March Madness won’t grow? Tournament expansion chances shrinking fast

Any hopes of the NCAA tournament expanding to 72 or 76 teams in 2026 appear to be dead. 

ACC CommissionerJim Phillips had already mentioned that while the men's basketball coaches in his conference are in favor of expansion while the women's basketball coaches are generally opposed. Plus the logistics of adding teams and games to the tournament in a short window.

NCAA president Charlie Baker echoed Phillips' thoughts and concerns while speaking with the National Press Club on Thursday and a story from Ross Delliinger of Yahoo! Sports goes into greater detail about why expansion would work at this time. 

“The big challenge is the logistical one,” Baker said. “The tournament has to start after conference championships are over and the selection (show) happens like two hours after the last championship ends. And (the tournament) has to finish by the Tuesday before the Masters. There’s not a lot of room there.”

It's time for the NCAA Tournament to go big or go home

At the end of the day, it seems like the conference commissioners want to crawl to the place where we may inevitably end up -- 96 teams. When the play-in game was created, it was done out of necessity. There was a new conference, the Mountain West, and they were granted an automatic bid and the tournament wanted to keep the 34 slots. 

The play-in game alone was fine as a novelty, but it wasn't particularly good basketball and two teams battling for the right to lose by 35 to a blueblood seemed almost cruel. By expanding the tournament to 68 teams, they added another 16 vs 16 game, and also two games between the 'last team in' at-larges, usually for the 11 or 12 seed.

Now the plan should be to get to 96 teams with play-in games for seeds 9-through-16. This gives the fans two more full days of college basketball. Yes, this will be a disaster for productivity in the workplace, but you probably work too much anyway.

What it does is make the fight for the top eight seeds that much greater. Those NET rankings will mean much more. And instead of just the bubble teams being the focus of the power conference tournaments, now fans can also focus on teams sitting on the top-8 bubble. 

The college basketball regular season is always fun, but why can't we take it to the next level? Why can't the first-second round tournament sites get a couple more days of tourism for the local economy? 

But this isn't happening until after the 2032 season because that's when the current media rights deals will expire. And it could become one of the NCAA's biggest bargaining chips when it's time to negotiate.