The men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments will not be expanding beyond 68 teams this season, but future growth remains on the radar, NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt announced Monday.
“Expanding the tournament fields is no longer being contemplated for the 2026 men’s and women’s basketball championships,” Gavitt said in a statement. “However, the committees will continue conversations on whether to recommend expanding to 72 or 76 teams in advance of the 2027 championships.”
The idea of expanding the tournament to either 72 or 76 teams had picked up steam in the spring.
NCAA president Charlie Baker said last month that 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 also said the NCAA already has had “good conversations” with TV partners CBS and Warner Bros., whose deal runs through 2032 at the cost of around $1.1 billion a year.
Though there has been no concrete plan for how expansion would work, speculation had centered on bringing more at-large teams, likely from major conferences, into the 64-team bracket.
Currently, two of the First Four games involve 16 seeds — teams that automatically qualify by winning lower-ranked conferences — while two more involve at-large teams often seeded 11 or 12. For instance, in 2021, UCLA made the Final Four as an 11-seed that also played in the First Four.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
