As college basketball infests your television this week, there is a good chance you will be swept up in March Madness. But what seems more like pathological madness has been spreading in intercollegiate sports for years, and some people are looking to Washington for help — arguably the craziest thing of all.

The clearest madness has been conference realignment.

In 2012, the Big Ten, once purely Midwestern, added the University of Maryland and Rutgers. In 2022, the University of California-Los Angeles and the University of Southern California announced they were joining, stretching the now greatly misnumbered Big Ten coast to coast. Then the Pac-12, “Pac” for “Pacific,” splintered, with Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley joining the ACC. The “A” and first “C” stand for “Atlantic Coast.”

Football and its big television bucks are driving this mania.

In its last days, the Pac-12 had a prospective broadcast deal for $23 million per school, per year, with a chance of more if subscribers showed up in droves. The Big Ten, in contrast, expected its broadcast contract to yield schools $80 to $100 million. Meanwhile, ACC members get about $40 million, which powerful Florida State University fears cripples its ability to compete for national championships. FSU has sued the ACC to exit, and if it leaves other members will likely follow, threatening the ACC with the Pac-12’s fate: disintegration.

Of course, even the “small” deals feel like lots of money, especially considering that none of the players get paid. Which also seems like madness.

Emphasis on “seems:” Except for some football and men’s basketball, college sports are money losers. According to the latest NCAA data, of 350 Division I schools reporting, only 28 profited off athletics.

Importantly, most athletes are in non-revenue sports such as swimming and rowing. Scholarships as compensation are a good deal for them. They typically could not get paid competing elsewhere, while a bachelor’s degree is generally both expensive and a good investment, yielding lifetime earnings around $1 million greater than just a high school education.

Big-time football and basketball players, in contrast, likely bring their schools more money than they get in scholarships and living costs.

Enter NIL: name, image, and likeness. After a couple of court cases and a 2019 California law requiring that state institutions allow their athletes to profit from their personal brands, college sports entered the NIL era. States have passed diverse laws, and the NCAA has blessed whatever states allow. Various entities, often run by alumni and boosters, help direct money to athletes.

It seems entropic, but it takes time for order to emerge after change.

The final chaos-causer is player unionization. In 2015, Northwestern University football players petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to unionize. They were ultimately turned down,  but the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team just received regional-level approval. Dartmouth is appealing, arguing athletes are students, not employees. It might have an especially strong case — Ivy League schools do not allow athletic scholarships.

All of this could make one yearn for someone to stop the madness, and various congressional committees have held hearings to discuss it. But federal interference would be a bad idea.

First, there are competing values. For instance, is it more important to maintain competitive balance by restricting NIL, or to let individual players get as much money as they can? That is a normative, not factual, question.

Then there is reality: College sports are driven by more, and more powerful, forces than Congress can harness. Congress cannot, for instance, dictate sports television coverage. But TV money is largely fueling the madness.

Meanwhile, professional leagues directly affect college sports. The NBA now has a farm team system, enabling players to forgo college, and overseas opportunities are significant. These talent-drainers put more immediate pressure on colleges to change player compensation than the feds could likely muster.

In football, there are no NFL farm teams or serious opportunities to play abroad, but it, too, could be seeing more non-college opportunities. With the creation of the USFL and XFL spring leagues, now merging into the UFL, demand for players has risen.

Congress should just leave college sports alone.

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Let universities decide for themselves how to balance attracting top talent against having enough schools with comparably talented rosters to keep the games compelling. Let individual athletes decide what compensation they will accept as universities compete for them. Let broadcasters and fans choose how much they will pay for games.

All those decisions will balance, producing the outcome that most closely meets everyone’s desires. It is the sane way to handle ever-evolving college sports.

Neal McCluskey directs the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, where Kayla Susalla is the research associate.