March Madness to remain at 68 teams, for now

The NCAA Tournament field will remain at 68 teams, at least for the time being.

Dan Gavitt, the NCAA senior vice president of basketball, announced Thursday that both the NCAA Division I mens and womens basketball committees met this week to discuss potentially expanding the field beyond the current 68-team format.

"The topic of expanding the field for each championship was discussed at length but no decision or recommendation was made, Gavitt said in a statement.

The still-viable outcomes include the tournaments remaining at 68 teams or expanding the fields to either 72 or 76 teams in advance of the 2026 or 2027 championships." March Madness expanded from 64 to 68 teams in 2011 with the creation of the First Four, a set of games in which the four lowest-seeded at-large teams and four lowest-seeded conference champions play for the right to move into the traditional 64-team bracket.

The womens tournament expanded to 68 teams in 2022.

San Diego State played in the First Four for the first time last season, losing 95-68.

It was the fifth straight year the Aztecs reached the Big Dance and the 12th time in 15 years, excluding 2020 when it was canceled due to the pandemic, with SDSU expecting no worse than a No.

2 seed.

The Tecs reached the national championship game in 2023 before losing to UConn.

NCAA President Charlie Baker said in late May that he sees value in expanding the NCAA Tournament by a handful of teams and wants a decision by later this summer.

Baker said it would be good to give more opportunities to worthy teams and that the current format has flaws.

If you have a tournament thats got 64 or 68 teams in it, youre going to have a bunch of teams that are probably among what most people would consider to be the best 68 or 70 teams in the country that arent going to make the tournament, period, Baker said during the Big 12 spring meetings.

The point behind going from 68 to 72 or 76 is to basically give some of those schools that were probably among the 72, 76, 68, 64 best teams in the country a way into the tournament.

Baker said the NCAA has had good conversations with CBS and Warner Bros.

Discovery, whose holdings include the Turner networks that air NCAA Tournament games.

Our goal here is to try to sort of get to either yes or no sometime in the next few months because theres a lot of logistical work that would be associated with doing this, he said.

If we were to go down this road, you just think about the opening weekends, who has to travel the longest, it gets complicated..

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