March Madness May Be on TV, but AI Is Taking Over Gameplay

As March Madness draws millions of viewers to screens across the U.S., artificial intelligence is quietly reshaping how college sports operate, from game strategy to recruiting and the economics of athlete endorsements. What plays out on the court is increasingly influenced by systems that analyze, predict and optimize decisions long before tipoff.

The shift from intuition-driven decision-making to data-driven systems is accelerating across every layer of college athletics: performance preparation, talent acquisition and the financial machinery that now governs athlete compensation.

Real-Time Analytics

On the performance side, AI is changing what coaches see and how fast they can act on it. As reported by EdTech Magazine, AI video analysis tools can sort game film by play type, personnel groupings and situational context, enabling coaches to surface insights in a fraction of the time previously required for manual film review. The technology reduces the all-nighter culture historically associated with game preparation and allows analysts to focus on interpretation rather than cataloging.

Hardware is now entering the mix. According to Intel, Arizona State University became the first Division I NCAA football program to deploy a fleet of AI PCs during the 2025-26 off-season, with on-device neural processing units enabling coaches and staff to run AI workloads locally for game preparation, football operations and fan-facing media production. ASU Athletics Director Graham Rossini described the deployment as a tool to identify recruits faster and visualize game data in ways not previously possible.

Wearable sensors are generating a parallel stream of athlete intelligence. Research published by the University of Florida found that continuous wearables collecting physiological data are being used to help athletes and training communities achieve performance goals, though the study flagged privacy concerns around the extensive personal data these devices collect and the largely unstudied patterns governing how that data is shared.

Recruiting Enters a New Era of Precision

Talent identification has historically favored programs with the largest staffing budgets and the widest recruiting footprints. AI is beginning to rebalance that equation. As reported by CBS Sports, Nebraska’s assistant athletic director for strategic intelligence developed an AI agent system that autonomously monitors public sources including news articles and recruiting histories, to help the program quickly evaluate why a player missed game time, compressing what previously required hours of research into near-instant outputs during transfer portal windows.

The tool ecosystem supporting these efforts carries a high cost. According to CBS Sports, platforms like Teamworks offer basic packages for football programs starting in the mid-five figures annually, with costs expanding into six figures as integrations scale across multiple sports.

Sponsorships and Fan Engagement

The financial transformation of college sports has created immediate demand for AI-powered valuation tools. As reported by Texas A&M University, a researcher in the Department of Kinesiology and Sport Management developed SSPAIN.ai, a machine learning tool trained on data from more than 5,800 sponsorships spanning 23,000 observations globally, using survival analysis to forecast the probability and duration of sponsorship renewals. The tool has drawn interest from Texas A&M Athletics, the Dallas Mavericks and the NFL, among others.

Conference scheduling is also benefiting from AI optimization. As covered by Sportico, the SEC worked with scheduling software firm Fastbreak to construct its 2026 football calendar, with the conference’s associate commissioner for men’s basketball stating the software produced a slate that is 25% to 30% fairer by the conference’s own measurement criteria.

Fan engagement is following the same data trajectory. According to Business of College Sports, AI-driven personalization tools are enabling athletic departments to tailor marketing campaigns to alumni and student fans based on past ticket purchases, social media behavior and event attendance, with some programs using chatbots to handle thousands of fan queries during a single season.

Fans are also using AI independently: During this year’s tournament, tools including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini were widely used to generate bracket predictions, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, illustrating how AI consumption of college sports data now runs in both directions.

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