“Chalk” I mutter, standing in front of an evidence board I have constructed myself using bits of string, covers from sports magazines, and the cut-up parts of several teams jerseys I have decided I do not like. “Chalk” I say, as I put a red X over the University of Houston Cougars, another red X added to a board now covered with them. I tied another piece of yarn to the board, this one connecting the University of Florida Gators to a trophy. “Chalk”, I harrumph ostentatiously as I leave the room, dramatically closing it after turning off the lights with a violence that will force me to replace the switches within a few months.
Chalk is a term used for when games end the way people expected them — a reference to how bookies would write the odds or handicaps in chalk at gambling sites. If a tournament is chalky, it means that all the magic is gone, and Team A beats Team B when Team A is ranked higher than Team B. And in 2025, March Madness had a bizarrely low number of upsets, which means only one thing…
There’s been a murder in College Basketball, and Eshaan Joshi, sports sleuth extraordinaire, is on the case. Someone killed Cinderella stories, and I’ve got to find out who did it.
To avoid making this cliche take too much time, I’ve assembled a few different perps in a lineup for you, the reader, to take a look at. This time, we’ll crack it.
Name, Image, and Likeness: The favorite to blame ever since Dabo Swinney got up on the big stage and tried to convince us that all we needed was God’s Name, Image, and Likeness to win games. Dabo Swinney has not won a major bowl game since he’s made that comment. Clemson remains in the dumps. NIL is one of the usual suspects whenever something is wrong in college sports. Your favorite player transfers? NIL. OSU loses to Michigan again? NIL. Your blue blood SEC team can’t buy players under the table anymore and has to pay them real money and not strange golden Trans Ams? NIL. In a sport with as few players as college basketball, it’s fully possible that NIL is the root cause for significant changes in the game. It’s easy to buy the one or two players you need to make significant improvements to your team when your team is five people, and if you only need to spend money on a few people, you can use your NIL way more effectively than football, for example, which relies on massive squads. Top basketball schools usually have massive NIL funds that allow them to recruit and bring in top talent, and that top talent turns the tournament into just one big ol’ money competition.
Except… several teams have been paying exorbitant amounts for players without getting them the results they want. Sure, Cooper Flagg got Duke to the Elite Eight, but all the NIL money in the world couldn’t help No. 3 Texas Tech and JT Toppin take down Florida, but they’re paying the guy $2.8 million. Meanwhile, the top two teams, Houston and Florida, had zero of the top-paid NIL players, with most going to various top schools, few of whom made it to the Elite Eight. There’s one guy from Duke, one from UK, one from UCLA, and a pair from Rutgers. College Basketball Powerhouse Rutgers.
It seems like NIL alone cannot explain why this tournament was so chalky. We need to go deeper.
Artificial Intelligence
Well, well, well. It looks like it’s AI ruining yet another part of our lives. First, it’s slop image generating software, now it’s destroying my basketball. I mean, those two things happened in the opposite order, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that I can pin this whole thing on the AI and the algorithms used for seeding. Seeding is a huge part of the NCAAT, determining who plays who in the hectic early rounds where most of the upsets and Cinderella stories happen. Various algorithms are used year to year, combined with personal calls made by the NCAA selection committee based on how various teams are doing. Sometimes, a team gets screwed over, like when Seton Hall and Indiana State got left out of the 2024 March Madness, but, usually, it’s just a human element that makes sure teams that pass the eye test get in.
But now, with AI, we’ve got better algorithms. Better ways of running our code. Better ways to find out who’s actually good. With the perfect algorithm, we don’t even need to play the games! We’ll know who will win every single time, without fail.
Well…
Not exactly. While the actual ability we have to judge various teams strengths is definitely improving (take a look at KenPom or Battorvik or NET if you wanna see how much nerds have ruined our beloved sport), those results don’t translate well to the stress and high variance situations in a real game of college basketball. Even the best algorithms wouldn’t have given Fairleigh Dickinson a win over Purdue in 2023, but it happened. And you couldn’t have seen it coming. Sure on any given day, Purdue is significantly better than FDU, but sometimes, you just have a terrible day and your eight-foot-tall player just doesn’t perform and you go down to a school nobody has ever heard of.
Meanwhile, this also doesn’t explain how chalky this year was. There were over 50 games in this year’s March Madness and we had almost no major seed upsets! Even the best algorithm expects some sort of variance. It can’t just be AI. ChatGPT may be able to do my homework but it can’t solve my case just yet. The Cindarella Killer remains at large.
Old People
Well, not the elderly, but fifth and sixth year seniors. See, in sports, you can do this thing called redshirting, where you take five years to graduate by skipping your first year of play and focusing on training. It gives you the same four years of play that everyone else gets, but you get an extra year to bulk up before it starts. COVID gave every single player in the league at the time an extra year of eligibility, in order to deal with the fact that half the sports teams shut down totally, and the other half shut down, sort of. With the strange combination of the two, it wasn’t fair to punish students by taking away a full year of eligibility, so the replacement was just giving it back to them. This meant if you showed up as a freshmen, redshirted, took a COVID year, you would spend six years in college. Add in a medical redshirt for various injuries and you’re looking at seventh year seniors taking the court.
There’s a name for people who go to college for seven years: doctor. While being an absolute scholar with the ball gets you a lot, it does not confer upon even the most amazing player a PhD.
So you have, essentially, fully grown adults, older than 25, playing on the same field as a bunch of barely-outta-high schoolers, and you expect these games to go well? It’s just beating up some kids on the court!
But…
While there are teams with very old players — BYU seems to be full of the elderly; these teams aren’t taking the world by storm. Moreover, it seems like a lot of the biggest offenders of the COVID year are gone by now — if you’re still here, you were either not good before COVID and pushing time, or you were good and decided not to make money in the NBA because you hate money. Either way, the remaining players have their stars, but many just aren’t the sort of superstars that would explain away the massive levels of chalk this year. And even if there were many more old players — like last year and the year before — you’d expect that to have no effect since everyone’s got them.
I guess we can’t blame the boomers on this one. Which means we’ve got no leads, no suspects, and no hints. What in the hell can we do?
Blame Florida
As much as I’d like to just call it here and give up, Florida is blameless here. For once. The voodoo that takes over the swamp cannot extend its powers into San Antonio, Texas, which is protected by its own strange magic and Texans with guns.
Blame the President
Not touching this one with a 10foot pole, but my parlays always hit when Obama was in office.
Blame… all three?
Well, what if there wasn’t just one murderer, there were three! What if, a combination of massive money letting teams by the players they want help separate the haves and have-nots even more than they already are. That decreases variance between really good and really bad teams — when the strange, really good, singular player you recruited from the middle of nowhere Iowa is going to Duke for two million instead of Podunk U, you lose a lot of the surprise factor. Then, we combine that with better seeding preventing teams from being significantly underseeded due to bad committee calls, we only end up further decreasing variance. Now, we’ve got more boring seedings and more boring teams, and the good ones are beating up on the bad ones over and over again. If we combine that with the fact that this year’s No. 1 seeds were incredibly good, and that was borne out in massive rankings leads across KenPom and the rest, it means we have a bunch of good teams playing a bunch of bad teams and then a bunch of mediocre teams and then a bunch of okay teams, and only then playing each other. And, finally, take away the years and old glue guys that give the teams experience they can’t get anywhere else and you’ve got a recipe for the tournament with the least upsets in a decade, with two one seeds battling it out for first place.
Oh, and also, blame Florida. I hate the Gators.
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