NCAA President Charlie Baker: March Madness could expand to 72, 76 teams

The NCAA Basketball Tournament could see expansion before too long, according to Yahoo Sports‘ Ross Dellenger.

“NCAA president Charlie Baker says progress is being made around expanding the NCAA tournament to 72 or 76 teams,” Dellenger wrote on Twitter. “He doesn’t expect it to move past 76. TV partners have expressed an openness to it.”

The tournament currently has a field of 68 teams. A field of 64 was the long time, modern day tradition. It was pushed to 68 teams with “First Four” games back in 2011.

Baker made an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show in November and was asked about a previous model that could push the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams.

“No we’re not. The most we’ll ever go to is somewhere in the 70s. The calendar is very, very limited in how many games we can slam into that period of time,” Baker said.

NCAA Tournament to 72 or 76 games?

College sports leadership took another big step toward expanding the NCAA Tournament, Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported in June. Commissioners were presented with a model that would expand March Madness by four or eight teams as early as the 2025-26 season.

NCAA vice president for basketball Dan Gavitt presented the models to commissioners, and an idea would be to expand at-large bids instead of taking away the automatic bids from smaller conferences. The NCAA Tournament could also see an additional First Four site, along with Dayton.

If such expansion occurs, the 64-team bracket will stay in place for the NCAA Tournament, Dellenger reported. That means the NCAA would look to bring more teams in by adding play-in games.

However, chatter increased over the last year about adding more teams to the NCAA Tournament field. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey made waves after saying “we’re giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers,” but Dellenger’s report suggests expansion will include more at-larges.

Andrew Graham contributed to this report