MW 4 money stories that helped define the 2025 March Madness tournaments

By Weston Blasi

This year's men's and women's NCAA tournaments featured surprisingly accurate AI, big bets and a $1 million giveaway from Warren Buffett

March Madness has been decorated with dollar signs this year.

The 2025 college-basketball postseason has been marked by the near-total domination of No. 1 seeds, highlighted pay disparity between the men's and women's games, and drawn more than $3 billion in total wagers. It has also seen one lucky entrant finally win billionaire investor Warren Buffett's bracket contest.

All four No. 1 seeds made the Final Four in the men's tournament, which will conclude with Monday's Florida-Houston championship game. Three No. 1 seeds - South Carolina, Texas and UCLA made the women's Final Four before the lone No. 2 seed, UConn, took home the title on Sunday.

Here's a closer look at four of the biggest financial storylines for March Madness 2025 as the men's tournament comes to a close on Monday night.

AI got the Final Four prediction 75% right, but not the winner

Some March Madness fans who perhaps didn't tune in to much college basketball this season but still wanted to fill out a bracket for their office pools turned to artificial intelligence. And if they didn't, perhaps they should have.

That's because the performance of some AI models have been generally strong.

When asked to predict the men's 2025 March Madness outcome, OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT-4 model) created a bracket that featured a Final Four of Auburn, Kansas, Duke and Houston, with Duke winning the title. It got three out of the Final Four teams correct.

Similarly, Alphabet $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ unit Google's Gemini (Gemini 2.0 Flash) picked a Final Four of Auburn, UConn, Duke and Houston - also predicting three No. 1 seeds going through to the final weekend.

Both AI models picked Duke to win the title, but the Blue Devils were eliminated in the national semifinals.

That the top seeds should advance to the finals is not a given with the wild nature of college hoops, notably in March. Prior to the start of this year's tournament, there has only been one instance - in 2008 (when, like this year, the Final Four games were played in San Antonio) - in which all four top-seeded teams reached the Final Four, and only five years in which three No. 1 seeds have made it that far.

While some AI models did well this year in predicting the Final Four, it's worth noting that AI tended to favor the better-seeded teams, as well as teams that had a history of runs through the tournament. But with this year's Final Four turning out to be favorite-heavy, humans have also had a better-than-average year picking Final Four teams. According to the NCAA, some 286,354 people got this year's Final Four exactly right in its men's bracket challenge.

"2025's numbers are head and shoulders above the pack, nearly 21 times the second-best in 2015," according to Wayne Staats, senior interactive producer for NCAA.com.

Women's teams are being paid for the first time - but they will get $200 million less than the men

While March Madness brings in roughly $1 billion in annual revenue for the NCAA, women's teams did not see any of that money until this year. For the first time, women's programs are getting a piece of the NCAA pot - but they're not getting as much as programs on the men's side.

Both the men's and women's teams will be paid a similar percentage of the respective TV-rights deal, but the disparity in what they ultimately take home is stark. That's because the broadcasting deal for the men's tournament is much bigger than the one for the women's tournament.

The prize money for the men's teams will amount to 24% of the March Madness media-rights deal, or approximately $216 million, according to the NCAA's financial statements and reporting from the AP. In comparison, the women's NCAA tournament TV deal is valued at $60 million, with 26%, or $15 million, being distributed to teams, the NCAA told MarketWatch. The NCAA noted that the 26% the women's teams are getting is the same percentage that the men's teams got in 1991, the first year that the monetary "performance units" were introduced.

NCAA policy doesn't allow for players to be compensated directly by a school or conference, so these payments don't actually go to the team members. The prize money is meant for the schools and is distributed first to the conferences of which those institutions are members. The payments are calculated based on how far a team makes it in the tournament, among other factors known as performance units.

Men's teams have been paid for participating in March Madness for 34 years. The women's teams, which had their first NCAA tournament in 1982, were not compensated before this year.

College players can still earn money in other ways, however, such as through leveraging their names, images and likenesses. Payments for NIL deals come from businesses like Nike $(NKE)$, Gatorade or Experian, as well as donor-funded NIL collectives. Some women's athletes have huge NIL deals, like Louisiana State's Flau'jae Johnson, who has made an estimated $1.5 million from NIL this season, according to college sports newsletter On3.

