March Madness: Record ratings prove NCAA scare tactics about NIL were all a show
The NCAA predicted doom and gloom if college athletes were ever paid. Well, they're getting paid, and the NCAA tournament is putting up record numbers.
If you had believed the NCAA’s NIL fear mongers, let alone its legal arguments in defense of “amateurism” taken all the way to the Supreme Court, here’s what would have happened over the weekend.
No one would have watched March Madness.
Well, in fairness, someone would have, but the audience would have been much smaller than before.
That’s what NCAA power brokers, coaches, athletic directors and attorneys alike argued would happen if college players were allowed to profit off their name, image and likeness. If these athletes started getting “paid,” a substantial number of fans who were, apparently, drawn to college athletics because the players didn’t make any money, were going to stop caring and watching.
Former NCAA president Mark Emmert testified in the landmark O’Bannon v. NCAA case that NIL would be “be tantamount to converting [college sports] into minor league sports and we know that in the U.S. minor league sports aren’t very successful either for fan support or for the fan experience.”
Well, an average of 9.2 million people tuned in for the first round of the men’s basketball tournament last Thursday, according to CBS/TNT. It was a record number for the opening day of the event. It was exceeded on Friday, when 9.3 million watched.
And while the women’s tournament plays to a much smaller audience — just 257,000 viewers on average over on ABC/ESPN — it was up 27% year over year. Monday’s round two games, which were played without competition from the men, are expected to push closer to one million viewers.
Fans aren’t fleeing college athletics the way college athletic leaders warned. They are actually flocking to it.
We are now two full seasons into NIL and it turns out almost no one cares. This tournament follows a college football season that ESPN said was the most watched in five years and Fox claimed numerous record breaking viewership numbers, including 17.1 million watching Michigan-Ohio State
With March Madness, maybe it’s NIL keeping exciting, established stars around – Gonzaga’s Drew Timme, for example, or Kentucky’s Oscar Tshiebwe. Maybe it’s the legality of sports wagering in several states. Maybe it’s a bunch of factors.
What is clear and grows increasingly clearer is that the predictions about how NIL was going to ruin everything was just the latest “sky-is-falling” act from College Sports Inc., which was and still is bent on maintaining control of the money by any means necessary. That includes trying to scare the public.
It’s worth remembering these doom-and-gloom predictions never actually materialize as college sports keeps the act up in an effort to get Congress to step in and spare them from sharing the money.
Preventing NIL was “necessary to preserve the amateur tradition and identity of college sports,” the NCAA argued in trying to fight (unsuccessfully) the O’Bannon lawsuit. The NCAA’s chief legal counsel, Donald Remy, declared it a “scheme” that “threatens college sports as we know it.”
In a separate lawsuit, NCAA attorney Dan Waxman argued the “cost of labor” was a “differentiating feature” for college athletics. Without it, he said, interest would decrease.
Waxman even cited an NCAA-funded study that supposedly “tested people’s reaction to giving [athletes] … a $10,000 academic award [which concluded that] something like 10% of the respondents said they would be less interested and would watch less if that’s the case.”
This was comical. Why would 10% of the college sports fans stop being college sports fans because their favorite players won an academic award? Is finding out your favorite player is also a good student a horrifying thing?
Yet that is what they kept trotting out. Never forget then-Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany who, when discussing the O’Bannon case, claimed his league might drop down to non-scholarship Division III if it was forced into any kind of “pay-for-play” system.
“The Division III model ... would, in my view, be more consistent with the Big Ten’s philosophy,” Delany stated.
The highest rated game Sunday featured Big Ten member Michigan State playing against Marquette. It drew nearly 11 million viewers.
Not bad for D3.
And it's one more reason not to listen to college sports leaders once again claim they need federal assistance to avoid a crisis that, just like the last crisis, won’t ever materialize.
Everything is fine. Just keep enjoying the show.
