Welcome to the Audible presented by Trader Joe's. I'm Stuart Mandel, joined as always by Bruce Feldman. Basketball tournament is now behind us, though I will tell you we've got some mailbag questions related to it coming up. Bruce, what's on your mind?

Good games, right? Good games, right? It was fun. The national championship game, I think a lot of us underestimated. It was just so surreal to see this

event that has traditionally been dominated by the likes of UNC, Duke, Kentucky, et cetera, that you get

to the final night of the season. It's Virginia versus Texas Tech. Not that those teams weren't

good teams who were deserving. They absolutely were. Just not the traditional brands you expect to see.

But then the game happened, and it wasn't this ugly defensive showdown that people thought

there would be. It was very exciting. It was guys hitting big shot after big shot. You know,

you can't beat overtime of a national championship game. What I was interested in a little bit,

and this is college football related, is, and some of this is anecdotal. It's however many people show up on your timeline to say something, it's like, okay, this feels like when you're saying a lot of people, and I felt like it was definitely more than three or four, we're saying, oh, this game's going to be a dog, you know, everything like that, the brands issue. Well, on the college football side, there's a lot of frustration from a lot of people who are

like, oh, it's going to be Alabama fatigue.

Pretty soon you're going to have people you may already have who have Clemson fatigue.

And it's just those two schools, whereas here's the flip side of it.

You have Texas Tech way off the radar and Virginia, who's been very good in the regular

season, but has not been a big player in Final Four basketball. And all of a sudden now, it's like,

it was riveting. And I mean, again, I always come back to it's live sports. I don't want to hear

people predicting, you know, getting too caught up into, no one's going to watch.

It's going to suck or whatever, you know, that kind of thing.

I mean, people watched and it was fun.

And again, I'm not saying that if you had, I don't know, let's say if somehow Utah State goes 12, you know, goes 13 and 0 this year,

that they would become a big factor and people would tune in. And they, you know, it's a different

animal football from college hoops. But again, I just think the brands versus no brands or

not big brands is a very interesting dynamic. Well, the biggest difference, right, is that in the

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