Horizon League Tweaks Tournament Format Ahead of 2025-26 Season

Robert Morris sent both of its men’s and women’s basketball programs to Indianapolis for the Horizon League Championships last season.

The men’s team earned the No. 1 overall seed heading into the tournament while the women’s team finished the regular season as the No. 4 seed.

That made both of their paths to Indy simple, which was to win a home quarterfinals matchup. Both did just that and took the trip to the Corteva Coliseum together.

Now, that format is changing a bit which was first reported by Tyler Markley of Projection Sports.

New conference tournament format just dropped, courtesy of the Horizon League pic.twitter.com/th4fsxBt5Q

— Projection Sports (@ProjSports) August 20, 2025

The new format, which is catered to the odd number of teams in the league, now gives the top teams from the regular season a slight advantage once the tournament starts and adds an extra team making the trip to Indianapolis.

To start, the league’s two worst finishers from the regular season will face off in a play-in game to determine who plays the regular season champion in the first round.

Following that game, the remaining ten teams will play campus-site first-round games in the appropriate seeding order with the winners each earning a trip to Indianapolis.

Once the remaining five teams reach the Corteva Coliseum, the two worst seeded teams left over will play in a brand new, one-game second round. The winner of that game will then face off against the best remaining team by seed in the semifinal round.

The other semifinal game will feature the second and third best seeded teams left.

Obviously from that point on, the tournament will play out like any other with the winners of the semifinals squaring off the next night in the Horizon League Championship.

In contrast, the previous format had the league’s bottom six finishers play in the first round, with the winners joining the top five seeded teams in the quarterfinals. In the old model, there was not a play-in round or a one-game second round.

The new format changed a couple of things from the previous layout. First, it gives the regular season champ an even greater advantage as it now only has team beat one of the two worst teams in the league, instead of possibly the seventh-best team, at home to advance.

With a win in that round, the top seed gains an additional advantage which is a semifinal game against a team that played an additional do-or-die game the day prior.

Would the new format have changed the fates of either the men’s or women’s teams last season? Who knows, but either way, it should make for a thrilling experience once March rolls around this year.

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