At the center of the 2025 NCAA Convention is a gift shop. It is everything you imagine: T-shirts. Mugs. Keychains. Tchotchkes of all shapes and sizes.
Among the sea of overpriced objects lies a group of branded items far more recognizable than even the ubiquitous logo of the association itself: the NCAA tournament section.
For the administrators who have descended upon Nashville, this collection bearing the logos of this year’s Final Four of the men’s basketball tournament in San Antonio and the women’s edition in Tampa are hot sellers.
They usually are. There is a deep love of the annual hoops festivals. It is, after all, called March Madness.
Everyone enjoys the buzzer beaters and the ability to showcase one’s school on the grand stage—a marketing opportunity unlike any other in American sports.
There is also a healthy debate about the future of this commonality, a simmering question mark among the vast number of debates about the future of college athletics going on right now.
What, exactly, is going to happen to the tourney? At this point, it’s a rhetorical question. But there is additional clarity coming over the weeks and months to come.
The 68-team field could be on the way out. Expansion, again since the 64-team format was originally instituted, may happen. Or, surprisingly, it may not.
“The answer is definitively no, I’d say, it is not a foregone conclusion that the championships would expand,” NCAA vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt says. “We’ve certainly been looking at it for some time, we continue to work on it with the basketball committees. There’s good reasons to consider it. The growth of Division I, which we know has been like 30% over the last 40 years. The consolidation of high-major programs in fewer and larger conferences as we’ve seen as a result of realignment. Then just general parity in the game and institutional investment.
“But one of the possible outcomes is not to expand. And I think it may have been lost a little bit in the coverage of the debate.”
Perhaps the most vocal opponent to this line of thinking has been Gavitt’s boss, NCAA president Charlie Baker. He has been vocal over the last several months about the tournament expanding to 72 or 76 programs.
Proposals for such a move have been formally debated and discussed since last summer. They are expected to become even more accelerated in the wake of the NCAA v. House settlement. Not surprisingly, a decision will revolve around money.
The NCAA currently has a longtime media rights deal with CBS and Turner Sports to broadcast the men’s basketball tournament through 2032 that is worth billions of dollars. There is a separate deal with ESPN to televise the women’s tourney—along with 40 other championship events—that runs another eight years starting this season.
Both represent the vast majority of the NCAA’s yearly intake, which Baker noted Tuesday has seen TV revenues rocket up by more than 19% year-over-year for the organization. Most of those dollars flow through the national office back to the schools in the form of distributions and tournament “units” won by teams the further they progress in the tournament.
However, if the NCAA expands the men’s tournament, there would be no additional media rights revenue from CBS or Turner. More games would not equal more money based on the way the current contract is worded, even accounting for growth in other areas such as sponsorship and tickets. The added expenses, which vary depending on the model adopted, would shrink the pie available to programs making the tournament.
Notably, those expenses would grow further as the result of the NCAA’s commitment to gender equity. If the men’s tournament expands, so too will the women’s. That means more expenses to deal with for the association, which is already undergoing a shift on the women’s side with the introduction of payouts for successful postseason runs in the form of units akin to the men.
In a potential post-House world, that’s a no-go before even getting into the complicated matter of where those extra bids might come from.
That strikes at the heart of the other issue with NCAA tournament expansion: Is this all a move designed to give more bids to bigger leagues like the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC at the expense of the Cinderellas that have defined the event?
Could last year’s Oakland Golden Grizzlies stunner of the mighty Kentucky Wildcats never happen moving forward because the Horizon League champions will instead be shipped to play another mid-major at the new equivalent of the First Four in Dayton? Will nobody revel in knowing the location of the Saint Peter’s Peacocks because they went on a run as the 15-seed out of nowhere?
“They’re having those discussions with the NCAA staff as well as with the selection committees. Oversight committee will ultimately get a recommendation to take a review, and I’m looking forward to what that recommendation will be,” says Big West commissioner Dan Butterly, the chair of the Division I men’s basketball oversight committee. “I am really considering, from a commissioner standpoint, how are we protecting the automatic qualifiers? What happens with those 32 automatic qualifiers? Are they guaranteed to be in the main bracket and the additions added to a First Four or whatever that could be down the road? Or, will the lowest-seeded teams regardless of AQ be put in those [First Four] brackets?”
Such questions are part of a growing concern, especially among the dozens of conferences who do not sponsor FBS football and primarily consider themselves basketball leagues.
“Championships access is a line in the sand,” one Division I athletic director cautioned.
It doesn’t help the case of the Power 4 leagues, or Autonomy 4 in NCAA parlance, that they recently submitted proposals regarding the future of the governance structure the NCAA will operate under once things eventually work their way through a byzantine structure of committees and votes.
One proposal, submitted by the SEC, is mostly centered around the creation of a new subdivision that would further codify the major football-playing schools’ power as separate from the rest of their D-I brethren.
Part of the proposal is handing over additional control of the one thing most closely associated with the NCAA, its championships like the men’s and women’s basketball tournament. Not only could the power leagues change the number of bids to March Madness, they could determine who is invited.
That, however, could be a bridge too far for some in a membership of over 300 schools who are increasingly limited to just a few common touchpoints.
“I’m a hard seller that the biggest problem we have is that we don’t do a good job running championships. I actually think that’s something we’re pretty good at,” Baker said. “There are many things about the way that we operate, particularly on the D-I level, that are worthy of conversation and discussion, including that one.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as March Madness Expansion a Hot Topic at NCAA Convention.