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Here’s an honest question for every athletic department: who actually owned the conversation around your program during March?

 

For most, the answer wasn’t your social team. It was fan accounts, media personalities, gambling aggregators, and beat reporters. Your owned channels were a supporting cast.

 

That’s the reality of how attention works during the tournament. But it’s a reality you need to understand, track, and build a plan around.

 

Our team spent three weeks monitoring online conversation across all 136 programs in the men’s and women’s tournaments, first round through the final buzzer. Beneath the volume and the virality, we found patterns that answer the questions operators and decision-makers care about most: which programs turned attention into loyalty, which formats broke through the noise, and which gaps quietly compounded into missed opportunities.

 

Access Legend Labs March Madness Dashboard l Password: MarchMadness2026

 

The Women’s Tournament Won the Final Weekend

If you stopped at total mentions, you’d think this was a one-sided story. The men’s tournament generated 276K mentions to the women’s 108K. But that headline obscures what actually happened during the Final Four weekend.

Men’s Tournament Total Mentions
276,000+
Women’s Tournament Total Mentions
108,000+

Over the final three days, the women’s tournament generated 44,300 mentions compared to the men’s 36,400, and saw a 270% increase in earned mentions versus just 1.5% growth for the men. To borrow a basketball term, the women’s tournament maximized every possession.

 

For programs investing in women’s basketball, this is validation with data behind it. The attention is there, and during the moments that matter most, it’s accelerating.

One Upset. Half a Year’s Worth of Brand Attention.

This year’s tournament was light on Cinderella stories, but High Point University made the most of the one it got. The Panthers’ first-round upset of Wisconsin generated 34.5K mentions and 723K engagements. That’s the kind of earned media no communications budget can replicate.

 

What set High Point apart wasn’t the upset itself, but what happened next. The university’s communications team seized the basketball momentum and channeled it into owned accounts, converting a sports moment into a university brand moment. They pivoted their social presence from athletics highlights to institutional storytelling, pulling admissions, campus life, and brand messaging into the spotlight while the attention was hot.

 

The result: March Madness coverage accounted for 50.3% of High Point University’s total mentions over the past year.

 

One game. Half a year’s worth of brand attention. That’s not luck, that’s a team that was ready for the moment.

Coach Personality Is a Content Engine. Build Infrastructure Around It.

 

If there’s one operational takeaway from this year’s data, it’s this: coach personality is the tournament’s most reliable driver of engagement, and the moments that broke through were organic, not manufactured. Programs that had the systems to identify and amplify those moments in real time consistently outperformed those treating content as a broadcast.

 

Three examples from different points on the spectrum:

 

Geno Auriemma’s confrontation with Dawn Staley generated 19.9K mentions. This was a controversy-driven engagement, but UConn’s WBB team responded sharply. Their post sharing Auriemma’s official apology became the highest-performing owned post of any WBB program during the tournament. The lesson: even a crisis moment can be managed into a brand-positive outcome if you move fast and own the narrative.

 

Maryland Coach Brenda Frese’s coaching moment with her player Oluchi Okanawa drove a +3,590% surge in earned mentions (5.1K) and 1.95M total engagements. While initially perceived as controversial, this human, unscripted moment became the breakout coaching story of the first weekend, and led to follow-up content with Frese and Okanawa explaining the context for the interaction.

 

Dawn Staley led all WBB coaches in owned engagement at 93.4K across 40 posts. It was a volume and consistency no other coach matched. Staley’s results show that online brand building requires sustained investment that compounds over time.

 

The pattern across all three: the highest-performing content wasn’t game recaps or polished graphics. It was human, fast, and emotionally resonant. Programs that want to compete for attention during the tournament need to build their content operation around that reality.

 

The Fastest-Growing Voice in Your Conversation Isn’t Yours

 

Official league and broadcast accounts still dominated total engagement. The March Madness MBB account on X cleared 400K+ engagements. But the more revealing trend is what’s happening around the edges.

 

Personality-driven accounts post less and punch harder. Barack Obama generated 206K engagements from a single post. The Pat McAfee Show consistently outperformed most programs and media handles on a per-post basis. And gambling-related engagement grew +291% during the tournament, with estimated views surging +415%. Sportsbook brands and prediction platforms like Kalshi are showing up organically in earned conversation, not just in ad placements.

 

This is a structural shift in who controls the conversation around your program during the tournament. Whether your institution has a position on it or not, the conversation is happening. The question is whether you’re tracking it.

 

Brand Weight Creates Its Own Gravitational Pull

With very few upsets this year, established programs dominated the conversation, and the data confirms that brand equity generates attention independent of results.

 

MEN’S TOURNAMENT – TOP FOUR TEAMS BY EARNED MENTIONS: 

Michigan
27,900+
Duke
24,100+
UConn
19,600+
Illinois
14,100+

WOMEN’s TOURNAMENT – TOP FOUR TEAMS BY EARNED MENTIONS: 

South Carolina
19,200+
UConn
17,500+
UCLA
16,100+
Texas
5,370+

The telling detail: despite not making the Final Four, Duke generated the second-most mentions among all MBB teams. Duke’s fans drove 62% of the conversation around their Elite Eight matchup with UConn. These programs don’t need to win to be relevant. Their brand weight creates gravity regardless of results, and that’s a dynamic every mid-major and emerging program should study.

What to Do With This

 

Three weeks of data across 136 programs pointed to the same conclusion: the programs that won March weren’t the ones posting the most. They were the ones who knew where attention was flowing before it arrived and had the infrastructure to act on it.

 

That means two concrete things for your program:

 

Build for the unscripted moment. The highest-performing content across both tournaments wasn’t polished—it was human and fast. High Point pivoted a first-round upset into half a year’s brand attention. Maryland turned a postgame coaching moment into 1.95M engagements. None of that happened by accident. Each required a team that was watching in real time and empowered to move. If your content operation shuts down after the final buzzer, you’re leaving your best material on the floor.

 

Treat digital as an intelligence function, not a production function. The gap between programs isn’t creative talent. It’s whether your team is operating with live data, knowing which voices are driving your narrative, where gambling content is reshaping fan conversation, and which moments are gaining velocity before they peak. That intelligence layer is the difference between reacting to March and being ready for it

 

March comes every year. The programs building these capabilities now will be the ones with something to show for it next spring.

 

Methodology

Legend Labs built a digital listening infrastructure to monitor more than 130 athletic programs across both tournaments. The data in this report was collected using Meltwater and proprietary Boolean search strings developed by our team. For questions about methodology or to discuss how listening intelligence can support your program, contact us at hello@legendlabs.com.