Year in and year out, March Madness is the greatest of all sporting events if you ask me. Greater even than the Super Bowl, the World Series (except for 2016’s fall classic), the Olympics, the World Cup, the Master’s, the Derby, the Indy 500.
Nothing beats March Madness for sheer drama and heartbreak and elation. Nothing is so utterly unpredictable. Not one game, 63 games. Dozens of buzzers beaten, tens of millions of brackets busted. Stars born, giants slain, a champion crowned. Confetti drops, hardware is hoisted, that iconic song plays. One Shining Moment.
It’s so mad it can’t even be kept to the month it’s named for, always spilling over into April. In a matter of weeks in 2023, the National Collegiate Athletic Association raked in over a billion dollars from the sale of tickets and broadcast rights, marketing deals and merchandise licensing. This year, for the first time, the NCAA found pots of gold at the end of two rainbows. The women’s championship game had considerably more viewers than the men’s title game. Two Shining Moments, two enormous paydays for the NCAA.
The odds of getting the winners of 63 tournament games correct by flipping a coin are roughly one in 9.2 quintillion. To be more precise, one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. To put that number in context, it’s estimated there are 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth. None of this puts a damper on the office pools and online contests. Well in excess of $15 billion is wagered on the madness.
Probably should’ve mentioned before now that all this fuss is being made over college basketball, but the chances you didn’t already know that are nil or nearly so. The dictionary says nil means zero or nonexistent. In the world of college sports, NIL stands for name, image and likeness. Shorthand for college athletes benefiting financially from the notoriety their performances bring them.
NIL payments combined with a newfound right of athletes to freely move from one school to another through something called the transfer portal are quickly turning college sports into a mercantile exchange where players are mercenaries who shop themselves to the highest bidders. The resulting system, far too disorderly to truly qualify as a system, is one without guardrails.
There are no employment contracts, no minimum salaries, no players union, no collective bargaining. No rules, at least none being enforced. Soon, no remaining loyalty to school, to team, to fans. Just money, lots and lots of money. Some will profit handsomely, others will lose out. As with all change, all those involved have little choice but to adapt. There will be casualties. And unintended consequences.
For the moment at least, chaos reigns in the new order, but there’s self-enriching method to the madness. Players are getting paid, which is what they’ve wanted. The universities belonging to the NCAA aren’t doing the paying. NIL payments come from opaque collectives, presumably funded by boosters and corporate sponsors. The NCAA and its member institutions still get to keep all the proceeds from the spectacles they host. Works for them, too.
What’s in danger of being lost is love of the game and of the alma mater. The system, if it can even be called that, is commercial and transactional, a vivid reflection of our culture as a whole nowadays. No clairvoyance is required to see what lies ahead. A fateful choice. You know the story. It’s as old as the hills.
There was once a Countryman who possessed the most wonderful Goose you can imagine, for every day when he visited the nest, the Goose had laid a beautiful, glittering, golden egg. The Countryman took the eggs to market and soon began to get rich. But it was not long before he grew impatient with the Goose because she gave him only a single golden egg a day. He was not getting rich fast enough. Then one day, after he had finished counting his money, the idea came to him that he could get all the golden eggs at once by killing the Goose and cutting it open. But when the deed was done, not a single golden egg did he find, and his precious Goose was dead.
Excellent analysis, Mike. It's the Wild West. Jim Wedde
I agree. The transfer portal and the NIL are going to ruin college sports. So sad.