Jeff Borzello
Multiple Authors
It’s finally official: The NCAA is expanding the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments by eight teams to new fields of 76, set to take immediate effect with this upcoming season.
Of the 68 teams in last season’s tournaments, 31 were automatic bids — each conference receives one apiece — and 37 were at-large bids, chosen by the selection committees based on various metrics. The increase to 76 teams means 44 at-large bids will now be handed out, with 32 automatic bids needed due to the return of the Pac-12.
This is the first expansion for the men’s tournament since 2011, when it grew from 65 to 68 teams. It’s also the biggest expansion since 1985, when the field doubled from 32 to 64 teams.
The women’s tournament has shifted more recently, making the jump to 68 teams in 2022. It had been a 64-team field since 1994, increasing incrementally in the decade since the first NCAA women’s basketball tournament in 1982 (played with 32 teams).
The latest expansion raises the question: What does it mean for the sport of college basketball? Here’s everything you need to know.
Go to: Men’s Bracketology
How will the eight additional teams be bracketed?
The First Four is out, the Opening Round is in. Instead of eight teams playing in four games for a chance to advance to the round of 64, there will now be 24 teams playing in 12 such games. Half of said teams will be the lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers, the other the lowest-seeded at-large teams.
The NCAA will visually present the new Opening Round at the top of the bracket, with winners feeding into the classic 64-team field.
Here is what the 76-team bracket will look like: pic.twitter.com/BmJsJZ7pOY
— Jeff Borzello (@jeffborzello) May 7, 2026
When and where will the new ‘Opening Round’ take place?
On the men’s side, the 12 games will be played on the Tuesday and Wednesday between Selection Sunday and when the round of 64 begins that Thursday. Instead of scheduling two games each day in Dayton, as has been the case with the First Four, there will be three games each day in Dayton and three games each day in a second city yet to be determined. ESPN’s Pete Thamel has reported the second site is expected to be west of the Eastern time zone to help with logistics.
On the women’s side, the 12 Opening Round games will be played on the Wednesday and Thursday between Selection Sunday and when the round of 64 begins that Friday — and across 12 of the campus sites designated as first- and second-round hosts.
What does this mean for the bubble and potential Cinderellas?
The bubble will get bigger, with more teams seeing their chance to make the tournament rise entering the final stretch of the season, in part by minimizing some of the “bubble elimination” games we have seen during Champ Weeks, when teams often go head-to-head for an at-large bid. And the biggest beneficiary of the expansion will undoubtedly be the power conferences.
With realignment, we’ve already seen teams that finished in the middle of the pack make the field, which will happen more frequently with more bids up for grabs. For instance, an Auburn team that finished 7-11 in the SEC and 17-16 overall was among the first four teams out of this past season’s tournament; the Tigers would have gotten a bid if the field was expanded.
There might be room for another mid-major at-large team or two, particularly those that dominate the season but lose early in their conference tournaments (i.e. Indiana State in 2024) or those with gaudy records and impressive metrics but not the marquee wins of the power-conference teams (i.e. Miami Ohio in 2026).
The bottom line, though: After a 2025 men’s tournament that featured zero teams seeded lower than 12 advance to the second round and a 2026 men’s tournament that saw just one double-digit seed reach the Sweet 16 — and a 2025 women’s tournament that featured zero teams seeded lower than 10 advance — Cinderellas could have even more of an uphill climb in the expanded field.
VCU athletic director Ed McLaughlin told ESPN in 2024 that he’s concerned about what expansion would do to the small-school runs that captivate the nation each March.
“Without those magic [upset] moments, the NCAA tournament isn’t magic,” said McLaughlin, whose Rams upset North Carolina in overtime of their first-round matchup before losing in the second round this past March. “Does greed end up killing the golden goose? Greed kills a lot of things.”
How will this affect the tournament’s broadcast partners?
As for the broadcast rights, both media rights agreements — CBS and Turner for the men; ESPN for the women — are set to end in 2032. CBS Sports and Turner agreed to an eight-year extension in 2016 worth $8.8 billion. ESPN and the NCAA reached an eight-year deal last September for the rights to 40 NCAA championships, including the women’s basketball tournament, worth $115 million annually.
There are no indications that either agreement has materially changed in the wake of the tournament expansion.
Why expand the tournaments now?
Plans for this expansion have been bubbling under the surface over recent years while college athletics contended with the College Football Playoff expansion and conference realignment. It revved up in January 2023, when the NCAA Division I board of directors approved a transformation committee’s recommendation to expand all sports’ championship events to include 25% of teams — by that summer, the NCAA said the men’s basketball committee had discussed expanding the field.
The NCAA presented expansion plans to Division I conference commissioners in summer 2024, including options to increase the fields to 72 or 76 teams, and NCAA president Charlie Baker said last May that he saw value in the move.
“The point behind going from 68 to 72 or 76,” Baker said this time last year, “is to basically give some of those schools that were probably among the 72, 76, 68, 64 best teams in the country a way into the tournament.”
Commissioners of the biggest conferences in the country have long eyed expansion, which could offer a clue as to which benefit the most from this change. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips have both expressed support for the idea in recent years.
“If the last team in can win the national championship, and they’re in the 30s or 40s from an RPI or [NCAA] NET standpoint, is our current approach supporting national championship competition?” Sankey told Sports Illustrated in 2022. “I think there’s health in that conversation. That doesn’t exclude people. It goes to: How do we include people in these annual national celebrations that lead to a national champion?”
“More access, more opportunity for more young men and women,” Phillips told ESPN a few months later. “There’s a lot of positives to that.”
NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt told CBS Sports in an interview earlier this year that the recent changes in college athletics — i.e., the introduction of NIL then revenue sharing, the rise of the transfer portal and the impact of conference realignment — has made the increase more viable.
“There’s no sport that is deeper overall and has more parity than men’s college basketball,” he said. “There’s great basketball played at every level in men’s basketball right now. So I think it’s important to keep the tournament contemporary and relevant, based on what is going on in college athletics.”
In the NCAA’s announcement, it highlighted two major factors: more championship access for student-athletes and the financial incentive. More teams in the tournament means more money for conferences, which means more money for schools — and more eyeballs on the sport.
How could this, and the approval of a 32-game schedule, impact how coaches manage their teams in the run-up to and during the tournament?
It won’t change much in terms of roster management and minutes distribution, as the majority of teams are still playing the same number of NCAA tournament games with the same amount of rest as in previous NCAA tournaments. The addition of a 32nd regular-season game, as voted on last year, will impact nonconference scheduling early in each campaign and thus shouldn’t dramatically affect the stretch before the tournament. It could, however, increase the likelihood of nonconference showdowns in January and February.
For example, Duke played Michigan this past February and will face Gonzaga in Detroit next February. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see more teams add these types of games as a way to manufacture a break from the grind of conference play and prepare for potential NCAA tournament opponents.
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