March Madness is an NCAA gold mine. This year, players can finally cash in too

Television rights for the men's March Madness college basketball tournament earned the NCAA a whopping $850 million last year. The players who competed? They made nothing.

This year, it's a new ballgame. It's not that the NCAA will be paying athletes when round one of the men's tournament kicks off Thursday — the association already funnels roughly two-thirds of profits back to colleges and universities. Instead, for the first time in the history of March Madness, players can sign endorsement deals that allow them to capitalize off their popularity.

It's a change set in motion by last summer that effectively upended years of resistance by the NCAA, which had blocked student-athletes from getting paid for the use of their names, images and likenesses. Less than a year later, a burgeoning multimillion-dollar industry has developed, transforming players from across the NCAA universe into a corps of influencers who earn money to endorse everything from the local restaurant in their college