Sixty-eight teams made it to March Madness this year. After the championship game on Monday, there will only be one left standing. That team will not be Tom Izzo’s Michigan State Spartans, and maybe that’s okay.
“Somebody’s going to go home sad. Today it’s the Spartans,” Izzo said after his team fell to Auburn on Sunday. “There’s some locker rooms that people are … complaining, and there’s some locker rooms where people are crying and hugging. It was a crying and hugging locker room, and that means we had something special.”
But is having “something special” enough if you fail to realize the ultimate goal? It goes without saying the Spartans had an impressive season; they went from being unranked preseason to going 30–7 overall, winning the Big Ten Conference’s regular season championship and reaching the Elite Eight for the first time since 2019. Still, in a sport like college basketball, where a tournament loss could mean the end of a career — or a transfer — it’s hard not to think in absolutes.
It’s a well-understood fact that nobody enjoys losing. What I would like to argue, though, is that losing has never been worse than it is today.
Of course, a major contributor to this hypothesis is the scrutiny athletes are placed under due to the extremism and polarization of social and broadcast media. Further, in almost every major sports league, contract salaries are at an all-time high, as is the money being invested in TV deals and franchise marketing. The same goes for college sports, where players are now not only playing for school pride and legacy but also a check. As more and more money gets poured into sports, each mistake becomes increasingly costly — and each loss harder to take.
There’s a psychological angle to it, too: When athletes scrutinize their own performances, they are more likely to make mistakes. This concept of “analysis paralysis” can be found all over the place, a famous example being Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Cat.” In sports, it’s been proven by social psychologist Roy Baumeister that “increased conscious attention disrupts the automatic or overlearned nature of the execution.” So, when players over-analyze their failures, they are actually limiting their ability to play freely and at their highest level.
But with the pressure put on players today, athletes are more likely to have to confront their defeats and weaknesses in an unhealthy way. For Simone Biles in the Tokyo Olympics, this pressure was so high and unrelenting that she decided to withdraw from almost all of her scheduled events. While the general public has gradually come to recognize the ‘yips’ as a real and debilitating condition, Biles, at the time, faced increased hostility and pressure.
For many, the main response to this issue is simply that athletes should be tougher. After all, with those huge salaries, shouldn’t they be able to take a little pressure?
Some progress has been made — for example, the NBA started requiring all teams to have a formal relationship with a mental health practitioner in 2019 — but more can, and must, be done. While sports are primarily entertainment, they are also a celebration of human ability. The dominant belief may be that the cream rises to the top, that it’s survival of the fittest, but this view fails to understand that every athlete can only compete at their best if their mind and body are in harmony.
Maybe the whole culture of ‘losing’ should shift. Maybe, just maybe, we should all trust the word of Giannis Antetokounmpo: there is no such thing as failure, only “steps to success.”
