Upcoming NCAA Championship Bid Cycle Detailed

The bid portal for the next NCAA championship bid cycle will open this summer with bids due in the fall and the announcement of future hosts for dozens of championships coming in the summer of 2026.

NCAA Vice President of Championships & Alliances Anthony Holman presented the tentative timeline for the next bid cycle during the Sports ETA Symposium in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Whether the next cycle is for two, three or four years is to be determined; there could be a chance that some events would be bid out for three years, then others for a different time period.

After the bid portal opens this summer, the NCAA will host a symposium for interested cities in August in Indianapolis. The portal will close in the fall with a first round of review completed before the Christmas period and finalists announced for some of the marquee events, a change from years past.

The next bid cycle could also have the NCAA making site visits for some event evaluations as the organization wants to leverage its marquee championships more than in the past.

“We’re going to say, ‘if you want to host a Tier 1 championship, we’ve identified your community for a Tier 3 championship and we want you to host that too,’” Holman said as one example. “Hopefully you will all be responsive to that.”

There is also the growing interest in having what Holman called “extended agreements” beyond the regular bid cycle in hosting championships. Along with the long-term deals such as Omaha for baseball and Oklahoma City for softball, the NCAA in December announced deals with Cary, North Carolina, for men’s and women’s Division I soccer through 2028 and Division II baseball through 2038. Orlando will be the site for Division I men’s and women’s tennis through 2037 and beach volleyball will take place in Gulf Shores, Alabama, through 2031.

“We will be entertaining extended agreements but they need to make sense both financially and for that individual sport,” Holman said. “If you’ve got a facility and community that really embraces a sport, that there’s resources to maintain that, I would encourage you to play that up and make that known and submit that as a proposal.”

There was also the question of what would happen for emerging sports for women that could be given championship status and fall within the bid cycle of 2028–2031. Women’s wrestling will have its inaugural NCAA championship in 2026 and then be part of the next bid cycle and “we anticipate before the next bid cycle ends that women’s flag football (and) stunt will likely have championships so we will likely have bid specs for emerging sports that may be at the backside of the next bid cycle,” Holman said, giving an example of a three-year cycle that ends in 2031 could have a women’s flag football RFP for the final year.