Hello and welcome to the first edition of Free Agent! Did you know it’s March? It’s a special all–college basketball edition of Free Agent, including a brain fart you have to see to believe. Bust out your brackets and look out for creepy mascots with truly enormous teeth today.
By the way, if you think your bracket can beat ours, and the rest of our readers’, enter the Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest right here. A $750 prize goes to the best brackets in the men’s and women’s tournaments.
Kick-Off
Betting Is Fun
There are enough places to find media scolds who are overly concerned about other people gladly wagering their own money. This won’t be one of them. Sports betting is fun, and March Madness shows us why.
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Tens of millions of people will make a bracket. The tournament is basically three weeks where you can ask any casual sports fan, “How’s your bracket looking?” Bracket picks make us care more, especially about otherwise uninteresting games (looking at you, Mississippi State vs. Baylor). Sure, upset-watch games are always fun. They’re even more fun when you’re trying to remember if this is one of the upsets you picked, or whether you put the team getting upset in the Final Four.
It’s not like there are more teams in the tournament and more people are watching because their team is involved—there’s more interest in March Madness because more people are making brackets. More brackets means more people with a rooting interest in any given game, which means more TV viewership. (If you’re looking to get into the women’s tournament but aren’t sure how, making a bracket will keep you engaged.)
March Madness is “America’s most wagered-on competition,” according to the American Gaming Association. In 2018, they estimated that just 3 percent (or $300 million) of the $10 billion bet on March Madness that year was wagered legally. But legalization has brought a lot of that wagering out of the shadows: They’re now estimating that $3.1 billion will be wagered legally on the tournaments in 2025. (They didn’t share an estimate of how much will be illegally wagered, but since the typical unlicensed bracket pool with a buy-in is illegal, the amount is probably in the billions.)
How many of the people who hate on legalized sports gambling are going to make a bracket? Hopefully, they realize how much fun it is and get over themselves.
Actually, the Committee Did a Good Job
Does North Carolina deserve a shot at the national championship? No, they suck. But they suck a little less than the teams that didn’t make the tournament.
After the bracket is released, everyone spends a few hours whining about something—my team should have had a better seed, their team shouldn’t have made it, etc. The roles in this year’s complaints are filled by Michigan (which perhaps deserves a better seed than 5 after winning the Big Ten Tournament) and North Carolina (which made the field despite having almost no wins over good teams).
As an unapologetic fan of analytics, let’s check in on Ken Pomeroy’s ratings. The highest-ranked team to miss the tournament? Ohio State at 39th, with a mediocre 17-15 record. No sympathy from me. Michigan’s ranking of 25th is actually in line with a 6 or 7 seed—perhaps the committee didn’t ding Michigan (whom I like!) enough for all those wins that came by just one possession.
North Carolina (whom I loathe!) similarly deserves credit for many of its losses coming by one possession—they rank 33rd in Pomeroy’s system, 15 spots higher than Indiana, 20 spots better than West Virginia.
None of these bubble teams were going to win the tournament anyway. You should not, under any circumstances, ask your state’s attorney general to spend time and resources investigating the NCAA over this.
The Conference Tournament Con?
Pitting 68 basketball teams against each other in a single-elimination tournament is fun. It’s chaotic, and we always #rootforchaos at Free Agent. It is absolutely not a great way to determine who is actually the best team in the nation (that would probably involve pitting 16 teams against each other in a best-of-seven series—sound familiar?). Single elimination means a loss of legitimacy, but the fun is worth it.
I understand why some people want automatic bids to go to a conference’s regular season champion (I was once one of them). Is St. Francis, its 16-17 record, and its diabolical mascot deserving of a shot at the national championship just because it somehow won the Northeast Conference Tournament? No, but neither is Central Connecticut, who won the conference’s regular season title. Thanks to at-large bids, teams that deserve a chance to win it all aren’t getting left behind anyway. All the arguing about bubble teams is just fighting over margins.
If the national championship tournament is going to prioritize fun over legitimacy for the best teams in the country, the process for automatic qualifiers should do the same.
Price Spike
If you thought economic inflation was bad, inflation for ticket prices is even worse.
Inflation is 2.5 percent in the last year, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But admission prices to sporting events are up 23 percent (thankfully not as bad as egg inflation, coming in at 52 percent). The trend holds up going further back too, with general prices up 89 percent since January 2000 and ticket prices up 162 percent. Fortunately, disposable income for Americans has tripled since 2000 too—it’s no surprise we’re spending more of that money on sporting events, driving up prices.
Two events that feel cheap, at least for now, are the men’s and women’s tournament finals. If you’re feeling overconfident, you can buy a ticket to the men’s championship game for about $160 or women’s for $250 (probably because the men’s venue, the Alamodome, is 3.5 times bigger than the women’s, Amalie Arena).
Replay of the Week
Scroll past if you can’t stand to watch cringeworthy mistakes.
South Carolina State was down 8 points with a minute to play, miraculously battled back to tie with 9 seconds left, and then intentionally fouled instead of defending. Brutal. South Carolina State (still) hasn’t made the tournament since 2003.
That’s all for now. Enjoy watching the real game of the week in an even older bracket competition, the New York Pancyprian-Freedoms against F.C. Cincinnati 2 in soccer’s U.S. Open Cup.
