Jon Rothstein sounds off on NCAA Tournament expansion

Few, if any, people on the planet love college basketball more than Jon Rothstein. So, it’s not a great sign for the sport when even he hates the reports that the NCAA is in the “final steps” of expanding the NCAA Tournament to 76 teams.

Rothstein voiced his concerns about expanding the NCAA Tournament during the latest edition of CBS Sports’ Inside College Basketball Now podcast.

“This has been a very difficult week for me,” Rothstein began on the subject. “And this has been something that I have kind of accepted as a fait accompli since last summer, when there was real, real movement towards the NCAA Tournament expanding from 68 to 76 teams. Now, last summer, I knew that it was a win for the 2025-26 college basketball season that the NCAA Tournament was only going to include 68 teams. But I felt last summer that college basketball had lost the momentum needed to keep the NCAA Tournament in its current form.”

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“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Expanding the NCAA Tournament might be the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas. And I am going to preface that with this statement,” Rothstein said, before using the Jurassic Park franchise to elaborate on his point. “In the movie The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park, circa 1997, Jeff Goldblum said that ‘taking dinosaurs off this island was the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas.’

“To me, the NCAA Tournament expansion that feels obviously inevitable right now, based upon final approval by a number of committees over the next couple of weeks, to me, will be something that college basketball will never, never recover from, in the sense of this: the NCAA Tournament, the rendition that we have all grown up with and made part of our fabric as part of being the greatest sporting event that we know in society, is not going to exist in the same form moving forward. Now, as you get a little bit older, and I am somebody who is now approaching his mid-40s,…

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Publish date : 2026-05-05 14:00:00

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