March Madness tournaments will expand to 76 teams each starting next season

The NCAA announced Thursday that it will expand its two March Madness tournaments by eight teams each next season, a move that will drop more early-round games into the first week of the highly popular and lucrative showcase without substantially changing its overall form.

The new 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games — for a total of 12 games involving 24 teams — into the front half of the first week of the men’s and the women’s tournaments, turning what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair. It is the first expansion of the tournaments in 15 years, when they were bumped to 68 teams each.

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The 12 winners will move into the main 64-team bracket that will begin, as usual, on Thursday for the men and Friday for the women.

Most of the eight new slots are expected to go to teams in the power conferences that were already commanding the lion’s share of entries in the bracket. Two years ago, the SEC placed a record 14 teams in the men’s bracket. Last season, the Big Ten had nine.

The move is a product of the times, which include massive expansion — the ACC, for instance, has grown from nine to 17 teams since 1996 — and the reality that mid-major schools with topnotch players will often see those players plucked away by programs with bigger budgets and the ability to pay them through revenue sharing.

Cinderella? There will still be room for those, though not a single mid-major advanced past the first weekend of the either tournament the last two seasons.

This hardly registers as a concern of the decision-makers anymore, who will point to the TV ratings that traditionally spell out fans’ preference for Duke and North Carolina over St. Peter’s and San Diego State, especially once the Sweet 16 starts.

What matters more to the biggest schools is that their teams have a chance to compete in what remains the best postseason in college sports and that they aren’t iced out by lower conference champions who earn automatic bids.

“You’ve got some really, really good teams who are going to end up in that 9, 10, 11 (seed) category that I think should be moved into the” 64-team bracket, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last year in discussing how he favored expansion.

There is also money at stake: Conferences earn “units” — which amounted to about $350,000 per unit for the men’s tournament last season — for placing teams in the bracket and then for every round those teams advance. The Big Ten made nearly $70 million from both tournaments, won by conference members Michigan (men) and UCLA (women).

Leaders in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC have all acknowledged that the smaller teams help make March Madness what it is, all the while steadily expanding their own power in NCAA decision-making. That brings with it the tacit threat of fracturing the single thing the NCAA does best — the basketball tournament.

This move might forestall that. What it isn’t expected to do is generate much more revenue.

The current deal for the men’s tournament is worth $8.8 billion and runs through 2032. Adding a few extra games between mid-level Power Four teams on Tuesday and Wednesday won’t change that much.

One of reason this took as long as it did was the NCAA negotiations with CBS and TNT, which themselves have been in negotiations over their own ownership.

The more drastic option of expanding the tournament to 96 teams or beyond would involve adding an extra week to a tournament that has thrived in part because of the symmetry of a six-round bracket that gets whittled down over three weeks.

That basic shell began in 1985, with only slight tweaks, the latest of which came in 2011 when it was upped to 68.