INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The magical March Madness cocktail will now include eight more teams, eight more games and more of one other ingredient, too: beer. Maybe wine, too.

The NCAA on Thursday announced a long-expected expansion of its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to 76 teams each starting next season, explaining that it made the money part work by opening sponsorship opportunities to a long-restricted alcohol category.

“I would say that expansion would not have happened without that agreement,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball.

The new, 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games — for a total of 12 involving 24 teams — into the front half of the first week of each tournament. It will turn what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair that will now be called the March Madness Opening Round.

The 12 winners will move into the main 64-team bracket that will begin, as usual, on Thursday for the men and Friday for the women. In all, there will now be 120 games across the two tournaments over seven days to set the table for the Sweet 16s.

“Things will look a little different, but feel very, very similar,” said Amanda Braun, the women’s tournament committee chair.

Because the added games were unlikely to sell themselves, the first expansion of the men’s tournament in 15 years — when it was bumped to 68 teams, followed by the women in 2022 — will be bankrolled by around $300 million in extra funding courtesy of new sponsorship opportunities for beer, wine, spirits and hard seltzer that includes more advertising space on CBS, TNT and other partners whose $8.8 billion deal runs through 2032.

The NCAA said it will distribute more than $131 million of the new revenue to schools that make the tournament.

A ‘money grab’ for big conferences and an opportunity for Cinderellas, as well

The number of at-large selections will increase from 37 to 44, ESPN reported, most of which are expected to go to teams from the power conferences that were already commanding the lion’s share of entries in the bracket. Two years ago, the Southeastern Conference placed a record 14 teams in the men’s bracket. Last season, the Big Ten had nine.

In an interview earlier this week, UConn women’s coach Geno Auriemma spelled out the bottom line.

“This is strictly a money grab for the Power Four conferences to get teams that finished 6-10 in their conference to get into the tournament,” he said.

He also questioned the need to expand the women’s bracket. Only seven of 32 round-of-64 games this year were decided by single digits compared to 11 for the men.

The move is a sign of the times, which includes massive expansion — the Atlantic Coast Conference, for instance, has grown from nine to 17 teams since 1996 — and the reality that mid-major schools with talented players will often see them plucked away by programs with bigger budgets and the ability to pay them through revenue sharing. The rich get richer.

Cinderella? There will still be room for those stirring runs in the tournaments, though not a single mid-major advanced past the first weekend of either tournament the last two seasons.

“As someone who has been both David, and won some, and Goliath, and lost some, that’s what makes this tournament special,” Arkansas coach John Calipari said earlier in the week. “We can’t afford to lose that special piece of our sport.”

This is not a huge concern of the decision-makers anymore, who will point to TV ratings that traditionally spell out fans’ preference for watching the likes of Duke and North Carolina over St. Peter’s and San Diego State, especially once the Sweet 16 starts.

“The impact on everyone was considered,” said Keith Gill, the men’s tournament chairman. “We actually think it’s, overall, going to be positive. And we think that’s for folks at the autonomy level (Power Four) and folks that are non-autonomy.”

All conferences agreed, but big conferences pushed hardest

Gavitt said none of the 32 conferences in the NCAA objected to the proposal, though it’s no secret the power leagues have been pushing this the hardest.

Those schools don’t want to see promising teams left out of what remains the best postseason in college sports, especially in favor of lesser conference champions who earn automatic bids.

“You’ve got some really, really good teams who are going to end up in that 9, 10, 11 (seed) category that I think should be moved” into the 64-team bracket, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last year in discussing how he favored expansion.

The new beer and wine money will add to what the NCAA can distribute in “units” that are earned for placing teams in the bracket and then for every round those teams advance. Last year, that amounted to about $350,000 per unit for the men’s tournament.

Some of that extra money will go to the small guys, too. This gives all the 16 seeds (and some 15s) a chance to play an evenly matched game in the play-in round, then maybe win that game and the extra “unit” that comes with it.

“Also, as we continue to grow our basketball profile, additional at-large spots positions” are possible, Big Sky Conference commissioner Tom Wistrcill said.

Leaders in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC have all acknowledged that smaller programs help make March Madness what it is, all the while steadily expanding their own power in NCAA decision-making. That brings with it the tacit threat that they could split off and fracture the single thing the NCAA does best — the basketball tournament.

This move might forestall that. What it isn’t expected to do is drastically change the TV element, at least not beyond the advertising component.

