NCAA Approves Single Site for 2026 Divisions I, II and III Basketball Championships and NIT

At its annual summer meeting this week, the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee approved Indianapolis as the host site for the 2026 Division II and III men's basketball championship games, as well as the semifinals and finals of the National Invitation Tournament, with all five games scheduled the same weekend as the Men's Final Four, which was previously awarded to the city. 

The Final Four will take place April 4 and 6, 2026, at Lucas Oil Stadium, an announcement that was first made in 2018. It will mark the ninth time that Indianapolis will serve as host of college basketball's premier event. The Horizon League and IU Indy will serve as co-hosts. Today's announcement means three additional champions will be crowned in the Circle City that weekend. The NIT will play its semifinals Thursday, April 2, at Butler's Hinkle Fieldhouse, with the title game scheduled for Sunday, April 5, at a time and venue to be announced.  

Sunday's schedule will also include the Division II and III championship games, which will be played downtown at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. This is the second time the NCAA will conduct its three men's basketball championships on one weekend in the same city. The first was in Atlanta in 2013. The three NCAA women's basketball championships were hosted in the same city on the same weekend in 2016 in Indianapolis and again in Dallas in 2023. 

"This will be a tremendous celebration of men's college basketball across all three divisions in Indy," said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA's senior vice president of basketball. "When we did this in 2013, we had nearly 8,000 fans watching the Division II and III championship games, and the final two nights of this year's NIT at Hinkle Fieldhouse featured sold-out crowds of more than 9,000 fans. It will be an awesome opportunity for student-athletes at the participating schools, as well as a showcase for the legendary college basketball fans in Indiana." 

The committee also spent considerable time discussing principles and procedures for selecting, seeding and bracketing teams, and affirmed that the 2025 championship will feature an automatic qualifier from each of the 31 conferences to go along with the best 37 at-large teams as determined by the committee. The evaluation of teams will be enhanced by the addition of two metrics as the committee voted to include the Torvik and Wins Against Bubble rankings on the team sheets. 

"The committee has always valued different data points and metrics to assist with its evaluation process, and these two metrics have increasingly been referenced by members in recent years," Gavitt said. "Adding them to the team sheet ensures that all 12 members easily have access to this data. The Torvik rankings, along with BPI and KenPom, give the committee three predictive ratings, while the WAB, Strength of Record and KPI give them three results-based metrics, all of which, in addition to the NET, will be beneficial to the team evaluation process." 

The committee also selected Keith Gill, the commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference, as the vice chair of the committee for the 2024-25 season. He will also serve as chair for the 2025-26 season. Gill has been at the Sun Belt for five years and previously worked for the Atlantic 10 Conference, where he was executive associate commissioner. He also served as the director of athletics at both Richmond and American, spending five years on each campus. Gill also worked in the athletics departments at Oklahoma and Vanderbilt and had two stints working in the membership services department at the NCAA national office. A four-year football letterman at Duke, Gill graduated in 1994 and later earned a master's degree from Oklahoma. 

"It is a tremendous honor to serve on this committee with a great group of colleagues who serve as stewards for the great game of college basketball," Gill said. "I look forward to working with all of them, especially Bubba Cunningham, our chair for next season, who I will support as vice chair. To be elected to serve in that role, and as chair for the 2026 championship, is one of the highlights of my professional career. It is especially satisfying to be able to do it in a year when we'll conduct championships for all three divisions, plus the NIT, on what will be an incredible weekend." 

The committee also received updates from representatives from TNT and CBS Sports and discussed several tournament operations and ticketing issues, future site selections and officiating matters, including adopting referee push-to-talk microphone technology for the entire tournament, beginning in 2025, to better communicate results of video reviews to broadcast viewers and in-venue fans. 

The NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Committee also is conducting its annual summer meeting this week. A recap of that meeting will be distributed upon its conclusion Thursday afternoon.