March Madness might be getting even bigger.
NCAA president Charlie Baker said during this week’s Big 12 Spring Meetings in Orlando that the college basketball tournament could expand as soon as 2026.
“That would be the goal, to try and do this for next year,” Baker told Front Office Sports. “…We’ve been talking about 72 and 76.”
Kansas’ Bill Self said his most of his Big 12 colleagues are also in favor of the expansion.
“[Self] said the league’s coaches would be in favor of expanding the NCAA Tournament,” The Lawrence Journal-World’s Henry Greenstein wrote on X.
The men’s tournament last expanded from 64 to 68 games in 2011.
Before then, the format had been unchanged since the first NCAA Tournament in 1985.
During the meetings, Baker said the governing body and its television partners are currently going over logistics of the change.
“We’ve had good conversations with CBS and [Warner Bros. Discovery],” Baker said, per ESPN. “Our goal here is to try to sort of get to either yes or no sometime in the next few months because there’s a lot of logistical work that would be associated with doing this. If we were to go down this road, you just think about the opening weekends, who has to travel the longest, it gets complicated.”
Baker added that a bigger field could make sure fewer worthy teams aren’t left out of the tournament.
“If you have a tournament that’s got 64 or 68 teams in it, you’re going to have a bunch of teams that are probably among what most people would consider to be the best 68 or 70 teams in the country that aren’t going to make the tournament, period,” Baker said.
“The point behind going from 68 to 72 or 76 is to basically give some of those schools that were probably among the 72, 76, 68, 64 best teams in the country a way into the tournament.”
