March Madness… that’s what it used to be called, right?
The first weekend of the annual NCAA Tournament once known for its breathtaking beauty, paralyzing intensity, and rigor mortis-inducing results came and went without much to talk about. Most games were blowouts or comfortable victories, and there was a severe lack unheralded underdogs who became national heroes.
The chalk is talking in this year’s bracket moving into the Sweet 16. But what does that say about the state of March Madness, and what were the biggest takeaways from the first weekend?
Here are the top five lessons we learned from March Madness so far.
NIL ruined Cinderella teams
Do you know what Florida, Michigan and Arkansas have in common? None of them are Florida Atlantic.
Remember watching the mighty FAU, which had never won a March Madness game in its history, go on a terrorizing run to the 2023 Final Four and come up just one point short of appearing in the national championship game?
Alijah Martin, Vladislav Golden and Johnell Davis, all members of that historic team, are all still playing college ball. In fact, they ALL qualified for the Sweet 16, just with new and more affluent institutions.
The relocation of these three stars is emblematic of the problem that is tearing the fabric of March Madness as we know it. NIL has made it next to impossible for low-prestige mid- and low-major institutions to field competitive rosters, and even if they do, player retention is at an all-time low.
Allow me to be clear: this is not a referendum on the merits of NIL. Services rendered deserve payment, and athletes deserve to be rewarded for the billions of dollars they generate.
Blue-blood programs always had advantages in recruiting and the transfer portal. However, NIL has allowed lesser P4 or P5 conference teams to offer players significantly more compensation than they would receive from top teams in lower conferences.
Take Vanderbilt as an example. The Commodores hadn’t made the tournament since 2016-17 and were coming off a 9-23 (4-14) season.
Instead of going through the process of recruiting and finding diamonds in the rough to rebuild around, Vandy simply dug into its hefty NIL fund to field an almost entirely new roster. The team’s top nine scorers at the end of the year all came from the portal, including all-SEC third-team guard Jason Edwards (17.0 ppg, 2.0 rpg), who averaged 19.1 points per game at North Texas the year before.
This effect also played a major role in the SEC getting a record 13 teams into the bracket, meaning that more than one out of five teams competing in March Madness came from this conference.
Keep in mind, that’s Vanderbilt! A relative laughingstock of its conference!
Furthermore, every school that qualified for the Sweet 16 either hailed from the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, or SEC. Even the Big East was blanked from the second weekend of action.
March Madness is the best moniker in sports because it is true in every sense. There is an annual period of madness since any team can win on any given day.
But with the mass exodus of mid- and low-major talent to meddling Power conference schools, those days are quickly fading, and college sports are going back to Pangea.
Nobody buys tickets to watch the referees
It doesn’t take long to figure out why professional athletes are better than college athletes. They are older and wiser, more physically developed, and have more time to refine their skills.
Naturally, professional basketball leagues should and will get better referees than the NCAA since they make more money.
While there may be clear-cut age-influenced contrasts between the leagues for athletes, the same physical barriers don’t exist for referees. That’s where the issue lies.
The decline in refereeing ability from the NBA to NCAA is inexplicable. Watching the past week of tournament action garnered the same appreciation for NBA refs as one would get for a hot shower after spending a week in Antarctica.
Several games and moments stand out, none more so than BYU’s Round of 32 showdown with Wisconsin.
The Zebras called 14 total fouls—six on Wisconsin and eight on BYU—during the first half. For the most part, they let the players play.
The same crew proceeded to call 10 fouls on the Badgers and 14 on the Cougars during the final 20 minutes of play. They also ejected Dawson Baker for elbowing a player in the groin while trying to squeeze between two defenders who had trapped him near the corner since the rules stated they either had to award a common foul or a flagrant two but couldn’t award a flagrant one.
That decision and the total inconsistency in what did and did not constitute a foul between the two halves almost allowed Wisconsin to come back in a game in which it never held the momentum, and one that finished in a two-point win for the Cougars.
Defending back-to-back national champion coach Dan Hurley sounded off on the “unfair” officiating in his team’s final game, a 77-75 Round of 32 loss to top-seed Florida, during which his team was called for four more fouls than their opponent.
“I hope they don’t f*** you like they f***ed us,” Hurley said to members Baylor’s team, who played Duke in the next game, while leaving the court. “I hope they don’t do that to you, Baylor.”
“I hope they don’t fuck you like they fucked us, Baylor”
You’re not gonna believe this but Dan Hurley is unhappy with the officiating
— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) March 23, 2025
One of the last games of the second round was a physical battle between Michigan State and New Mexico, teams that ranked fifth and 19th in KenPom’s defensive rating metric. The Lobos’ frontline, which consists of two 6-foot-9 and 6-foot-10 athletes, met the Spartans’ physicality in kind, but they were called for 22 fouls to just 11 for the favorites.
Officials in the Maryland-Colorado State also missed a call on the biggest play of the tournament thus far, a game-winning bank shot by freshman center Derik Queen.
