In 2026, the Horizon League tournaments will be the beginning of the end. Or, more accurately, the beginning of a new end.
The conference will substantially revise its playoff schedule in the coming season, a discovery first made by Tyler Markley, through his Projection Sports project, on Wednesday. Markley’s work was then easily confirmed through the Horizon League website.
The new format, though it appears awkward at first glance, is both quite simple, and identical for the women’s and men’s versions of the tournament.
On Monday, March 2nd, a play-in game will pit the 10th and 11th place teams against each other. Two days later, the winner of that game will take on the league’s top seed in one of five first round games. That jam-packed Wednesday will also feature campus site matchups between the other eight HL teams, paired off in the appropriate seed order. The five winners that evening will then advance to Corteva Coliseum in Indianapolis, the HL’s championship destination.
At that point, the two lowest seeds of those still alive will play each other on Sunday, March 8th, with the winner sticking around to play the best remaining team on Monday in a semifinal. The other semifinal, naturally, will involve the second and third best seeds of the group in Indy.
All of that is a notable departure from the structure that had been used since the 2022-23 season, the first with the HL’s present membership lineup. The now-former tournaments had the bottom six finishers in the standings play in a first round, with the three winners joining the top five teams in the quarterfinals.
While no tournament format – particularly one accommodating an odd number of entrants – is ever perfect, the revised Horizon League bracket does wallpaper over several issues with the previous iteration.
For one thing, the conference’s regular season champion is now practically guaranteed a trip to Indianapolis, as it will only need to defeat one of the two worst teams in the league at home to advance to the final five. Should that happen, the top seed gains an additional advantage: a semifinal contest against a team that needed to survive a must-win game roughly 24 hours earlier. Though there certainly are no guarantees in March, the HL’s first place team has never had an easier path to league championship game, which places a premium on regular season performance.
At the same time, the tournament also minimizes the regular season in a couple important ways. Recent years have seen loads of parity in the conference, including a women’s table where just one game separated fifth and ninth places last season. The men’s standings were a bit more defined, though fourth and seventh places were just two games apart.
Under the previous reality, the top four teams received a first-round bye and hosted a quarterfinal game, while number five also received a bye ahead of a road quarterfinal against the fourth-place team. That often created situations where the tournament’s built-in advantages were not equitably distributed.
For example, Northern Kentucky’s women’s team, 8-12 in conference play in 2024-25, finished fifth in the standings, receiving a bye and a manageable trip to Robert Morris for the quarterfinals. Meanwhile, Youngstown State, whose 7-13 mark included a pair of wins over the Norse, placed ninth and had to travel to Wright State for the first round. Had the Penguins won that game, they then would have needed to bus to Purdue Fort Wayne two days later for the quarterfinals.
It’s certainly fair to point out that NKU deserved an easier path with their superior finish, but it could just as easily be argued that the magnitude of the Norse’s advantage was well out of line with what the regular season justified.
Thanks largely to a straightforward “win one game and make it to Indy” bracket (for all but the bottom two finishers), the experience of the Horizon League’s signature event is now open to two additional teams, one in each tournament. That move could certainly become a gateway to transferring even more of the playoffs to Circle City eventually.
The only major drawback? HL commissioner Julie Roe Lach will have to assemble everyone to do it all over again next summer, when Northern Illinois increases the circuit’s membership to 12, just as its deals with both Corteva Coliseum and ESPN are scheduled to expire.
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