NEW YORK — All that stands in the way of expanding the NCAA men’s basketball tournament appears to be money.
College sports leaders have been discussing with increasing diligence the possibility of allowing more teams to participate in March Madness for about four years. The iconic three-week event dominates the sports calendar and generates hundreds of millions in revenue for the NCAA and its 356 (and counting) Division I member schools.
Where do those conversations stand as 68 teams from Duke to St. Francis (Pa.) prepare to make a championship run and/or secure a few seconds in the “One Shining Moment” montage? In short: If those involved, including TV network partners CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery, figure out how to cover the costs of staging more games and paying out more schools without cutting current payments, expansion of the tournament field almost certainly will happen. Probably as soon as next year — no matter how unpopular it appears to be with fans.
There is also no guarantee the finances can be made to work, and if they don’t, expansion almost certainly will not happen.
“I’d say it’s not a foregone conclusion that the championships would expand,” NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt told The Athletic in January, a message he has reiterated in more recent interviews. “We’ve certainly been looking at it for some time.”
Driving this push to expand are the four wealthiest and most powerful of the 32 Division I conferences.
“I’m in favor of expansion to 76. I think that’s the right number,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said last week. “I think there will be some decisions over the next 90 days, 60 days. I think the economics, candidly, have to work. CBS and TNT have a marquee asset with the tournament. I know they know that. But in order for us to expand, they have to come to the table and provide the right economics. No one wants to get diluted.”
Outside the Power 4, positions on expansion generally fall into two categories:
1. Conditional support and optimism that the potential benefits of a bigger bracket will trickle down from the Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and ACC to other schools and conferences.
“I’ve been a proponent of expanding the tournament,” said Atlantic 10 commissioner Bernadette McGlade, whose league used to regularly put multiple teams in the field but lately has struggled to get as many as two bids. “One, I think there are additional teams beyond the 37 at-large slots that are available that are absolutely outstanding teams that can be part of the bracket.
“And number two is, I don’t think it’s all about money. Because what it does for individual institutions in terms of the uptick in branding, the national branding for any college or university that gets into the bracket, and their undergraduate enrollment and their fundraising, etc. It just all is exponentially higher when they’re a part of Selection Sunday, and they actually go up on the board.”
Take Drake, which is headed to the men’s NCAA Tournament for a third straight year as Missouri Valley Conference tournament champion. Had the Bulldogs (30-3) been upset at Arch Madness, they probably would have been sweating out Selection Sunday the way MVC rival Indiana State did last year. The Sycamores ended up being one of the first four teams left out of the 68-team field in 2024 after winning the MVC regular-season title.
“Today, maybe more than ever, the quality of teams expands across many leagues, and being able to try to find ways to get more quality teams into the tournament is a good thing,” Drake athletic director Brian Hardin said.
Ivy League executive director Robin Harris is quick to point out that expansion would also come to the women’s tournament, where her league secured two at-large bids for the first time this year.
“So expansion would actually help us. And on the men’s side, we’ve been close to getting an at-large. We could be one of the conferences to benefit from expansion,” she said.
2. Wary resignation from those who are fine with the status quo, see the case for expansion and hope making room for a few more middling power-conference teams keeps those conferences content while doing no harm to one of the crown jewels of American sports.
“That’s why everybody’s proceeding, I think, relatively cautiously,” Horizon League commissioner Julie Roe Lach said. “Because they recognize, Hey, there could be an opportunity to grow this a bit, but we’ve got to make sure that if that’s done we don’t undermine what is so magical about this time of year.”
“In the Big East, we’re fine if it stays the same and we’re fine if it expands at the level that we’ve heard is possible, which would be four to eight teams,” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman said. “But at the same time, we love the tournament the way it is, too. It’s not broken.”
And for coaches, whose job security often depends on making the tournament? Well, they’ve generally been supportive of expansion for years.
“Make it as big as they can make it,” Butler coach Thad Matta said.
The money
An eight-year extension of the NCAA’s deal with CBS and WBD for the men’s tournament broadcast rights began in September and is projected to push the yearly payout to the association past $1 billion over the course of its lifetime. Revenue from the men’s tournament already accounts for more than $900 million of the nearly $1.4 billion the NCAA reported in the 2024 fiscal year. Most of that revenue is distributed back to member schools through conferences, and for many D-I schools, that distribution is the foundation on which their athletic budgets are built.
The TV contract funds three key NCAA distributions: the equal conference fund, which guarantees each Division I league a share, or unit, that last year was worth about $2 million paid out over six years; the performance fund, which rewards conferences with additional units based on teams advancing in the tournament; and an academic fund, which provides schools bonuses for high graduation and academic progress ratings.
Starting this year, a similar unit program begins for women’s basketball, thanks to the NCAA’s new eight-year, $920 million deal with ESPN for the rights to that tournament and 39 other championships.
More teams in the field means more units to distribute, but nobody wants their pieces of the revenue pie to shrink because of expansion. Especially with the NCAA about to begin 10 years of paying off $2.8 billion in damages to settle three antitrust lawsuits. The agreement awaits final approval from a judge, but those damages are expected to impact the NCAA’s distributions to its members.
For power conference schools, NCAA Tournament payouts fund a fraction of annual budgets that soar past $100 million and for some go well over $200 million. The ACC pulled in the biggest unit haul from last year’s men’s tournament with a total of $34 million, but for 2022-23 the conference reported record revenues of $706 million, distributing an average of $44 million to its then-14 full members.
