The men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments are expanding to 76 teams, the NCAA announced Thursday.
It is the first time the men’s tournament has expanded since 2011, and the first time the women’s tournament has expanded since 2022.
“Expanding the Division I men’s and women’s basketball championships is the right decision for the student-athletes and programs that will now have access to the greatest events in college sports,” said Tim Sands, chair of the Division I board of directors and the president at Virginia Tech. “As NCAA leaders, we are especially excited to provide additional, highly competitive games for fans who look forward to March Madness every year.”
The expansion from 68 teams to 76 teams marks the men’s tournament’s largest increase since it moved to 64 teams in 1985. It went from 64 to 65 in 2001 and then added three more teams in 2011 to form the First Four.
With the increase to 76, the First Four — doubleheaders on back-to-back days in Dayton — will be replaced by a 12-game Opening Round. The Tuesday and Wednesday of the men’s tournament will feature 12 games played by 24 teams in two different cities. There will now be three games each day in Dayton and three games each day in a second city yet to be determined, with sources telling ESPN’s Pete Thamel that 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 the beginning of the round of 64 on Friday — and across 12 of the campus sites designated as first- and second-round hosts.
Half of the 24 Opening Round teams will be the lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers; the others will be the lowest-seeded at-large teams.
The traditional 64-team first round and ensuing rounds will remain the same in both the men’s and women’s tournaments.
“March Madness is the best postseason in all of sports, and this new format will continue that legacy by producing even more compelling games for fans and student-athletes,” said Division I Men’s Basketball Committee chair Keith Gill, commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference.
Movement toward expanding the NCAA tournament has been ongoing for more than three years, as the College Football Playoff expanded and college athletics contended with conference realignment and the growth of the four biggest conferences. In January 2023, the NCAA Division I board of directors approved a transformation committee’s recommendation to expand all sports’ championship events to include 25% of teams. The men’s basketball committee began discussing expanding the field that summer.
The NCAA presented expansion plans to Division I conference commissioners in the summer of 2024, including options to increase the fields to 72 or 76 teams. NCAA president Charlie Baker publicly endorsed the move in the spring of 2025 and reiterated his support on multiple occasions — pointing to access as the biggest reason for expansion.
“From my point of view, the more teams we can get into the tournament and make it work logistically and mathematically, the better,” Baker said in February. “It gives more kids the opportunity to experience that.”
Although potential expansion for the 2026 NCAA tournament was tabled last summer, momentum among decision-makers and conference commissioners was clearly headed in the direction of expansion.
The various committees that needed to approve the decisions — the Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Committees, the Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Oversight Committees, the Division I Finance Committee, the Division I board of directors and the NCAA board of governors — officially voted to expand on Thursday.
