March Madness’s gross 76-team bracket was created for one reason

The NCAA announced expansion of the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments on Thursday, swelling the annual March brackets to a pointlessly bloated 76 teams each, set to begin in 2027. It takes the concept of the “First Four,” which was adopted in 2011, and expands it by another eight teams to have six games take place ahead of the true first round — rather than two. No one wanted this, and yet we’re getting it anyway.

While the move stops shots of adding a full round, it unquestionably waters down a field that already feels bloated. Under the new format, the tournament “bubble” would have effectively been eliminated in 2026, with Oklahoma, Auburn, Indiana, Cincinnati, and San Diego State all making the play-in portion, despite several of the teams having a barely-better-than-500 record on the season. From an aesthetic point of view the new bracket is ugly as hell, adding to the already-awkward “First Four” which has ruined the beauty of the bracket for the last 15 years.

The NCAA’s motivation for the decision should surprise nobody. Instead of discussing the sports value in expanding the field to 76, SVP of basketball Dan Gavitt focused on the important thing: Those sweet, sweet corporate dollars.

“I think we can say with confidence that 76 is really maxing out the opportunity here, given the time frame the tournaments operate in,” Gavitt said. “A larger field size wouldn’t be easily accommodated or even feasible to fit into that time frame. It also is expensive. We think we’ve optimized the media value with eight new teams and eight new games.”

The 2026 tournament marked the first time in history that broadcast rights for the tournament topped $1B, thanks to viewership escalators, which pushed up the amount of money the NCAA received from CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery (TNT, TBS, TruTV). The current escalator rights deal is in place until the 2032 season, meaning there’s significant incentive for the NCAA to bloat the tournament as much as humanly possible, because every new set of eyes, every additional game broadcast, all get to add to their bottom line at the end of it.

Gavitt comically attempted to downplay the amount of money the NCAA is bringing in from the tournaments by attempting to explain how expensive it is to host March Madness.

“Expansion would not have happened without that agreement,” Gavitt said Thursday. “There’s travel expenses, of course. There’s per diem for the teams, and there’s game operations expenses as well.”

Travel? Per diem? Game expenses? Be still my beating heart! How can y’all possibly be managing to make ends meet with $1B in revenue? It’s akin to winning the Powerball, then complaining about how it cost $15 in gas to drive to the lottery commission and redeem the ticket.

The losers in all this are the fans of college basketball. It’s not just about the bloat which March Madness will experience, but the de-emphasis of the regular season as a result. Leagues across sports have been struggling to balance trying to add revenue from expanded playoff formats, while also keeping the regular season interesting — but these efforts have largely failed. There is functionally no point to turning into games in December and January, knowing full well that barely having a winning record is all that’s required to get into the tournament.

We’re all addicted to March Madness, and the NCAA knows it. There’s no point discussing “not watching,” because we won’t. The more games means more viewers, and more gambling — all of which means more than the sanctity of the sport. In a perfect world someone would say “enough is enough,” get off the endless capitalist treadmill that preaches “more is always better,” but that’s not going to happen any time soon.

The NCAA has pledged this will be the last expansion until 2032. At that point the media rights are back up for bid, and who knows what happens next? It’s both ridiculous and plausible that in a decade’s time we could be facing a field of 128, stretching into February and turning “March Madness,” into just “Madness.”

As long as the money is there, nothing else matters to the NCAA.