March Madness is the biggest and longest sports spectacle in the country. With an average of 9.9 million viewers across 67 games, the tournament attracted a total of roughly 666.3 million spectators last year alone. That’s more than the most-watched Super Bowl of all time (2025), the most-watched NBA Finals of all time (1998), and the most-watched World Series of all time (1978) combined. The tournament is also significantly longer than any of these professional sports finals. The Super Bowl lasts 3 or 4 hours at max, and the series structure of the NBA, MLB, and NHL limits games to about a two-week timeframe. On the other hand, March Madness is (you guessed it) about a whole month long.
Even if you don’t think this is a fair comparison because I’m evaluating the entirety of March Madness, not one game (like the Super Bowl) or one series (like the NBA finals), it’s important to remember that, unlike every other professional sports postseason in the world, every single one of March Madness’ 67 games feels like the finals. Take the NBA, MLB, and NHL. The best-of-7 games format means the first three games have relatively low stakes. It might be an uphill battle to come back from, say, a 2-0 or 3-0 deficit, but a team cannot be eliminated until at least Game 4. Until then, there’s always a chance to climb back into the series.
The only other postseason that comes close to matching the intensity of March Madness is the NFL playoffs and its single-game elimination structure. March Madness has almost five times the number of teams and three more rounds to account for them. That means more opportunities for upsets, tougher runs to the finals, and a level of unpredictability that makes March Madness a uniquely entertaining tournament.
However, as top talent, NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) money and revenue-sharing capacities become increasingly consolidated in the hands of top-tier programs, March Madness is beginning to die.
Don’t get me wrong. Unfairness in college basketball has always been inevitable. Even before NIL was introduced, top players naturally committed to schools like Duke, Kentucky, and UCLA over smaller, mid-major programs because of their coaching staff, resources, and history of preparing players for the NBA. These top-level basketball universities have had the talent to win the tournament, year in, year out, for decades. But the type of basketball player that could make a college team a championship contender just by signing has always been ephemeral. They’re “one-and-dones,” playing a year at a top program before declaring for the draft.
To dampen the impact of these kinds of players, smaller schools develop their athletes over several years, creating starting lineups of mostly juniors and seniors; in other words, players with chemistry who have had the benefit of playing with each other for more than one season. So, if you’re wondering how a school like Saint Peter’s upset Purdue to advance to the Elite 8 in 2022 or how Yale beat Auburn last year (the highest-seeded team in this year’s tournament), this is the reason. Talent versus practice. Flash versus fundamentals.
These age-old battles in the college basketball landscape used to stabilize the playing field. But now, the transfer portal and the sheer amount of NIL money to go around (even to McNeese State University’s student manager, Amir Khan) will more than likely turn mid-major schools like Yale into glorified Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) programs, where talented players go only in order to go elsewhere.
It’s already starting. Not only are there no mid-major teams in the Sweet Sixteen for the first time in six years, but according to ESPN, over 750 players entered the transfer portal on just the first day of the tournament. That’s 14% of all Division I players. As NBA analyst Travis Branham pointed out, the number of opening day transfers this year is almost two and a half times greater than last year, which broke the previous record with 291 portal entries. But, even among teams poised to make a deep tournament run, the field of players is as volatile as it has ever been. Justin Pippen, son of six-time NBA champion Scottie Pippen, announced his intent to leave Michigan right as the team cracked into the round of sixteen. That’s like Steph Curry saying he’s going to leave the Warriors right after they make it to the Western Conference Finals. It just doesn’t happen. This level of instability and fluctuation is unprecedented.
It’s only going to get worse, especially for smaller schools. The House vs. NCAA settlement will get approved on April 7th and it will allow universities to directly compensate student athletes for the first time ever.
The best programs are only going to get better as the divide between them and the mid-majors becomes even more stratified. They’ll be able to command the transfer portal since the settlement now lets schools share up to 22% of their annual revenue with players. That’s upwards of $20 billion over the next decade. The pool of competitive mid-major schools like Yale, Davidson, and Butler is going to get increasingly smaller until it ceases to exist at all. They just can’t compete with the kinds of promises bonafide programs can offer players.
That’s why Saint Francis University just reclassified from Division I to Division III despite making the March Madness tournament this year for the first time since 1991. According to the school’s chairman, “The governance associated with intercollegiate athletics has always been complicated and is only growing in complexity based on realities like the transfer portal, pay-for-play, and other shifts that move athletics away from love of the game.” This switch is extremely rare, but it’s a marker of the beginning of the end of mid-major schools—and with it, the very basis of college basketball’s appeal.
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
