“If you’re going to try and make sense of the NCAA Tournament, best of luck to you. Because this thing is a beautiful mess.” — college basketball analyst Seth Davis
Let’s for the sake of necessity focus on the word “beautiful.” Every year we collectively can’t wait to get back here. Survive and Advance season. Bracketoligarchy. March magic. Madness guaranteed, promised, inevitable. Lady Gaga. Luther Vandross. Everyone in-between, everyone’s all in.
We, as a nation of millions who are now gaining a generational understanding of what it’s like to be held back, need this NCAA Tournament more than we have in recent memory. Beyond brackets and even basketball, we need the most unbiased, unemotionally attached by proxy of team loyalty (sans NFL) sporting annual in America to remind us that while we probably do have more things in difference than we do in common, there is this one thing called “the Dance” that for three weeks becomes our magnet.
The beauty of what the NCAA, with all of its flaws and assumed corruption as a governing body and organization, puts on display every year — on both the men’s and women’s side — has become a national vacation. A locked-in, three-week so-needed excursion from our everyday divided lives which has, without corporate or university-sanctioned case study, proven to be one of the few occurrences that has kept our society in “disagreeing with one another” mode as opposed to “totally turning on one another” mode.
It’s now a tournament of civility as much as it has been competition.
The 2025 version of the Madness may play a larger role than it has in the past, especially with the direction it seems the country is headed over the last 100 days. In all transparency and honesty, we need it. As a distraction. As a public common denominator.
In a year when (again) a woman might actually be the best college player alive and their tournament may be better and have greater meaning — they could (will) still be labeled DEI beneficiaries. Something that in any other area of life or at any other time would pull us apart at the appliqué, but because it is the NCAA Tournament (and not, say, an NBA vs. WNBA conversation or a Supreme Court nomination or a run for the presidency, etc.), we’ll be able to raise above the 24/7 drama and let the 134 total games guide us through these life landmines without blowing one another into pieces.
Never saying that the tournaments or their host (NCAA) are perfect, but as major sports events go, the timing for both couldn’t be better. Age disparity (grad students and six-year seniors everywhere), NIL deals and portal-transfer activities gone wild, legendary coaches unable to adapt to no longer having ownership-type rule over programs and players, watching SEC basketball become a monopolized football version of itself, all factor in but still might be unable to penetrate the uncontrolled mindfulness that allows so many millions of us to compartmentalize all of the other daily, real BS that is our lives to a place where college basketball games are prioritized. Even for a small moment.
The unexpected and unknown yet slightly prepared is an edge we like to live on.
Just the 12 vs. 5 seed (on the men’s side) alone becomes a unifier. A 12-seed has beaten a 5-seed 57 times in the tournament, 35 times in the last 40 years. Just as McNeese did Clemson and Colorado State did Memphis, extending the trend. If nothing else, this country — which is No. 24, it’s lowest ever position, on the World Happiness Report — either loves, gravitates to, rallies around or places bets on an underdog or the concept of someone, some team being an underdog. And nothing in the annual annals of all of sport provides us the opportunity to nurture those feelings better than the NCAA Tournament. Nothing in any current walk of our society even comes close.
So enjoy it both while they’re here and for what they have the power to do. For as long as they have games left, discover Drake’s Bennett Stirtz and Vanderbilt’s Mikayla Blakes, reintroduce yourselves to Walter Clayton Jr., act like you knew who Chaz Lanier and Ta’Niya Latson were from the beginning, root for a USC-UCLA re-re-re-rematch, ride the St. John’s (men) and Notre Dame (women) feel good stories, see if Dawn Staley and Dan Hurley can defy the odds and walk away for the second and third times in a row, respectively, with nets around their necks.
While this is one of the few things left rooted in human diplomacy and equity that has yet to be toe-tagged by Trump, Musk or DOGE or erased or removed by the Pentagon (read: Jackie Robinson), through all of the tariffs, S&P declines and economic uncertainty and the attempts at destroying the Department of Education, use the NCAA Tournaments to detach yourselves from what our lives have become and where we all seem to be headed.
It’s the American version of the “beautiful” game. Our beautiful, unscripted, much beloved madness. It’s sports’ best version of American democracy. Even during a time where democracy outside of sports doesn’t actually exist.