MISSOULA — Football might be king, but basketball is still the NCAA’s cash cow.
According to the NCAA’s audited financial statements, the governing body reported $1.57 billion in total revenue in 2025. Of that, more than $1 billion came via the men’s and women’s national basketball tournaments.
Member schools who win games in the brackets each earn units worth millions of dollars in the men’s tournament and hundreds of thousands in the women’s.
With the tournaments expanding to 76 teams in 2027, the Big Sky Conference is hoping to get a piece of the pie.
“It’s millions of dollars that flow back into the system,” Big Sky commissioner Tom Wistrcill told MTN Sports last month at the Big Sky Kickoff media event in Spokane, Wash. “With the expansion of the tournament, we’re going to have a better chance of winning a game, which means more money for the Big Sky, both men’s and women’s.”
The new March Madness format will likely pit the Big Sky champion against a similarly ranked opponent in the opening round, which is expanding to 12 games. The winners in the opening round will advance, and a traditional 64-team bracket will commence.
Those opening-round games are still worth those significant financial units to the winning teams, and the improved revenue opportunity is part of a larger vision for Wistrcill. As a conference, the Big Sky is not generating tens of millions of dollars of profit like Power 4 conferences, but the league still aims to redistribute earnings to its member institutions. The schools can spend that money however they want — from improving facilities to paying players.
To that end, the Big Sky’s own basketball tournaments are pivotal to the bottom line.
“We work hard to try to be efficient with those dollars but not be too skinny on things like championships,” Wistrcill said. “We continually hear from our student-athletes and coaches that the championship experience we provide is really at a high level, so we certainly invest in those, as well. It’s a balance there.”
The conference revealed its 2026-27 basketball schedules on Wednesday. Notably, league play begins in early December as the Big Sky has grown to 11 full-time members — Southern Utah and Utah Tech joined the Big Sky prior to this academic year, while Sacramento State left the league. The conference will play a 20-game double round-robin format, with each team taking on every other conference opponent both at home and on the road.
2026-27 Big Sky Conference basketball schedules: Men | Women
The regular season will conclude March 1, and an expanded Starch Madness begins March 5. All 11 schools will send their men’s and women’s teams to Boise, Idaho, for the conference basketball tournaments.
“We talked for a long time about, ‘Do you keep the bracket the same and leave one team at home, one men’s team and one women’s team?’” Wistrcill said. “In the end, we decided — and I think it was the right decision by our administrators — to say, ‘Hey, let’s play a (No. 10 seed vs. a No. 11 seed) game on Friday night, one men’s, one women’s game, and then feed into the bracket.”
Those 10-vs.-11 matchups will be the only games on Friday of the new-look tournament. The winners will advance to play the No. 9 seeds, and the brackets flow from there as they have in the past with the Nos. 1 and 2 seeds playing their first games on Sunday.
“We need to kind of strike a balance between rewarding the best teams, the 1 and 2, and we do that by having them play the winner of the four worst teams the first games. Then they get a bye while 3 through 6 are playing, so we give them an advantage,” Wistrcill said.
Related: 2027 Starch Madness bracket
Wistrcill was quick to note that the tournaments have recently seen lower-seeded teams winning the championships and securing the Big Sky’s automatic bids to the Big Dance. On the men’s side, the regular-season champion has failed to win the conference tournament three of the past four years.
Even Montana, which shared the regular-season title with Northern Colorado in 2024-25, won the tournament title as the No. 2 seed.
The women’s tournaments have been chalkier in recent years with the top seeds cutting down the nets each of the past three years.
The Big Sky’s 2027 champions will be crowned March 10 with the NCAA men’s tournament beginning March 16 and the women’s tournament tipping off March 17.
