A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
— T. Jefferson
![theatlantic:
What March Madness Can Teach Us About the Economic Geography of Sports
Geographically speaking, one thing is abundantly clear: The majority of March Madness teams hail from small and mid-size metros (those with less than one million people) and college towns. Roughly 60 percent of this 2012 NCAA tournament teams come from small and mid-size metros. Just 10 percent hail from the nation’s ten largest metros. Only one of the top 16 seeds, Georgetown in Washington D.C., comes from a top-ten metro. All four of the top seeds—Kentucky, Syracuse, North Carolina, and Michigan State—are located in small and mid-size metros.
At first blush, this makes sense. Lots of college and universities, after all, are located in college towns.
But big cities boast large numbers of colleges and universities and have tremendous numbers of students enrolled in college. Greater New York alone has dozens of options for the college-bound, and hundreds of thousands of students. The same is true of Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, D.C., and of course Boston. In fact there was a time not too long ago when big city teams did dominate college basketball. UCLA, with 11 titles, is the all-time leader in NCAA championships.
The pattern holds not just for college sports, but for sports across the board. You would think large metros with big pro sports franchises, superstar payrolls, state-of-the-art stadiums and arenas, and gigantic media markets would dominate the sports economy, but they don’t. The fact of the matter is that small and medium-sized communities have much higher economic concentrations of sports occupations, even when pro sports and every other kind of sports is taken into account.
What lies behind this pattern?
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
LOVE THAT THEY USED A PICTURE OF THE 2008 CHAMPIONSHIP OMGGFGGGGGG](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0s2sy43ov1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
I don’t feel bad. Missouri wanted this. So why should I feel bad? I don’t feel bad for anybody.
— Bill Self, http://www.npr.org/2012/02/26/147424635/money-ends-college-sports-oldest-rivalries
I hate it here and I want to come home now.
