At your first glance of the 2025 March Madness brackets, you’d be excused for thinking things look anything other than normal. Even a thorough examination of this year’s 68-team field to anyone signing up for another year of North America’s most popular office pool wouldn’t give away the fact that the NCAA’s prime event – and most critical business – is already blowin’ in the winds of change.
With Auburn University and the University of Florida granted number-1 seeds and poised for a Final Four meeting April 5 in San Antonio, their conference, the SEC, celebrates the inclusion of 14 of its 16 members. Due to space restrictions, only LSU and South Carolina, the two SEC teams not in the tournament, will be named here.
The 14 is an NCAA Tournament record but more importantly, it’s a sign of the times, with whispers turning to real talk that the tournament is to expand in the near future to 72 or 76 teams. This would be a major increase from the current-day 68 teams, and from the 64-team format that first captivated the world in the 1980s.
With 13 of the past 20 college football champions coming from the Southeastern Conference, and the cascading television money that came along with it, SEC member teams were able to invest heavily in basketball, especially in the last two seasons when Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) money became a requirement in the USA’s two big league sports – football and basketball. Athletes are getting paid huge sums, and choosing schools based on who can pay the most, legally.
In the race to professionalize college basketball, the SEC and the Big Ten jumped the line and are miles ahead of their competitors. Texas and Oklahoma became SEC schools, UCLA and USC joined the Big ten. Cable television football deals ensured the cash was in hand.
These two conferences combine for 22 of the 68 schools in this year’s tournament field. A lot can be questioned about some of their teams’ competitiveness. For instance, Texas finished only 19-15 overall, 13th in the conference(!), with a 5-8 record against teams in the Associated Press Top 25 poll (most of those fellow SEC teams, making the five wins stand out), yet landed an 11-seed and a First Four contest against Xavier. Two hundred miles up the road in Dallas, Southern Methodist University finished 23-10 and tied for 4th in the ACC, but with zero wins against Top 25 teams, landed a date with Northern Iowa in the National Invitation Tournament first round.
More importantly, the SEC has become so powerful that the new whispers aren’t so much about expanding the NCAA Tournament as much as replacing it. The SEC could band with other so-called power conferences like the Big Ten, and presumably the Big 12, Big East and Atlantic Coast Conference, and maybe a mid-major league for good measure, and run its own postseason extravaganza … without the NCAA.
With USA Today reporting that the revenue from the 2025 tournament is set to be USD $955 million, an increase of $122 million from last year’s total, the NCAA has many reasons to play along with the rising powers that be. According to Sportico, total NCAA revenue in fiscal 2024 was $1.38 billion, a record, sure, but almost completely dependent on the tournament. Over 90 per cent of that comes from television money doled out by CBS and Turner. A conference-run, NCAA-exiled tournament would significantly eat into that total sum, garnering its own TV money from another network or two, or maybe a streamer looking to get into the college hoops sweepstakes.
The American Gaming Association estimated that 68 million Americans wagered up to USD $15.5 billion on the tournament in 2023. March Madness has become an institution in America, and beyond. It’s the NCAA’s meal ticket. If that means the SEC gets 14 teams and the traditional power ACC only gets four, binding the most powerful conference to the association for something potentially more long term, then so be it.
To the naked eye, and to tens of millions of bracket bettors, the field doesn’t look much different. It’s 68 college basketball teams battling it out in a vastly unpredictable do-or-die sporting event that causes each of us to choose game-by-game favourites for our own frivolous reasons. It doesn’t matter who the schools are, or how they got here.
The change has started, but fortunately, it still feels the same.
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