We are getting close to March Madness, and I’ve always felt that the NCAA basketball tournament is the toughest championship to win in all of sports. You have to win six games in a row, and you really can’t have an off night. One bad game, one cold shooting night, or one bad stretch, and your season is over. At the same time, your opponent can get hot at the right time and end your season just like that. The shorter three-point line is also a great equalizer in college basketball. A team can suddenly get hot from beyond the arc and steal a game. That’s part of what has always made the tournament so unpredictable and exciting. A team that might not be as talented on paper can still knock off a favorite if they hit a few shots early and build some confidence. We used to see it almost every year, when a lower-seeded team catches fire for a night and sends a powerhouse home early. The sport has drastically changed with NIL though, and we probably won’t see the “Cinderella” stories like we used to from the smaller conferences. Most major conference teams will always have the talent to pull off an upset against a higher ranked power conference team, but smaller conference teams just don’t have the same funds to attract players. Unfortunately for them when they do develop a really good player, a bigger school is usually going to come along and pry them away. In the past, a lot of those smaller schools that made deep runs in the tournament did it with older rosters full of juniors and seniors who had played together for years. That experience made a huge difference in March. Those teams were more disciplined, they knew how to play together, and they weren’t intimidated . That’s how some of those schools were able to make those memorable runs. But now those kinds of players aren’t staying at those schools anymore, and that makes it a lot harder for those programs. The transfer portal and NIL have changed college basketball. If a player is talented at a smaller school, a bigger program will come and take that player with more opportunities and more exposure, but most importantly more money. March Madness will always be exciting because of the format. A single-elimination tournament guarantees drama and surprises, and there will always be a few upsets along the way. But college basketball has changed, and the gap between the bigger programs and the smaller schools is much wider now. The tournament will still produce great games and shocking results, but the classic Cinderella story that used to be a major part of March may be getting harder and harder to find. And that’s a little bit of what made March Madness so amazing.
