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Tuesday, March 24
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Ignore the Haters—March Madness Is Alive and Well In Spite of Transfers and NIL

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Ignore the Haters—March Madness Is Alive and Well In Spite of Transfers and NIL

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Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! May your baseball-related hopes spring eternal this week—for lo, the winter is past, Opening Day is almost here, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

But before we get to baseball, we’ve got a March Madness opener: Is Cinderella dead? We’ll discuss that and explore tournament expansion before a quick hit on baseball. We’ll close it out with some thoughts on the newest season of Shoresy.

  • “Team USA vs The World is having a moment, but will it last?“
  • A good reminder that big sporting events are not engines of economic growth: “World Cup Economic Bump Is Starting to Look Like a Bust“
  • The NCAA has strict restrictions on teams sharing highlights on social media, which seems like a bad marketing strategy, but at least created some funny content.
  • The NCAA is suing DraftKings for using the NCAA’s trademarked phrases “March Madness,” “Final Four,” “Elite Eight,” and “Sweet Sixteen.”
  • Sports betting is only for sportsbooks? Two senators introduce a bipartisan bill to keep sports betting off prediction markets. Likewise, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y) called the MLB partnership with Polymarket “sad.”
  • In a major blow to people who like to buy resale tickets, Ontario is going to outlaw ticket resale above list price.
  • “A professional cornhole player with no arms and legs has been accused of murder.”
  • Elsewhere in Reason: “4chan Sends Hilarious, Hamster-Filled Reminder That U.S. Companies Need Not Follow British Speech Regulations“
  • This isn’t sports, but I love a challenge like this. He played on hard mode and got seven states, plus D.C., via train. With a designated driver and an earlier start I think you could get to at least 12.

Maybe I just don’t like whining, but whenever there’s bellyaching en masse that some change has ruined sports and “It just ain’t like it used to be,” I usually recoil and think to myself: “You’re still watching, aren’t you?” (Yes, people are still watching.)

The combination of name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals and a wide open transfer portal has ruined men’s March Madness, we’re told, because Cinderella is dead. The only double-digit seed to make the Sweet 16 is No. 11 Texas—and no one is happy to see Bevo’s chariot ride off toward the San Jose regional. We were not treated to any first-round upsets over seeds one through four (Siena giving Duke a run for its money was fun until it wasn’t). Assuming you count the Big East as a power conference in basketball, all the remaining teams are from power conferences. Where have you gone, Florida Gulf Coast?

But what did we get? No. 9 seed Iowa upset Florida and gets to face Nebraska for all the corn you can handle (the first 9 seed to beat a 1 seed since 2018). Vanderbilt may have had the best miss ever. Duke looks strong, yes, but we’ve gotten to see blueblood giants fall, like Kentucky, North Carolina in shambles, and Kansas (not to mention whatever was going on with Villanova’s head coach). High Point knocked off Wisconsin in a supremely entertaining game. Was I rooting for Kentucky? Never, but this buzzer-beater to send it to overtime was absolute cinema.

I would have loved more upsets, to be sure. More often than not, they’re happening to someone else’s team, and it’s fun to point and laugh. But, as they say, they can’t all be bangers. Having so many top seeds left makes March Madness look a little less random, yes, but hopefully it means the last 15 games will be close and supremely entertaining . Less randomness also gives the tournament champion more legitimacy.

As the critics’ theory goes, the big programs are pilfering talent from mid-majors using the lure of NIL money, enabled by that wide open transfer portal. But most of the Sweet 16 teams are still mostly homegrown talent. It’s easy to play this game and guess all but a few of these (the ones that are really dicey had coaching changes in the last few years).

(Here are the right answers.) Another factor that’s reducing upsets is that the Selection Committee got smarter. Seeding all the teams in the tournament is a difficult task, especially when the teams play such different opponents in their walled-off conferences. The eye test and basic stats are not good enough for this task. In the past, one of the better auto-bid teams that should have been a 12-seed might instead get overlooked and end up as a 15-seed, thus giving a 2-seed a tougher opponent than they really deserved (no, I am not interested in discussing the most scarring example of this that comes to mind). But now the Selection Committee uses more advanced statistics when setting up the bracket, giving the tournament more accurate seeding.

