It is that time of year: college basketball fans across the country are filling out brackets and watching the 68 best college teams in the country compete in one tournament. That’s right, March Madness is here. This annual fixture displays the best and worst college sports has to offer. The highs of a Cinderella run are juxtaposed with the lows of off-court drama. Player compensation, the transfer portal and conference realignment all draw attention away from compelling games. Every year, it gets harder and harder to just watch the games and root for your team.
On Feb 29, Iowa Hawkeyes guard Caitlin Clark declared for the 2024 WNBA draft, forgoing her final year of eligibility. Three days later, she passed Pete Maravich to become the all-time leading scorer across all of college basketball. She is a star. Still, her announcement provoked some questions from some members of the media. Since the inception of name, image and likeness (NIL) rights into college sports following a June 2021 Supreme Court decision in NCAA v Alston, college athletes can be compensated for commercial opportunities. In the past, players could not monetize their careers to compete in college sports. As players move up to the pros, college basketball loses its brightest stars. Clark, the biggest star in college basketball, would be a big loss. Reportedly, Fox Sports considered offering Clark an NIL deal to stay in college so they can continue to showcase her on their broadcasts.
The story is indicative of Clark’s star power within the sport. She is a member of a new generation of young women’s basketball stars alongside the likes of USC’s JuJu Watkins and LSU’s Angel Reese. This year, the women’s tournament has attracted comparable attention to the men’s. Yet, it also reveals the complications of the post-NIL world of college basketball. There are not really any rules for this. Unlike the pros, there is no bargaining process. Everybody is out on their own and it has led to some troubling outcomes.
In 2018, the NCAA launched the transfer portal, an online tool to help connect athletes with programs in the hopes of transferring. Previously, athletes would have to sit out and lose a year of eligibility in order to change programs. This is a step in the right direction for college sports, empowering athletes to do what is best for their development. However, when combined with NIL, it has had some negative consequences. For one, it interrupts the natural development cycle of young athletes. Rather than learning a system and slowly developing before getting significant playing time, athletes can leave if they do not immediately get what they want. Additionally, mid-major schools risk losing their players to bigger programs capable of dangling better NIL offers to recruits. It threatens to further shift power to big programs, potentially preventing the upsets that make college sports worth watching. This division between the haves and have nots is present in another worrying trend across college athletics: conference realignment.
Much like in pro sports, college teams are arranged into conferences. These divisions assign a champion and help decide schedules. Unlike in the pros, however, college conferences govern and decide membership themselves. Historically, these were regional divisions like the southern SEC or midwestern Big 10. This precedent has been shaken by the arrival of big television contracts. Conferences sign contracts with networks to broadcast games. This money is then used to pay for coaches, facilities and staff in the hopes of securing new recruits. Money is not shared across conferences, meaning conferences only think about what benefits themselves in the short term. It is an arms race. Realignment threatens to eliminate historic rivalry games. USC and Stanford have played over 100 games against one another dating back to 1905. With each team departing for the the Big 10 and the ACC respectively, that rivalry is no more. Additionally, because conferences are no longer based around geography, it leads to instances where athletes have to travel further distances for competition. Instead of a USC student remaining mostly on the West Coast in the PAC 12, they will now be forced to fly out to Ohio and Pennsylvania for in-conference games, all while juggling a typical college workload, just to please television networks.
Again and again, the problem is that programs look out for their own rather than the collective. That’s why college sports needs a real boss with real power. While the NCAA has a president in former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, his powers are limited to the occasional fine or penalty after damage has been done. The NCAA does not have a monopoly on governance and any real attempt to curb the power of big programs would yield a lawsuit at best and a breakaway league at worst. That is why we need an impartial, national-level figure appointed by the President to manage college athletics. The United States is one of the few countries in the world to lack a minister-level official to oversee sport. It is time we join the rest of the world. Otherwise, we will continue to go down this path and it will get harder and harder to just watch our teams play.
