Love is in the air. It finally feels like spring. Unfortunately, one crucial element of spring is missing. An unpredictable college basketball tournament!
I have still thoroughly enjoyed this tournament as a whole. However, there is a missing sense of chaos that used to make this tournament something special. The days of a small school, that you have never heard of, defeating one of the top programs in college basketball, are apparently over. Goodbye Florida Gulf Coast. Nice to know you, George Mason! Hello Duke, Uconn, MSU, U of M, Houston. Can’t wait to see the same schools every year for the foreseeable future!
Teams outside the power five conferences have almost no chance of being successful anymore. It is a sad sight to see.
There are numerous reasons for this changing college basketball landscape. The number one culprit is the NIL.
I have a long-documented history of supporting college athletes’ rights to earn income from a third party. Sadly, this has created a quite a divide in talent between teams in college basketball. Some of these games honestly looked like a Junior Varsity team playing a Varsity team.
The biggest upset in the first round of the NCAA tournament was the 11th seed Texas Longhorns advancing over the 6th seed BYU. It is a sad day when the biggest Cinderella in college basketball is Texas Freaking Longhorns.
I don’t want to be too big of a Debbie Downer on this beautiful Wednesday afternoon. But the fact of the matter is, money talks. When a lightly recruited player has a successful season at a smaller school, instead of retaining that player and developing that player, that player will now jump ship to a bigger university.
Case and point Yaxel Lendeborg, at the University of Michigan. Yaxel is a potential player of the year candidate. He is also the best player on the best team in college basketball.
Yaxel started at a community college in Arizona. From there the University of Alabama Birmingham offered him a good chunk of change to go play for them. After two successful seasons at UAB, Michigan offered Yaxel a buttload of cash to finish his career there. It just feels a little odd for the face of the best team in college basketball, to play and grow at other institutions.
I love seeing a good kid like Yaxel make the money that he so rightly deserves. In years past, Yaxel would have stayed at UAB. UAB would then ride Yaxel’s coattails to potential success in the NCAA tournament. Smaller schools are no longer rewarded for taking a chance on a lightly recruited player. Instead, they are almost punished. There is no form of compensation for the fruits of their labors. The larger universities get to come in and pick the fruit and leave the smaller schools with nothing.
An example from years past is Stephen Curry at the University of Davidson. Because of his slight stature, a young boy from Charlotte North Carolina was overlooked by the likes of UNC and Duke. Davidson gave the kid a chance. For their efforts, they were rewarded. Davidson made a deep NCAA tournament thanks to Curry. If this situation were to present itself today, Curry would play one or two seasons at Davidson, then Duke or UNC would back the truck up and dump cash into his lap.
NCAA basketball is now officially minor league basketball. There are different levels to this league now. In order to level the playing field, we may need to look at numerous solutions.
There is a second culprit when it comes to the death of our beloved Cinderella. The sneaky bastard is analytics.
In years past, when the major upsets would happen, it was usually the result of an all-time three-point shooting performance by the lower seed. The higher seed would simultaneously fall victim to one of their worst shooting nights of the season. Thanks to analytics, teams are able to counteract this.
Larger schools have learned that they need to play to their strengths when taking on these smaller opponents. In most cases, the larger school’s strength is literally their size and strength. It’s crazy that it took years of study and research for the giant schools to realize that they should play their biggest and strongest players as much as possible.
Limiting the smaller school’s second chances greatly hinders their chances of making more threes. Afterall, most wide open three-point opportunities come off of an offensive rebound. On the other side of the coin, the larger schools are obtaining more offensive rebounds for themselves.
The best example of this over the first weekend was Duke vs Siena. Siena started out white hot from three point land, on their way to a double digit lead. Rather than panic and jacking up three pointers of their own, Duke stayed the course and exerted their dominance inside. What looked like it would be the biggest upset in years, turned into another run of the mill win for Duke. Thank you analytics.
As much as the death of Cinderella is a big ass bummer, a byproduct is we have some super sexy Sweet Sixteen matchups. Bennie cannot wait!
A bientot!
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