s Division I board next meets in August.
“The topic of expanding the field for each championship was discussed at length but no decision or recommendation was made,” NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said in a statement after the meetings. “The still viable outcomes include the tournaments remaining at 68 teams or expanding the fields to either 72 or 76 teams in advance of the 2026 or 2027 championships.”
