NCAA Tournaments expanding to 76 teams in biggest increase to field in decades

After years of debate, the NCAA Tournament is expanding.

The men’s and women’s tournaments will grow from 68 teams to 76 next season, the NCAA announced Thursday. The move is the most significant alteration to the men’s tournament’s format since 1984-85, when the field grew from 53 teams to 64, and to the women’s format since it grew from 48 to 64 in 1994.

That 64-team bracket has largely remained the basis for March Madness ever since, with small tweaks – a 65th men’s team being added in 2001, three more in 2011, and then the women’s expansion to 68 in 2022 – that created four games on the two days before the first round.

Those additions pale in comparison to the expansion next spring.

The 12 lowest-seeded at-large teams and 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers will play in what will now be called the “March Madness Opening Round.” In the men’s tournament, those games will be split between Dayton, Ohio (site of the First Four since 2011) and a to-be-determined site.

The 12 women’s games will be played on the home courts of 12 of the top 16 seeds in the tournament. Only 52 of the 76 teams each season will be guaranteed a spot in the round of 64, down from 60 currently.

As part of the expansion, the total value of the tournaments’ television rights agreements will increase by roughly $50 million per year over the remaining six years of the existing deal. The NCAA projects it will distribute more than $131 million to schools over that span – known as tournament “units,” which are paid out through the conferences – or roughly $21.8 million in additional unit distributions per year.

Based on the new 76-team format, six automatic conference qualifiers (likely outside the autonomy conferences) will play at least two tournament games each year, which guarantees those conferences at least one additional unit. Only two automatic qualifiers had that opportunity each year under the 68-team format.

The NCAA also announced it will open up new tournament sponsorship opportunities for previously restricted alcohol products including beer, wine, spirits and hard seltzer.

Expansion has been seen as inevitable across the college basketball landscape since last summer, when there was significant momentum to grow the Big Dance ahead of the 2025-26 postseason, despite public sentiment indicating many fans were not in favor of the change. NCAA power brokers and their television partners ran out of time to implement the shift before the start of the athletic calendar.

The NCAA said last August that its committees would continue conversations about expansion for 2027, leading to Thursday’s approval.

Power conferences have been the largest drivers of tournament expansion, with NCAA President Charlie Baker also vocally advocating for it. Baker’s reasoning has been to allow more college basketball players to experience March Madness, a rationale that overlapped with power conferences’ push for more “access” to the postseason – especially as Division I men’s college basketball swelled to 365 teams.

The NCAA’s Transformation Committee recommended in 2023 that any sports with more than 200 sponsored teams allow 25% of them to participate in the postseason. The expanded 76-team field doesn’t get college basketball all the way there – that would require more than 91 teams in the Big Dance – but at 21.4% of teams, it is now much closer.

“Bringing more teams into the NCAA Tournament is not a bad thing,” said DI men’s basketball committee chair Keith Gill in an interview published by the NCAA. “I think that access is great. I think there’s a lot of good teams out there that – wins and losses don’t always equate to whether or not you’re a quality team. So I think creating more access and opportunity is a great thing.”

The biggest holdup to expansion has been figuring out the finances. The NCAA still has six years remaining on its men’s and women’s tournament television contracts. CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery pay the governing body over $900 million annually for the men’s tournament rights, but those networks were under no obligation to increase their payout for an expanded bracket. That said, the NCAA long maintained that it could unlock more revenue through increased sponsorships and advertising sales, which would make up the financial difference associated with including more teams and hosting more games.

Expansion would not have been approved if those costs had not been covered, and/or if there had been any hit to the revenue distributed to the 32 DI conferences.

Come 2032, though, when those television contracts are set to expire, a larger television inventory could mean a larger annual payout to the NCAA.

The majority of men’s coaches the Athletic spoke to in recent weeks – as momentum toward expansion picked back up after this year’s Final Four – were against growing the field, arguing that it further diminishes the sport’s regular season, which has already struggled to maintain relevance against increasingly lengthy NFL and college football schedules. Coaches at all levels of DI men’s basketball were also against expansion because of its impact on mid- and low-major teams. Four fewer automatic qualifiers will make the 64-team field because of the expanded first round, while some of the sport’s best teams from one-bid leagues will also face tougher paths as they’re pushed further down the seedline.

Some proponents of expansion have argued that a larger field means more mid-major teams will be included, but a recent review by the Athletic found that the majority of the additional eight at-large berths will likely go to high-major teams. One other benefit for mid-major teams could be increased revenue for their conferences by winning the opening-round games; conferences receive payouts – known as “units” – when their teams win a tournament game, and the prize for advancing out of the First Four is the same as the payout attached to every win in the tournament.