I lost track of how many mornings I spent in cold conference rooms sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups alongside college presidents. They would congregate at the NCAA’s national office, where I worked as a writer and editor for seven years, to slap backs and shake hands and parse the rules that governed the lives of nearly 500,000 college athletes around the country. Without fail, these chummy quarterly gatherings included skirt steak and a budget review, and one line on those multihued spreadsheets seemed simultaneously simple to gloss over and impossible to ignore: It pertained to the insurance policy that would kick in if the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, which is responsible for more than 80% of the association’s annual revenue, was canceled and the related funds for the event’s TV rights voided.
The NCAA Canceled Its Cash Cow. Now, How Bad Could This Get?
