Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, made it official this week: The NCAA Tournaments for men’s and women’s basketball will not be expanding for the upcoming season and will remain in their current formats at 68 teams.
“However,” Gavitt added, “the committees will continue conversations on whether to recommend expanding to 72 or 76 teams in advance of the 2027 championships.”
Folks in power in women’s college basketball should, for the time being, continue to advocate against tournament expansion. The NCAA Tournament is not broken and does not need fixing. For women’s college basketball, keeping the tournament at 68 teams is the right move and there’s several reasons why.
One reason, and this is a significant difference between the men’s and the women’s tournaments, is the First Four. A hypothetical expansion to 72 or 76 teams would likely add just more of these First Four play-in games. While the men have been playing these games since 2011, the women’s tournament just got its own First Four in 2022. And while the men’s tournament has created a tradition around these first handful of games in Dayton, Ohio, that draws in fans and creates a unique atmosphere to begin March Madness, the women’s tournament is still trying to figure that piece out.
(An aside: it is the opinion of this writer that the women’s First Four should be played annually in Norfolk, Virginia, the home of the first women’s NCAA Championship in 1982.)
Currently, women’s First Four games are played at on-campus venues of the top 16 seeds in the tournament. The matchups are often made up of teams with little-to-no history between them and often get placed at venues far from their respective campuses. Take this year for example: Iowa State played Princeton at Notre Dame, Columbia faced Washington at North Carolina, and High Point and William & Mary clashed in Austin, Texas.
The highest-attended women’s First Four game from the 2025 tournament was Iowa State’s narrow win over Princeton in South Bend, which drew 819 fans. On the men’s side, in Dayton, North Carolina vs. San Diego State drew an announced crowd of 16,899 fans.
This begs two questions: One, would the women’s basketball tournament be better served if all First Four games were played at a single neutral site? And two, should the women’s tournament really be adding more First Four games when the current ones don’t draw audiences all that well?
“There’s a lot of messiness that comes with it because of our format currently,” Jackie Carson, senior associate commissioner for women’s basketball in the ACC, said of the First Four. “Now, if that changed, maybe that would also spark some of our coaches’ thoughts. But right now, trying to play and travel as a First Four is an absolute nightmare.”
Furthermore, in the four years that the women’s tournament has had a First Four, only one team — Mississippi State in 2023 — has advanced to the Round of 32. In the men’s tournament, two First Four teams have advanced to the Final Four and three others made it to the second weekend of March Madness. This is all to say, while parity has improved in women’s college basketball, it hasn’t reached the same level as the men’s game.
This is also to say that, while there have been some valid and warranted criticisms of decisions made by the NCAA Selection Committee — I’m still thinking about how No. 1 N.C. State got sent to play in UConn’s backyard in 2022 — they more often than not get it right with seedings and selections in the women’s tournament.
Cases could’ve been made last spring for the likes of Virginia Tech or James Madison to make the field, but the decisions weren’t overtly egregious. And that’s the case most years. There have been exceptions of course, like the 2023 tournament when two teams in the top 40 of NET — Kansas and Oregon — were excluded from the field, but neither of those teams won 20 games. The same is true for the duo of Miami and Penn State in 2024. Should we really be rewarding mediocre Power 4 teams with tournament bids when they couldn’t even hit the 20-win mark in the regular season?
Making and playing in the NCAA Tournament should be special. It’s a milestone and a privilege. Hearing your school’s name on Selection Sunday is an exclusive experience: You’re just one of 68 teams still playing meaningful games. Tossing in four-to-eight more teams diminishes that a little bit.
All of the above is opinion that could be swayed one way or another. But the following is a fact and is perhaps the biggest reason why people with power in women’s college basketball should push back on expansion until it changes.
More NCAA Tournament games won’t bring in more money for the sport.
I’ve already given you the attendance figures of the First Four games. The NCAA isn’t making much additional money off ticket sales for play-in games for women’s basketball. So, one would think, the additional big flow of revenue would come from the media rights contract.
Except, according to Front Office Sports, ESPN’s contract with the NCAA doesn’t require increased rights fees if the women’s tournament expands. So, expanding the tournament would actually mean less money — in unit payouts — for the teams competing in it. The size of the pie will be the same, but there will be more mouths to feed.
“We just got units. Are we adding more people that take out of that pot? Is it the same pot of money? I don’t need to split it anymore,” Carson said. “And honestly, for ACC women’s basketball, our coaches are confident that they can get into the tournament. So I don’t necessarily need more teams to be able to get in. The teams that were on the bubble know what they need to do to be able to get into the tournament next year.”
The question should be raised: If expanding the tournament just means more sparsely-attended First Four games being played and there’s no additional money coming in, then what’s the point of expanding the tournament? Money is typically the biggest motivator for the NCAA, but when it comes to expanding the women’s tournament, the math isn’t mathing.
Perhaps the only thing that would make expanding the women’s NCAA Tournament worth exploring is if ESPN was willing to come back to the table — as Dawn Staley has called for — to renegotiate the favorable long-term media rights deal it has for the tournament. If women’s basketball can get its own singular television deal, like men’s basketball and college football has, then there’s a conversation to be had about adding more teams to the field.
Until then, women’s basketball is better sticking with 68 teams and its current format.
The NCAA Tournament is not broken and it does not need fixing.
