Is college basketball about to say, ‘So long, Cinderella?’

After the opening weekend of last season’s historically chalky NCAA tournament, the remaining teams all shared something in common.

For the first time since the NCAA tournament expanded to 32 teams in 1975, every team that advanced to the round of 16 hailed from a power conference.

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There were no giant-slaying underdogs for TV viewers to fall in love with, no small-conference afterthoughts punching above their weight class. The lone surviving double-digit seed was an Arkansas team coached by John Calipari and assembled thanks to one of the sport’s largest NIL war chests.

A Sweet 16 loaded with nothing but big brands stoked growing concerns in college basketball circles that de facto free agency (a.k.a. the transfer portal) was widening the gap between well-heeled power-conference programs and everyone else. For days, debate raged over whether the absence of the usual March magic was a one-year aberration or the start of a troubling trend.

Would the one-two punch of a soaring NIL market and the lack of transfer restrictions turn out to be “the death of mid-major Cinderella runs,” as former Duke star and current ESPN analyst Jay Williams argued at the time? Or were scorching hot takes like that a wild overreaction to results from a single NCAA tournament?

It’s too soon to definitively answer those questions, but early evidence suggests that teams from smaller conferences have reason to be worried they’ll struggle to compete. Besides Gonzaga, not a single team from outside college basketball’s power conferences has cracked the AP Top 25 so far this season. And high-majors are swatting aside smaller-conference competition with unprecedented ease.

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There were 378 matchups this November between high-majors and non-Gonzaga teams from other conferences. The little guy won only 22 of them, according to research by Yahoo Sports.

How does the little guy winning 5.82% of those games compare to previous seasons? It’s by far the lowest winning percentage…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/mens-college-basketball/article/is-college-basketball-about-to-say-so-long-cinderella-222525827.html

Author : Jeff Eisenberg

Publish date : 2025-12-01 22:25:00

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