Huge 12’s Yormark: 76-team tourney ‘ideal number’
Mar 11, 2025, 04:29 PM ET
KANSAS CITY, Mo.– Huge 12 commissioner Brett Yormark is in favor of expanding the guys’s NCAA tournament to 76 teams, and he thinks a decision might be available in the next few months, opening the possibility of proposed modifications being implemented as quickly as next year.Yormark spoke
before the start of the Big 12 competition Tuesday.
“I’m in favor of expansion to 76. I think that’s the best number,” he said. “I think the economics candidly need to work. CBS and TNT have a marquee [television] property with the tournament. I know they know that. But in order for us to expand, they require to come to the table and supply the ideal economics.”
This year’s edition of March Insanity will be the 40th males’s bracket considering that the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985; it later grew to the existing 68-team configuration. The females’s bracket increased to 64 in 1994 and included 4 more groups in 2022.
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In 2015, the NCAA provided a strategy to Department I commissioners that would expand the guys’s and women’s tournaments by 4 or 8 teams together with an option to leave each field at 68. The time-honored 64-team bracket would remain, and the added groups would become part of the play-in games involving the 10-through-12 seeds.NCAA senior
vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said in a recent CBS Sports interview that he doesn’t anticipate a vote in the future, but he left open the possibility of a spring vote. Gavitt said that modifications in game operation and travel are amongst numerous concerns to consider, which the choice is “not taken in a lighthearted method at all.”
“Growth, even in a modest level, is complicated, more intricate than I believe has been recognized and reported because it is expensive,” said Gavitt, whose dad, Dave Gavitt, helped oversee the 1985 expansion as chair of the choice committee.Gavitt said throughout
the CBS interview that he isn’t sure whether the field must expand, however he sounded more favorable about the possibility than he was a couple of years back. Call, image and likeness, conference realignment and the transfer website have altered the dynamics, and Gavitt said males’s basketball, in specific, might be suited to handle it.
“There’s no sport that is deeper general and has more parity than guys’s college basketball,” he said. “There’s terrific basketball played at every level in men’s basketball right now. So I believe it is essential to keep the tournament modern and pertinent, based upon what is going on in college sports.”
That was the case made by Yormark, who stated Tuesday that he believes there is a cravings for more teams and games.
“I believe there will be some choices over the next 90 days, 60 days,” he stated. “Nobody wishes to be watered down, and we have an excellent asset here. We’ll see how it plays out.”