NCAA mulling over expansion to March Madness, possibly in time for 2026 tourneys

Do we really have to add more teams to March Madness? NCAA President Charlie Baker isn’t ruling out going from the current 68-team tournaments for men’s and women’s basketball to either 72 or 76, as early as this coming season.

“There are, every year, some really good teams that don’t get into the tournament for a bunch of reasons,” Baker told ESPN. “One of the reasons they don’t get in is because we have 32 automatic qualifiers. There are 32 conferences in D-I, and their conference champion gets into the tournament. Now, I love that, I think it’s great, and I never want that to change. But that means there’s only 36 slots left for everybody else, and in many cases, there are teams that are among the 50 or 60 best teams in the country.”

Baker ended his thought there, but presumably, he meant to conclude that some of those “50 or 60 best teams in the country” get left on the outside looking in because the field is set at 68.

I was at the First Four in Dayton in 2024 and watched a mid UVA team miss a hundred shots in a row in a 67-42 loss to a Colorado State team that went on to score 11 points in the first half of its 56-44 loss to Texas two days later.

So, no.

The flip side of this is, more games means more money for the NCAA, and for the conferences – and with the ACC getting the shaft from the selection committee the past few years, you can guess how Jim Phillips feels about all of this.

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“As I’ve talked with our coaches and listened to some of the feedback, our men’s coaches are more in favor of expansion, our women’s coaches are more against expansion. It’s almost like a split in the conference as it related to that,” Phillips told reporters last week at the 2025 ACC Kickoff.

I forgot the part about how the ACC is pretty solid on the women’s hoops side, and doesn’t need any help from the NCAA to get its team into the women’s tournament.

Thing is, the women’s game still doesn’t make money, because the NCAA hasn’t valued women’s basketball when it comes to its media deal.

Until that changes, what’s good for men’s basketball will be the driving factor here.

“I always like additional access for teams or for schools, when it’s the right time, and when it’s the right tournament and format. So, we’ll look at it,” Phillips said, though he added that he doesn’t think an expansion will happen in time for the 2026 tournaments.

“Logistically, it has to make sense,” Phillips said. “The compression of when tournaments finish, and then when you have the Masters, which obviously with a partner like CBS, you’re not going to change that, only allows you a certain amount of time to get these games in, so you can’t hastily expand the tournament if you haven’t looked at that, and player safety and number of games, and what it would mean for travel, and how you would work that additional four or eight. … I think it would be difficult to push it through this year if it expands. Who knows? There’s still time to do that, but I want to do it in a really thoughtful, measured way.”