WASHINGTON, D.C. — Any expansion of the NCAA basketball tournaments is growing more unlikely for this upcoming season, according to executives in the sport.
During a speaking engagement at the National Press Club on Thursday, NCAA president Charlie Baker confirmed comments earlier this week from ACC commissioner Jim Phillips that any expansion of the men’s and women’s tournaments would be “tough” to do for 2025-26.
“I think that’s a reasonable statement,” Baker said.
He pointed to the “logistics” involved with any expansion.
The NCAA basketball selection committees — responsible, along with the basketball oversight committees, for making any expansion decision — met earlier this month where committee members learned that expansion, if approved, would most likely start in 2026-27, multiple sources with knowledge of the meeting told Yahoo Sports.
The comments from Baker and Phillips further advance that notion.
(Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images)
However, during an hour-long address to the National Press Club, Baker continued to speak in favor of expanding the tournament to 72 or 76 teams to grant access to more worthy participants, such as those left on the bubble.
“There are every year some really good teams that don’t get to the tournament for a bunch of reasons,” Baker told the crowd. “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,” he continued.
For more than a year now, college administrators have been seriously exploring adding four or eight teams to the 68-team field, a move that likely requires the addition of another “First Four” site.
Baker pushed back against suggestions that additional revenue from TV partners is behind the NCAA and conferences’ desire to expand. It is not a “big moneymaker,” he said, and the association would only want to cover the costs of expansion with any additional revenue.
The NCAA has been in negotiations with the networks, Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS, for months now. Last month, Baker told Yahoo Sports that the organization has held “good conversations” with those partners and that any decisions for 2025-26 would need to be made by “the middle of August.”
“The big challenge is the logistical one,” Baker said Thursday from D.C. “The tournament has to start after conference championships are over and the selection (show) happens like two hours after the last championship ends. And (the tournament) has to finish by the Tuesday before the Masters. There’s not a lot of room there.”
That hasn’t slowed his support for expansion.
In fact, Baker mentioned recent bubble teams left out of the field like St. John’s and Indiana State. “They should have been in,” he said.
Expansion is “a way to preserve the AQs and real Cinderellas, but it’s also to make sure some of the 65 best teams in the country who get left out because of the 32 AQs find their way in,” he said.
Baker addressed another looming issue: athlete eligibility standards.
On Thursday, as he spoke to the press club, the NCAA announced a proposed legislation change to Division II eligibility rules. The proposal would grant athletes five years to play five seasons (five-in-five) instead of the current four seasons-over-five years standard.
Such a change in Division I is on the “backburner” while the NCAA adopts a new governance model, something expected next month from the NCAA DI Board of Directors.
“I would assume at some point (five-in-five) will come up again. I don’t know if we’ll land there or not,” Baker said of the five-in-five eligibility proposal for Division I.
