After a single season playing with a reduced field following conference expansion, the Big Ten Basketball Tournament is back to including all of the conference's teams.
The Big Ten announced on Thursday, with the release of its teams' schedules, that the men's Big Ten Tournaments will expand to include all 18 schools in their brackets.
After Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington joined the conference ahead of the 2024-25 season, the Big Ten kept its conference tournament fields restricted to 15 teams, excluding the bottom three teams in the league standings. Nebraska, Penn State and Washington missed the cut.
The expansion to include all 18 teams will work in a third layer of byes to the Big Ten Tournament's structure. Seeds 15 through 18, as determined by the final Big Ten regular-season standings, will play each other in two games that take place on Tuesday during the week of the tournament, then the rest will follow its classic Wednesday through Sunday structure.
Seeds No. 9 through 14 will receive a bye to the second round on Wednesday. Seeds No. 5 through 8 will get a double-bye to the third round on Thursday, and for the first time in Big Ten Tournament history, the bracket will now feature triple-byes for the top four seeds, which start their conference tourney journeys in the quarterfinals on Friday.
The 10th-seeded Ohio State men lost to 15th-seeded Iowa in the first round of the 2025 Big Ten Men's Tournament. The 2026 Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament will take place on March 10-15 in the United Center in Chicago.
The Big Ten women’s basketball tournament, which will be held March 4-8 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, will remain at 15 teams for the 2025-26 season.