That’s not how most of Division I lives.
“If you’re drawing the revenue distribution pie, I think it’s fair to say, for many conferences, (NCAA Tournament distribution is) the biggest piece,” Lach said. “If it’s not the biggest piece, it’s one of the top two. It’s media revenue, and it’s the NCAA equal conference distribution.”
At Drake, a private school in Des Moines, Iowa, with an enrollment of about 4,500, basketball success and the revenue that comes with it is vital to funding an $18 million athletic budget.
“Access to the tournament has a significant impact on our bottom line at Drake, whether you look at it through the value of the unit and the additional funds that we’re able to receive by representing our conference in March Madness, as well as just the exposure of being on that stage, the excitement it generates with our alumni and with other students interested in attending college at Drake,” Hardin said.
CBS and WBD are under no obligation to increase the rights fee to cover the cost of expansion, nor have they signaled any great desire for more NCAA Tournament games.
“So as they’re looking to see if there are tweaks to be made, I think everyone’s just being really diligent and smart and careful,” said David Berson, president and CEO of CBS Sports. “Because while we might want to enhance it given the change in the college landscape that can justify expanding by a few teams, no one wants to do anything that’s going to take away from how special this tournament is. And I think that’s really where the focus is.”
He added, “It’s more in their lap than ours, but as a partner, we work with them to see how we can best maximize it.”
So where’s the money going to come from? How about beer commercials?
NCAA rules restrict sponsorship and advertising partnerships with certain products and services, most notably alcohol, pharmaceuticals and gambling. There will be no lifting of the prohibition of gambling sponsors anytime soon, but the other two are up for discussion. Allowing the TV partners to sell ad time and sponsorship opportunities to alcohol and pharma companies could be the tradeoff that unlocks the revenue to help the NCAA pay the cost of putting on the four games necessary to accommodate eight more teams being added to the field.
How much more the NCAA needs to at least break even is unclear.
For increasing the number of tournament games by four, or 6 percent, one might conclude the rights fee should increase by about $60 million per year. But all games are not created equal.
An expansion to 76 teams would likely result in another set of First Four games on Tuesday and Wednesday in which teams play into the main bracket of 64. Last year, those four games drew a total of 6.2 million viewers to truTV. By comparison, last year’s first-round games on Thursday and Friday drew an average of 8.53 million viewers to CBS and WBD platforms.
More games also mean more tickets to sell and other additional revenue opportunities that come with putting on an event, like T-shirt and souvenir sales.
There are other sponsorship opportunities the NCAA has shied away from tapping into over the years that could also be unlocked. How about ads on the courts during March Madness? Maybe on the players’ jerseys?
At a time when everyone in college sports is looking for a few extra bucks, it’s all on the table.
Meaningful access
To be fair, expanding the tournament wasn’t just a P4 idea. One of the recommendations to come out of the work of the NCAA’s transformation committee, formed in 2021 by former president Mark Emmert, was to adjust the field size of all NCAA championships to accommodate about 25 percent of the schools that compete in a sport.
When the basketball tournament expanded from 32 to 64 teams starting in 1985, it included 23 percent of Division I (282 schools). When it jumped to 68 in 2011, Division I had grown to 335 schools and the field represented 20 percent of teams.
Currently, the 68-team field for both the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments represents 19 percent of Division I schools. Nine more schools are in the process of making the transition to D-I. A 76-team field for a 364-school Division I would cover 21 percent of the division.
Purely by the numbers, another small expansion is easily justifiable.
The biggest concern outside the power conferences when expansion conversations first started was protecting the automatic bids (and the units that come with it) for every league. That doesn’t appear to be under serious threat in the current discussions. Instead, the focus has shifted from protecting access for the mid-majors to preserving what Lach, Harris and others refer to as “meaningful access.”
The current First Four format features two games matching the lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers playing into the bracket as 16 seeds and two more between the last four at-large teams to make the field. For the low mid-majors that play in the First Four in Dayton, the trade-off has been that with a victory comes the financial reward of a performance fund unit equal in value to those handed out to conferences that advance at any other point in the tournament.
If expansion turns a new First Eight into a play-in tournament exclusively for mid-majors, that would decrease opportunities for the types of upsets that highlight the first few days of March Madness, like last year when 14th-seeded Oakland from the Horizon League eliminated blue blood Kentucky of the SEC.
In short, Cinderella would be invited to the reception but still have to work her way past the bouncer and into the ball.
“You have to keep the magic in March Madness,” Lach said.
The good news for mid-majors is the television networks don’t love that idea, either. Having at-large teams in those Tuesday and Wednesday games ensures the presence of bigger brands that draw more viewers.
The devil’s in the details is the cliche thrown around often when talking about March Madness expansion. If the power conferences push for a larger cut of guaranteed tournament-related revenue, the way the Big Ten and SEC did with the College Football Playoff, that could spark a big fight in Division I. If, indeed, the math works out on the revenue side, expect the haggling about the execution to continue.
Everything else appears doable.
“I don’t think it’s a slam dunk that it’s done,” McGlade said, “but I do think that the analysis and the study is really serious, and I think the spirit is willing if the logistics and the formatting and the finances can be worked out, because the teams are definitely there.”
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