That's not true

College sports here reminds me a lot of lower level English football but with stadiums bigger than most Premier League grounds like my favorite team Michigan Wolverines has the 3rd biggest stadium in the world ‘Michigan Stadium’ for an amateur sport just wild

You have NEVER watched march MADNESS?!?! OMG YOU ARE IN FOR A TREAT HOLY CRAP

It's really that not that interesting@@Freemycousinn

@@Mdksupreme1 that’s a horrible take. Look up Virginia Vs UMBC, and Connecticut VS Cincinnati and get back to me

@@Mdksupreme1 weird thing to say. it's okay to not like basketball or college sports obviously, but the majority of those who appreciate both agree it's the most entertaining sporting event of the year. even if we generally prefer other sports or professional sports.

I have seen videos about that and it’s insane

Regista makes them leave their positipn too much, so a DM isnt really a DM/holding mid anymore, regista can work with sufficient support at the back

@@iondelic5967 Wait so where does the Regista actually move? Im running essentially an assymetric diamond, and my middle two dont always get wide enough and my DLP seems too static in front of my back four. Ive been playing around with a Carrillo, but havent loved it.

@@2639theboss Regista starts from the DM position and usually ends up around the box. A DLP s very "rarely" moves that far up the pitch and DLP d never does that. It's basically about their positional discipline

@@iondelic5967 Im 5 seasons into an FK Sarajevo match, and 2 seasons ago i sold my best newgen for 4 million into the PL and his was was Ion Delic.

@@dAiMYoBeAr Hhahaa siiick, can you send me a screenshot? 😆 In FB or i cam give u my e-mail on dm

and then that same Virginia team with most of the same players, won the national championship the next year.

@@jtp2007 that type of rebound seems to happen with upsets, like when Columbus swept Tampa in hockey and then Tampa won the next year

And it was incredible! I went to Catonsville High School and UMBC is right across the street! Go Retrievers!!!

@@dantenicastro9617 tampa’s coach actually reached out to uva’s coach and they kept a uva hat in the locker room to inspire them

@@ianturner3613 shoutout John Cooper

I would imagine as well even if they have a pro team in the state that pro team could up and move to the other side of the country at any time where as a college can't really do that. Plus lets be honest you Americans seem to have this almost obsessive with the whole Alumni thing, it's almost like going to high-school and college is like joining the Mafia. It's like a lifetime commitment that becomes almost more important as part of your identity than anything, in my experience put more than 2 Americans into a room together and their school will be one of the first things they use to identify themselves, to a point that I'm surprised they tell people their name first and don't just go by the name of their school :) Certainly here in the UK you wouldn't ever get something like homecoming taking off, school and uni is largely just something you fo and then move on from without a second thought

@@SimonWakefieldUK lol me and a former coworker would literally spend our entire lunch breaks talking about how much we hated each other's high team and argue over who had the most tradition and prestige we played 20 years ago our pro sports don't have real rivalries don't have real history don't have real passion and definitely aren't loyal to the people or the city/state it also doesn't help that college sports are way older than pro sports and high school and college sports are cheaper to attend so we combine years of passed on loyalty and passion for our high school with support for the kids from the community that are playing for our team we want to see those kids get recruited to the college teams especially our local team and if they do that just makes us more loyal to our college teams because they have this kid that we literally saw grow up our pro teams just don't have that since of community we don't feel like we own them we don't feel like they one of us because they aren't

​@@SimonWakefieldUKyeah, you got that lifetime commitment thing spot on lol. I love my college class ring. It gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment, and a sense of belonging. It helps that my best friend and my mom (who graduated 25 years prior to me) got their's with me. As such, I can't really turn away from my school's sports. Even though I have graduated, it feels like there is a distant connection with the players, simply because they walked the same places I walked, and experienced similar things that I got to experience. You can't really make that comparison with pro-sports. Sure, they may be a part of your city, but there are status levels to a city. The wealthy will always be perceived as higher than that of everyone else. Conversely, the status level is not ranked by wealth, but by class year, employment at the university, or your former student status. Factor in several other reasons, like community culture and economics, regionality, and location of professional teams, and it is easy to see why college sports reign supreme in America.

