Disclaimer: This story is purely satirical, in honor of April Fool’s Day on April 1. It is not meant to be taken at face value.

The NCAA tournament is one of the most anticipated sporting events of the year. Unfortunately, there has been recent information released about the NCAA college basketball tournament. For basketball lovers, a tragedy has occurred; the championship game has been cancelled. Questioning of why they would continue the games by spectators occurred. However, this year the NCAA has decided to throw away the championship game. This is both great and terrible news. Congratulations, the time you would have been spending focusing on your bracket standing and watching countless college basketball games can now be focused on the multiple tests and homework that you decided to disregard for the sake of college basketball. On the other hand, people wait all year to fill out brackets and watch the March Madness.

The cause of this shutdown was determined by the NCAA directors. As usual, the tournament had a variety of games that were unevenly called and biased towards one team. The directors overlooked the small factor. However, the increasing use of social media brought the attention of the matter to higher ground to be reevaluated. The directors did background checks on the referees and discovered almost all of them would be exceptionally biased if used in the tournament. At first, the directors were unsure how to deal with the matter so, they continued all play of the tournament as if all was normal. They finally came to the conclusion that the championship game will not be played in order for the tournament to be fair. The final two teams will share the title and a new refereeing staff will be hired immediately. They apologize to the wide audience of basketball fans, but they feel that this is the correct way to handle the scandal.

In regards to next year’s tournament, they plan to hire a completely new staff of officials. The hiring will be restricted to officials with no ties to NCAA teams. They understand that it will be difficult to find the correct officials and cannot promise at this time that the games will be called perfectly. However, they believe this will make for a better and more fair tournament.  The directors are in the process of hiring months in advance, so the same problem does not occur.