It's officially Selection Sunday, as college basketball fans around the country finally learn which teams have qualified for the 2025 NCAA Tournament. The battle for a spot in this year's field has been historically competitive, with seemingly more teams than ever making their case on the bubble. But how many spots are up for grabs?
The number of teams who get to compete for a Division I national title has changed more than you might think over the years, growing exponentially as the popularity of March Madness took off. Here's where the field currently stands, and where it could be headed in the future.
Total number of teams in the NCAA Tournament
Both the men's and women's tournaments feature fields of 68 teams: 31 autobids for winners of conference tournaments, and 37 at-large bids which the selection committees reward to the teams deemed to have the best overall resumes. Of course, how one defines "best resume" is a matter of much debate every year, one that now involves things like NET ranking, Quad 1 and 2 wins, strength of schedule, non-conference schedule and several other factors.
One the fields are set, the games begin with the First Four in Dayton, Ohio. The four lowest-seeded automatic bids (16 seeds) and the four lowest-seeded at-large teams (11 or 12 seeds) compete for spots in the final 64-team bracket. Once 68 has been winnowed down to 64, the first round begins in earnest.
How has the number of teams in March Madness changed?
As you might imagine, the tournament has come a long, long way over the years. The first men's Division I NCAA Tournament was held back in 1939, and featured just eight teams: Brown, Ohio State, Villanova and Wake Forest in the East region, and Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Utah State in the West. (Oregon topped Ohio State to win the national title.)
From there, the field slowly grew as the tournament's popularity did. First came a move to 16 teams in 1951, then to 32 in 1975. (The need to keep the bracket clean meant that the field could only really double in size, which made expansion a trickier and slower-progressing proposition.) We settled on 64 teams in 1985, adding the First Four to bump the number up to 68 in 2011.
The first women's tournament was held in 1982, and featured 32 teams. The number increased to 40 in 1986, 48 in 1989 and finally hit 64 in 1994. It wasn't until 2022 that the women's tourney moved to include a First Four that bumped the final field up to 68 like the men's side.
Could March Madness expand again?
Given just how much money the men's and women's tournaments generate, and how much more could be generated by adding even more games to the docket, this feels like a matter of "when" rather than "if". Further expansion has been a subject of constant speculation in recent years, with both 72-team (adding two more games to the First Four) and 76-team (adding one more game to each bracket) proposals floated.
That said, there's still plenty that needs to be ironed out before this actually becomes a reality.
"It's not taken in a lighthearted way at all because of the success of the tournaments and how important they are to college basketball overall," NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt told reporters back in February. "Expansion, even in a modest level, is complex, more complex than, I think, than has been recognized and reported, because it is expensive."
It's a heavy operational lift, and it doesn't seem likely that a vote will be held in time to implement changes ahead of 2026. Again, though, as we've seen with college football, money always wins out in the end.