For rounds prior to the Final Four, the women's tournament saw a drop in TV ratings as compared with a year ago. But sports-marketing experts say they are not concerned about the future of women's basketball, because this year's first round ratings were the second-highest ever and are up 43% from 2023.

A Warren Buffett payout, finally

After years of trying to give away a massive sum during the men's March Madness basketball tournament, someone has finally won Warren Buffett's bracket challenge.

An employee at FlightSafety International, a subsidiary of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway $(BRK.B)$ $(BRK.A)$, won Buffett's $1 million prize after picking 31 of the 32 winning teams in the first two rounds of the men's tournament.

The winner has opted to remain anonymous.

For years, Buffett pledged to give $1 billion to any college basketball fan who filled out a perfect bracket, but no one has ever done that. The odds of filling out a perfect bracket are so long as to suggest it's nearly impossible, at 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

This year, Buffett changed the rules. Instead of a perfect bracket, an entrant in the Berkshire pool only needed to name the winners of 30 of the first 32 games - to the Sweet Sixteen round - to win a lesser prize of $1 million.

There were 12 people this year who satisfied those requirements, Berkshire said in a statement, but the eventual winner was the individual who got the most correct to start off the tournament, accurately picking the outcome of the first 29 games. The other 11 winners will get $100,000 each.

The winner's only incorrect pick was in the Xavier-Illinois matchup, which the Illini won by 13 points. This bracket competition was exclusively for employees of Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries and was not open to the general public.

For the winner's bracket, Buffett's near-perfect picker leaned on favorites and "Power Five" conference schools. Four conferences were represented in this year's Sweet Sixteen, while every other Sweet Sixteen round since 1975 featured at least seven conferences.

There are no perfect brackets remaining on any major platform. There were, however, 30 brackets in ESPN's bracket challenge that had every single pick in the first round wrong - an ignominious but equally improbable feat.

Sportsbooks may be in trouble

An estimated $3.1 billion was expected to be legally wagered on the March Madness tournaments this year, but it looks as if sportsbooks are not going to keep as much of that in their coffers as they had hoped.

Generally speaking, public bettors tend to prefer betting on teams that are favored, because they are typically more well-known to the average bettor, and fans like to root for a competitor they think is most likely to win, regardless of odds. That means this year's result - a men's Final Four that featured all No. 1 seeds - was a bad outcome for the bookmakers.

Christian Cipollini, trading manager at BetMGM $(MGM)$, told MarketWatch that the tournament "has gone in the bettors' favor with favorites consistently winning," referencing the historical rarity of an all-top-seeds Final Four.

Cipollini added that BetMGM's biggest liabilities for the tournaments were for Duke and Florida, as roughly 40% of all money bet on the men's tournament winner this year was on Duke. So it was at least good for sportsbooks that Duke was eliminated.

Some notable high-dollar bets for the men's March Madness tournament at BetMGM included:

-- $500,000 on Duke +350 to win the National Championship

-- $100,000 on Florida +900 to win the National Championship

-- $50,000 on Houston +600 to win the National Championship

A FanDuel $(FLUT)$ spokesperson told MarketWatch that Duke and Florida were the most wagered-on teams to win the tournament overall at that sportsbook.

Monday's championship game is seen as a close matchup by the oddsmakers. Florida is favored by just one point over Houston, according to odds on DraftKings Sportsbook.

The men's March Madness tournament, with gamed spread over several weeks starting March 18 (with the brackets set on Selection Sunday two days earlier), is the U.S.'s biggest betting event of the year, surpassing even the Super Bowl.

Last year's NCAA tournament outcome was also "unfavorable" for sportsbooks, DraftKings Chief Executive Jason Robins recalled.

The strong trend for March Madness bettors comes after a great 2024-'25 NFL season for bettors, which sportsbooks have described as the most "customer friendly" football season that online sportsbooks have ever seen.