Gavitt said the new games will likely be part of tripleheaders on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The NCAA will find a site to join the traditional First Four host, Dayton, Ohio, for some of the games. Then, come Thursday, there will be 64 teams in a bracket and a tournament that looks comfortingly familiar: three weeks of hoops capped off by the Final Four.

Gavitt said it was impossible to predict what might come after the current TV deal expires but that 76 teams is “maxing out the opportunity here.”

“Anything’s possible, I guess, in 2032 or beyond,” he said. “But I can say with confidence that this is the format that will be in place through 2032, and, we think, for a long time after that.”

HERSHEY, Pa. (AP) — Supreme Court justices are not “political actors,” Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday, insisting unpopular court decisions are based solely on the law.

“I think, at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is how things should be, as opposed to what the law provides,” he said. “I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”

His remarks to a conference of judges and lawyers from the 3rd U.S. Circuit in Pennsylvania came at a time of low public confidence in the court, and about a week after the court handed down a decision that hollowed out the Voting Rights Act.

The high court struck down a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, finding it was an unconstitutional gerrymander based on race. The decision weakened the Civil Rights era law that has increased minority representation in Congress, and it opened the door for more redistricting across the country that could aid Republican efforts to control the House.

In recent years, the conservative majority court has also handed down landmark rulings overturning the constitutional right to abortion, expanding gun rights and ending affirmative action in higher education.

Roberts didn’t reference any specific decisions in his remarks, but said the court is “simply not part of the political process.”

Opinions, he said, are based on the Constitution — though he acknowledged disagreement with some outcomes. “One thing we have to do is make decisions that are unpopular,” he said.

Criticism, he said, should focus on rulings rather than personal attacks. He condemned the targeting of lower-court judges, a sentiment he’s repeated amid rising threats to the judiciary. “That’s not appropriate and it can lead to very serious problems,” he said.

High-profile criticism of judges in personal terms has come from Republican President Donald Trump, who also targeted Roberts and other justices who voted against him in the opinion that struck down tariffs the president levied under an emergency-powers law.

DALLAS (AP) — A former FedEx driver was sentenced to death on Tuesday after he pleaded guilty to killing a 7-year-old girl he took from her Texas home while delivering a Christmas gift.

Jurors in a Fort Worth courtroom decided on Tanner Horner’s punishment after hearing about a month of testimony and evidence that included audio of Athena Strand’s last moments from inside his delivery van. Horner, 34, pleaded guilty to capital murder last month in the 2022 killing just as his trial began. Athena’s body was found two days after she was reported missing from her home in the rural town of Paradise, near Fort Worth.

Horner didn’t visibly react when the judge read the sentence, according to a livestream of the court proceedings.

Jurors found there was a probability Horner would commit criminal violence and be a continuing threat to society. They said there was nothing in the commission of the crime or in Horner’s background to warrant life without parole instead of death.

Prosecutor James Stainton told jurors in opening statements that Horner had told, “lie upon lie upon lie upon lie” in the case, including telling authorities that he accidentally struck Athena with his van while making the delivery and then killed her in a fit of panic.

Several jurors cried as they were shown video and heard audio from inside the van after Athena was taken. He could be seen lifting her into the van, and then driving away, telling her not to scream or he’d hurt her.

Horner then covered the camera, but the audio continued recording. Horner asks Athena questions, including how old she is and where she goes to school, before stopping the van and telling her they are going to “hang out.” Horner tells her to take off her shirt and she begins crying, and asks whether he’s a kidnapper.

She asks him: “Why are you doing this?” He replies, “Because you are pretty.”

“My mom says I can’t do that to somebody,” she tells him. “And you can’t do that to me either.”

As the recording, which lasts over an hour, continues, Athena’s screams can be heard. At one point he tells her: “If you don’t shut up, I will hurt you worse.”

A medical examiner testified that Athena died of blunt force injuries with smothering and strangulation.

While acknowledging during opening statements that the evidence against Horner was “overwhelming” and “terrible,” Horner’s attorney, Steven Goble, told jurors that Horner’s mother drank while she was pregnant, that he has autism and suffered from “various mental illnesses throughout his life” in addition to being exposed to a “massive amount of lead.”

Goble had asked jurors to sentence Horner to life in prison.

Athena’s family has said that the package Horner had dropped off was a Christmas present for her — a box of “You Can Be Anything” Barbies.

The trial was moved from rural Wise County to Fort Worth after Horner’s attorneys argued that he would not have received a fair trial. ____