NCAA President Charlie Baker remains hopeful that the NCAA Tournament could expand for the 2026-27 season, he announced at a Big East Media Roundtable on Monday afternoon.\u00a0Baker declined to place a percentage chance on expansion, but said he hopes \u201cwe could find a way to get there\u201d by next year. The 2025-26 Tournament will remain unaffected.<\/p>\n
Speaking to an assembly of conference representatives, Baker reiterated his support for expansion. \u201cI really see expansion as an opportunity to give a bunch of worthy schools,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re giving 32 automatic qualifiers every year in a field of 68, almost by definition it means you\u2019re gonna leave a bunch of teams out of the Tournament who are probably among the 65 best. You raise the size of the Tournament a little bit, you can pretty much guarantee that won\u2019t be an issue going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baker cited recent snubs from the Big East, including the 2023-24 St. John\u2019s team that finished 20-13 and nearly toppled eventual national champion UConn in the conference Tournament. \u201cI was bummed St John\u2019s didn\u2019t make the Tournament a couple years ago because they were the only team that gave Connecticut a run for their money,\u201d he said. \u201cThey had a couple of terrible losses early, and their net rating was just outside the perimeter. And I think if they did (qualify), then that would be fun.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Baker also bemoaned the exclusion of NIT finalists Indiana State (MVC) and Seton Hall (Big East) from the 2024 Tournament: \u201cIt bothered me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The projected expansion would raise the number of teams in the field from 64 to 76. It would slash the First Four play-in tournament and introduce a new \u201copening round\u201d of 24 competitors, a mix of the lowest ranked at-large and automatic qualifiers. The 12 winners would advance to the Round of 64. \u201cThe opening round is now the First Round,\u201d Baker said of the possible new model. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a play-in anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baker has previously stated that any decision on expansion must be made by the middle of August, roughly seven months before Tournament play. Across three seasons of expansion discourse, his primary obstacle has remained logistics. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of people you got to move around in a very short period of time without much notice,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause the due date, with respect to all this, is the night of the day before.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Any decision made would impact both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s Tournaments.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMore Like This<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NCAA President Charlie Baker remains hopeful that the NCAA Tournament could expand for the 2026-27 season, he announced…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":319711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[1339,1317,1337,1338,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-319710","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-basketball","11":"tag-ncaabasketball","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}