DI Men’s Basketball Championship will start in Dayton and Wichita with tripleheaders Tuesday and Wednesday after Selection Sunday
The NCAA this week awarded Wichita, Kansas, the hosting rights for the Opening Round of the 2027 and 2028 Division I Men’s Basketball Championships.
Wichita and Dayton, Ohio, which has served as the host city for the start of the tournament since 2001, both will host three games each day on the Tuesday and Wednesday after Selection Sunday. The change was necessitated by the decision in May to expand the tournament field from 68 to 76 teams.
The site selection process began soon after the expansion announcement and culminated this week during the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee’s annual meeting. Wichita was selected from several cities that expressed interest in hosting the Opening Round. The Division I Men’s Basketball Oversight Committee on Thursday approved the selection recommendation from the Men’s Basketball Committee.
“We were pleased but not surprised by the number of cities from around the country that very much wanted March Madness to begin in their market,” said Keith Gill, the commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference and the chair of the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. “Like Dayton, Wichita is a basketball-crazed community that we expect will embrace the reimagined start of the tournament. Having a city in Middle America will be advantageous for getting teams from various points around the country, many of which won’t be known until Selection Sunday, to the Opening Round and subsequently first-round sites.”
Wichita’s hosting history dates to the 1956 tournament, when the first round of the Midwest Regional was played at Levitt Arena, which eventually staged 24 tournament games over eight tournaments through 1981. The Kansas Coliseum hosted first- and second-round games in 1994, while InTrust Bank Arena did the same in 2018 and 2025. InTrust Bank Arena will serve as the Opening Round venue the next two years.
UD Arena in Dayton has hosted 145 tournament games, the most of any venue in tournament history. That total ranks second for any city, trailing only Indianapolis, which has hosted 169 games at six facilities.
The Opening Round of the 2027 championship will take place March 16 and 17 and will feature the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers and the 12 lowest-seeded at-large teams. Provided all principles are met, the committee determined this week that the automatic qualifier games among teams seeded 16th will feature the 69th-ranked team on the overall seed list playing No. 70, 71 against 72, 73 versus 74, and 75 against 76, while games between 15 seeds will see No. 65 facing 66, and 67 playing 68. The six games featuring the at-large teams will consist of the last at-large team on the seed list playing the second-to-last at-large team, the third-to-last at-large team playing the fourth-to-last at-large team, and so on, again assuming all principles are met. As a secondary consideration, the committee will weigh moving Opening Round teams along the same seed line to optimize their travel to Opening Round and first-round sites.
The Men’s Basketball Committee also voted to remove the provision that prohibited a school from playing at a site at which it is serving as the tournament host.
The full principles and procedures document for selecting, seeding and bracketing the 2027 championship will be posted on ncaa.org later this summer.
The first- and second-round games will take place March 18-21 in Charlotte, North Carolina; Fort Worth, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; Minneapolis; Omaha, Nebraska; Pittsburgh; Sacramento, California; and Spokane, Washington. Regional competition will be played in Kansas City, Missouri; Los Angeles; New York City; and San Antonio on March 25-28. The Final Four will be played April 3 and 5 in Detroit. For tickets, visit ncaa.com/tickets.
Along with discussing Opening Round formats, the committee was given an update from a consultant who worked with NCAA staff to evaluate the NCAA Evaluation Tool, quadrants and Wins Above Bubble. While no changes were made to the NET or quadrants, the committee did approve an adjusted baseline for the WAB, given the additional at-large teams that will be in the field.
The NET’s strength of schedule and WAB are calculated from the perspective of an average bubble team. In each of the first two seasons of WAB, that baseline was the team ranked 45th in NET. After studying recent history and considering the additional teams in the tournament, the new baseline will be 55.
“The WAB is an important factor for selecting teams, so the bulk of our time on this topic focused on that,” Gill said. “The quadrants help us organize the team sheets but sometimes receive too much focus, especially given that very different outcomes can fall within the same quadrant. The WAB addresses that because you get more credit for beating better teams and even more so if you do it away from home. The overall and nonconference strength of schedule will continue to impact results-based metrics like the WAB.”
The Men’s Basketball Committee also selected West Coast Conference Commissioner Stu Jackson to serve as vice chair for the 2026-27 season and to chair the group in 2027-28. Jackson has been the commissioner of the West Coast Conference since 2023. Before that, he was executive associate commissioner for men’s basketball for the Big East Conference for nearly nine years. Jackson served as head coach at Wisconsin from 1992-94, leading the Badgers to their first NCAA tournament berth in 47 years. He also held coaching positions at Providence, Washington State and Oregon, and he served on the NCAA Rules and Competition Committee. Jackson also spent 13 years working for the NBA, serving first as senior vice president and later as executive vice president of basketball operations. Jackson also served as president and general manager of the expansion Vancouver Grizzlies from 1994-2000, and he was assistant coach and later head coach of the New York Knicks from 1987-90.
“I’ve spent decades working in the great game of basketball, and being a member of this committee has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career,” Jackson said. “It’s an honor to have my colleagues place their trust in me to support (2026-27 Chair and Samford Athletics Director) Martin Newton for the upcoming season and then lead this group the following year. The expansion of the tournament will impact our work, so it’s important that we are poised as a committee during our season-long evaluation of teams and with how we use all the information we have available to select, seed and bracket 76 teams.”
Along with Newton and Jackson, members of the 2026-27 committee will include Pete Bevacqua, the director of athletics at Notre Dame; Keith Carter, the director of athletics at Ole Miss; Irma Garcia, the director of athletics at Manhattan; Jeff Jackson, the commissioner of the Missouri Valley Conference; Mark Jackson, the director of athletics at Northwestern; Arthur Johnson, the director of athletics at Temple; Zack Lassiter, the director of athletics at Abilene Christian; Lee Reed, the director of athletics at Georgetown; Chad Weiberg, the director of athletics at Oklahoma State; and Tom Wistrcill, the commissioner of the Big Sky Conference.
