Midnight came early again for Cinderella.
All 16 teams that advanced to the second week of this year'sNCAA tournamenthail from one of the five power conferences.
The only double-digit-seeded upstart that managed to crash the party is aSean Miller-coached Texas team with a $22.4 million operating budgetand an enviable NIL war chest. The closest thing to a charming underdog story left in this year's field is aBig Ten runner-up Nebraska teammaking its firstSweet 16appearance after decades of basketball irrelevance.
At least one team from outside the power conferences reached the round of 16 for 49 straight years after the NCAA tournament expanded to 32 teams in 1975. That streak ended last March when none of those schools advanced beyond the NCAA tournament's opening weekend. Now the mid-majors have been eliminated early for a second consecutive year.
Why is March Madness becoming less mad? Why are the NCAA tournament's giants swatting aside the giant slayers more consistently than they did just a few years ago? Jeff Eisenberg and Dan Wolken of Yahoo Sports examined what's behind this trend and offer differing theories below.
Jump to:Jeff Eisenberg on NIL's impact|Dan Wolken on the hidden villain(s)
Cinderellas worried about tourney future can blame NIL
By Jeff Eisenberg
When his team opened conference tournament play earlier this month, Queens University men's basketball coach Grant Leonard glanced into the stands and was surprised by what he saw.
Sitting courtside, Leonard said, was an SEC assistant coach who was there to get a head start scouting and recruiting a Queens player who had not yet entered the transfer portal. The SEC assistant wore school-branded apparel just like coaches do when trying to make their presence known to high school prospects while attending Peach Jam or other AAU tournaments.
"I don't think it is the right thing ethically to go to our conference tournament, sit on the floor and try to interact with my player in an elimination game," Leonard told reporters Thursday on the eve of Queens' first-round NCAA tournament game against Purdue. "That is my opinion; it is not a fact. Is it permissible? Maybe, maybe not. Is it ethical? In my opinion no."
Stories like that help illustratewhy the Cinderella runs that have long been the lifeblood of the NCAA tournament are rapidly becoming more scarce. The gap between college basketball's haves and have-nots is rapidly widening because top-tier programs can offer massive NIL payouts to the best available talent and because transfer rules no longer prevent players from switching schools as often as they want without penalty.
The name-brand programs who have advanced in this year's NCAA tournament have treated mid-major teams like their personal farm system. Their rosters are littered with players who began their college careers at a lower level, from Michigan's Yaxel Lendeborg, to Louisville's Ryan Conwell, to UCLA's Donovan Dent, to Tennessee's Ja'Kobi Gillepsie.
Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for the 2026 MLB season
Mid-majors struggling to keep best players
Those player retention issues have eaten away at the biggest advantage that small-conference programs used to have in March. The Loyola Chicagos, Wichita States and Butlers of the past overcame the talent gap with older players who developed superior cohesiveness through years of playing together. That's harder to pull off today with wealthier programs sliding into players' DMs or making life-altering offers through back channels.
The ability to offer NIL payouts well into seven figures has also allowed high-majors to recruit guys who in the past would be playing professional basketball. Teams at the top of this year's NCAA tournament bracket are loaded with prized freshmen, international prospects and proven veterans who can earn more playing college basketball than they can in overseas pro leagues, the G League or even on an NBA two-way contract. There are teams who are paying six figures to players coming off their bench.
The concentration of talent at the top of college basketball is exemplified by how the past two NCAA tournaments have unfolded. Not a single team seeded 13th or worse has advanced out of the round of 64. Every team that has made the past two Sweet 16s has come from a power conference.
Thirteen of 32 first-round games in this year's tournament were decided by more than 20 points. The average margin of victory in the first round was 17.4,the highest since the tournament expanded in 1985, per ESPN research.
Impact of regular season
Two NCAA tournaments may be a small sample size, but regular-season results also reflect the growing chasm between top-tier teams and everyone else. There were 378 matchups this November between high-majors and non-Gonzaga teams from other conferences. The little guy won only 22 of them, according to research by Yahoo Sports.
"In the past, if you did a good job evaluating and a good job recruiting and you found guys who were a notch above your level, they wouldn't leave because they'd have to sit out some place," former Fairleigh Dickinson and Iona coach Tobin Anderson told Yahoo Sports in November. "Now with the portal and nonstop free agency, a good low-major or mid-major team for the most part is going to lose its best players every year."
By the numbers, Duke, Arizona and Michigan entered this year's NCAA tournament as three of the strongest No. 1 seeds in recent memory. Each boasted KenPom adjusted efficiency margins of at least 37.59, meaning that's how many points that college basketball statistician Ken Pomeroy would project them to outscore the average Division I opponent by over 100 possessions.
Since the KenPom era began in 1997, only 10 teams have ever finished a season with adjusted efficiency margins higher than 35. Four of those are last year's No. 1 seeds.
It isn't just the No. 1 seeds who were unusually formidable this season. A total of 20 teams seeded sixth or higher entered the NCAA tournament with adjusted efficiency margins of plus-25, compared to just four at the end of the 2022-23 college basketball season and nine the year before that.
It's the opposite story for schools from single-bid leagues, the sorts of programs who populated the seed lines at the bottom of this year's bracket.
That's why this has been another NCAA tournament where the giants have swatted aside the giant slayers, where the teams that advance have deep pockets, not glass slippers.
