March Madness expansion is coming, even if it could ruin what's great about the tournament
March Madness expansion is coming, even if it could ruin what's great about the tournament
Dan Wolken Tue, March 3, 2026 at 5:49 PM UTC
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It will hang over March Madness like the sword of Damocles, a reality most college basketball fans need to confront sooner rather than later.
As most of the country begins to pay attention to the No. 1 seeds, the bubble teams and the sneaky mid-majors, what many won’t realize is that this may be the last time they’ll fill out a bracket that doesn’t look like it requires advanced trigonometry to figure out.
Indeed, as perfectly imperfect as the 68-team field has been, it feels like this is the final year of sanity before an NCAA tournament expansion most of us don’t want and nobody has bothered to explain.
But the NCAA has made it abundantly clear. In 2027, we’re probably getting a 72- or 76-team field whether we like it or not.
“I said all along that I think there are some very good reasons to expand the tournament,” NCAA president Charlie Baker told reporters last month. “So, I would like to see it expand.”
What are those “very good reasons?”
That’s where the NCAA and the two mega-conferences pushing toward expansion have struggled to articulate a vision for why it’s necessary (because it’s not) and why it’ll make the tournament better (because it won’t).
Yes, in practical terms, the answer is self-evident: The SEC and Big Ten want expansion, and because everyone in the NCAA lives under constant threat of those two pulling a pin on the whole thing, expansion is what they’ll get.
It’s easy to understand their angle: Both leagues gorged themselves on the remains of the old Big 12 and Pac-12, creating a larger middle class of teams with conference records at or below .500. But rather than accept that a 10th or 12th-place team in an 18-team league might not deserve to play in the NCAA tournament, they’d rather just change the entire structure and make sure none of their members get their feelings hurt.
So that’s why expansion is going to happen. That doesn’t mean it’s a good reason or that it should happen without vigorous pushback from the people who really matter: You know, the fans. Remember them?
The NCAA tournament is perfect as is, so why do so many of the sport's powerbrokers want to expand it? (Lance King/Getty Images) (Lance King via Getty Images)
Because when you expand the NCAA tournament beyond its current configuration, you’re not just adding more mediocre teams to the field, you’re effectively changing the nature of the tournament and ignoring why this event has become so popular in the first place.
Why is March Madness such an American cultural phenomenon when college basketball itself is a niche sport with a limited regular-season audience?
It’s the bracket. And if you mess with the bracket the way you’d have to for a 72- or 76-team field, you’re messing with the tournament in a way that needs to be thought through far more carefully than expansion proponents want to admit.
The 64-team bracket was perfection: Simple, clean, easy for anyone to understand. In fact, you can roughly correlate the NCAA expanding to 64 teams in 1985 with the start of office pools becoming such a tradition that 100 million brackets get filled out every year now, according to some estimates.
And though all kinds of sports leagues use a postseason bracket, the NCAA effectively owns that imagery in American culture. They’ve made it a key part of the March Madness branding, including on the center court logo at tournament venues, and integrated it into the winning locker room ceremony when a player takes a placard with the name of their school and Velcros it into the next round.
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The bracket structure itself is invaluable in the popularity of the tournament. Even someone who couldn’t tell you the difference between the ACC and the A-10 can look at a bracket, see that Team X is playing Team Y and make a pick. You don’t need to think about it too hard or know anything about college basketball, yet it triggers an instant level of emotional investment. Between Sunday night when the bracket comes out and Thursday morning, “Who do you have in the Final Four?” is arguably the most-asked question in America at social gatherings, replaced only by “How’s your bracket look?” the following week.
Nobody should be too eager to disrupt that, and I don’t believe Baker or any of the power conference commissioners who are pushing expansion fully appreciate the risk of making the NCAA tournament more difficult to follow for the common fan than it already is.
Since 2011, when the NCAA expanded to 68, the four play-in games have been mostly an afterthought. It’s decent filler programming for a Tuesday and Wednesday night on TruTV, but it’s not essential viewing. Those four empty slots on the 64-team bracket are awkward but not overwhelming when people enter their office pools because the real tournament starts on Thursday. That’s what everyone looks forward to.
If the tournament expands to 76, however, the likely structure would be four play-in games each on Tuesday and Wednesday. Sure, more single-elimination postseason basketball is good in theory. But eight play-in games means a more complicated, asymmetrical bracket to fill out — and you need to do it by Tuesday morning.
The diehards will adapt quickly. But it’s a lot to ask of the tens of millions of people who are only paying attention because of the office pool, and it would arguably be the biggest fundamental change in how America experiences the NCAA tournament since CBS acquired the exclusive TV rights in 1991.
Nobody should be cavalier about the potential for that to go wrong, especially when the reasons given for expansion are so flimsy.
Baker has staked out his position on enhancing the student-athlete experience, citing conversations with athletes who enjoy participating in postseason tournaments.
“From my point of view, the more teams we can get into the tournament and make it work logistically and mathematically, the better," he told reporters. "It gives more kids the opportunity to experience that.”
Oh, so athletes like competing for championships? No kidding, Charlie. Every kid should get a pony for Christmas, too.
Other expansion proponents will cite the annual sob stories like Indiana State getting snubbed a couple years ago despite a 28-6 record or West Virginia’s six Quad 1 wins being ignored last year while an uninspiring San Diego State team got in only to get waxed by 27 points.
But that’s not a compelling reason, either. No matter where you draw the line, someone will always feel aggrieved. At the moment, most bracket experts have a 15-14 Auburn team that has lost 10 of its 16 SEC games among the last teams in.
It’s simply laughable to argue that any team that would add value to the NCAA tournament is going to get left out or that the SEC is being disadvantaged by its size and competitiveness. It doesn’t even matter if you think Auburn is good enough to make a run. We do not need to expand this thing to make sure more Auburns get in.
Expansion is also not likely to be a financial pot of gold, which is often what motivates these types of moves. It’s unclear if CBS/Turner is even willing to pay enough for these extra Tuesday and Wednesday games to be revenue-neutral.
Instead, the leaders of college sports have offered little except that expansion is likely to happen because they want it to happen while failing to explain why it’s necessary and how the benefit is greater than the potential cost. They seem eager to gamble the sanctity of a brand college sports spent the last 40 years building without recognizing that the bracket is the brand.
Changing the NCAA tournament is a risk, and one nobody can vigorously defend. It’s a solution in search of a problem. But like so many things in college sports, self-interest and inertia will continue to guide the enterprise toward unpopular decisions that make the good stuff worse while failing to fix what’s broken.
March Madness is mostly perfect as it is. This year may be the last time we can say that.
Source: “AOL Sports”
