Hope you’re ready for a rebrand, Jeff Goodman and Rob Dauster. All that time you spent pushing for The Field of 68 as the go-to national college basketball talk show — now under the On3 umbrella, thankfully! — has gone to waste. Throw those t-shirts and hats in the dumpster, get a new graphic designer on payroll. Or you can just Sharpie out all of the 68s, throw some tape over and slap a new number on top. Whatever it takes, it’s time to get moving, because NCAA Tournament expansion is coming.
On3’s Ross Dellenger is reporting that while an agreement is not yet finalized, NCAA executives are inching toward one that will see a move from 68 teams in the March Madness field to 76 — not the 72 that had been previously discussed. That structure would lead to eight additional games in the Big Dance, starting in 2026-27, just one season away from now.
You know the First Four we see now, played on Tuesday and Wednesday ahead of the full game slate later in the week? That will be considered the “opening round,” as one executive told Dellenger, getting us back to that 64-team field on Thursday and Friday, getting us down to 32 for Saturday and Sunday games ahead of the Sweet 16.
The added chaos will be frontloaded with just a one-day gap following Selection Sunday. Ready or not, here it comes!
“This new opening round features 24 teams playing in 12 games over the two days, with six games each at two sites (Dayton, the current home of the First Four, plus another likely more basketball-centric Western location),” Ross Dellenger reports. “Those involved in the negotiations caution that plenty of this could change through the course of continuing talks with TV partners Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS.
“For now, this is the plan.”
The new format will include 12 lower-seeded automatic qualifiers and 12 at-large selections with eight extracted from the main bracket and eight at-large picks added thanks to the expansion, now adding a play-in game to reach the field of 64.
It’ll be like starting in the loser’s bracket to get to the winner’s bracket — but you’re getting a shot to make some noise in March Madness, which is all anyone wants each season anyway.
NCAA president Charlie Baker wants all 32 automatic qualifiers to get in like always, but others on the bubble and just outside are deserving, too.
“There are every year some really good teams that don’t get to the tournament for a bunch of reasons,” he said. “One of the reasons is we have 32 automatic qualifiers (for conference champions). I love that and think it’s great and never want that to change, but that means there’s only 36 slots left for everybody else. I don’t buy the idea that some of the teams that currently get left out aren’t good. I think they are. And I think that sucks.”
What do we think, BBN? Are we in on the field of 76?
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