Advertisement
Jump to:Jeff Eisenberg on NIL's impact|Dan Wolken on the hidden villain(s)
Meet the real villain(s) behind death of Cinderella
By Dan Wolken
As we endure a second straight year without much mid-major magic in the NCAA tournament's opening weekend, plenty of fingers will be pointed at the current NIL and transfer environmentfor killing Cinderella.
That may or may not be true. Two years is still a small sample size, and if a couple close games go the other way — Santa Clara, Siena and Wright State all had great chances in the final few minutes to take down blue-blood programs — we're having a totally different discussion.
But, in the aggregate, I'll acknowledge it certainlyfeltlike the first round of the NCAA tournament was top heavy. A lot of blowouts — the first-round average margin of victory was 17.4 points, the highest since the tournament expanded in 1985. A lot of 12, 13, 14 and 15 seeds that looked significantly outclassed.
The transfer portal is an easybête noirein this discussion. All the power conference schools are scouting mid-major rosters, and anyone who shows promise at a lower level is being offered big money to transfer. Again, I'll acknowledge this isn't great for mid-major programs. From a 30,000-foot view, it is harder to maintain talent and continuity across the bottom 270 or so programs in the sport.
In terms of how it's specifically affecting the NCAA tournament, however, there's another factor that deserves more of the blame than it's getting.
Conference realignment.
If Cinderella is indeed on life support, it's far more likely that the mad rush since 2010 to draw up coast-to-coast, mammoth football conferences was what put her in the ICU in the first place.
Mid-majors had proud history in NCAA tournament
Go back 15 years and look at some of these conferences that produced the iconic mid-major teams of recent vintage like Butler, VCU, Wichita State and Loyola Chicago. They are almost unrecognizable today, and you can trace the reason directly to the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC gluttonizing themselves into amorphous blobs and creating a domino effect that significantly weakened dozens of conferences below them.
And yet all those conferences continue to get automatic bids, and the quality of teams filling those slots has undeniably gotten weaker.
Let's look at 2016 — just 10 years ago. The average pre-tournament KenPom ranking of the No. 15 seeds was 124, the average No. 14 seeds was 105, the average of No. 13 seeds was 84 and the average No. 12 seeds was 73.
Four years ago, in 2022, we had one of the craziest tournaments ever. Here were the KenPom averages: No. 15 seeds were 140, No. 14 seeds were 134, No. 13 seeds were 83, No. 12 seeds were 61. (In that tournament, a 15 seed won a first-round game, two 12 seeds won first-round games and the 4-13 games were decided by a total of 18 points.)
This year? It's a totally different story. The 15 seed average is around 179, the 14 seed average is roughly 142, the 13 seed average is 113, the 12 seed average is 76.
As you can see, it's very clear in the numbers that the quality of automatic bid winners filling these Cinderella seed lines has declined over time. The same conferences that put good teams in the tournament are now producing weaker champions. And that's happened at the same time fringe NBA prospects are staying in college longer because of NIL, making the top layer of the sport stronger.
But when you're talking about the NCAA tournament, where a limited number of teams from that top layer are playing the cream of the crop from smaller conferences, it's crucial to understand that many of those conferences are now a shell of what they once were due to realignment.
Realignment erodes lower-level conferences
When the Big East reformed as a basketball-only league in 2013 because it got tired of being jerked around by football realignment, it weakened the A-10 by taking Xavier and Butler, and the Missouri Valley by inviting Creighton. The A-10 responded by taking VCU and George Mason from the CAA, Davidson from the Southern Conference, then Loyola from the Missouri Valley several years later.
The Valley, having lost Creighton, Loyola and Wichita State (which bolted to the American), backfilled with Belmont and Murray State, which took the two best programs from the Ohio Valley Conference, which in turn added Little Rock and Western Illinois.
Meanwhile, the American losing SMU, Houston, UCF and Cincinnati to power conferences sparked a raid of Conference USA, which caused that league to take a grab bag of schools from the CAA, Atlantic Sun and Missouri Valley.
This has happened over and over across all these realignment moves. As one league scrambles for survival by taking the best members of a league just below them in the pecking order, it erodes the strength of each conference down the chain.
For a long time, leagues like the MVC, CAA and Horizon could reliably put competitive 12 or 13 seeds in the tournament because they had a core of solid programs and good brands. Now, the membership of those leagues is totally different, but they're still getting the same automatic bids.
You don't even need to mention NIL or the transfer portal to see very easily how the quality of teams filling those bids could slip, which is now showing up clearly in the numbers. And if you get a year like this one where several of the No. 1 seeds in the mid- and low-major leagues lost their conference tournaments, it takes the quality of the No. 12-15 seeds down another notch and you end up with the kind of blowouts we saw on Thursday and Friday.
The NCAA tournament is not a microcosm of the sport. College basketball has never been as equal as the March Madness branding makes it look. With 350-plus teams, the gap between the haves and have-nots has always been massive.
But in a one-off event like this, how you sort the teams in the field matters significantly. If the 100th-best team in the country was a typical 14 seed a decade ago and now the typical 14 seed is the 142nd-best team, that's a huge difference driving a decline in upsets.
Is that an issue the NCAA needs to address? Perhaps. But if we're going to worry about the death of Cinderella, we need to correctly identify what killed her. NIL and the transfer portal are only part of the story — and maybe even the smallest part compared to 15 years of realignment shock coming home to roost.
Midnight came early again for Cinderella. All 16 teams that advanced to the second week of this year'sNCAA...
