John Oliver On The NCAA

With the March Madness brackets being released yesterday, Last Week Tonight's host shows us a deeper look into the NCAA's actions.

It's that time of the year again. Time to fill out your brackets and choose wisely, your money and sports credibility is on the line. What makes the NCAA Basketball Tournament so amazing is the level of play from all of the teams participating. Sixty-eight teams from all over the United States enter the bright lights of the March Madness tournament, but only one team will go down in history as the champions.

The next couple weeks will be booming with tournament coverage and analysis. These college players will be shown on over 180 million televisions throughout the United States. Players like Jahlil Okafor and Montrezl Harrell will become household names, bringing hours of content for sports talk shows and piles of money for the schools they're playing for. But the one thing we seem to forget during these weeks of quite possibly the most intense basketball of the year: these are college students playing without pay.

John Oliver, host of HBO's satirical news show Last Week Tonight tackles the billion dollar cash cow that is March Madness and the NCAA. It seems illogical that a student athlete get's zero revenue from all the publicity given to the schools and NCAA themselves, but a bookstore student employee gets paid selling the jersey's of said players. If you've got the spare time to watch this twenty minute segment I will guarantee that by the end of the video you will have a different view of the situation. It may be one sided and satirical for some, but sometimes that's what it takes in order to get it into people's minds.