A new era of college basketball has begun—kicking and screaming.
The NCAA tournaments will expand to 76 teams in 2027, with the men’s and women’s basketball committees voting unanimously to expand the tournaments, per CBS Sports. The proposal now heads to further committee votes, as well as the Division I cabinet on May 22 and the NCAA’s Board of Governors after that.
The development follows years of speculation, and marks the first addition of teams to the men’s tournament since 2011 and the women’s tournament since 2022.
"Expanding the Division I Men's and Women's Basketball Championships is the right decision for the student-athletes and programs that will now have access to the greatest events in college sports," Virginia Tech president Tim Sands, the Division I Board of Directors chair, said in a statement Thursday. "As NCAA leaders, we are especially excited to provide additional, highly competitive games for fans who look forward to March Madness every year."
"Providing additional access to the NCAA Men's and Women's Basketball Championships for Division I programs will be incredibly meaningful, especially to the student-athletes of the eight additional men's and women's programs that receive these coveted bids," said ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, who chairs the NCAA board of governors. "The leadership by President Charlie Baker as well as Dan Gavitt, Lynn Holzman and JoAn Scott has been outstanding. We also appreciate the support of our broadcast partners and corporate champions and partners in making this a reality."
How the 76-team NCAA basketball tournaments will work
Instead of eight teams playing four games on the first two days of the tournaments, 24 teams will now play 12 games. Those games will be split between Dayton, Ohio—the traditional home of the old First Four—and a location outside of the Eastern Time Zone to be determined.
In March, Sports Illustrated’s Kevin Sweeney laid out what a 76-team version of the 2026 men’s basketball tournament would have looked like. Of the eight additional teams on the men’s side, seven would have come from the Power 4 conferences.
Here is how the new-look bracket will appear, via the NCAA:
The men’s tournament has not grown this much year-over-year since 1985, when it jumped from 53 teams to 64 teams, where it held steady until the addition of a play-in game in 2001. The women’s tournament, long a second-class affair in the NCAA’s eyes, was a 48-team affair as recently as 1993 before going to 64 teams in 1994.
The NCAA claims tournament expansion will generate $300 million in new media rights revenue over six years
The men’s NCAA tournament, which will still be covered by CBS and Turner Sports, while ESPN will continue to carry the women’s tournament. Through these updated rights packages, the NCAA claims that its payments from its media partners will “increase $50 million each year on average over the course of the six years.” Additionally, it claims that the expanded events will generate “more than $131 million in new revenue distributions to member schools” who will now participate in the tournaments.
Though March Madness is a legendarily recession-proof television event, the NCAA may have a significant sales job ahead of it to skeptical fans and observers. The symmetry of the 64-team bracket has been crucial to the NCAA tournament’s enduring appeal over the last four decades, making it an easy in to college basketball (and sports at large) for casual fans and non-fans. Whether fans are willing to wait out 12 games to fill out their brackets, and whether the finances justify the tournaments’ bloat, will be storylines to watch next March.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as NCAA Makes Official Decision on March Madness Expansion: How Men’s, Women’s Tournament Brackets Will Look.
