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Good Thursday Morning. Here’s the rundown of this week’s Sports Business Playbook:

• 📰 This Week’s Topic: The 2025 college basketball season is in the books, and we are looking at three key numbers from the last March Madness of the NIL Era.

• 🤯 “Whoa of the Week”: Kalshi’s strong performance in March Madness betting

• 💪 Weekly Reminders that Sports are Awesome: Ovi passes the Great One, and the celebration is everything it needed to be.

Hey team,

This year’s college basketball season came to a close, with the UConn women’s team and Florida men’s team earning the crowns.

Both Final Fours closed out what were successful tournaments for the NCAA and its member schools on the business front overall, but there is much change heading college athletics’ way with the impending House settlement expected to be finalized in the coming weeks.

Let’s wrap up this year’s March Madness with a look at three key statistics.

📺️ 18.1 million

That’s the number of viewers who tuned into Monday’s Men’s final, up 22% year-over-year making it the most watched final since 2019.

Anchored by two close games, in particular the Duke vs. Houston nailbiter that went down to the wire, the Final Four semifinals on Saturday averaged about 15.5 million viewers, up 21% from last year’s 12.8 million.

These figures show a broader trend, with viewership across the entire NCAA tournament up 3% from last season. This is a modest gain, but it’s also a positive indicator at a time where this is so much scrutiny on the men’s game.

Something to watch will be how these numbers continue to track in future years if/when we get the consolidation of top-ranked teams advancing to the later rounds, shutting out the underdog stories.

As we talked about heading into the Sweet 16, chalk likely means better ratings because bigger schools with bigger fanbases invested in their team’s success, but it could also be a double edge sword that turns off fans who enjoyed the magic of March Madness.

📺️ 8.6 million

That’s the number of viewers who tuned into Sunday’s Women’s final.

It’s been much publicized that this number is less than half of the 18.9 million record set in last year’s final that featured Caitlin Clark, and the overall tournament viewership saw a steep drop-off as well.

This is dumb, and it frankly boils down to the fact that Caitlin Clark is not normal.

No college basketball player, man or woman, has dominated the game and captured America’s attention like that in a long time, if ever.

To emphasize this point, I’m reposting a chart from a post last year about the women’s class of 2020 that shows what a freak Clark is.

She had rapper Travis Scott flying to Iowa to sit courtside for her games. She was doing commercials all over TV. She had people emulating her game like another sharpshooter with limitless range — Steph Curry.

All of this to say, comparing this year’s tournament to the two Clark Final Four years is like comparing a good MLB hitter’s season statistics to 2003/2004 Barry Bonds.

Instead of looking at how far off it is from those outlier years, let’s look at it against historical data.

The 8.5 million viewers is the third-most for a women's title game since ESPN began broadcasting the game in 1996, and the most in a non-Clark final. It’s also two times the audience size of nearly all of the finals over the last 30 years.

So, instead of falling prey to gotcha headlines, let’s respect the fact that we’re seeing sustained growth past the historical norm and a potential new baseline for the women’s game.

⌛️ 2

That’s the number of weeks before judge Claudia Wilken is expected to approve the House v. NCAA settlement that will completely reshape the landscape of college athletics. It feels appropriate this is coming to a head on the heels of the NCAA’s crown jewel — March Madness.

The final hearing occurred earlier this week, and Wilken has indicated she will approve the settlement if the two sides can come to terms on two areas, per Yahoo Sports:

1. Provide a phase-in period for implementing new roster limits or “grandfather in” current athletes on rosters. The current settlement would create new roster limits on specific sports, putting downward pressure on non-revenue sports and likely leading to the elimination of thousands of roster spots for walk-ons and partial scholarship earners. This provision has generated the most public outcry and concern from athletes, and Wilken seems to have taken issue with it. Based on her wording, it doesn’t sound like she is against it wholesale. Instead, she wants it to be phased in so current athletes and kids actively being recruited are not getting the short end of the stick.

2. Adjust language related to binding future athletes to the 10-year settlement. The settlement currently ties future athletes not in college yet to the House settlement so that the NCAA is not facing repeated challenges with every net new class of athletes that comes in. That being said, Wilken didn’t like this explanation and wants more optionality for the future student athletes. This puts the NCAA over a barrel, so it will be interesting to see what they negotiate.

In addition to the ruling, be on the lookout for any movements in Congress, as the NCAA continues to lobby for government intervention that creates a new regulated system of collective bargaining but doesn’t count student athletes as university employees.

We are entering unchartered territory over this next year, and the Madness may apply to all of college sports, not just March, soon enough.

🤯 “Whoa” of the Week

Insane, mind-blowing things constantly happen in the sports business world. Here was my favorite of the past week.

1. Kalshi’s sports trading practice did big numbers in March Madness, much higher than the Super Bowl and they were insulated from the favorites dominating the tournament due to their market-based model that takes trading fees instead of a vig like a traditional sportsbook.

💪 Weekly Reminder that Sports are Awesome

This newsletter is, of course, mostly centered on the business side of sports and the things that happen off the field. That being said, it’s important to remember why we fell in love with sports in the first place, though.

This section is meant to highlight the amazing things that happened in sports this week that serve as that reminder.

1. Alexander Ovechkin passed Wayne Gretzky on Sunday to become the NHL’s all-time leader goals scored (895), and the big celebration was fitting for such an incredible record

Thanks for reading! Let me know what feedback you have.

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Until next time, sports fans!

-Alex