March Madness is over. But what are we celebrating?

Most of these athletes are returning to schools where support is being eliminated or curtailed. There's a better choice.

By Shalise Manza Young

On Monday night, the annual party known as NCAA March Madness came to an end, with the University of Florida men joining the University of Connecticut women as national champions of men’s and women’s college basketball.

Even as their schools, alumni, and states they represent celebrate their achievements, many of the athletes who played last weekend from the eight schools that advanced to the Final Four–South Carolina, UCLA, the University of Texas and Connecticut on the women’s side and Auburn, Florida, Duke and Houston on the men’s–return to campuses at state schools where departments and programs established to support them and their peers have been eliminated.

And it makes me wish that the athletes affected by such cuts would turn their backs on those programs the way administrations have turned their backs on them. In a perfect world, they’d transfer to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, but, at minimum, they’d go to schools in states that aren’t loud and proud about their bigotry.

Well before President Donald Trump began his second term, numerous states had begun banning offices that support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in state-funded colleges, universities, and other public institutions. As they push to eliminate DEI initiatives, governors and other administrators repeatedly lie about the purpose of such units and affiliated groups, claiming they aim to discriminate and spread “divisive” ideas and that merit should be considered above all, which both ignores the history and present of race-, gender-, sexuality- and disability-based discrimination and presumes that members of those communities are inherently not meritorious.

(Take it from someone who covered the NFL for about 15 years: writing about the league’s Rooney Rule and persistent refusal to hire Black head coaches inevitably brings a torrent of “we just want the best coach!” messages on social media from people unable to imagine that the best choice might not be white.)

DEI is so often presented as a zero-sum game: If a Black person is admitted to a selective program, it must have been at the expense of a white man; if a school celebrates LGBT+ pride month, there’s inevitably whining about a need for straight pride month, and on and on.

South Carolina, Texas, Alabama (home to Auburn), and Florida shut down DEI departments on their respective campuses and, in some cases, push to further whitewash or eliminate the teaching of Black history.

As we all know by now, DEI is generally used as a euphemism for Black, particularly in the Trump administration. There are other people against whom it is disparagingly used, including women and members of the queer community, but it’s not a coincidence that when the Naval Academy removed 381 books from its library last week in advance of a visit from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, just over 200 of them had something to do with race, anti-Black racism, and/or were written by African-American authors; most of the rest centered gender and sexuality.

But though Hegseth and President Donald Trump cannot fathom a world in which a Black man became chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the strength of his resume and intelligence, many like them are more than happy to cheer on Black people when they’re winning Olympic medals for the country or championships for their favorite pro teams and universities.

Black athletes hold up the basketball programs that made it to the women’s and men’s Final Four: By my count, 10 of the 14 members of the Texas women’s program are Black, and all 14 of Houston’s players are. A quick count shows that about two-thirds of the players on the eight teams that played last weekend are African American.

Coaching is important, but players win games. And those wins bring money not just to their schools and conferences but also to their coaches: Auburn’s Bruce Pearl collected $500,000 in bonuses for getting the Tigers to the Final Four, and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson also got $500,000. UConn’s Geno Auriemma got $737,500 in extra pay for leading the Huskies to a national championship.

For the record, the players get nothing. Though name, image, and likeness deals have meant big paydays for a growing number of college athletes, those are endorsement contracts. The athletes don’t get a penny from their respective schools because the NCAA wants us to keep believing in their illusion of amateurism. Plus, if programs paid athletes, that would open the door to having to pay benefits or players unionizing, and we can’t have that.

Schools, especially smaller or lesser-known colleges, are enriched in other ways, too: Within days of Saint Peter’s in New Jersey advancing to the men’s Elite Eight in 2022, the school saw a 56 percent increase in applications and millions in donations. Florida Gulf Coast University saw a 35 percent bump after its modest success in the men’s 2013 tournament.

In truth, getting these athletes to HBCUs isn’t easy. It’s a chicken-and-egg kind of issue: Though big-time recruits filling the rosters at South Carolina State or Tennessee State would certainly raise those schools’ profiles and increase donations, decades of intentional financial neglect mean many struggle just to keep the lights on. Money to build the type of flashy facilities that have become the norm isn’t there.

Instead, top high school players bring their talent to places like the University of Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has done plenty to harm the state’s Black community, was all too happy to shout out the Gators on his X page.

To borrow from a phrase in the Black community, “They want our rhythm but never our blues.” Or in this case, our rhythm but not our full recognition.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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