The First Four is about to become the First Twelve.
The long-awaited inevitability is nearly a reality. Both the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments are expected to expand to 76 teams, effective next year, sources told CBS Sports on Tuesday.
A formal announcement by the NCAA is expected in May, after every necessary committee officially ratifies the change in the near future.
Expansion has been discussed and debated at the NCAA level for four years. Proponents — particularly conference commissioners, head coaches and NCAA president Charlie Baker — have celebrated the idea of more access. Inversely, adversaries insisted it would lessen the significance of the regular season, deteriorate the quality of March Madness and be a net-negative for the sport. In the end, the argument for a bigger tournament that will eventually generate additional revenue apparently won out.
Although a decision has not formally been voted on yet, one source said it’s a “very, very small chance” that any reversal would happen in the next week. A slew of NCAA groups, including the men’s and women’s oversight committees, the men’s and women’s basketball selection committees, the Division I cabinet and the Board of Governors all need, and are expected to, approve the move in the short-term.
ESPN first reported the development Tuesday evening. In response to that story and this one, the NCAA put out a statement: “Expanding the basketball tournaments would require approval from multiple NCAA committees, including the men’s and women’s basketball committees, and no final recommendations or decisions have been made at this time.”
This will be the first expansion of the NCAA Tournament since it went from 65 to 68 teams in 2011. In 2001 the tournament moved from its platonic ideal of 64 to an additional 65th team after the Mountain West’s creation. The die was cast then for NCAA leaders who opted to expand the tournament as opposed to eliminating one at-large bid and staying firm at 64.
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The move will create eight additional at-large bids, all of them to worse teams (per the cut line’s standard) than those that have qualified for every previous NCAA Tournament. Per sources, the NCAA will be adopting an expanded model for its opening-round games that matches what it had been doing with the First Four. The move to 76 will mean 52 teams auto-slot into the main bracket (first round starting on Thursday and Friday), with the 24 leftover teams filling up 12 game slots for that Tuesday and Wednesday immediately after Selection Sunday.
How that all fits on a single piece of paper and in an easily understandable format for the average sports fan remains to be seen. What’s undeniable is that the NCAA, by choosing to go to 76, is making the process more complicated for the American sports public that, for decades, has mostly paid attention to a 64-team tournament.
The First Four in both branding and format is dead, one source said. The 12 games for the 24 teams in the expanded NCAA Tournament will be labeled “the opening round.”
The expanded opening round will be split between at-large teams and teams that have won automatic bids by winning their conference tournaments. All No. 16 seeds and half the No. 15 seeds will slot into those play-in games on Tuesday and Wednesday of the opening round. The other half of the games will be a mix, depending on team quality, comprised of No. 11 seeds, all No. 12 seeds and potentially a game that will feed into the No. 13 line for the first round that Thursday or Friday.
This would also mean a new TV lineup. While exact tip times and format for the opening round on Tuesday and Wednesday have not yet been determined, the broad template will be to have the first games tip in the late afternoon on the East Coast, sources said, and to stagger the tip times in a tripleheader format on multiple networks. The first window would be somewhere in the 4 p.m. ET slot, then the second closer to 7 p.m. ET, the third pair of tip times slated between 9 and 10 p.m. ET.
I found this via Defector, whose Ray Ratto gets into the real reasons behind this move. Before I get to that I’ll confess that I have been in favor in the past of expanding this tournament, on the grounds that there are over 300 teams that play in tournament-eligible basketball, and it seemed unfair to me that so many of them get shut out of it. I naively thought this would improve access to the tournament. IN my defense, that was thinking from more than a decade ago, well before the current orgy of major conference expansion and all of the other chaos that has wrought. Here’s Ratto:
This news, long expected but not awaited, was broken by ESPN’s very estimable college basketball transom peeker, Pete Thamel, although his story had one bright red herring in it. That would be the 11th paragraph, which reads:
>The primary driver of this move hasn’t been money, but rather access for at-large bids for power conferences. The expansion has been pushed by power conferences, which have grown throughout the course of the current deal.
What he clearly meant to say was, “the primary driver of this move has of course been money, because that’s the only thing that ever drives any of these scabrous billboard lawyers. The expansion has been pushed by power conferences, who fully expect to have their lesser members fill those extra 12 slots so that they won’t have to drag-ass back to their alums and say, ‘We need money to pay off the coach we’re about to fire because we got stuck in the goddamn NIT.'”