This one is pretty good about the NFL: ukposts.info/have/v-deo/fWWglmx8oIGUtJc.html

can't wait for Zealand to come out with the 10 hour long documentary on the convoluted mess that is college football

Even though it is embarrassing to go to the NIT (used to actually be a more prestigious tournament back in the day), it does have the charm of being played at the best team's home court. Even though A&M got robbed of a tournament bid the year this video was made, it was still fun watching them play at Reed Arena in the 1st Round.

this is nothing compared to the mess that is college football 🏈

​@@SalmanAli-hn2kt thank God that is changing.

And last year (2023) #1 Purdue lost to #16 Fairleigh Dickinson, #2 Arizona lost to #15 Princeton, and #4 Virginia lost to #13 Furman.

As a Michigan fan I knew we didn’t stand a chance in the semis against you guys lol but glad you beat Bama

The NFL Draft is absolutely exciting for me as a longtime NFL fan. I've watched the last 12 NFL drafts in their entirety live. Z's insights in the NFL draft process would be interesting, especially considering the long lead up to the NFL draft.

@@tubbs51 i honestly feel so blessed i grew up here in the states and i know the NFL, NBA MLB college and european football so well. we need an NFL equivalent of football manager

College football is a little simpler in some respects, and more complex in others. Essentially, the conferences are the same, although the top tier of college football is smaller -- I believe it's now 130 teams in 10 conferences -- and the postseason is both shorter and weirder. Each team plays at least 12 games, usually 8 in conference and 4 non-conference games. There's historical rivalries that can cross conference lines, so most teams play one "rivalry game" a year (regional ones like, Ohio State-Michigan, in-state ones like University of Central Florida-University of South Florida, and even in-city ones like Houston-Rice), many of which are massive events with nicknames, trophies, and decades of history (the aforementioned Ohio State-Michigan game is literally called The Big Game. Georgia-Florida is The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, Alabama-Auburn is the Iron Bowl, UCF-USF is The War on I-4 -- because Interstate 4 is the main road you'd drive on between those two campuses, etc). There's teams that would gladly go 1-11, so long as that 1 win is their rivalry game. Conference games work much like in basketball, to either spit out a winner of the conference (in the case of conferences with less than 12 teams) based on winning record, with various tiebreakers (direct wins, points scored/allowed, etc), or two teams that will then play a 13th "conference championship" game. Simple enough. The postseason is where it gets weird. There's what's called the "College Football Playoffs," a 4-team tourney to determine the national champion. There's a selection committee, with no automatic bids (in theory, although in practice most of the teams are almost always selected from the conference champions of the SEC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, and ACC), and the fact that there's only 4 teams playing means that who is selected - or not - is a huge point of contention (ie, UCF went 12-0 in the regular season of 2017 and didn't get invited because they played in the "weaker" American Athletic Conference. In their postseason bowl game -- we'll get to those in a bit -- they beat Auburn, the team that beat both Georgia and Alabama, the teams that eventually played for the national championship. Because of this -- and a #1 ranking from one of the computer ranking services for college football for that season, UCF claims the 2017 national championship on paper, even though they weren't invited to play for it.). For teams that don't make the playoffs, but have at least 6 wins on their record this season, there's still a single posteason "bowl game" that they'll attend, where there's usually some form of conference tie-in (ie, the Fenway Bowl -- played in Fenway Park, the baseball stadium where the Boston Red Sox play -- usually is a top American Athletic Conference team playing a top Atlantic Coast Conference team), although each bowl has a selection committee that has the right to determine who will play. The bowl games have corporate tie-ins, and offer prize money to the schools involved (NOT the players! Players in college football are, ostensibly, not paid, although they can get the cost of schooling and housing during their tenure in school paid for, and there have been scandals where rich fans of various teams offer inducements to players like do-nothing jobs during the offseason, cars or houses for family members, or even straight-up envelopes filled with cash), which result in some stupid names (my favorite: The Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl, generally just called the Gasparilla Bowl), and many are played in nontraditional venues (the Fenway and Pinstripe bowls being played in Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park, which are baseball stadiums, the Bahamas Bowl played in Thomas Robinson Stadium in Nassau, etc). Big breath. So, college football -- 4 non-conference games, 8 or 9 conference games, and hopefully 1 or (for 2 teams) 2 postseason games. But so much more.