From the archives (April 2024): NCAA president says prop betting on college athletes is 'enormously problematic'

-Weston Blasi

MW 4 money stories that helped define the 2025 March Madness tournaments

By Weston Blasi

This year's men's and women's NCAA tournaments featured surprisingly accurate AI, big bets and a $1 million giveaway from Warren Buffett

March Madness has been decorated with dollar signs this year.

The 2025 college-basketball postseason has been marked by the near-total domination of No. 1 seeds, highlighted pay disparity between the men's and women's games, and drawn more than $3 billion in total wagers. It has also seen one lucky entrant finally win billionaire investor Warren Buffett's bracket contest.

All four No. 1 seeds made the Final Four in the men's tournament, which will conclude with Monday's Florida-Houston championship game. Three No. 1 seeds - South Carolina, Texas and UCLA made the women's Final Four before the lone No. 2 seed, UConn, took home the title on Sunday.

Here's a closer look at four of the biggest financial storylines for March Madness 2025 as the men's tournament comes to a close on Monday night.

AI got the Final Four prediction 75% right, but not the winner

Some March Madness fans who perhaps didn't tune in to much college basketball this season but still wanted to fill out a bracket for their office pools turned to artificial intelligence. And if they didn't, perhaps they should have.

That's because the performance of some AI models have been generally strong.

When asked to predict the men's 2025 March Madness outcome, OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT-4 model) created a bracket that featured a Final Four of Auburn, Kansas, Duke and Houston, with Duke winning the title. It got three out of the Final Four teams correct.

Similarly, Alphabet (GOOGL) $(GOOG.UK)$ unit Google's Gemini (Gemini 2.0 Flash) picked a Final Four of Auburn, UConn, Duke and Houston - also predicting three No. 1 seeds going through to the final weekend.

Both AI models picked Duke to win the title, but the Blue Devils were eliminated in the national semifinals.

That the top seeds should advance to the finals is not a given with the wild nature of college hoops, notably in March. Prior to the start of this year's tournament, there has only been one instance - in 2008 (when, like this year, the Final Four games were played in San Antonio) - in which all four top-seeded teams reached the Final Four, and only five years in which three No. 1 seeds have made it that far.

While some AI models did well this year in predicting the Final Four, it's worth noting that AI tended to favor the better-seeded teams, as well as teams that had a history of runs through the tournament. But with this year's Final Four turning out to be favorite-heavy, humans have also had a better-than-average year picking Final Four teams. According to the NCAA, some 286,354 people got this year's Final Four exactly right in its men's bracket challenge.

"2025's numbers are head and shoulders above the pack, nearly 21 times the second-best in 2015," according to Wayne Staats, senior interactive producer for NCAA.com.

Women's teams are being paid for the first time - but they will get $200 million less than the men

While March Madness brings in roughly $1 billion in annual revenue for the NCAA, women's teams did not see any of that money until this year. For the first time, women's programs are getting a piece of the NCAA pot - but they're not getting as much as programs on the men's side.

Both the men's and women's teams will be paid a similar percentage of the respective TV-rights deal, but the disparity in what they ultimately take home is stark. That's because the broadcasting deal for the men's tournament is much bigger than the one for the women's tournament.

The prize money for the men's teams will amount to 24% of the March Madness media-rights deal, or approximately $216 million, according to the NCAA's financial statements and reporting from the AP. In comparison, the women's NCAA tournament TV deal is valued at $60 million, with 26%, or $15 million, being distributed to teams, the NCAA told MarketWatch. The NCAA noted that the 26% the women's teams are getting is the same percentage that the men's teams got in 1991, the first year that the monetary "performance units" were introduced.

NCAA policy doesn't allow for players to be compensated directly by a school or conference, so these payments don't actually go to the team members. The prize money is meant for the schools and is distributed first to the conferences of which those institutions are members. The payments are calculated based on how far a team makes it in the tournament, among other factors known as performance units.

Men's teams have been paid for participating in March Madness for 34 years. The women's teams, which had their first NCAA tournament in 1982, were not compensated before this year.

