March Insanity is likely to be getting even greater.
NCAA president Charlie Baker stated throughout this week’s Huge 12 Spring Conferences in Orlando that the school basketball event may develop as quickly as 2026.
“That would be the goal, to try and do this for next year,” Baker instructed Entrance Workplace Sports activities. “…We’ve been talking about 72 and 76.”
Kansas’ Invoice Self stated his most of his Huge 12 colleagues are additionally in favor of the enlargement.
“[Self] said the league’s coaches would be in favor of expanding the NCAA Tournament,” The Lawrence Journal-World’s Henry Greenstein wrote on X.
The lads’s event final expanded from 64 to 68 video games in 2011.
Earlier than then, the format had been unchanged because the first NCAA Match in 1985.
Through the conferences, Baker stated the governing physique and its tv companions are at present going over logistics of the change.
“We’ve had good conversations with CBS and [Warner Bros. Discovery],” Baker stated, per ESPN. “Our goal here is to try to sort of get to either yes or no sometime in the next few months because there’s a lot of logistical work that would be associated with doing this. If we were to go down this road, you just think about the opening weekends, who has to travel the longest, it gets complicated.”
Baker added {that a} greater discipline may ensure that fewer worthy groups aren’t disregarded of the event.
“If you have a tournament that’s got 64 or 68 teams in it, you’re 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 aren’t going to make the tournament, period,” Baker stated.
“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.”
