A call on whether or not or to not broaden the NCAA males’s and ladies’s basketball tournaments will probably be made within the upcoming weeks, sources instructed ESPN.
If the choice is made to broaden, the enlargement would start within the 2025-26 season, per sources, and the event would broaden to not more than 76 groups. Sources have indicated to ESPN for months that 76 is the extra seemingly enlargement choice than 72, as the present format for the lads’s and ladies’s event is 68 groups.
The NCAA stays in talks with its media companions concerning the potential enlargement, which have been ongoing for months.
An enlargement of the event could be a historic and doubtlessly controversial step for the NCAA. An eight-team addition could be the largest bounce in how the lads’s NCAA basketball event has been compromised since 1985.
The boys’s event expanded to 64 groups in 1985. An extra staff was added in 2001, and the enlargement to the present 68-team format got here again in 2011.
The expectation is that each the lads’s and ladies’s tournaments would develop by the identical quantity of groups.
NCAA president Charlie Baker has been open in speaking publicly about event enlargement, telling reporters at a Massive 12 assembly in Could that the NCAA is having “good dialog” with its media companions.
Baker stated on the time: “Our objective right here is to attempt to kind of get to both sure or no someday within the subsequent few months as a result of there’s plenty of logistical work that will be related to doing this. If we had 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 could be the anticipated addition of at the very least one extra website, reminiscent of Dayton within the males’s NCAA event. ESPN reported in February {that a} location could be anticipated to be exterior the Japanese Time zone.