College players can still earn money in other ways, however, such as through leveraging their names, images and likenesses. Payments for NIL deals come from businesses like Nike (NKE), Gatorade or Experian, as well as donor-funded NIL collectives. Some women's athletes have huge NIL deals, like Louisiana State's Flau'jae Johnson, who has made an estimated $1.5 million from NIL this season, according to college sports newsletter On3.

For rounds prior to the Final Four, the women's tournament saw a drop in TV ratings as compared with a year ago. But sports-marketing experts say they are not concerned about the future of women's basketball, because this year's first round ratings were the second-highest ever and are up 43% from 2023.

A Warren Buffett payout, finally

After years of trying to give away a massive sum during the men's March Madness basketball tournament, someone has finally won Warren Buffett's bracket challenge.

An employee at FlightSafety International, a subsidiary of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) (BRK.A), won Buffett's $1 million prize after picking 31 of the 32 winning teams in the first two rounds of the men's tournament.

The winner has opted to remain anonymous.

For years, Buffett pledged to give $1 billion to any college basketball fan who filled out a perfect bracket, but no one has ever done that. The odds of filling out a perfect bracket are so long as to suggest it's nearly impossible, at 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

This year, Buffett changed the rules. Instead of a perfect bracket, an entrant in the Berkshire pool only needed to name the winners of 30 of the first 32 games - to the Sweet Sixteen round - to win a lesser prize of $1 million.

There were 12 people this year who satisfied those requirements, Berkshire said in a statement, but the eventual winner was the individual who got the most correct to start off the tournament, accurately picking the outcome of the first 29 games. The other 11 winners will get $100,000 each.

The winner's only incorrect pick was in the Xavier-Illinois matchup, which the Illini won by 13 points. This bracket competition was exclusively for employees of Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries and was not open to the general public.

For the winner's bracket, Buffett's near-perfect picker leaned on favorites and "Power Five" conference schools. Four conferences were represented in this year's Sweet Sixteen, while every other Sweet Sixteen round since 1975 featured at least seven conferences.

There are no perfect brackets remaining on any major platform. There were, however, 30 brackets in ESPN's bracket challenge that had every single pick in the first round wrong - an ignominious but equally improbable feat.

Sportsbooks may be in trouble

An estimated $3.1 billion was expected to be legally wagered on the March Madness tournaments this year, but it looks as if sportsbooks are not going to keep as much of that in their coffers as they had hoped.

Generally speaking, public bettors tend to prefer betting on teams that are favored, because they are typically more well-known to the average bettor, and fans like to root for a competitor they think is most likely to win, regardless of odds. That means this year's result - a men's Final Four that featured all No. 1 seeds - was a bad outcome for the bookmakers.

Christian Cipollini, trading manager at BetMGM (MGM), told MarketWatch that the tournament "has gone in the bettors' favor with favorites consistently winning," referencing the historical rarity of an all-top-seeds Final Four.

Cipollini added that BetMGM's biggest liabilities for the tournaments were for Duke and Florida, as roughly 40% of all money bet on the men's tournament winner this year was on Duke. So it was at least good for sportsbooks that Duke was eliminated.

Some notable high-dollar bets for the men's March Madness tournament at BetMGM included:

-- $500,000 on Duke +350 to win the National Championship

-- $100,000 on Florida +900 to win the National Championship

-- $50,000 on Houston +600 to win the National Championship

A FanDuel (FLUT) spokesperson told MarketWatch that Duke and Florida were the most wagered-on teams to win the tournament overall at that sportsbook.

Monday's championship game is seen as a close matchup by the oddsmakers. Florida is favored by just one point over Houston, according to odds on DraftKings Sportsbook.

The men's March Madness tournament, with gamed spread over several weeks starting March 18 (with the brackets set on Selection Sunday two days earlier), is the U.S.'s biggest betting event of the year, surpassing even the Super Bowl.

Last year's NCAA tournament outcome was also "unfavorable" for sportsbooks, DraftKings Chief Executive Jason Robins recalled.

The strong trend for March Madness bettors comes after a great 2024-'25 NFL season for bettors, which sportsbooks have described as the most "customer friendly" football season that online sportsbooks have ever seen.

From the archives (April 2024): NCAA president says prop betting on college athletes is 'enormously problematic'

-Weston Blasi

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