College football confuses Americans don’t worry😂

It’s mainly the same for conferences but no massive tournament only a 4 team playoff, hope he makes a video on this someday

@@tthaas you were doing so good until you tried to claim that plastic Disney trophy as real nobody thinks you won that title

would love an American Football "head coach" game as intricate as FM. I know some games similar exist, but just don't hit it.

It's convoluted and not convoluted at the same time. Regulated chaos in a way

I can give a brief explanation of it addressing some of the points you brought up. So for most "American" (i.e. football, basketball, baseball, etc.) sports, you don't really have academies. There are some here and there, but really all of the attention from the professional level falls on college performance. So while being a part of one of these academies might help you progress in your skills, it doesn't hold the same weight when making the step to the professional level like it would in soccer (football). For example, there is a 0% chance someone would get drafted to the NFL if they didn't play in college. Basketball and baseball are a little looser in that they will draft potential all time greats from high school (LeBron is an example of this happening) but those are really the only options here. Each level will have scouting and also a general lifetime career path as well. I can give a breakdown of hierarchy, this will mostly pertain to football as that's what I'm most familiar with and participated in growing up, but it generally applies to all sports here: youth club team -> high school -> college -> professional So read that as the top high schools will probably look to recruit from people in well known youth leagues or academies, college will look to recruit from high school, and pro leagues look to recruit from college. Most scouting tier lists are available starting at the high school level. So if you really wanted to you could look up the top rated high school player at any given position in the nation right now. When it comes to the financial aspect of it, I can give a few examples of where money comes from. Lots of big name sports high schools are private schools, so they get funding through people donating. When it comes to college sports, just as Zealand mentioned in the video above they are a lot older than professional sports in our country. So there is a history of that being the main attraction. With that comes lot of televised commercials and marketing, as well as private colleges getting donations (like high schools). There is a very controversial topic that has been going on since I was a kid about how NCAA (the best division of college) athletes are NOT allowed to make money off of their sports skills/notoriety. I believe the NCAA is finally taking steps to change this but you can assume how the league makes money if its best players aren't allowed to make anything off it. Hopefully that paints a better picture, it's very interesting to me how different my country's sports system is to the rest of the world since I was raised just thinking this is how it always is haha. If you have any other questions feel free to let me know, I would be happy to answer!

@@dapir8731 Thanks for clearing some things up! can you tell me a bit more about the financial aspect affecting the college as an education institution? i'm sure that seeing the commercial attraction of the event, there will be alot income for the participating colleges. and as you say, most top highschool and colleges are private. so as an organization, there will be some(or more) incentive to focus on the sporting aspect. i'm asumming that there is a disparity between educational and sporting aspect in terms of funding. and seeing that college and high school sports are an integral aspect for the professional league, there is alot of pressure for both the institution and students to do good in the sports, knowing that there might be scouts watching them. doesn't it impact the educational aspect for them?

and yes, it is very interesting to know about other countries sporting system. i'm especially curious about the country with the most top flight sports in the world. because my country Indonesia, just copied the football/soccer system used in Eropa. Except for badminton, that sports are in the hands of cigerattes companies. They do all the things from scouting, developing, marketing and even the leagues. Sadly, that's also the sports where my country is the best at.

@@Mash027 so if you are a really good athlete for the sport you were scouted for the school will give you a athletic scholarship for school and then if you aren’t as good you can walk on(try out) or get scouted and you may have to wait for a scholarship to open up.

@@Mash027 NCAA is kind of shady too because between football and basketball their post season generates millions to billions of dollars in revenue and wouldn’t compensate the athletes saying it supports other sports and such things while their coaches are sometimes the highest earning educators in the state the college is in.

Every player in this tournament is an adult. Thus, it’s better to look at college sports in the USA as “pre professional” rather than “youth sports.” Every team plays a minimum of around 25-30 games every season. March madness is playoffs, not the regular season itself

Everyone in the tournament is 18-23 years old, so the sport has transitioned to serious and competitive For a lot of the schools it is an honor just to make the tournament

Ok I see, thanks for the insights

Yep, once you lose you are out. That's just how it goes. This isn't all bad though. For a lot of schools, it's just about making it as far as possible and hoping you set the ground work for future teams and players.

what game? usc vs miami?