Another theory says that almost every team has optimized into playing the same strategy now—and if two teams are playing the same tactics, the better team is more likely to win than win a chaotic clash of playing styles.

It might help if mid-major teams went back to sending their regular season champions to the tournament instead of their conference tournament champion. That would improve the quality of the lower seeds, even if they’d still be teams we rarely hear of.

Eventually, Cinderella will be back at the ball. The lack of upsets now will make future upsets that much more fun when they happen.

On the other hand, a lack of upsets sure seems like a great argument against expanding March Madness, which the NCAA seems hellbent on doing. But if your worst at-large teams aren’t making much of an impact (aside from Texas this year), then why push for even worse at-large teams to join the party?

The Big Ten and SEC (and, by extension, NCAA President Charlie Baker) seem to want four to eight more teams in the tournament. So instead of the First Four games, we’re pushing more teams into play-in games that could be branded the Starting Six or the Early Eight (pretty proud of these names I made up). Those don’t have quite the same pomp and circumstance as the rest of the tournament. The First Four wasn’t really on my radar this year, but I guess it got great ratings anyway, thanks to curiosity about Miami (Ohio).

An underrated factor here is how much this would mess with people making their brackets. It’s going to be tough to pick all your first-round winners and the rest of your bracket by first tip around noon on Thursday if so many teams are still in the mix late on Wednesday. People like watching basketball, but a casual fan without a team in the hunt is probably more invested in the tournament’s early rounds because they want to follow their bracket. If they give up on making a bracket because it’s too hard to make one with the uncertainty created by the play-in games, they might give up on most of March Madness altogether. (Arguably, this also cheapens the excitement of Selection Sunday for more teams—finding out you’re in the play-in rounds is not as exciting as getting into the real field of 64 teams).

“I don’t believe Baker or any of the power conference commissioners who are pushing expansion fully appreciate the risk of making the NCAA tournament more difficult to follow for the common fan than it already is,” as Dan Wolken wrote for Yahoo Sports. “They seem eager to gamble the sanctity of a brand college sports spent the last 40 years building without recognizing that the bracket is the brand.”

Happy Almost Opening Day, baseball fans. Who knows if you’ll get one next year?

The league’s collective bargaining agreement expires after this season, and a lockout is “almost guaranteed,” according to the players union’s interim executive director, Bruce Meyer. (For what it’s worth, Polymarket has the chance of a new agreement by December 1 at 48 percent—I’m not giving you advice, but that seems very optimistic to me.)

The situation has hardly budged since this time last year, when I wrote, “Things are going pretty well for Major League Baseball right now, which means they’re probably about to badly screw it up.” Commissioner Rob Manfred has not changed his tune since saying lockouts are “actually a positive.” The union’s leadership may have changed (why are professional players union heads always resigning in shame?) but its stance on a salary cap remains the same: Not now, not ever, no way. The owners want a salary cap to keep labor costs down and to try and get more competitive balance.

There might not be much room for negotiation, but luxury taxes or salary floors might help give players and owners the things they want (although the most powerful players in the negotiations are seeking big paydays: Paul Skenes and Tarik Skubal, among others). Baseball is barreling toward a lockout—what happens afterward in negotiations will decide if fans lose games in 2027 or not.

The newest season of Shoresy is out, and it remains one of the best sports shows on TV, ever (even better than Brockmire). The fifth season is not my favorite in the series, but still full of laughs and fights (it could use a little more hockey on the side). We finally get to see Shoresy behind the bench, coaching a team of North Americans against Europeans. The North American version of hockey is dead, we’re told, and the superior European style is coming to crush North American teams, six-goose. Thankfully Shoresy is here to teach us how to build a winning culture on short notice.

Aside from all the entertainment, the show is a pretty good example of positive masculinity: making sacrifices for teammates, stepping up to lead, fighting on the rink and sharing a beer afterward, and treating the women in your life right (but the ideal version of masculinity would probably be a little less focused on strip clubs).

With all due respect to go-ahead buckets scored with 3.4 seconds left, there’s nothing like walk-off baskets. (They’re rarer than you think!)

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the week, match two and match three (if necessary) in the TGL Finals, both Tuesday night (now featuring Tiger Woods, apparently).



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