NCAA talks expanding hoops tourney to 72 or 76

LAS VEGAS — NCAA president Charlie Baker is “bullish” on the prospect of the NCAA basketball tournaments expanding to 72 or 76 teams in the near future.

Baker said he has been having productive conversations with television partners and members of the NCAA’s basketball committees on expanding from the current 68-team bracket. He said the NCAA would have to make a decision to move forward by the end of this year’s March Madness in order to implement the expanded field for the 2026 tournament.

He said the tournament is unlikely to grow any bigger than 76 because of the limited window they have to schedule games between the time when conference championships end and coverage of the Masters begins.

“I’m bullish on the conversations we’ve had about going to 72 or 76, and I think the committees are willing to consider that, but I don’t think it’s going to be anything beyond that,” Baker said after speaking about the future of the NCAA at a conference hosted by Sports Business Journal.

The NCAA’s basketball committees presented proposals to expand the tournament last June after several major conferences and leaders such as SEC commissioner Greg Sankey publicly pushed to create more at-large bids for their schools.

“We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers [from smaller leagues], and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion,” Sankey told ESPN last March.

Baker told reporters his focus in the coming year is to implement changes made to the NCAA through the pending, industry-shifting antitrust settlement that will allow schools to start paying players directly. He said he expects to begin working in January on the details of a system that will provide more freedom for the major conferences to form rules that are better suited to their economic reality.

When asked if the NCAA’s experience in organizing March Madness could provide any help to the College Football Playoff — which is not operated by the NCAA — in its selection process, Baker said that some disappointment in the selection process is inevitable.

“There are always going to be people who thought it worked exactly the way it should and people who think otherwise,” Baker said.

He added that one of the main differences between the two selection processes for the two tournaments is the College Football Playoff’s weekly release of new rankings during the second half of the regular season. The NCAA selection committee shares limited ranking information only once before making its final decisions about tournament seeding.

“I can’t figure out in my own head if it generates excitement and is interesting to people or if it just makes people crazy as the season goes on to have this thing constantly move,” Baker said.