President Charlie Baker set a timeline of early April to determine whether the NCAA Tournament would expand in 2026.
Speaking at a sports business conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Baker described growing support to increase the number of teams in the NCAA Tournament from 68 by up to eight.
He said media and TV executives and most conference commissioners are increasingly open to bringing additional teams into March Madness following NCAA vice president Dan Gavitt’s proposals in June.
“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 Wednesday.
Some coaches, including John Calipari and Tom Izzo, were outspoken in March about maintaining a semblance of exclusivity with the current setup in place since the First Four was added in 2011. But there were others in the 2024 NCAA Tournament, like Akron’s John Groce, who said lower-exposure leagues like the Mid-American Conference deserve a shot additional at-large bids.
Multiple high-profile commissioners, including Greg Sankey in the SEC, proclaimed automatic bids for smaller conferences have diluted the depth of the Field of 68. Automatic tournament bids are won by 32 conference champions.
A couple SEC coaches know there’s nothing automatic against teams that win their conference to claim tournament bids.
On the first day of the 2024 NCAA Tournament, Horizon League champion and automatic bid-winner Oakland was a 14 seed and knocked off No. 3 seed Kentucky in the first round. Ivy League champion and automatic bid-winner Yale, seeded 13th in the East Region, erased plenty of brackets and No. 4 seed Auburn, 78-76, a day later.
Auburn had just completed a sprint through the SEC tournament, while Yale entered the game as a nine-loss team that lost to Vermont, Cornell, Brown and Princeton in the regular season. But the Ivy League has produced a win in the NCAA Tournament in back-to-back years.
Oakland had 11 losses in the regular season. The legend of fifth-year senior Jack Gohlke might not have existed if a structural shift moved to erase bids for small-conference champions. Gohlke made a tournament-record 10 3-pointers to sink the Wildcats and plant Oakland’s euphoric flag.
“This is the holy grail for mid-majors, right?” longtime Oakland coach Greg Kampe said in March. “It is. And I’ve said this many times over the last week. The NCAA basketball tournament — please don’t change it, please don’t change it. But it is one of the three greatest sporting events in the world.”
Another 2024 tournament darling, N.C. State, was one of five ACC teams awarded a bid in a conference that since expanded by three.
Wolfpack coach Kevin Keatts took a pro-expansion position because of his experience at mid-major UNC Wilmington, where every team in the league knew the only ticket into the NCAA Tournament was for going to the conference tournament champion.
“I was at UNCW, we had won 28 games, and if I didn’t win that championship game, no matter what I did, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to play in the tournament. So somehow we gotta figure it out. … I’m saying that more student-athletes, in my opinion, should have the opportunity to play in the best postseason tournament in college.”
Baker said in November that reports the NCAA was pushing to expand the tournament field beyond 76 were false, and he knows there will not be unanimous approval of any changes because of the popularity of the tournament as comprised.
“There are always going to be people who thought it worked exactly the way it should and people who think otherwise,” Baker said.
–Field Level Media
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