March Madness expansion to 76 teams will be fueled by alcohol ads

The magical March Madness cocktail will now include eight more teams, eight more games and more of one other ingredient: beer. Maybe wine, too.

The NCAA on Thursday announced a long-expected expansion of its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to 76 teams each starting next season, explaining that it made the money part work by opening sponsorship opportunities to a long-restricted alcohol category.

The new, 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games — for a total of 12 involving 24 teams — into the front half of the first week of each tournament. It will turn what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair that will now be called the March Madness Opening Round.

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. In all, there will now be 120 games across the two tournaments over seven days to set the table for the Sweet 16s.

Because the added games were unlikely to sell themselves, the first expansion of the men’s tournament in 15 years — when it was bumped to 68 teams, followed by the women in 2022 — will be bankrolled by around $300 million in extra funding courtesy of new sponsorship opportunities for beer, wine, spirits and hard seltzer that includes more advertising space on CBS, TNT and other partners whose $8.8 billion deal runs through 2032.

The number of at-large selections will increase from 37 to 44, ESPN reported, most of which are expected to go to teams from the power conferences that were already commanding the lion’s share of entries in the bracket. Two years ago, the Southeastern Conference placed a record 14 teams in the men’s bracket. Last season, the Big Ten had nine.

In an interview earlier this week, UConn women’s coach Geno Auriemma spelled out the bottom line.

“This is strictly a money grab for the Power Four conferences to get teams that finished 6-10 in their conference to get into the tournament,” he said.

He also questioned the need to expand the women’s bracket. Only seven of 32 round-of-64 games this year were decided by single digits compared to 11 for the men.

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

This is not a huge concern of the decision-makers anymore, who will point to TV ratings that traditionally spell out fans’ preference for watching the likes of Duke and North Carolina over St. Peter’s and San Diego State, especially once the Sweet 16 starts.

The new beer and wine money will add to what the NCAA can distribute in “units” that are earned for placing teams in the bracket and then for every round those teams advance. Last year, that amounted to about $350,000 per unit for the men’s tournament.

Some of that extra money will go to the small guys, too. This gives all the 16 seeds (and some 15s) a chance to play an evenly matched game in the play-in round, then maybe win that game and the extra “unit” that comes with it.

(AP Photo Gene J. Puskar)