A choice on whether or not or to not broaden the NCAA males’s and girls’s basketball tournaments might be made within the upcoming weeks, sources instructed ESPN.
If the choice is made to broaden, the growth would start within the 2025-26 season, per sources, and the match would broaden to not more than 76 groups. Sources have indicated to ESPN for months that 76 is the extra seemingly growth possibility than 72, as the present format for the lads’s and girls’s match is 68 groups.
The NCAA stays in talks with its media companions concerning the potential growth, which have been ongoing for months.
An growth of the match can be a historic and probably controversial step for the NCAA. An eight-team addition can be the largest bounce in how the lads’s NCAA basketball match has been compromised since 1985.
The lads’s match expanded to 64 groups in 1985. An extra staff was added in 2001, and the growth to the present 68-team format got here again in 2011.
The expectation is that each the lads’s and girls’s tournaments would develop by the identical quantity of groups.
NCAA president Charlie Baker has been open in speaking publicly about match growth, telling reporters at a Large 12 assembly in Could that the NCAA is having “good dialog” with its media companions.
Baker mentioned on the time: “Our objective right here is to attempt to type of get to both sure or no someday within the subsequent few months as a result of there’s quite a lot of logistical work that may be related to doing this. If we have been to go down this street, you simply take into consideration the opening weekends, who has to journey the longest, it will get sophisticated.”
One of many logistics can be the anticipated addition of a minimum of one further web site, reminiscent of Dayton within the males’s NCAA match. ESPN reported in February {that a} location can be anticipated to be outdoors the Jap Time zone.