The seemingly inevitable change that absolutely nobody wants appears to be coming in 2027.
According to ESPN’s Pete Thamel, the NCAA has initiated the final steps to expand the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments to 76 teams. The expansion is on track to be formalized in the upcoming weeks, and the new 76-team tournament formats will begin next year.
The news was met with the same reaction we’ve seen every time the idea of tournament expansion has been floated: Near universal disapproval.
While not unexpected at this point, messing with the least flawed postseason in all of American sports remains inexplicable and indefensible.
Outside of a handful of head coaches, athletic directors and television executives who stand to personally (but not sizably) benefit from this, nobody associated with college basketball wants this to happen.
Fans of the sport absolutely despise the idea. Media members who cover the sport mostly feel the same. The NCAA Tournament is already the most popular postseason in American sports. There’s no obvious competitive reason for the change. And in an era where massive change is driven by money and virtually nothing else, the financial implications of expansion would seem to be minimal when put up against the pushback from just about everyone who cares about March Madness.
There is simply no logical defense when it comes to messing with one of the few things in sports that just about everyone agrees shouldn’t be messed with it.
Side note: The irony of all ironies here is that if you polled every college basketball fan in the world and asked them what they would do to change the NCAA Tournament before the better, the most common response you would undoubtedly get would be to DECREASE the field back to 64 teams like it was from 1985-2001.
Despite its best efforts over decades littered with ineptitude and head-scratching decisions, the NCAA has consistently done one thing well: Organize a tournament that captivates the American public like few other things can for three weeks ever March/early April. The event brings in about a billion dollars a year for the NCAA, a total which accounts for right around 90 percent of the entity’s annual revenue.
You would think those two sentences would be more than enough reason to leave well enough alone, and yet here we are.
The most logical explanation for why, despite everything, expansion seems inevitable revolves around greed. No amount of money is ever enough, which is why college basketball fans are going to be force fed multiple tournament games featuring power conference teams with losing conference records playing ugly basketball in front of small crowds starting in March of 2027.
The problem with this argument is that the financial benefits of tournament expansion really aren’t that great.
The current television rights agreement between CBS Sports/TNT Sports and the NCAA runs through the 2032 tournament, and the addition of any early round games would have little to no bearing on that deal.
“Right now there’s no guarantee there’s any additional revenue,” one commissioner told CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander last fall. “One of the main sticking points is that without more revenue, how do you pay for more games? How do you pay for more travel? How do you pay for more expenses of an expanded tournament? And on the flip side of it, if you expand, you’re devaluing basketball units at that point. Without more revenue it creates more problems.”
Adding to the point: The current television ratings for the four “First Four” games that are played in Dayton each year on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the “real” tournament starts are … not great. The numbers belabor the point that the 2001 move from 64 to 65 teams — a move made because power conference officials didn’t want to lose an at-large bid after a handful of teams left the WAC to form the Mountain West Conference — was the original minor sin that is now on the verge of blossoming into a deadly sin.
March Madness fanatics are willing to ignore the TruTV contests, and will even fill out brackets on Sunday-Wednesday of tournament week without knowing (or caring) who is going to win the four games in Dayton, but the early round becomes almost impossible to ignore when the number of teams participating jumps from four to 12.
This is what a new “First 12” would look like, based on NCAA seed list, First Four Out, and WAB. Mid-major AQs get pushed down, and still no room for Belmont, New Mexico, Yale, etc. And Akron, South Florida, McNeese likely would’ve missed w/o autobid: https://t.co/pqXqKc7mJE pic.twitter.com/ZYTPGmLkmV
"Last 12 in."Look at this.Do you realize we're going to have a "first four out" and how vile that 80th team's résumé is going to be?🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮 https://t.co/5pZn53G6R5
The biggest argument in favor of tournament expansion surrounds the idea of access.
Great power conference teams are left out every year.