INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — As a new college basketball season tips off, teams across the country are chasing a bigger prize: the NCAA’s men’s and women’s tournaments will each grow from 68 teams to 76 in 2027, and nobody yet knows exactly which schools the extra spots will reward.
Each bracket still gives an automatic bid to every conference champion, with the rest filled by at-large picks from the selection committees. The change adds eight teams to each field and replaces the old First Four with a 12-game round the NCAA is calling the March Madness Opening Round.
Half of those games will match the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers against one another, and the other half will pair the 12 lowest-seeded at-large teams. Winners move into the familiar 64-team bracket, so the first-round weekend and everything after it stays the same.
On the men’s side, play starts Tuesday, March 16, 2027. Instead of two games a night in Dayton, there will be three per night in Dayton plus three per night in a second city that has not been named. The women’s Opening Round runs March 17-18 on the home courts of 12 of the top 16 seeds.
The NCAA says the bigger fields lift postseason access to 21% of Division I basketball teams, up from 18%, which had been the lowest among major team sports. The association also expects to send more than $131 million in new revenue to tournament schools over the final six years of its broadcast agreements.
History suggests the earliest round matters. Two First Four teams, VCU in 2011 and UCLA in 2021, went on to reach the Final Four, and Virginia’s women made the Sweet 16 from that round this past spring.
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