NCAA Tournament expansion to 76 teams likely to be finalized Thursday

After years of debate, the NCAA Tournament is on the cusp of expanding.

Multiple NCAA committees have approved growing the field from its current 68-team format to 76 ahead of the 2026-27 season, a person involved in the discussions said Thursday. The NCAA will next ratify its contract with CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery before making it official.

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The move to expand would be the most significant alteration to the men’s NCAA 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, known as the “First Four.”

However, those additions pale in comparison to the expansion next spring. Instead of four games over two days, the expectation is that 12 games will now be played in a supersized opening round — likely featuring the final 12 at-large selections and the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers from low- and mid-major conferences. In the men’s tournament, those games are expected to be split between Dayton, Ohio (site of the First Four since 2011) and another to-be-determined site outside of the Eastern time zone, to ease logistics and travel. The women’s First Four has traditionally been held at the home courts of four 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.

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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…

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Publish date : 2026-05-07 18:46:00

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