I parrot the premier league thing for football. It's basically the bowl game system but in regular season format.
Even if true, they will get a boatload of TV money and be able to split 100% of it...not letting the NCAA keep 85%. 100% of 500M is a lot better than 15% of 1B...Tv folks are happy they pay less and schools are happy they get more...the loser are the fans, but we don't matter
It does in the first two to three rounds. Once you get to the Final Four, it is a bad thing to have Cinderella still standing.
Ehhh...I think Cinderella mid-majors keep the non-hardcore fans interested. Also if your team is knocked out early in the tourney the Cinderella's keep the interest going. The years when UConn not in or out early I always watched the first 4 days of tourney with great interest, but after that if no UConn or Cinderella around my interest really dropped and I consider myself a hardcore fan.
If that's the case then I have to be honest, I don't think you're as hardcore of a fan as you claim if the only thing keeping you invested in March Madness is if Fairleigh Dickinson or Saint Peter's is making a deep run
People love an underdog whether they’re mid-major or not. As long as they don’t massively shrink the field, people will still love talking about when the 60th best team beats the 1 seed. People always root for the underdog in the CFP playoff and that ends up being like #5 in the country half the time.
It's a good point but I'm not so sure it's 100% comparable. Most casual march madness bracketeers wouldn't know that Nebraska doesn't have a traditionally good basketball program, but the university is well known, so it probably won't have the Loyola Chicago effect If the Huskers went to the E8.
Loyola's final 4 game had like 10% less viewers than the final 4 from the previous year. We remember the Cinderellas but we don't watch them.
I could be completely off base here, and to be clear I don't want to see an all P6 tournament or anything. I'm just not sure if swapping out the Cinderella's for bottom tier P6 teams will turn that many people away. Feel like the draw is 4 straight days of non-stop high level basketball games, and you'd still have that
It will for the first weekend. March Madness has an excellent format for TV viewership. The Cinderellas make things interesting for the Round of 64 and Round of 32 and sometimes the Sweet 16 or Elite 8. Usually by the time you get to the Elite 8, there are either no or one Cinderella left to duke it out with the big boys (who get better ratings).
This is true. And it's a strange phenomenon. It definitely seems that the cinderellas get more love in the early rounds but lose sparkle in the later rounds (i.e. FAU last year). I wonder if it's because of busted brackets: I'd say the first weekend gets more eyes because everyone's brackets are still alive, if a mid major makes it to the final four, it might mean that many brackets are done and only the hard-core fans of bball are still watching.
Ha...ok if you say I guess I'm not hardcore. March Madness with just "power" schools would not be March Madness imo.
This may be true once you get to the final 4 but you want the Cinderella's in the Tourney.
I think he's right. People tune in to the early rounds to watch the tournament. I doubt that fewer people would watch if the matchups were more competitive. If a Cinderalla makes a run, that may be a different story.
