The NCAA men’s, women’s basketball tournaments span 76 teams

The men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments are expanding to 76 teams, the NCAA announced Thursday.

It is the first time since 2011 that the men’s tournament has been expanded and the first time that the women’s tournament has been expanded since 2022.

“Expanding the Division I men’s and women’s basketball championships is the right decision for 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 president of Virginia Tech. “As NCAA leaders, we are especially excited to provide additional, highly competitive games for fans who look forward to March Madness each year.”

The expansion from 68 teams to 76 teams marks the men’s tournament’s largest expansion 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. 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 per day in Dayton and three games per 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, 12 opening round games will be played on Wednesday and Thursday between selection Sunday and Friday when the Round of 64 begins — and across 12 of the campus sites designated as hosts for the first and second rounds.

Half of the 24 teams in the opening round will be the lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers, the others the lowest-seeded at-large teams.

The traditional 64-team first round and subsequent rounds will remain the same for 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 creating more exciting games for fans and student-athletes,” said Division I Men’s Basketball Committee Chairman Keith Gill, commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference.

The movement toward expanding the NCAA Tournament has been underway for more than three years, as the College Football Playoff has expanded and College Athletics has grappled with conference realignment and the growth of its four largest conferences. In January 2023, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors approved a transition committee recommendation to expand all sports championship events to include 25% of teams. The men’s basketball committee began discussing field expansion that summer, and the NCAA presented a plan.

These expansion plans have been bubbling under the surface in recent years as college athletics debated College Football Playoff expansion and conference realignment. It was revived in January 2023, when the NCAA Division I Board of Directors approved a transition 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 the expansion plan to Division I conference commissioners in the summer of 2024, with options to increase the field to 72 or 76 teams, with NCAA President Charlie Baker publicly supporting the move in the spring of 2025 and repeating his support on multiple occasions — pointing to access as the biggest reason behind the move.

“From my perspective, 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 a chance to experience it.”

When the decision to expand for the 2026 NCAA Tournament was tabled last summer, momentum among decision makers and conference commissioners clearly led to expansion.

The various committees required to approve the decisions – the Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Committee, the Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee, the Division I Finance Committee, the Division I Board of Directors and the NCAA Board of Governors – officially voted to extend Thursday.