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NCAA files trademark for phrase ‘Mask Madness’

Mark Schipper

By Mark Schipper

Published:

It just wouldn’t be the National Collegiate Athletic Association if those who sit in the executive offices high atop Indianapolis, Indiana weren’t machinating ways to profit off of everything in sight, including a pandemic.

According to Josh Gerben, a legal properties personality on Twitter, the NCAA has filed trademark on the phrase: “Mask Madness,” which is the front-expression for both a line of branded masks and a campaign encouraging people to wear them in the waning days of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

The expression itself is a simple play on the association’s most famous tagline, “March Madness,” which originally was an organically developed call out used by media and fans to describe the annual insanity of the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament. The association trademarked and copyrighted that trope to within an inch of its life before carpet-bombing the country with it for the last twenty years, and now they have found another use for it.

Their latest mask motto may not prove to be nearly as popular as the original, however. It appears their focus groups missed a fairly obvious, and likely bad, double entendre in putting madness after mask. There are large swaths of individuals and groups across the country, and the world, to be fair, that consider the idea of wearing a mask as a healthy person to be an act of madness in itself, arguing that the science doesn’t back it and the lack of efficacy in preventing the viral spread more than confirms it.

Has the NCAA given this group an unintentional gag to support their cause, or are they doing something helpful? And where is all the money, assuming the campaign generates any, going to go?

There’s nothing to see here, it’s just the NCAA on Monday morning during business hours. What were you expecting, anyway?

Mark Schipper

Mark Schipper is a reporter, sportswriter, and aspiring novelist living in Chicago, Illinois.