Cinderella dropped her slipper and only the NCAA can pick it up

Not everyone was shocked when Florida cut down the nets a couple of weeks ago in San Antonio. Not everyone was shocked when Houston beat Duke (I still deny it happened though). However, nobody, and I mean nobody, thought the bracket would be THIS CHALKY. And you can tell because nobody got it right…again. In fact, anyone who used the “Chalk” setting for their bracket in a tournament challenge would have destroyed someone who used the “Analytics” setting or my picks (I picked with prior knowledge of March MADNESS, and that didn’t work). In fact, aside from a couple of 5-12 upsets in the first round, the women’s bracket out-chalked the men’s, which has never happened before. Even the “upsets” weren’t fun this year (Ole Miss killed ISU, Arkansas beat a St. John’s team that shot about 25% from the field). The most interesting tournament games were: all three final four games, any game involving Texas Tech in San Francisco, the last five minutes of a terrible Clemson-McNeese matchup, Baylor vs Mississippi State in the first round, BYU vs Wisconsin (again only in the last couple of minutes when the Badgers woke up), and the best game of the first weekend…Colorado State vs Maryland, which featured the only buzzer beater outside of the First Four. So, what explains the appearance of March Midness? Many have said it was an off-year, but many others believe NIL has to do with it. So let’s find out who took Cinderella’s slipper before the Madness could get to it…

We’ll start in 2018, in the beginning of the transfer era. The NCAA had just created the college basketball transfer portal; however, students had to sit out a year before being eligible to play for their new schools. This rule kept many players from entering the portal for the first two years of its existence. How many of these names do you know: Isaih Moore, Karrington Davis, Cormac Ryan, Clifton Moore, Antwann Jones? One, maybe two, most of you probably know none. I had only heard of one before I researched this article. That, yes THAT, is the combined list of top transfers from 2018 and 2019. That is why 2020 was so important.

Yes, it may have been a year to forget in college basketball. A dream season for Dayton, Florida State, San Diego State, and the Big East cut short. Under 30% of conference tournaments finished, none of the big conferences made it past the quarterfinals, and we never got our March Madness bracket. But it turns out 2020 was a HUGE year in college basketball history, as we got a new rule from NCAA regarding the transfer portal: players who used the transfer portal no longer had to sit out a year. There were no immediate impacts in 2020, we still had no big names in the portal, but we then saw the changes. In late June 2021, Josh LeBlanc and Pavlo Dziuba moved from LSU and ASU to UAB and Maryland respectively. While those names mean nothing to most of the country, they kickstarted a rampage in the transfer portal. Players rushed to other teams, and although there were none who made any crazy impact, we saw our first student transfers to UNC, Texas, BYU, Arizona, and A&M, schools that have proved they are national title contenders in recent years. In 2022, big schools continued to take players from other big schools, like Jackson Robinson (Arkansas → BYU) and Pete Nance (Northwestern → UNC) transfers. Tyrese Hunter transferred from Iowa State to Texas. Although we had begun to see changes in the portal, there was still no shortness of Madness in March, as a chaotic 11-seed UCLA Final Four run in 2021 was followed up by 15-seed Saint Peters and 10-seed Miami’s runs to the Elite Eight, coupled with a close title loss by 8-seed UNC. In 2023, teams like West Virginia, Marquette, SMU, Alabama, and previous portal squads UNC, Kansas, and Florida State dominated transfer news. Then, in 2023, we saw Hunter Dickenson, Kel’el Ware, Grant Nelson, LJ Cryer, Ryan Nembhard, Dalton Knecht, Caleb Love, Ace Baldwin, Steve Ashworth, and so many more players moved schools. It truly showed the transformation from a small operation in 2018 to a full-blown game-changer in 2023. And while the portal began to expand, we arguably had our craziest March Madness yet. FDU toppled Purdue, Furman over Virginia, Princeton beat Arizona and Missouri. Miami, San Diego State, and Arkansas beat Houston, Alabama and Kansas, and all of the 1-seeds were gone before the Elite 8. Florida Atlantic, Miami, Creighton, San Diego State, and Kansas State reached the Elite 8, and one of the best games in March Madness history ended with a San Diego State victory in the Final Four over Florida Atlantic. The only thing normal about the tournament was Connecticut’s dominating run to the title. 

Then 2024 came about, and the NCAA announced that students could transfer any number of times. However, the 2024 class was only as good as the 2023 class. This past year, it was Kadary Richmond, Norchad Omier, Tyrese Hunter, Chaz Lanier, JT Toppin, Ja’Kobi GIllepsie, Milos Uzan, PJ Haggerty, Danny Wolf, and a trio of West Virginia stars. And following the 2023 March Madness chaos and portal was a much calmer 2024 tournament, with an NC State run foiling a normal Final Four for the first time since the pandemic. But then, after a calm 2024 portal, we somehow saw chalk. You would think that with the transfer portal not reaching its maximum potential yet, Cinderellas would survive in 2025. But no, even with incentivized money through NIL (which we’ll talk about in a minute), we had an extremely chalky tournament. In 2025, we’re getting SO many more high-quality transfers, but there doesn’t seem to be a direct trend between transfer performance/rules and March Madness. We’ll see if moves from Yaxel Landeborg, PJ Haggerty (Again), Bennet Stirtz, RJ Luis, Donovan Dent, Ja’Kobi Gillespie (Again), Keyshawn Hall, Tucker DeVries (Again), and many more will again shift the landscape of the NCAA basketball tournament. 

So if there’s not a noticeable trend between the tournament and the portal, what about the tournament and NIL? We already know NIL deals in 2021 influenced transfers, as players have gone from smaller schools to teams with higher markets to earn money, but what has NIL done to cinderellas? When the NCAA implemented their NIL policies in 2021, the transfer portal simultaneously began to boom, but we know those aren’t related, as the NCAA created rules just related to the transfer portal in 2020. However, it is difficult to tell whether the 2024 NIL settlement from the NCAA, which now allows schools to pay athletes directly, influenced the tournament. First, there is the explanation that some sort of combination between higher NIL incentives and more lenient transfer rules allowed power schools to take more athletes from smaller schools, but there is also the issue that the trends between the portal and March Madness don’t align well since the former’s inception in 2018. 

In my opinion, the fall of cinderellas can definitely be explained in multiple ways, but the 2024 NIL settlement was definitely a major pushing factor for why the 2025 tournament was so chalky. The allowance of schools to directly pay their athletes created a better chance for larger schools to attract talent, and I think we’ll see an aligning trend of high chalk, high number of high-quality transfers, and high NIL deals if transfer or NIL rules aren’t diminished by the NCAA. And while we probably shouldn’t expect any MORE chalkiness, as this past tournament was about as boring as we could get both in matchup quality and low-seed storylines, we shouldn’t be expecting many slippers late in the tournament anytime soon. So this is my reasoning for why the NCAA should push harder against NIL, as at least in the college basketball landscape, there seems to be no point in a 64-team tournament (with historically lower-quality teams) if all of the talent will be held within 4-7 “power conferences.”