Adding teams to March Madness field among recommendations by NCAA Transformation Committee

The long-awaited report of official recommendations from the NCAA Division I Transformation Committee was released Tuesday, and among the most notable items in the 39-page document is the previously reported action that would enable Division I sports to field postseason tournaments that accommodate as much as 25% of a sport’s membership. 

The caveat being: only sports with at least 200 schools participating would be empowered to potentially act on that 25% number. 

One potential outcome of these recommendations could be down-the-road expansion of the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments. However, industry sources have told CBS Sports there is not a lot of momentum for that change in the near future. There remains the possibility the NCAA Tournament doesn’t expand at all, sources told CBS Sports. If the committee’s full range of recommendations are formally adopted, as is expected at next week’s NCAA Convention, it would allow for the men’s and women’s tournaments to expand from their current size of 68 to as many as 90 (out of 363 schools). Conversely, if expansion ever did happen, it might also mean an increase on a minor scale: going from 68 to 72. 

The NCAA Tournament’s contract with CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery Sports runs through 2032. 

Over the past 12 months the committee looked at: what it meant to be and/or qualify as a Division I institution; what the student-athlete experience was, and how it could be improved; how all D-I sports are governed; how postseason championships are built and the access protocols for qualification; how the money is shared across Division I; the student-athlete transfer environment; and enforcement of the NCAA’s slimmed-down rulebook.  

The 21-person panel was formed at the instruction of outgoing NCAA president Mark Emmert, who prompted action after a landmark antitrust case by the Supreme Court went 9-0 against the NCAA in June 2021. The committee was co-chaired by SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Ohio University athletic director Julie Cromer. The group met on a mostly weekly basis throughout 2022, their charge being to change both big-picture features and more granular particulars of Division I.

But the report isn’t the landscape-changing event that many in college athletics were anticipating. If anything, a lot of what was released Tuesday was telegraphed for months by Sankey and Cromer in their previous comments to media…