NCAA Tournament expansion talks will wait until after March, leaders say

INDIANAPOLIS — Decisions on whether to expand the NCAA basketball tournaments won’t happen until after this year’s tournament at the earliest, though NCAA president Charlie Baker and major-conference leaders are still in favor of it happening.

NCAA senior vice president of basketball operations Dan Gavitt said at the organization’s headquarters Thursday that conversations around expansion are ongoing, but there won’t be serious meetings on the topic until at least after this year’s men’s and women’s Final Fours. The timeline remains fluid.

“Their focus is on this year’s tournaments,” Gavitt said.

Gavitt said he also updated conference commissioners about expansion on Thursday.

Deep conversations on the topic most recently took place last July, when the committees that oversee March Madness failed to decide whether to expand to a 72- or 76-team field. The men’s field has been at 68 teams since 2011 and previously grew to 64 teams in 1985. The women’s tournament expanded to 68 in 2022.

Proponents of expansion focus on participation, beginning with a recommendation in 2023 by the Division I transformation committee to adjust the fields for all NCAA postseason championships to include at least 25 percent of schools that participate in a given sport. The 68-team field makes up less than 20 percent — a shrinking number as Division I continues to grow.

Television money has stood in the way of expansion. The NCAA’s rights deal with CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery for the men’s tournament pays the association more than $1 billion annually and runs through 2032, but the networks are under no obligation to increase the rights fee for a bigger tournament. (Separately, WBD is in the early stages of a potential sale of parts or all of the company.)

NCAA officials have been working with those partners to find ways through sponsorships to generate the revenue needed to cover the cost of adding more teams and staging more games.

“We’re still talking to the various players in this one,” Baker told reporters Thursday. “I said all along that I think there are some very good reasons to expand the tournament. So, I would like to see it expand.”