@@akjdhajkdjhaghjkadh9804 It is a Joke mate

@@ahmedelsaidy1995 huh

The NCAA is your nba season with the amount of picks you have

@@martinabdou6280 Haha true that 😂

For better or worse, this tournament makes enough money that I actually don't think those kinds of considerations come into play directly when it comes to deciding who gets in. Schools that invest more into their basketball programs will tend to be better and therefore have more chance of getting in, but any team can theoretically make it if their resume impresses the committee enough. Or if they win their conference tournament as Z mentioned.

I think the system is too strong for that. The Super League was plausible (or at least plausible enough for greedy club owners to try to make it happen) because in football clubs are privately owned by random billionaires who don’t really have restrictions on what they can and cannot do, like splitting their clubs off and making their own “super league” was a realistic idea, at least to them. But the collegiate system in America is too strong and the people in charge of the programs aren’t independent billionaires, they can just be fired. Revenue can definitely play a part in certain areas of college sport, but it won’t break the system down

I'm an American, and I'd say that many of us DO think prestige and money become a factor in selection, unfortunately...that being said, you are choosing 36 teams, and most people feel like whoever gets left out was probably not going to win it all anyway. My own school plays in a smaller conference, and I feel has been cut out of the tournament a few times when they clearly deserved to be in. It is frustrating.

Because otherwise it would be like like 6 of the best teams and 20 other pretty good teams and nobody would watch. Imagine a champions league with only the top team in each of the top 5 leagues plus winners of all the other leagues.. no Chelsea, liverpool, dortmund, Real Madrid, Barcelona etc.

They are made up of representatives of all the interested parties and usually get it about right (tho Texas A&M were screwed this year)

Most of these 36 come from prior Top 25 Rankings. Most of the time it is very obvious who gets in. A #7 in the country Duke team that just lost to a #5 UNC team in the ACC Tournament is going go get in without a sliver of a doubt. Once you get outside the top 25, things get a lot more heated. Those receiving votes (top 25 is always voted upon each week by the AP Poll) are usually, but not always safe. Those that did fairly well in the season and made a surprising deep run in their tournament are also likely to get in. In the end, it's really the last 8-12 teams that become questionmarks and not the 24-28 selected ahead.

Survive and Advance really gets to the heart of what the tournament means. A #6 Seed Underdog going all the way to knock off an incredibly talented #1 Seed UH team that had the likes of Clyde Drexler and Akeem/Hakeem Olajuwon.

a perfect bracket is when you guess every single game right in march madness tournament there is a 1-9 quintillion odds to get a perfect bracket

A "bracket" is when someone puts together a sheet listing what they think will happen this year in the tourney between when the teams are announced and the first games (there's often casual gambling involved in brackets -- people in an office might assign a value to picking winners in each round, and the person with the "best" bracket wins a pool of money put in by participants). A "perfect bracket" -- something that has never been verifiably made -- would be one where every single game is correct (picking randomly, the odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 9 quintillion). A "busted bracket" is one where at least one game has been picked incorrectly.

@@tthaas Well, apparently it's just a term for betting on March Madness, at first I thought the "perfect bracket" was that the team in the top seed always win the match without any upsets. But why did the term just become popular this year? Because the NCAA opens up challenges this year for people who can guess 100%?

@zesevic no, there's always talk about how many perfect brackets are remaining on the ESPN and Yahoo March Madness contests. It's been a thing for years.

It is, and there's always some drama about Selection Sunday because of it (ie, this year, Texas A&M was not selected to play, despite many people arguing that they are a better team than the weakest of the at-large teams. There's other postseason tourneys, the most prestigious of which is the National Invitational Tournament -- the NIT -- and A&M was invited to play in the NIT and is currently in the quarterfinals of it, further proving the point). That's the problem of trying to select the best 68 teams out of a field of 300+ when the season is "only" around 27 games (there's some +/- there, due to preseason invitational tournaments etc), and teams often play each other 2 or even 3 (in the case of conference tournament play) times. There's just not enough hard data to determine who's the 68th versus the 69th best team.

You're correct, it is.

It is all subjective. But it is made a lot easier by prior rankings through stuff like the AP Polls. While not the exact metric used by the Committee (as seen by last year with A&M getting screwed AGAIN), it paints a decent picture as to how things will pan out for the first 18-20 at large bids.

