March Madness: Sport, Money, and the American Soul

So a star player can sign endorsement deals, appear in advertisements, build a brand.

It blew the whole thing open.

Some college athletes are now making hundreds of thousands of dollars while technically still being 'amateurs.'

Es muy complicado.

It's very complicated.

Profoundly.

And now, expanding to 76 teams, you have to ask what the motivation really is.

More teams means more games.

More games means more television.

More television means more money.

The tournament that was born in 1939 as a modest collegiate competition has become one of the largest media events in American life.

¿Cuándo empieza la locura exactamente?

When exactly does the madness start?

The first Thursday of the tournament, the country more or less stops functioning.

I'm barely exaggerating.

Productivity studies have actually tried to calculate how much money is lost because people are watching games at work.

The number is usually somewhere north of fifteen billion dollars in lost productivity.

Which tells you something about how embedded this is in the culture.

En España, la gente trabaja durante el Mundial de fútbol también.

In Spain, people work during the football World Cup too.

There's that parallel again.

And I think what March Madness and the World Cup share is that they give people a reason to care about something together.

There's a communal element.

Even people who don't follow the teams all year will fill out a bracket and suddenly have a rooting interest in a school they'd never heard of in Nebraska or Virginia.

¿Qué es un bracket?

What is a bracket?

It's a prediction chart.

Before the tournament starts, you predict who will win every single game, all the way to the champion.

And here's the beautiful thing, the odds of filling out a perfect bracket are so astronomically low that mathematicians compare it to winning the lottery several times in a row.

Warren Buffett once offered a billion dollars to anyone who could do it.

Nobody ever has.

¡Qué locura!

How crazy!

Entonces el nombre tiene sentido.

So the name makes sense.

Exactly.

The madness is the unpredictability.

And there's something in American culture that genuinely loves the underdog upset, the moment when the small school from nowhere knocks out the giant.

There's a democratic fantasy at work there, this idea that any team, any person, given one day and one chance, can beat the best.

Es un sueño americano.

It's an American dream.

Como en el cine.

Like in the movies.

You're absolutely right, and I don't say that as a throwaway line.

The tournament functions as a kind of national mythology refreshed every year.

And I think expanding it to 76 teams potentially dilutes that.

You let in more teams, you lower the average quality, the upsets are less shocking because the small schools were perhaps always going to be there.

The drama depends on the exclusion.

Más equipos, menos emoción.

More teams, less excitement.

Entiendo.

I understand.

There's a real tension in American sports between the romantic and the commercial.

And the commercial usually wins.

I covered a story years ago in Buenos Aires about a local football club that sold its name to a sponsor, and fans were devastated.

The identity of the institution felt violated.

I think something like that is happening slowly with March Madness, but because the money is so gradual, people don't notice the temperature rising.

En el fútbol español, pasa lo mismo.

In Spanish football, the same thing happens.

Es triste.

It's sad.

And there's a racial dimension to this conversation that I don't want to skip over.

The majority of the players in the Men's tournament are Black.

For decades, they were generating enormous wealth for predominantly white institutions and coaches.

The NIL changes that somewhat, but it doesn't fully resolve the structural problem.

That tension runs very deep.

Eso es importante.

That's important.

El deporte y la justicia son lo mismo, a veces.

Sport and justice are the same thing, sometimes.

That's a good way to put it.

Sport is never just sport.

It's always carrying something else.

The bracket, the madness, the Cinderella story, they all sit on top of a much more complicated set of relationships between money, race, education, and power.

And yet people fill out their brackets and have a genuinely wonderful time, and both things are true at once.

Como el fútbol en España.

Like football in Spain.

Complicado y bonito.

Complicated and beautiful.

Exactly that.

Now, for someone who didn't grow up in the United States, the other thing that would probably strike you about March Madness is the university loyalty.

Americans are intensely attached to their university in a way I've not seen replicated anywhere else in the world.

People wear their university colors decades after graduation, they donate money, they argue about football and basketball at Thanksgiving.

En España, la gente quiere a su equipo de la ciudad.

In Spain, people love their city team.

No de la universidad.

Not their university.

That distinction is so important.

In Europe, civic identity and sports are linked.

In America, for many people, it's the university.

I have colleagues at UT Austin who are far more emotionally invested in the Longhorns than they are in any professional team.

The university is a community of belonging in a very particular way.

¿Y Texas tiene un equipo bueno?

And does Texas have a good team?

I'm not going to touch that question on air.

What I will say is that the cultural ritual around the tournament matters more than whether any particular team wins.

The shared experience, filling out a bracket at the office, watching the upsets, arguing about who should have won, that's actually the point.

El ritual es más importante que el resultado.

The ritual is more important than the result.

Eso es verdad en muchas cosas.

That's true in many things.

That might be the most insightful thing said on this podcast today and I'm not going to argue with it.

The women's tournament, by the way, has been growing fast.

Last year's women's final drew more viewers than the men's.

That's a historic shift.

The expansion covers both tournaments equally.

¿Más espectadores en el torneo femenino?

More viewers for the women's tournament?

Eso es muy interesante.

That's very interesting.

It's driven significantly by one player, Caitlin Clark, who became a generational talent and made people tune in who had never watched college basketball before.

She's moved on to the professional league now, but she essentially handed the sport a new audience.

Which is another very American story, the individual who lifts an entire institution.

En España, el deporte y los deportistas son muy importantes también.

In Spain, sport and athletes are very important too.

Everywhere.

Sport and identity, sport and belonging, sport and money.

These are universal pressures.

What differs is how each culture resolves them or fails to.

In America right now, the resolution is: expand the tournament, add more games, sell more advertising, and call it progress.

Whether that's wisdom or just appetite, I genuinely don't know.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Por cierto, Fletcher, una pregunta.

By the way, Fletcher, a question.

Go ahead.

Dijiste 'aficionado' antes.

You said 'aficionado' earlier.

En inglés es la misma palabra, ¿no?

In English it's the same word, right?

We borrowed it directly from Spanish.

An aficionado in English means someone with a deep, passionate knowledge of something.

Wine aficionados, jazz aficionados.

It kept your meaning almost perfectly.

Sí.

Yes.

En español, 'aficionado' es una persona que ama algo.

In Spanish, 'aficionado' is a person who loves something.

O un fan del deporte.

Or a sports fan.

And it connects to the whole amateur question we were just discussing.

The word comes from 'afición,' which means passion or devotion.

Originally, an aficionado was someone who did something for love, not for money.

Which is exactly the fiction the NCAA was selling for decades.

La 'afición' es muy importante en el deporte español.

The 'afición' is very important in Spanish sport.

Los aficionados son el corazón del equipo.

The fans are the heart of the team.

The heart of the team.

I like that.

In America we say 'fan' which comes from 'fanatic,' and that word carries a slightly unhinged energy.

Your word, aficionado, implies something more dignified.

Someone who earned their passion through knowledge.

Maybe that says something about how each culture relates to sport itself.

O quizás los dos somos un poco locos con el deporte.

Or maybe we're both a little crazy about sport.

March Madness would suggest you're right.