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

• 📰 This Week’s Topic: There will be no non-power conference schools in the second weekend of the NCAA Men’s tournament for the first time ever. Is this an aberration or a sign of the times, and, at the end of the day, does it matter to us as fans?

• 🍸️ Impress Your Friends at Cocktail Party: Want to show off your sports knowledge in a public setting but don’t have time to read the deep dive? Hit the “Impress Your Friends at Cocktail Party” section at the bottom for a CliffsNotes of this week’s topic

• 🤯 “Whoa of the Week”: The women’s tournament turned in a solid first weekend, showing it has raised the bar on its year-in, year-out performance

• 💪 Weekly Reminders that Sports are Awesome: A heartfelt tribute to one of the great voices around college basketball, and an incredible MLB moment

Hey team,

One of the most celebrated things about the NCAA tournament, and why it has earned its moniker “March Madness,” is the potential for a magical run from teams that sit outside of the general college power structure and cultural narratives.

While football is dominated by the blue bloods, March Madness lends itself to Cinderella stories and David vs. Goliath matchups. A couple of archetypes we’ve seen over the past several years:

• The completely out of left field teams from schools you may or may not have heard — i.e., Florida Atlantic, St. Peter’s, and George Mason

• The incredible teams with fun side stories — i.e., Loyola Chicago and Sister Jean

• The team led by a man possessed — i.e., Davidson and the babyface killer, Steph Curry

Springing an upset in the round of 64 is huge, but doing it a few more times and making it to the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 is what it means to be a Cinderella.

Unfortunately, we will see no glass slippers being tried on this year.

This year’s Sweet 16 field will be made up entirely of teams from power conferences, a first since the bracket expanded to 64 teams in 1985. The lowest ranked seed in the second weekend is a 10 seed, but it’s held by Arkansas, a school with one of the biggest NIL budgets and a hall of fame coach who is one of the highest paid in the game and embodies much of the new money era. Not exactly “the little engine that could” material.

This brings up two important questions:

1. Is this year’s Sweet 16 field an aberration or another sign of the power consolidation at the top in college sports?

2. Do fans need the tournament to include Cinderella stories to maintain the March Madness magic, or is it more about the great games in high pressure situations?

Anomaly or the new normal?

It’s first important to consider why this could be happening.

The two obvious culprits here are conference consolidation and NIL.

There are schools from just four conferences — the four “power” conferences — in the Sweet 16 this year, a record low and a far cry from the high watermark of 11.

Each of these conferences has grown larger the past decade, adding a series of schools in the past decade as part of the shifting tectonic plates in college athletics. I wrote about this two years ago when the Pac-12 collapsed, but the landscape is a prisoner’s dilemma where all schools are chasing dollars to fund the rising cost of their athletic departments, and while staying together would further their interests, they don’t want to be left on the outside looking in. The scarcity of media dollars means an increased emphasis on going where the money is.

More schools in power conferences means we see consolidation of quality teams with major budgets at the top. The Power Four earned a record number of bids this year —14 for the SEC, eight for the Big Ten, seven from the Big 12, and four from the ACC (note that the Big East, which is effectively a power conference in basketball, earned five bids this year). The only other conferences that got multiple bids were the Mountain West — four — and the West Coast — two.

Some of these schools earning bids would have fallen into the mid-major category just a few years ago, but they’ve now joined the have’s by joining one of the major conferences.

This consolidation has a black hole effect where it needs to continue to consume more, and it extends to both coaches and players as well.

Four of the six coaches from a non-power conference who won a game in this tournament have left for bigger, greener (get it?) pastures in the top conferences.

• Will Wade: McNeese State —> NC State (and yes, he’s bringing Aura)

• Niko Medved: Colorado State —> Minnesota

• Ben McCollum: Drake —> Iowa

• Richard Pitino: New Mexico —> Xavier

The two that didn’t? School legends who will never leave — Gonzaga’s Mark Few and Saint Mary’s Randy Bennett.

The players are also on the move, and this gets to the second key factor driving this: NIL.

Since the transfer portal opened earlier this week (why the NCAA continues to set transfer portal dates while a sport’s playoffs are still going is beyond me), there have been over 1,300 players enter into the portal. This tracks with last year, when over 2,000 players entered into it.

Much of the high profile movement stems from upward mobility, with top schools opening up their war chests to lure away talent from other major schools and mid-major players jumping to bigger programs for bigger dollars.

This annual migration makes it increasingly hard for mid-majors to field competitive teams because their best players each year are potentially getting poached, effectively turning them into “glorified JuCo’s” as Norfolk State’s head coach Robert Jones put it.

There is also now a certain level of “keeping up with the Joneses” in the power conferences, with traditional football powers in the SEC and Big Ten investing serious money into their basketball programs, creating power dynamics and hierarchies within the mega conferences themselves.

As one one anonymous ACC coach told On3, “most of the SEC will be the biggest spenders. Really, the top of every high major league will at least be spending $6 to $8 million.”

Despite all of this, up until this year, a similar number of mid-majors were making it to the second weekend post-NIL era as before, including 2023 where San Diego St, Florida Atlantic, and Princeton were all in the Sweet 16 (and SDSU and FAU ended up in the Final Four).

