MORGANTOWN — The NCAA men’s basketball tournament died Tuesday night of pure greed and nonsense. It was 86 years old.
Beginning with the 2027 edition, a total of 76 teams will now take part in the national championship tournament, previously known as March Madness. That’s assuming various oversight committees and the Division I board of governors sign off on the idea, which will happen.
How is the expanded bracket going to work? Does it really matter? Will the women’s tournament also expand to 76 teams? Yes.
In the weeks to come – sometime in May – the NCAA will expand its hoops tournaments to a number desired only by NCAA officials for TV rights negotiating purposes and also by handfuls of Power Four Conference coaches and athletic directors who will be the greatest benefactors of the expansion.
The women’s tournament will expand to satisfy Title IX regulations. Expanding the men’s tournament has been a topic for nearly the last 20 years, an idea that had repeatedly met opposition from the media, fans and basketball traditionalists alike. The idea continuously was shot down until now.
The first question you want to ask is why. It’s the obvious question, but not the most critical one.
As to why, it comes down to money. We’ll break it down for you. The NCAA’s current TV contract with CBS and the Turner networks for the men’s tournament runs through 2032 and averages out to $1.1 billion per year.
The NCAA pockets a certain percentage of that, while the rest gets shoveled out to the conferences in forms of units. In terms of the Big 12, the more teams the conference gets into the tournament and the more those teams advance, the more units the conference earns from the pie.
Whatever that final unit tally is, the NCAA writes a check to the Big 12 and it becomes a part of the overall sum the conference hands out annually to its 16 teams. Each Big 12 school earned around $35 million in 2025. That sum includes so much more than just the NCAA hoops tourney – think College Football Playoff, TV rights with Fox and ESPN – but the NCAA men’s basketball tournament plays a part, as does the women’s hoops tournament, the NCAA baseball tournament and so on.
By adding eight more teams, the NCAA will negotiate a slightly higher deal with CBS and Turner, which means a little more for the NCAA to pocket and more units for Power Four schools to earn.
You didn’t expect those eight additional spots to go to schools in the Horizon League or the Mid-American Conference, did you? On average, maybe two of the eight will go to mid-major schools. The majority will go to the major conferences, who are already shelling out millions to its athletes for NIL and revenue sharing purposes, so the major conferences are on board with expansion.
The coaches aren’t going to complain. Why? Because WVU men’s head coach Ross Hodge earns a $20,000 bonus if the Mountaineers play in the round of 64. There are certainly other head coaches with more lucrative bonuses.
The more crucial question to be asked is whether or not this is just another step taken to the overall deterioration of college basketball?
Between conference expansion, one-and-done freshmen and the transfer portal the game is no longer what it once was. The product has been diluted, destroyed and picked apart to the point that the only thing that hasn’t changed are the names of the schools on the front of the jerseys.
Let me throw this fact at you: The highest TV rating for a men’s basketball championship game came in 1979, which drew a 24.1 rating due to the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird impact. That averaged out to about 35.1 million people watching the game.
Now, the population of the United States has grown by more than 50% since 1979, yet the TV viewership ratings haven’t really come close in recent years. This year’s Michigan-UConn title game averaged 18.3 million viewers. The 2025 Florida-Houston game averaged 18.1 million. The 2024 UConn-Purdue title game had fewer viewers than the NCAA women’s championship game that same year.
In any other facet of the world outside of the insane mindset of the NCAA, these types of numbers don’t scream for expansion.
The product is dying. True, it may be a slow death, but the overall national enthusiasm around college basketball isn’t what it once was. Greed is killing it. Players coming and going are killing it. Paying players who can’t average more than 10 points a game $1 million in NIL funds is killing it.
Fans don’t even hate Duke like they used to.
And now adding eight more teams to the tournament who will have records that look something like 17-15 or 18-14 that have no national interest or following outside of their own fan bases will only add to its demise.
The NCAA is helping its member schools make more money, but at what cost? That’s the question it refuses to ask itself.
The NCAA tournament, the one we all grew up loving, is now dead. What follows is March Madness in name only.