Because American football isn’t as popular as football. FM already isn’t a massively popular game, so idk if there’s a market for a similar game with American football. Also the way their coaching works is different, the offensive and defensive lines are essentially two different teams with different coaches, training exercises, and strategies, as head coach a lot of what you do is interacting with your assistant coaches, the offensive and defensive line coordinators. You could still make a game out of that, and tbh there probably is one, but I don’t think it would succeed like FM

I'm going back years here but I'm sure a baseball management sim was knocking about at some point.

OOTP Baseball is very close game to FM, very stat driven and you can set up leagues/teams all over the baseball playing world.

@@williamcross210 ahh, I only follow College Football, but I'm just getting into basketball as well so I was curious

Not a bad way to look at it

Minus Group Stage and 2 Game Aggragate Scores, yes.

I totally understand your critiques of the MLS structure, it’s definitely an imperfect system. A few general things to note. Single elimination playoffs are the norm in sporting culture in the US. From youth sports all the way to professional sports, virtually every sport and league has this type of setup. For better or worse, it’s just the way it is. While it creates a lot of drama and higher stakes, I totally see how it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Finally, There’s over 350 college basketball teams in division 1 (the highest level of collegiate sports and what Zealand’s whole video is exclusively referring to) alone. The system kind of has to be complicated in order to function properly with so many teams

@@scott2353 Also, the conference system as we know it originated more or less because baseball had two big leagues that kinda-but-not-really-merged-together, both with their own set of teams, scattered across the country, and that became the blueprint for the NFL, NBA, NHL and lastly MLS. So it does make a lot of sense if you contextualize it. Also, though the regular season/playoff system might seem weird to a European, FIFA does have a similar approach to say the World Cup. You need to play qualis to make it, no one cares about your standings if you get knocked out in the group phase. All that matters is the Big Game.

Go cry

It has the sane root as middle east so since the Americas are the western hemisphere the middle of the continent is the Midwest. It gets extra confusing for the Big Ten since they expanded into Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey which aren't Midwestern states

@@patrickstump6809 Oh, I didn't expect an actual reason for that other than when the US expanded West that was just the West Side of the frontier

You could say the same about Americans not caring about soccer...

Hey my ten seed Creighton blue jays made the elite eight on the women’s side maybe you should mention them

Basketball

Huh???

What the hell? I don’t think you get the point of this system lol

No that would be the women’s tournament

They can get paid now, thankfully

@@ZealandonYT A tiny and I do mean tiny step has been made. Still no salary, some might make a few hundred promoting their local clothing store but thats about it. Its still a 14bn industry that does not directly pay those that make it possible. And 98% of them will never make it to the pro's so considering it an investment into their future is also a senseless argument. Im still very comfertable calling it unpaid and unfair child labor.

These are adults. Most taking scholarships and other benefits as payment for playing and others are just grateful to get to keep playing the sport they love.

@@devinc5484 There is a reason people in college get called kids, they still are. But college ball makes 14bn a year. The top coaches get millions a year. They should be grateful they are making their coach millions and some companies that don't care about them billions? Don't try to justify your watching and liking of this event. It is all kinds of f*'d up.

@@WimpieKanaal If you want to just fire that off I'm all for it because like I said I've written multiple papers on this for my degree But it's not child labor, they're of age, it's unfair restriction of wage earning and a monopoly

You sound like a fun guy to be around...

If you’re not interested in this content then don’t watch it and go watch his vods or something, there is endless FM content for you to watch if that’s all you want.

@@Flash4ML it's more of a heads up, I wasn't sure what the nature of the content was from the title alone

This was pretty clear in the title, and if not, then within 5 seconds of the video. Thanks for the heads up though

Hey I worked in college sports for years and wrote multiple papers on why them not getting paid was awful, but now they can make money off their image, which isn’t perfect but it’s a massive step in the right direction along with the removal of transfer rules Don’t you go taking your massive hatred and leave it on my doorstep because I made a video explaining March madness

What a terrible post. Last I checked it was optional for these kids to play basketball and get a paid education. Some of which choose not to go to school, while some others do.

no one is forcing them to play lmao, if they are good enough they can go to one of the many professional leagues around the world instead of college