March Madness Daily: A Wild Stat That May Say Everything, or Nothing
For the first time in 47 years, the entire men's Sweet Sixteen comes from major football conferences.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Here’s a nugget about the Sweet Sixteen.
Eben: In 1978, the NCAA split Division I into multiple subgroups—the richest football schools (now FBS), a second tier of football schools (now FCS), and the non-football schools. The move came amid pressure from larger, richer universities that understood the booming business of college football and wanted increased autonomy and spending standards. Today, the partition still exists, with an ever-widening financial gap.
In the 47 years since that split, the NCAA Sweet Sixteen has always featured at least one team from those lower two groups. Sometimes it was many. Non-football schools Marquette 🦅 and Gonzaga 🐶 have been mainstays. Lower-tier football schools like Villanova 🐈 and Dayton 🛩️ have also been among the more successful tournament programs. Cinderellas 👠 sprinkled in seemingly every year.
This year, however, the run abruptly ended. All 16 teams left in the men’s tournament are FBS programs. What’s more, they’re all part of the “power four” leagues—the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC—a further subdivision of FBS that’s seeking a more serious version of autonomy and spending standards.
I see two ways to look at this. The first: it’s a statistical anomaly. Maryland 🐢 needed a last-second shot to beat Colorado State 🐏, which is FBS but is a member of a smaller conference. Creighton 🐤, St. John’s 🔴 and Gonzaga 🐶, none of whom offer football, were each a couple bounces away from reaching the Sweet Sixteen.
The more dour view, however, is that this is a harbinger of the future of March Madness, where competing in top-tier basketball requires a money-printing football team. Schools in the Big East like to talk about the potential advantage of not having FBS football. Basketball is the singular focus of time, effort, and money at a school like St. John’s—but that might not be enough in the future. So much of the NCAA’s current inequality is about to get worse, and the frenetic heyday of March Madness may soon be a relic of the past.
If you’re like me, and prefer to root for the underdogs, what’s left for us this year? Go BYU?? Ugh. 😞
Programming note: We’ll be sending daily business nuggets throughout the NCAA tournaments. If that’s not your thing, you can opt out of daily March Madness posts by updating your settings here or with the button below. We’ll return to normal programming in April.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.