The mechanics of the expansion in the men’s tournament would include eight additional at-large bids. What’s known now as the First Four – eight teams playing four games in Dayton, Ohio – would expand to 12 games played by 24 teams at two sites, one of which is expected to remain in Dayton.
More mediocre power conference teams in the tourney. More mid-majors in the play-in round.
As a meager silver lining, is it possible that a 76-team field would have gotten, say, 2024 Princeton into the tourney for a two-bid Ivy? Obviously, the main goal is to get more power conference teams in, but maybe the Selection Committee can throw ONE bone to the mids each year?
Color me skeptical that this increases ratings and revenue by very much if at all. But maybe it will reduce the fear factor for scheduling good mid-majors among the less-powerful power conference teams.
Hope it doesn’t kill the WBIT. I ran into Riley Weiss on campus and she did not disagree with the suggestion that, as much as they wanted to win the Ivy championship, they probably had more fun in the postseason than the Princeton women did.
To my thinking, the last thing the tournament needs is more P4 teams with sub-.500 conference records. If you can’t post a winning record in conference, you shouldn’t get a bid.
Agree 100%. Nobody wants to watch Auburn, Virginia Tech or sorry Indiana play again. And nobody wants to listen to the commentators make the case for these lousy teams either. Bruce Pearl stumping for Auburn was painful.
This is the language of the article that intrigued me: “The traditional 64-team men’s team bracket would still begin Thursday and look much the same. The major difference would be more teams that qualify as traditional at-larges would have to play earlier than the 64-team bracket.”
Does this mean that all the newly added at-large teams would be the ones playing that first round? Not the auto bids? If so, this is fine with me. If it means auto-Dayton (or whatever other site is used), this is bad news.
The quote was, “more teams that qualify as traditional at-larges would have to play earlier than the 64-team bracket.”
That statement is true if understood correctly. The 2026 NCAA tournament (this year) had 31 automatic qualifiers and 37 at large teams. 4 of the 31 teams representing automatically qualifying conferences were sent to Dayton to produce two winners who would join the other 27 automatically qualifying teams in the round of 64. 4 of the 37 at large teams were sent to Dayton to produce two winners who would join the 33 other at large teams in the round of 64.
In 2027 the Pac “12” with its current 8 football teams and 9 basketball teams will regain its automatic bid. The tournament will have 32 automatic qualifiers and 44 at large teams. 12 of the 32 teams representing automatically qualifying conferences will be sent to Dayton or the new, second site to produce 6 winners who will join the other 20 automatically qualifying teams in the round of 64. 12 of the 44 at large teams will be sent to Dayton or the new, second site to produce 6 winners who would join the 32 other at large teams in the round of 64.
So, the quoted statement was literally true. “More teams [next year, 12 compared to 4 this year] that qualify as traditional at-larges would have to play earlier than the 64-team bracket.”
Here is the real impact on the representatives from the automatically qualifying conferences. Since the size of the field increased from 64 to 68 teams, the committee seeded 6 automatic qualifiers as 16 seeds. 4 of those 6 teams were sent to Dayton. Starting next year, the committee will seed 8 automatic qualifiers as 16 seeds and all 8 of them will be sent to one of the two “opening round” sites. The committee will seed 6 automatic qualifiers as 15 seeds and four of those 6 teams will be sent to one of the two “opening round” sites.
The $64,000 question is which conferences will receive the benefit of the additional at large slots. We can figure discern how that would have worked in this year’s tournament. The NCAA Selection Committees publicly announced those teams that were the First Four out and the Next four out. Here are those teams and their conference affiliations.