Sources: NCAA nears choice on bigger tourney

A choice on whether to expand the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments will be made in the upcoming weeks, sources informed ESPN.If the decision is made to broaden, the expansion would begin in the 2025-26 season, per sources, and the tournament would expand to no greater than 76 groups. Sources have actually shown to ESPN for months that 76 is the more likely expansion option than 72, as the current format for the males’s and ladies’s competition is 68 teams.The NCAA stays in talks with its media partners about the possible growth, which have been ongoing for months.A growth of

the tournament would be a historic and possibly questionable action for the NCAA. An eight-team addition would be the most significant jump in how the men’s NCAA basketball competition has actually been compromised since 1985. The guys’s competition broadened to 64 groups

in 1985. An extra group was added in 2001, and the growth to the present 68-team format returned in 2011. The expectation is that both the males’s and women’s

tournaments would grow by the same amount of teams.NCAA president Charlie Baker has been open in talking publicly about tournament growth, telling press reporters at a Huge 12 meeting in Might that the NCAA is having”excellent conversation”with its media partners.Baker said at the time: “Our goal here is to attempt to sort of get to either yes or no sometime in the next couple of months since there’s a great deal of logistical work that would be related to doing this. If we were to go down this road, you simply consider the opening weekends, who needs to take a trip the longest, it gets complicated.”Among the logistics would be the anticipated addition of at least one additional site, such as Dayton in the men’s NCAA tournament. ESPN reported in February that an area would be anticipated to be outside the Eastern Time zone.