Is NCAA Tournament Expansion More Or Less Pressure On Marquette Basketball?

On Tuesday, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported that the NCAA was on the verge of expanding the men’s and women’s basketball national championship tournaments from their current size of 68 teams to 76 teams. In the wake of that story, CBS Sports, specifically Matt Norlander and Gary Parrish, did the actual work involved in breaking that story and laid out exactly what that eight team expansion would look like:

The move will create eight additional at-large bids, all of them to worse teams (per the cut line’s standard) than those that have qualified for every previous NCAA Tournament. Per sources, the NCAA will be adopting an expanded model for its opening-round games that matches what it had been doing with the First Four. The move to 76 will mean 52 teams auto-slot into the main bracket (first round starting on Thursday and Friday), with the 24 leftover teams filling up 12 game slots for that Tuesday and Wednesday immediately after Selection Sunday.

Instead of four games with eight teams in Dayton for the men’s tournament, there will be 12 games with 24 teams at two sites. That will initiate the start of March Madness. Dayton will stay on as one of the sites, but the second hasn’t been determined yet for the men’s tournament. The sites for the women’s opening round also remain unclear. One source told CBS Sports that it will for sure be in either the Central, Mountain or Pacific time zones and that a decision won’t happen until either this summer or in the early fall.

The expanded opening round will be split between at-large teams and teams that have won automatic bids by winning their conference tournaments. All No. 16 seeds and half the No. 15 seeds will slot into those play-in games on Tuesday and Wednesday of the opening round. The other half of the games will be a mix, depending on team quality, comprised of No. 11 seeds, all No. 12 seeds and potentially a game that will feed into the No. 13 line for the first round that Thursday or Friday.

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/ncaa-tournament-expansion-more-less-124046675.html

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Publish date : 2026-04-29 12:40:00

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