The Cinderellas simply can’t compete anymore.
A bove all other major sporting events, the NCAA Basketball Tournament reflects the American ethos: For 40 minutes, a little-known underdog can beat the odds and take down a big school, wrecking office brackets and giving hope to anyone who feels they have been overlooked.
That’s because small or mid-conference schools always had talent. The country is flecked with teams who have late-blooming point guards or undersized small forwards who couldn’t play at Duke or Kansas but have grown into skilled college players. Sometimes legitimate professional prospects would choose to stay and play at a local school rather than be swallowed up in a sports factory.
But if this year’s March Madness is any indication, the thrilling era of Davids taking down Goliaths is over. While one or more teams from a smaller conference typically sneak into the Sweet 16, every spot is now taken by one of the “Power Five” conferences. The Southeastern Conference has seven schools in the final 16, while the Big 10 and Big 12 each boast four entries. (The last spot belongs to perennial powerhouse Duke of the ACC.)
The Cinderellas simply can’t compete anymore, as new NCAA rules allowing schools to pay players and permitting athletes to move from school to school without penalty have made smaller schools a minor league for the big boys. Some powerful schools have even stopped recruiting high school athletes, knowing they can get proven talent at lower-level colleges simply by dangling a large check in front of them. Why take an unpredictable 17-year-old when you can add a 19- or 20-year-old who has already demonstrated his or her skill in college?
Before player payment and the transfer portal, athletes were incentivized to stay where they were. But with unlimited income possibilities and immediate transfer opportunities, all the talent is pooling near the top. The lowest seed remaining in the men’s tournament is Arkansas, an SEC school seeded tenth that happens to be coached by John Calipari, a former national champion and Hall of Famer. There isn’t a team seeded lower than sixth in the rest of the field.
All of this makes for a dreadfully boring tournament, and the U.S. Supreme Court is largely to blame.
In the 2021 case NCAA v. Alston, the court unanimously determined that college sports did not enjoy antitrust exemptions allowing them to deny benefits to student-athletes in the name of “amateurism.” The decision didn’t mandate paying athletes (it dealt with educational benefits offered to players), but the writing was on the wall: The NCAA knew its previous model was untenable.
A week later, the NCAA adopted a new policy allowing athletes to profit from their “name, image, and likeness.” In 2022, the NCAA expanded the transfer portal, removing the requirement that players sit out a year before being able to play for a new school.
The result has been total chaos, with agents taking control of player movement and fans no longer knowing who is going to be on their team from year to year. Even professional sports have guardrails to ensure competitive balance — salary caps, long-term contracts, and the like. But now college sports is anarchy and the product is getting worse.
In a concurring decision in the Alston case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh overtly supported paying athletes because he believed the NCAA’s claims of “amateurism” were a scam.
“All of the restaurants in a region cannot come together to cut cooks’ wages on the theory that ‘customers prefer’ to eat food from low-paid cooks,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Law firms cannot conspire to cabin lawyers’ salaries in the name of providing legal services out of a ‘love of the law.’”
Kavanaugh is right, but his framing is wrong. Individual schools competing for athletic talent aren’t like McDonald’s and Burger King trying to compete for workers. NCAA basketball is all one McDonald’s, and the schools operating within the system are like their franchisees. In order for the system to work, the franchises need uniform rules.
That’s because the product the NCAA is selling is competition — the annual belief that even small schools can compete with the big ones, which makes March Madness so exhilarating. And that product has to compete with other entertainment products. So in this metaphor, the NBA and Major League Baseball are Burger King and Wendy’s, not each individual school within the system.
Competition drives sports leagues’ success, which is why the NFL and NBA have salary caps. These leagues know that if the richest teams can buy up all the best players, 75 percent of the league will have no chance to win, and the fans in those cities will just give up. This is why you’re hearing calls for a salary cap in baseball — because of the high correlation between team payroll and on-field success. The defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers have a payroll of over $322 million, while the bottom-feeding Miami Marlins come in at $47 million. It’s as if they’re playing in completely different leagues.
That is why the vigilante wasteland of college sports can’t stay as it is.
“The transfer portal is crazy,” said University of Maryland head coach Kevin Willard this week. “There are kids asking for $2–3 million right now. The money has exploded [like] crazy because we have no guardrails. We have no rules.” He says it’s the worst-ever implementation of a change. “And agents are taking advantage of it.”
Of course, payment of athletes is here to stay. In October of last year, the NCAA agreed to a $2.8 billion settlement that will allow schools to pay players directly (as opposed to with NIL money, which comes from boosters and other third parties). The spigot is on, and the Supreme Court is unanimous in its desire to keep it open.
But to channel Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And one of those sacrifices is going to be the erosion of the big upset, condemning the NCAA Tournament to predictability. The true underdog will fade away, with only a handful of teams having any real chance of winning. And if a scrappy team does make any noise during March Madness, that team will be stripped for parts before the tournament is even over.
That means college sports need rules. Anything else, whether in March or otherwise, is simply madness.