The crew swallowed their whistles as Queen took three steps before launching the ball, which kissed off the glass and quietly nestled in the net as the buzzer sounded to give the Terps a one-point win.
The play would’ve been legal in the NBA since Queen took a gather and then used his two steps. However, the gather step is not legal in college, meaning that Queen was one step over his limit and should’ve turned the ball over with about 1.8 seconds remaining and trailing 71-70.
College kids don’t understand spacing
It’s one thing to project hate about analytics, though anyone who does that is likely misguided in their reasoning (to put it politely). It’s another to disregard the basic principle of putting players in optimal positions to score more points. You know, the whole point of basketball.
Great generals put their soldiers in positions to take advantage of their enemies’ weaknesses. Charge the front line, send reinforcements to the flank, the Art of War, that stuff.
Certain concepts and principles that are commonplace in the NBA are borderline off-limits at the collegiate level because of the vast difference in ability between the two groups of players. For example, a Spanoulis action with a flare away requires at least a few high-level shooters on the court, preferably two who are comfortable shooting on the move.
That said, limited shooting doesn’t excuse poor spacing. Bigs can space the floor by maneuvering around the dunker spot, staying in constant motion by running up to set high screens and rolling to the rim, finding pockets to set flares or create dribble hand-offs, or using their height and leaping ability to provide vertical spacing.
Guards and wings should know that a ball at the top of the perimeter should mean the corners should be filled on both sides, and if the court is tilted, then there should be someone in the corner on the weak side, someone near the break, and a player either involved in a screen action or one pass away on the strong side with the final player filling in the gaps, assuming a movement set isn’t in progress.
There are many reasons that spacing is so poor in the college game. One is that, simply put, the players aren’t as smart as professionals.
Another is that they don’t have the same number of reps or court time as the pros do, and a final is that their coaches may not have given enough or proper instruction.
Whatever the cause, on-the-fly offenses can often end up looking like pick-up games at the park, and that makes for exciting but frustrating television viewing.
College coaches are getting better
Look around the country. There’s a solid chance that one of the teams you root for is either happy with their coach, just hired a young coach, or recently recruited a coach who had success at a lower level.
Great coaches are popping up all over the place or arriving in short order.
Ben McCollum, who led Drake to a 31-4 season and won a first-round matchup, was just announced as Iowa’s new head coach. Ryan Odom of VCU will also take over at the University of Virginia not too long after he and his UMBC team made history by eliminating the top-ranked Cavaliers as a 16 seed. Even Jon Scheyer, who’s only 37 and in his third year of coaching, has Duke at 33-3 and the odds-on national favorites.
Not only are new coaches popping up, but the old guard is finding great success. Tom Izzo is back in the Sweet 16, Rick Pitino’s St. John’s went 31-5 and had their best season since the 1985-86 campaign, and Bill Self and John Calipari had a terrific tactical duel in the opening round.
I didn’t even mention coaches who regularly demonstrate their value with winning seasons, consistent tournament appearances and runs, and an intelligent style of play. That list includes Dana Altman, Mick Cronin, Kelvin Sampson, Dan Hurley, and plenty of others.
Prioritizing production over development hurts players long-term
This only applies to a small subset of players, but it still rings true.
Maximizing a player’s value at the collegiate level with no regard for their professional future is… bad… for a purposeful lack of a better word.
I won’t go so far as to call it selfish, shortsighted, or unwise, because the reality is that I don’t know the conversations that occur behind closed doors.
A player may tell his coach he doesn’t want to play at the next level, or a coach might know from countless hours of practice sessions that their athlete doesn’t have the physical or mental talents to add to their repertoire.
With that out of the way, it’s glaringly obvious that certain players thrive in styles that are effective in the college game and won’t translate to the professional level, particularly the NBA.
Take Kansas center Hunter Dickinson as an example. A 7-foot-2 former four-star and the 52nd-ranked player in his high school class, he has been a very good college player since the day he stepped foot onto Michigan’s campus.
His freshman year, which was by far his worst, saw him average 14.1 points and 7.4 rebounds on 59.8 percent shooting. Five years later and a matter of days ago, he finished with career averages of 17.4 points and 9.2 rebounds on 55.5 percent shooting.
Dickinson’s size and feel around the rim helped him post impressive numbers and star on notable programs, even becoming part of the top-ranked team in the country at different points. However, his back-to-basket style showed no evolution and did not mimic to the evolution of the NBA.
The burly center did not show much comfort or development in his ability to step away from the basket on defense, shoot the three, act as a mid- or high-post hub, comfortably flow into dribble-hand-offs with his guards, or become a lob threat rolling as a roller, essentially making him impossible to put on an NBA floor in a competitive matchup.
Unsurprisingly, Dickinson did not feature in the latest mock drafts posted on NBA.com or Tankathon.
The point of this is not to pick on Dickinson, who again was a great college player. Rather, it speaks to the mentality of maximizing a player’s value in March Madness instead of expanding their repertoire to potentially unlock new aspects of their game, create a more diverse program, or prepare them for an NBA career.
