Could College basketball fans experience more March Madness as early as 2026? NCAA president Charlie Baker feels optimistic about it.<\/p>\n
Baker was at the Big 12 spring meetings on Thursday. While there, he discussed that conversations are ongoing with March Madness broadcast partners \u2014 CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery \u2014 about possibly expanding the men\u2019s tournament as soon as 2026. David Rumsey of Front Office Sports reported that the conversations are for the NCAA Tournament to expand to either 72 or 76 teams.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had good conversations with CBS and WBD,\u201d Baker said, per Rumsey\u2019s report<\/a>. \u201cOur goal here is to try to either get to yes or no sometime in the next few months, because there\u2019s a lot of logistical work that would be associated with doing this, if we were to go down this road.\u201d<\/p>\n Citing Baker, Rumsey confirmed that if initiated, the change would be made for March Madness in 2026. Baker also offered a timeline as to when we\u2019ll know if the change will take place.<\/p>\n \u201cThat would be the goal\u2014to try and do this for next year, which is why the window to actually negotiate it will probably end sometime early summer,\u201d Baker said, via Rumsey.<\/p>\n The NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams from 53 in 1985. The tournament has kept a similar format over the last 40 years, with two minor additions being made along the way. In 2001, March Madness expanded to 65 teams, adding an \u201cOpening Round\u201d matchup. That remained the format until 2011, when the current 68-team bracket was implemented.<\/p>\n The 2025 men\u2019s tournament confirmed that there is still great interest in March Madness \u2014 and not just in the later rounds. The opening weekend of the 2025 tournament produced record viewership totals<\/a>. Additionally, from a competitive standpoint, the 2025 NCAA Tournament featured arguably the most notable snub of all time in West Virginia, who controversially missed<\/a> the tournament despite being on the bracket of all 111 bracketologists.<\/p>\n So, this is a particularly good year to have the March Madness expansion conversation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Could College basketball fans experience more March Madness as early as 2026? NCAA president Charlie Baker feels optimistic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[15899,7,15900,217,7456,231,772,1400,15901,1544],"class_list":{"0":"post-65941","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-2026-ncaa-mens-tournament","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-charlie-baker","11":"tag-college-basketball","12":"tag-march-madness","13":"tag-ncaa","14":"tag-ncaa-basketball","15":"tag-ncaa-tournament","16":"tag-ncaa-tournament-expansion","17":"tag-ncaab"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114596744543723630","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}