NCAA Tournament expansion to 76 teams in final steps of approval Thursday

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

After years of debate, the NCAA Tournament is on the cusp of expanding. The NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball committees 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 DI cabinet and board of governors are expected to vote later Thursday.

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.