Meet the real villains behind the death of Cinderella
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 environment for 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 certainly felt like the first round of the NCAA tournament was top heavy. A lot of blowouts. A lot of 12, 13, 14 and 15 seeds that looked significantly outclassed.
The transfer portal is an easy bête noire in 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. 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.
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