March Madness is the greatest playoff spectacle in sports, something that breaks through into popular culture and people’s workplaces and dominates an entire month of the sports calendar. Naturally, the powers that be want to destroy it.
Joel Klatt, who covers college football for Fox Sports, spoke about how he despises college basketball‘s March Madness because it is the “dumbest” and “least fair” tournament “in all of sports.” Klatt said he hates seeing small university teams play, an extension of the argument from him and other college football pundits who want to exile half of the Division 1 football teams from the college football playoffs because they don’t come from “power” conferences.
HOT TAKE from @joelklatt
“We don’t want Cinderellas. We want the best teams playing each other at the end… The NCAA basketball tournament is a joke. It’s the dumbest tournament and the least fair tournament in all of sports.” pic.twitter.com/8eMwoC8b4N
— The Next Round (@NextRoundLive) December 15, 2025
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None of what Klatt said is actually true, of course. March Madness is one of the fairest tournaments in all of sports. You know exactly what you must do to make the tournament: win your conference. (The remaining slots are filled by the “best” teams that did not win their conference, as decided by a committee.) You also know exactly what you have to do to win the tournament: win six (or seven) straight games. It is a single-elimination tournament, meaning all you must do is win the game in front of you. It is all pretty straightforward.
Those automatic qualifiers are what pundits like Klatt hate, though, because that means the smaller conferences get to participate. According to Klatt, “we don’t want” Cinderella teams, those small school double-digit seeds who upset some of the biggest brands in the nation. College sports media hate underdogs, so they want to eliminate the possibility of seeing, say, 15-seed Lehigh knock off title contender and historic powerhouse Duke in 2012.
The problem is that pundits aren’t alone in wanting to destroy March Madness. The SEC, constantly glazed by the media as the nation’s top football conference, wants to expand the tournament from 68 to 72 or 76 teams so more “power” conference teams get in. Obviously, the SEC is doing this with SEC basketball in mind, despite getting 14 of its 16 teams into the tournament. The “power” conferences and Joel Klatt won’t rest until LSU can get into the tournament with a 14-18 season record.
The obvious next step the SEC and others will pursue is ending automatic qualifiers for the conference champions from the non-“power” conferences. The NIT, the consolation tournament for teams that don’t make March Madness, eliminated its automatic qualifiers for the small schools in 2024. Klatt and others are already trying to get the College Football Playoff to do the same thing. March Madness won’t be far behind.
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These powers that be, obsessed with what they think will be a bigger financial haul, want to eliminate Cinderella and replace her with corporate sports brands such as Alabama or Duke. Why watch 16-seed UMBC (and Google what that acronym stands for) upset the No. 1 team in the country in the first round when you can watch Auburn play Arkansas, or Ohio State play Wisconsin? After all, who could ever possibly remember some of March Madness’s most famous upsets?
These powers that be want to destroy the magic of March Madness to make more money. They seem to be forgetting that the magic is what brings in the viewers and the money in the first place.