Duke, Arkansas, and Houston headline Men’s Sweet 16
With the Sweet 16 upon us, USA Today Sports’ Mackenzie Salmon previews a few of the top matchups we’re most looking forward to.
Sports Seriously
ATLANTA — If you buy into the narrative that college basketball has killed Cinderella, the remains are scattered all over this Sweet 16.
Three players from Florida Atlantic’s magical run to the Final Four two years ago are back in the second week of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with different programs. A freshman from the Saint Peter’s Elite Eight team is now Ole Miss’ starting point guard. The second-leading scorer from Oakland’s upset over Kentucky starts at power forward for Arizona. Kentucky’s most important player spent four years at San Diego State and scored 13 points in a national title game.
For better or worse, this is the new normal: Players at lower levels will perform well, the transfer portal will give them a chance to play somewhere else without sitting out a year and the opportunity to make significant money through name, image and likeness will usually draw them to schools with the most money in the major conferences.
So the question roiling college basketball this week cuts to the core of everything that has made the tournament one of America’s greatest sporting events: With zero teams from mid-major conferences in the Sweet 16 for the first time since tournament expansion in 1985, is the era of the Cinderella over?
“I don’t think Cinderella is dead,” Michigan coach Dusty May said. “I think she’s probably not going to be making visits as frequently as she did before.”
On one hand, it would be a borderline tragedy if the structural changes to college sports have led us to a point where stories like Florida Atlantic – the team May coached to upsets over Memphis, Tennessee and Kansas State two years ago in the school’s second NCAA Tournament appearance ever – are no longer part of the March Madness mystique.
But it’s also not clear that’s going to be the case.
Yes, the financial advantages of being in the SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 or Big East loom large in any conversation about what life looks like for teams from mid-major conferences in this era. But is that significantly different from the dynamic that always has existed?
“There’s still obviously room for upsets,” said Alabama coach Nate Oats, who won a first-round game in each of his last two years at Buffalo. “You’re going to have upsets every year. My guess would be you’re still going to have some upsets, but I did see somebody made the point, like anybody that gets really good at the mid-major level it seems like there’s just a lot more (revenue) share, NIL money up at the higher levels. I don’t know that I would have been able to keep my whole team together at Buffalo in today’s day and age.”
Spoiler alert: He wouldn’t have.
But why is that so bad?
Because as much as the modern college athlete has come under criticism for having no loyalty, switching schools on a whim or chasing NIL dollars over what’s in the best interests of their development, the reality for most of these guys is that they ended up playing for mid-majors because that’s the only option they had coming out of high school.
“I only had two (scholarship) offers,” said Frankie Fidler, who has been a key piece off the bench for Michigan State. “One was (UC-Santa Barbara) and one was Omaha.”
From the beginning of his college career, it was clear Fidler had more talent than your typical Summit League recruit. And by his third year at Omaha, he was averaging 20.1 points per game, making him a target for dozens of high-major schools when he decided to put his name in the transfer portal.
Yes, in the most romantic version of college sports, he’d have come back for his senior year, led Omaha to a conference championship, carried his squad to an NCAA Tournament upset or two and gone down in history as a program legend. At the same time, though, how can you begrudge someone who never truly expected to be at this level an opportunity to play for Tom Izzo at one of the elite programs in the sport?
“I had a bigger dream I wanted to chase,” Fidler said. “I felt like my time at Omaha was done, and I had the chance to go chase that dream.”
The great thing about having 350-plus schools in Division I basketball is that it provides an opportunity for thousands of players be on scholarship and have the chance to do what Ole Miss’ Jaylen Murray did two years ago.
But the reality is, very few players pick a school like Saint Peter’s because that’s where they think they belong. And Murray, who was overlooked largely because of his height – his recruiting profile listed him at 5-foot-9 – felt he was good enough to run a team in a league like the SEC.
“I always felt like I belonged at this level,” Murray said. “Everybody’s route is different. Everybody doesn’t get a chance to just immediately go at the highest level. Sometimes people have to work for that, and I’m fine with it.”
It was a similar story for Michigan’s Danny Wolf, who played at Yale for two years and was part of an NCAA Tournament upset last year when his team beat No. 4 seed Auburn in the first round. More than NIL money or the prestige of playing in the Big Ten, the opportunity to transfer was about challenging himself and proving that he could go toe-to-toe with the best players in the country. And after this season, he’s probably going to be rewarded by being picked in the first round of the NBA draft.
“I knew for what I needed and what I wanted with my basketball career, I needed to do that and make that step up,” Wolf said.
How is that different from what coaches want as they rise from places like Arkansas-Little Rock (Chris Beard) and Southern Indiana (Bruce Pearl) to jobs where they make millions of dollars coaching on stages like the one they’ll be on here Friday night? How is that different from what most of us want for ourselves when hard work leads to better career opportunities?
And yet, the idea that mid-majors are just farm teams for the glamour schools doesn’t sit completely right in a sport where the little guys are responsible for some of its most iconic moments whether it’s Steph Curry carrying Davidson to an Elite Eight or Gonzaga getting to Sweet 16s so frequently that the Cinderella label no longer applied.
“I don’t know if there’s enough sample size yet to say this is NIL-driven or just how it broke this year,” Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd said.
It’s possible this year is a one-off. This tournament has always been a bit of a random results generator, so it stands to reason that the randomness some years will result in a chalkier bracket. Just two years ago, you had Princeton, Florida Atlantic and San Diego State all in the Sweet 16 and beyond. Has college basketball changed that much in such a short period of time?
Maybe. Or maybe not.
It’s possible that four or five years from now, we’ll look back on the 2025 tournament as the beginning of the end for the little guys as pay-for-play tilts the playing field toward the SEC and Big Ten in a way that makes this sport look more like college football. But it’s also possible we’ll have another team like Florida Atlantic, which collected an unusual amount of talent that is now proving itself again at Florida (Alijah Martin), Michigan (Vladislav Goldin) and Arkansas (Johnell Davis).
“I think it’s just going to be a great that kind of emerges out of nowhere,” May said. “I just think it’s going to look different.”
What’s undeniable is that there’s enough talent in the mid-majors to fuel great teams because we’re going to see it all across the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games this weekend. But whether Cinderella is gone or merely on hiatus will be a storyline to follow in the years to come.
“I don’t think (it’s dead),” Murray said. “I don’t think so at all because when you’re trying to win, it’s all about the mindset. I feel like you can have the players, you can have the talent, all the pieces and still lose. A lot of people that we had on that Cinderella run (at Saint Peter’s), it wasn’t that we were super talented or better than everybody. We just had this mindset like, we’re not losing to nobody and if we lose it’s gonna be a dogfight. If you go back and look, everything isn’t about talent.”
Follow Dan Wolken on social media @danwolken.bsky.social
