The 2024 NCAA men’s tournament marked the 14th since the event’s most recent expansion from 64 to 68 teams in 2011. So far, reviews seem generally favorable, and two First Four participants (VCU in 2011 and UCLA in 2021) have gone all the way to the Final Four.
Never an organization to leave money on the table, the NCAA appears poised to go back to the expansion well. On Thursday, president Charlie Baker spoke more favorably of tournament expansion than at any point previously.
“We’ve had good conversations with CBS and (Warner Bros. Discovery, Turner’s parent company),” Baker said via Maura Carey of the AP. “Our goal here is to try to sort of get to either yes or no sometime in the next few months because there’s a lot of logistical work that would be associated with doing this.”
Baker made his comments at the Big 12’s highly publicized spring meetings, where the conference’s coaches have also spoken favorably of tournament expansion. Before ’11, the most recent expansions of the tournament were to 65 teams in 2001 and 64 teams in 1985.
“If you have a tournament that’s got 64 or 68 teams in it, you’re going to have a bunch of teams that are probably among what most people would consider to be the best 68 or 70 teams in the country that aren’t going to make the tournament, period,” Baker said. “The point behind going from 68 to 72 or 76 is to basically give some of those schools that were probably among the 72, 76, 68, 64 best teams in the country a way into the tournament.”
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