But we can forgive Thamel this one inadvertent error because, given that he has done this for awhile, he probably considered it an obvious inference based on the reflexively rapacious behaviors of the people involved. The NCAA is trying to pay tribute to keep the power conferences—the institutions that are, amusingly, the instruments of its eventual death—from killing it today. This is a pretty good strategy when it’s the only one available. The funny part, though, is that the power conferences want the NCAA dead no matter what. They want this so that their pals in government can create a new governing body through legislation, and so have their industrial larcenies sanctioned and controlled within a structure that lets them step on the burgeoning player compensation movement. Evidently, the big conferences want a system that allows them to pirate other schools’ players without having any of their own stolen.
Of course it’s about the money – it’s always about the money – but the threat of the big conferences ditching the NCAA and rolling their own tournament is a part of that as well. But maybe that’s not as big a threat as we might think, or at least as the NCAA might think. CBS’ Matt Norlander disputes that thinking.
In the early 2020s the SEC and Big 12 expanded to 16 teams. The ACC and Big Ten bloated to 18 schools each. They redefined the landscape of the NCAA and then used the blood of the old Pac-12 to draw the lines and borders on the new map of college athletics.
Even then, with their superconferences and mega-rich media deals, the commissioners, university presidents and athletic directors at the high-majors weren’t satisfied. Everything comes at a cost. Expansion of a league means it becomes statistically more difficult for average teams in the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC to qualify for the NCAA Tournament — while at the same time ensuring, across the board, that those conferences would hoover up more bids.
Sixty-eight was no longer enough. There just aren’t enough bids! Won’t you think of the 11th-place team in the Big Ten!
The Unspoken Threat was: Expand the tournament or else.
Or else what?
Or else the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC could eventually consider starting their own national basketball tournament? That was The Unspoken Threat. This unhealthy velvet-hammer sentiment was shared to me by various NCAA and conference sources across the past three years. The NCAA felt it had to work its way to expansion, eventually, to get the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC to put down their swords.
“Do you get out ahead of this potentially and try to do something that might be helpful and meet the needs of the landscape that’s changing?” one high-ranking source told CBS Sports in 2025. “It does potentially guard against you in a proactive way. Those four, and perhaps two conferences, saying at some point, ‘You know what? We’re done with this. We’re just gonna go do our own thing.’ Is that likely to happen right now? No, but in 2032 and it’s the end of this CBS/Turner contract, and given what they’re doing with CFP and all that, you just can’t be tone deaf to the reality. The overall greatest part of the value of the tournament — in addition to the David vs. Goliath, which is certainly a significant part — is having those [power-conference] teams involved.”
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The men’s basketball tournament is the only thing that makes money for the NCAA. You lose that, you lose everything. The NCAA dies. That’s the power of The Unspoken Threat.
If, theoretically, the power conferences went off on their own to make a new national basketball tournament, it would burn down March Madness and destroy one of America’s greatest institutions. Instead, the NCAA could expand its March Madness fields order to appease the most powerful people in college sports and keep the enterprise together. To avoid a civil war.
And I’m here writing this column to tell you that this ever-lurking threat is and was bullshit.
It would never happen.
The most powerful people in college football’s “Power Four” do not carry the collective guts, gumption nor stupidity to actually go through with such a doomsday act. To leave the NCAA Tournament and start your own would mean to leave the NCAA altogether. All the other sports have to come with you, and all those sports cost a lot of money. What do you even do with the Big East, which doesn’t have football but boasts three of the most historically significantly programs in the sport’s history? Do you have a national tournament without UConn? Get all the way out of here with that.
In this apocalyptic scenario, the defecting power leagues wouldn’t get the naming rights to March Madness and everything else that’s built up cultural equity over more than 60 years either. They’d deplete the value of college basketball’s biggest event by losing the Cinderella aspect and not porting over most other conferences and there would, ironically enough, be a smaller tournament and a less valuable as a product as a result. The power leagues would have to start everything from scratch.
There’s a lot more and I found it persuasive, so read the rest. It’s too late for that thinking now, but maybe for the next time, when the ask is to go to 80 or whatever. In the meantime, expect the process of picking a bracket for whatever pool you enter to become that much more complicated. And expect it to be that much harder for a small-conference Cinderella to get anywhere. That, too, was part of the point of this.
