Betting Makes March Madness Better
Hello and welcome to the first edition of Free Agent! Did you know it’s March? It’s a special all–college basketball edition of Free Agent, including a brain fart you have to see to believe. Bust out your brackets and look out for creepy mascots with truly enormous teeth today.
By the way, if you think your bracket can beat ours, and the rest of our readers’, enter the Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest right here. A $750 prize goes to the best brackets in the men’s and women’s tournaments.
Kick-Off
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- The magic of mid-major conference tournaments, by my friend Kyle Feldscher.
- Rory McIlroy is still winning big golf tournaments.
- Eminem wants to bring the WNBA back to Detroit because opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo.
- Every Olympics since 2000 has been on NBC, and will be through at least 2036 after an extension of their media rights agreement.
- Elsewhere in Reason: In terms of alcohol, “Trump Makes Canada Free Again.”
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Notice how Drake made the NCAA Tournament but Lamar didn’t.
Shows you who really won the beef.
— Barry (@BarryOnHere) March 16, 2025
Betting Is Fun
There are enough places to find media scolds who are overly concerned about other people gladly wagering their own money. This won’t be one of them. Sports betting is fun, and March Madness shows us why.
Tens of millions of people will make a bracket. The tournament is basically three weeks where you can ask any casual sports fan, “How’s your bracket looking?” Bracket picks make us care more, especially about otherwise uninteresting games (looking at you, Mississippi State vs. Baylor). Sure, upset-watch games are always fun. They’re even more fun when you’re trying to remember if this is one of the upsets you picked, or whether you put the team getting upset in the Final Four.
It’s not like there are more teams in the tournament and more people are watching because their team is involved—there’s more interest in March Madness because more people are making brackets. More brackets means more people with a rooting interest in any given game, which means more TV viewership. (If you’re looking to get into the women’s tournament but aren’t sure how, making a bracket will keep you engaged.)
March Madness is “America’s most wagered-on competition,” according to the American Gaming Association. In 2018, they estimated that just 3 percent (or $300 million) of the $10 billion bet on March Madness that year was wagered legally. But legalization has brought a lot of that wagering o
Article from Reason.com
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