Sports
Lacy and Sketch Got Kicked Out of March Madness for Streaming
On March 28, Twitch streamers Lacy and Sketch were sitting courtside in Houston, Texas at the Toyota Center for the NCAA Men’s March Madness Elite Eight game between Iowa and Illinois. They had paid somewhere between $5.000-$6,000 for their seats. They were also livestreaming on Twitch to roughly 30,000 total viewers. They were kicked out of the game by Toyota Center security and were told that the NCAA had them removed, filming their removal. Lacy argued he was streaming his personal experience and reactions, not the game but the two were escorted out nonetheless.
Lacy, born Nick Fosco, is a 23-year-old Twitch streamer ranked in the platform’s top 15 in 2026, with an average of over 15,000 concurrent viewers and 2.4 million followers. Sketch is Kylie Cox, known for his “What’s up, brother?” catchphrase. Both are IRL streamers, Lacy is especially known for his live content, and was previously a member of the FaZe Clan collective. Sketch got his start streaming games like Madden. Streaming something like an NCAA game is normal for them.
After he was removed, Lacy continued streaming from outside the arena. He speculated that the NCAA felt threatened because his Twitch audience was larger than the physical attendance in the building. He also showed Instagram DMs from the official NCAA March Madness account that had invited him to the game and suggested they collaborate. None of those messages said anything about being allowed to livestream during the event. Lacy claimed there had been a “miscommunication” about filming and said he had spoken with someone from the broadcast about getting permission to record. Security told him repeatedly that the decision was the NCAA’s. The whole confrontation, from the first conversation to the ejection, lasted about 10 minutes.
The NCAA, like many sports organizations in the US, is very strict with potential violations of broadcasting rights. CBS and Turner pay over a billion dollars a year for exclusive rights to the tournament. A creator with a camera two rows behind the baseline, with tens of thousands of live viewers is, from a legal standpoint, a competing broadcast. Even if Lacy was pointing the camera at his own face, the game was visible and audible and he was streaming live to the public on Twitch.
Lacy told his audience and arena security that he had been to other multiple March Madness games earlier in the tournament and had streamed from them without problem, but this was before the Elite Eight. The March Madness trip was already going badly before the ejection. Earlier in the tournament, Lacy showed up to a game thinking he had been given free courtside seats, but ended up having tickets for the top rows of the arena, watching the game from what he described as the nosebleeds. He also told the Houston Chronicle that he lost $10,000 betting on Iowa to beat Illinois in the Elite Eight game he was ejected from, on top of a $5,000 loss from betting on a Sweet 16 game at the same arena earlier in the week. The tournament cost him over $20,000 in total between tickets, bets, and general expenses.
The incident raises a question that is going to keep coming up as IRL streaming grows. Lacy was supposedly invited to March Madness by the NCAA’s own social media team. But an invitation to attend is not the same as permission to broadcast, and nobody on Lacy’s side appears to have confirmed where that line was before they sat down and hit go live. For someone whose entire career depends on streaming from wherever he is, that seems like a conversation worth having before you spend $6,000 on seats.
