Here's how the Sweet 16 would play out if the richest teams won every game

As the New York Yankees have shown time and again over the past decade and change, you can't always spend your way to a championship. But if you actually could, then Louisville would be a shoo-in to take the NCAA tournament: The Cardinals spent about $15.7 million on their men's basketball team last year, according to Department of Education data. But what about the rest of the Sweet 16 field? Applying that same criterion across the bracket, the tournament would play out like so:

As you'd expect, the big-name programs do pretty well by this metric. Poor Kentucky, though — they spent more on men's basketball than all but three other schools, but got stuck playing the richest team out of the gate. Heck, Kentucky head coach John Calipari's annual $5.4 million salary is more than the entire budgets of four of the remaining teams.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Jon Terbush

Jon Terbush is an associate editor at TheWeek.com covering politics, sports, and other things he finds interesting. He has previously written for Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, and Business Insider.