The magical March Madness cocktail will now include eight more teams, eight more games and more of one other ingredient, too: beer. Maybe wine, too.
The NCAA on Thursday announced a long-expected expansion of its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to 76 teams each starting next season, explaining that it made the money part work by opening sponsorship opportunities to a long-restricted alcohol category.
“I would say that expansion would not have happened without that agreement,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball.
The new, 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games — for a total of 12 involving 24 teams — into the front half of the first week of each tournament. It will turn what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair that will now be called the March Madness Opening Round.
The 12 winners will move into the main 64-team bracket that will begin, as usual, on Thursday for the men and Friday for the women. In all, there will now be 120 games across the two tournaments over seven days to set the table for the Sweet 16s.
“Things will look a little different, but feel very, very similar,” said Amanda Braun, the women’s tournament committee chair.
Because the added games were unlikely to sell themselves, the first expansion of the men’s tournament in 15 years — when it was bumped to 68 teams, followed by the women in 2022 — will be bankrolled by around $300 million in extra funding courtesy of new sponsorship opportunities for beer, wine, spirits and hard seltzer that includes more advertising space on CBS, TNT and other partners whose $8.8 billion deal runs through 2032.
The NCAA said it will distribute more than $131 million of the new revenue to schools that make the tournament.
A “money grab” for big conferences and an opportunity for Cinderellas, as well
The number of at-large selections will increase from 37 to 44, ESPN reported, most of which are expected to go to teams from the power conferences that were already commanding the lion’s share of entries in the bracket. Two years ago, the Southeastern Conference placed a record 14 teams in the men’s bracket. Last season, the Big Ten had nine.
In an interview earlier this week, UConn women’s coach Geno Auriemma spelled out the bottom line.
“This is strictly a money grab for the Power Four conferences to get teams that finished 6-10 in their conference to get into the tournament,” he said.
He also questioned the need to expand the women’s bracket. Only seven of 32 round-of-64 games this year were decided by single digits compared to 11 for the men.
The move is a sign of the times, which includes massive expansion — the Atlantic Coast Conference, for instance, has grown from nine to 17 teams since 1996 — and the reality that mid-major schools with talented players will often see them plucked away by programs with bigger budgets and the ability to pay them through revenue sharing. The rich get richer.
Cinderella? There will still be room for those stirring runs in the tournaments, though not a single mid-major advanced past the first weekend of either tournament the last two seasons.
“As someone who has been both David, and won some, and Goliath, and lost some, that’s what makes this tournament special,” Arkansas coach John Calipari said earlier in the week. “We can’t afford to lose that special piece of our sport.”
This is not a huge concern of the decision-makers anymore, who will point to TV ratings that traditionally spell out fans’ preference for watching the likes of Duke and North Carolina over St. Peter’s and San Diego State, especially once the Sweet 16 starts.
“The impact on everyone was considered,” said Keith Gill, the men’s tournament chairman. “We actually think it’s, overall, going to be positive. And we think that’s for folks at the autonomy level (Power Four) and folks that are non-autonomy.”
All conferences agreed, but big conferences pushed hardest
Gavitt said none of the 32 conferences in the NCAA objected to the proposal, though it’s no secret the power leagues have been pushing this the hardest.
Those schools don’t want to see promising teams left out of what remains the best postseason in college sports, especially in favor of lesser conference champions who earn automatic bids.
“You’ve got some really, really good teams who are going to end up in that 9, 10, 11 (seed) category that I think should be moved” into the 64-team bracket, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last year in discussing how he favored expansion.
The new beer and wine money will add to what the NCAA can distribute in “units” that are earned for placing teams in the bracket and then for every round those teams advance. Last year, that amounted to about $350,000 per unit for the men’s tournament.
Some of that extra money will go to the small guys, too. This gives all the 16 seeds (and some 15s) a chance to play an evenly matched game in the play-in round, then maybe win that game and the extra “unit” that comes with it.
“Also, as we continue to grow our basketball profile, additional at-large spots positions” are possible, Big Sky Conference commissioner Tom Wistrcill said.
Leaders in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC have all acknowledged that smaller programs help make March Madness what it is, all the while steadily expanding their own power in NCAA decision-making. That brings with it the tacit threat that they could split off and fracture the single thing the NCAA does best — the basketball tournament.
This move might forestall that. What it isn’t expected to do is drastically change the TV element, at least not beyond the advertising component.
Gavitt said the new games will likely be part of tripleheaders on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The NCAA will find a site to join the traditional First Four host, Dayton, Ohio, for some of the games. Then, come Thursday, there will be 64 teams in a bracket and a tournament that looks comfortingly familiar: three weeks of hoops capped off by the Final Four.
Gavitt said it was impossible to predict what might come after the current TV deal expires but that 76 teams is “maxing out the opportunity here.”
“Anything’s possible, I guess, in 2032 or beyond,” he said. “But I can say with confidence that this is the format that will be in place through 2032, and, we think, for a long time after that.”
