If you like underdogs, you will not like the NIL (short for name, image, and likeness) era of college athletics.

Since expanding to a field of 64 in 1975, at least one school from a mid-major conference has made the NCAA Tournament’s second weekend of play, more commonly known as the Sweet 16, every year.

Recommended Stories

• American precarity
• The baby bust hits the 30-somethings
• Newsom and his burner phones are all talk, no action

This year, for the first time ever, no small schools made it in. Every team in the Sweet 16 is from a power conference. The Southeastern Conference sent seven teams, the Big Ten and Big 12 each sent four, and the ACC sent one.

If you want to know why no school from a mid-major conference made the Sweet 16 this year, all you have to do is look at the rosters of the teams that did. Of this year’s Sweet 16 teams, only Purdue featured five starters who began school at Purdue. Duke and Michigan State featured four starters who began their collegiate careers at those schools, while BYU featured three, including a fourth who started just up the road at the University of Utah.

But Arizona, Michigan, and Kentucky all featured starting fives with zero students who began their careers at the schools they currently represent. Instead, these schools built their rosters by raiding Dayton, Delaware, Drexel, Howard, New Mexico, Nevada, and San Diego State.

Since at least the 1950s, college students have been allowed to transfer schools and still compete in college athletics. But until recently, they had to sit out a year in order to do so. More importantly, starting in 2021, student-athletes are now allowed to take NIL money from entities representing the schools.

Before NIL, it made sense for a marginal star player to stay at a mid-major school where they would be guaranteed more playing time, and the chance for big exposure on the national stage come tournament season.

But in the NIL era, a typical power conference basketball starter gets anywhere from $200,000 to $800,000 a year to play, while most mid-majors can only afford $10,000 to $50,000 per player. The end result is that as soon as a mid-major finds and develops a good player, that player then immediately leaves for a bigger school.

No other sport is like this. In Major League Baseball, teams get six years with a rookie player before he is a free agent. For the NFL, the length is four years. But in the current college system, every player is functionally a free agent at the end of the season.

No sports league has survived a system where every player is a free agent at the end of every season.

PATRICK MORRISEY CALLS NCAA TOURNAMENT SNUB OF WVU MEN’S BASKETBALL ‘MISCARRIAGE OF INJUSTICE’

It doesn’t have to be like this. The system could still pay student-athletes without creating an incoherent free-for-all. We just need to either limit the number of transfers a student can make or re-implement the one-year sit-out for each transfer. This would increase competition between large and small schools while also making sure college athletes identify more with the schools they play for.

Congress is going to have to step in to help implement any solution. An antitrust exemption is going to be needed to make any solution work. If Congress doesn’t get involved, we can all say goodbye to Cinderella stories, and March will forever be a little less mad.