The NCAA is about to add eight more teams to March Madness and the only people who asked for it were the people who already have the most.
That is the whole story. Everything else is marketing. The basketball tournament goes from 68 to 76 teams, likely starting next season, and the CFP is somewhere in the process of growing from 12 to either 16 or 24. Every press release about this will use words like “access” and “opportunity” and “more schools getting a chance to compete.” None of that is what this is. College sports expansion is a power conference money grab wearing a sportsmanship costume, and at this point they are not even particularly embarrassed about it.
An NCAA source told CBS Sports directly: “Because of lawsuits and settlements, the NCAA is strapped for cash. People saying it’s a money grab are probably not wrong.” That is a person inside the building saying the quiet part out loud. File that one away next time someone tells you this is about growing the game.
College Sports Expansion Is Not About the Teams You Think
Here is who the eight new at-large bids in the basketball tournament are actually for. Under the new 76-team format, teams like 17-16 Auburn and 19-15 Alabama would have made the field this past season. Not borderline cases with one bad loss. Teams hovering around .500. A team going 18-14 with a power conference logo on their chest is now a realistic March Madness participant. You think that is about giving deserving programs a shot? That is about making sure the SEC and Big Ten have enough room for their worst teams to still cash in on tournament units.
One NCAA tournament unit in 2026 was worth over two million dollars. Every game a team wins generates a payout that flows back to the conference. More power conference teams in the field means more units flowing to power conferences. That math is not complicated. The narrative around expansion being about mid-majors getting more shots at the dance is fantasy. CBS Sports broke down a decade of bubble data and the numbers are clear: of the 80 bubble teams from 2016 through 2026, the ACC alone had 17. Power conferences dominated the bubble then, and they will absorb the new bids now. The mid-majors are not winning this. They are getting bumped down a seed line so a 19-15 big-school program can take their spot.
Gonzaga’s Mark Few said it better than I can: “The one thing that isn’t broken, the shining light of everything in college athletics, is the NCAA tournament. I don’t know why they would ever mess with that.” He is right. The 68-team bracket was one of the last things in sports that actually worked. It was appointment television because it was hard to get in. That is gone now.
What a 24-Team College Football Playoff Actually Looks Like
On the football side, the CFP expansion conversation is centered on either 16 or 24 teams. The Big Ten has been circulating a formal proposal for 24. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has been pushing 16. The fact that both of the richest, most powerful conferences in the country are the ones driving this conversation should tell you something about who it is designed to benefit.
If you applied the Big Ten‘s 24-team model to the 2025 season, the field would have included seven SEC teams and six Big Ten teams. Thirteen of 24 spots going to two conferences. For comparison, the entire Group of Five conferences combined would get two automatic bids under the proposal. Two. Notre Dame gets their own spot as an independent. The math on this is not subtle.
I keep hearing that a bigger playoff means more Cinderella stories, more upsets, more drama. That is wrong. A 24-seed in college football is not winning three games against the top eight programs in the country. The one through eight seeds get a first-round bye in most of these proposals. So what the 24-team bracket actually produces is a guaranteed cupcake game for Alabama in round one, a guaranteed cupcake game for Ohio State in round one, and a guaranteed 14 additional games of television inventory that the networks can sell ads against. That is the actual product being manufactured here.
The Big Ten’s own proposal also floated eliminating conference championship games, which currently generate over 200 million dollars in media rights. They are proposing to kill a revenue source because the playoff itself would create enough new inventory to replace it. This is not sports policy. This is programming strategy with a scoreboard.
The One Thing Nobody Wants to Say About This
The NCAA is not expanding because the sport is healthy and growing. They are expanding because they are broke. Lawsuits, NIL settlements, revenue-sharing with athletes, legal challenges to amateurism from every direction, these have hammered the organization’s finances. An unnamed source inside the tournament expansion negotiations told CBS Sports point-blank that the NCAA is strapped and the people calling this a money grab are “probably not wrong.”
And still, even with that financial pressure, sources confirmed the basketball expansion will not generate significant short-term profit. One commissioner said flat out: “There’s no pot of gold, there’s no additional money from ESPN with expansion of the women’s tournament.” They are adding eight teams, absorbing more logistical costs, creating a clunkier bracket, and diluting the product for a “modest financial upside” that may not arrive for years. They are doing all of this primarily so power conferences can get more at-large bids.
The fans do not want it. Coaches do not want it. The format was not broken. College sports expansion is happening because the people with the leverage said it would happen, and nobody in that building has enough spine to tell them no. That is the whole story. The “access” framing is for the press release. The actual story is that the best postseason format in American sports is getting watered down to appease conferences that already won.