So, this could be a fluke. But it could also be a lagging indicator of the new order as schools are now catching up to how to work within the NIL era after almost four years.

This chalk Sweet 16 also feels somewhat apropos for the Wild West moment we’re in that is dominated by the Power Four oligarchs, and it certainly looks like we’re heading towards more chaos with a crash landing into the post-House settlement era this Fall where we will see this disparity potentially grow even more.

There is a bigger question here, though.

In the end, do we as fans care?

We will have to wait to see what the results are from this weekend and next to gauge how true this is, but despite the chalk results so far, this year’s NCAA tournament is on pace to be the most-watched NCAA Tournament in 32 years.

The combined average of the first weekend across CBS, TNT, TBS and truTV was 9.4 million viewers, which is up 3% year-over-year.

If this trend continues, it will be a much needed shot in the arm for the men’s tournament, which has seen viewership for its Final Fours decline during the NIL era.

So, it begs the question — do we as fans want March Madness to be about great stories for the first part of the tournament, or great games in the second part?

Sports fans, myself included, romanticize the David vs. Goliath matchups and the small school with a bunch of guys no one has heard of capturing America’s hearts through the first weekend.

The reality is that more often than not, many of these teams’ carriages turn into a buzzsaw instead of a pumpkin when the clock strikes midnight during the second weekend.

The tape is out on their strategies, and the more talented teams are both prepared for them and not overlooking them. Because of this dynamic, the result is usually a lopsided win in favor of the traditional powers.

So, it’s logical to assume that more games between power conference opponents with similar budgets and roster makeups will yield closer games. That being said, it also runs the risk of sterilizing the product even further, where the same teams are essentially competing each year without much variability.

I see both sides of this argument, but put me in the camp of still wanting to retain some aspect of the magic and what we find exhilarating about sports.

The men’s game is already lacking compelling stories due to the flow of top players to the NBA after one year and the constant shifting of rosters due to the transfer portal. Continuing down this path in the post-House era will likely further erode this (ironically, the women’s game is much better positioned to handle this new era due to the existing consolidation of quality talent at the top and that most players stay for at least four years, but I degress).

So, how to fix it?

It’s not easy, but it certainly doesn’t sit with the players. They’re working within the confines of the system.

The responsibility lies at the feet of the school administrators, conferences, and NCAA, who need to do the hard thing by setting up a system that embraces the new world order and creates sport-by-sport regulations that are tailored to the specific nuances of each.

Here’s hoping the clock hasn’t already struck midnight.

🍸️ Impress Your Friends at a Cocktail Party

Want to show off your sports knowledge in a public setting but don’t have time to read the deep dive? This section is the CliffsNotes of this week’s topic

• Opener: One of the most things celebrated about the NCAA tournament, and why it has earned its moniker “March Madness,” is the potential for a magical run from teams that sit outside of the general college power structure and cultural narratives. This year is the first time in modern history that the Sweet 16 is comprised of all power conference schools, though. Is this an anomaly or the new normal?

• Shot: If it is the new normal, it’s important to understand why. The reasons are likely that the consolidation of schools into bigger conferences and NIL create power vacuums that the bigger schools can exploit. Coaches who win games at mid-majors are often hired by major schools, and bigger schools are using NIL — sometimes $5 million plus annually — to recruit top talent and then poach talent from smaller schools who perform well in the tournament.

• Shot: All of that being said, the other years of the NIL era featured mid-majors in the Sweet 16 and beyond, so is this a fluke or a lagging indicator of how schools operate in the money era of college athletics?

• Shot: The biggest question, though, is if we as fans care. Do we want March Madness to be about great stories for the first part of the tournament, or great games in the second part? Despite the chalk results so far, this year’s NCAA tournament is up 3% year-over-year and is on pace to be the most-watched NCAA Tournament in 32 years.

• Chaser: I see both sides of this argument, but put me in the camp of still wanting to retain some aspect of the magic and what we find exhilarating about sports. The men’s game is already lacking compelling stories due to the flow of top players to the NBA after one year and the constant shifting of rosters due to the transfer portal. Continuing down this path in the post-House era will likely further erode this. Fixing it won’t be easy, but it certainly doesn’t sit with the players. They’re working within the confines of the system. The responsibility lies at the feet of the school administrators, conferences, and NCAA, who need to do the hard thing by setting up a system that embraces the new world order and creates sport-by-sport regulations that are tailored to the specific nuances of each.

🤯 “Whoa” of the Week

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

1. The Women’s tournament is tracking about where most expected — not like last year, but still stellar numbers.

While some are choosing to look at this as a negative, I think it should be recognized and celebrated that the women’s game both produced generational superstars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese that led to such massive numbers last year and that they have set a new watermark for where they expect to be each year.

Side note: It is an absolute travesty we will not get to see JuJu Watkins the rest of the tournament due to her ACL tear on Monday. Here’s hoping she is back and better than ever next year

💪 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. An incredibly touching tribute to one of the greats who was a mainstay during March Madness coverage, Greg Gumbel.

2. A non-March Madness feel good story about making the big league roster. Someone was chopping onions when I watched this

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

Also, if you enjoyed this breakdown, please consider sharing it with your friends and network by clicking the social media icons at the top of the newsletter.

Until next time, sports fans!

-Alex