Why Watching March Madness Just Isn’t That Fun Anymore

I used to regularly skip school on the first two days of March Madness. Those beguiling opening-round days, where it feels like absolutely anything can happen from the first tipoff on Thursday morning to the final buzzer on Friday night, ranked among my favorite forms of hooky. Sure, being anywhere other than chemistry class was a huge part of the appeal, but so too was the chance to watch hours upon hours of uninterrupted basketball. And as a West Coast kid, the first game of the day starting around 9 a.m. also meant the dopamine started flowing early. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer an indulgent teenager, but lately, the NCAA Tournament hasn’t seemed nearly as enticing.

I still look forward to filling out a bracket every March—the more uniformed the better. It’s still fun tuning into the final minutes of a game where a university with roughly the same enrollment as my high school tries to slay a giant. But as for waddling up to the college basketball buffet and remaining there all day, the experience is rarely as sweet as it once seemed.

For one thing, there’s never really as many truly improbable upsets as you want. In 2025, no men’s team seeded lower than 12th won their opening-round game. In 2024, there were just two (Yale and Oakland University); 2023 had three (Furman, Princeton, and Fairleigh Dickinson); and in 2022, the immortal Saint Peter’s Peacocks were the only squad to pull it off. That means that, entering this year’s tourney, the 13-16 seeds—a.k.a. the teams capable of creating leap-off-the-couch lunacy—had won just 9% of their Round of 64 matchups in the last four years. The disparity between the haves and have-nots is even greater on the women’s side, where 13-16 seeds have won just 11 times ever.

The trend continued on Thursday, as those lower seeds went 0-for-8 in the men’s bracket, robbing us yet again of the best part of March Madness. During Thursday’s slate, mid-major school High Point University did beat fifth-seed Wisconsin on three-point specialist Chase Johnston’s first two-pointer of the season, which was admittedly both hilarious and invigorating. The hour and 45 minutes when it seemed Duke might actually lose also piqued interest and cratered productivity nationwide. But in the end, it was yet another fairly chalky day, further damaging the allure of the tourney.

The other glaring issue—one that renders any argument about college basketball being more entertaining than the NBA immediately moot—is the quality of play. I don’t care how much mystique there is surrounding the tournament, or how long it’s been since a certain school qualified, an enjoyable basketball game should include both teams scoring at least 75 points. That is far from a guarantee in any NCAA game, but especially ones this time of year when the players are visibly nervous. It’s one thing to appreciate good defense, it’s another entirely to sit through wide-open threes and layups continually rimming out, or endure the yearly occurrence of five guys being completely flummoxed when presented with a zone defense or an inbound pass. You know your viewing experience is cooked when the tragicomedic “0 points in last 5 minutes” graphic shows up.