The NCAA is reportedly nearing the expansion of the men’s and women’s basketball tournament to 76 teams.
The proposed expansion would add eight games to the First Four, with 24 teams playing in an opening round before advancing into the main bracket.
Here is an excerpt on the proposal from Yahoo! Sports:
Soon after the completion of this year’s NCAA tournament, NCAA leadership and members of the association’s basketball committees — both the selection and oversight groups — are expected to finalize an expansion of the men’s and women’s tournaments to 76 teams.
Barring something unforeseen, “it will happen,” says one high-placed source.
According to a proposal socialized with members last year, eight games would be added to the current “First Four” played over Tuesday and Wednesday of the first week of the event. This new “opening round” — the verbiage used to describe it — would feature 24 teams playing in 12 games over the two days at two sites (Dayton and another). Those involved in the negotiations caution that plenty of this could change through the course of continuing talks with TV partners Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS.
The 12 winners of the opening-round games — likely six games pitting lower-seeded automatic qualifiers and six pitting at-large teams — advance to an awaiting 52 teams in the original bracket. Under this concept, eight teams are extracted from the main bracket, plus the eight new at-large selections from expansion.
Leaders at the Big 12 and ACC, perhaps more than others, have aggressively pushed for the expansion of the tournament.
But so has NCAA president Charlie Baker, who views it as a way for deserving bubble teams to extend their seasons — and potentially win a game, too. Two of this tournament’s last teams in, 11 seeds Texas and Miami of Ohio, won a combined three games.
“There are every year some really good teams that don’t get to the tournament for a bunch of reasons,” Baker said last fall. “One of the reasons is we have 32 automatic qualifiers [for conference champions]. I love that and think it’s great and never want that to change, but that means there’s only 36 slots left for everybody else.”
