NCAA Basketball: Is the Selection Committee ruining college basketball?
By Shaun Gordon
A Slippery Slope
Why should we care that fewer mid-major teams are making the Big Dance?
Two reasons. First, the lack of Cinderellas teams will make the NCAA Tournament less watchable for the average viewer.
Sure, fans of Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, and other basketball Blue Bloods will gladly tune in to watch their team make the tournament year after year. Anyone with money riding on their bracket will tune in to watch how their investment unfolds.
But the average viewers need to find a reason to root, a reason to stay interested throughout all three weeks of the tournament. They need an underdog, a Cinderella story.
A mediocre Baylor or Syracuse team isn’t going to inspire that average viewer. Syracuse managed to win three games in the tournament, but very few people outside of upstate New York really cared.
Millions cared about Loyola-Chicago. Millions cared about UMBC. They’re the true underdogs that make the average viewer want to watch the tournament.
But there’s a second and scarier result if the current trend continues.
The gap between the haves and have-nots will grow too wide.
Teams like Duke and Kentucky will always bring in the most talent. That’s a given. But they’re not so much more talented than a good mid-major team that they can’t be beaten on any given day.
Just ask Virginia.
But that can change quickly.
Last year, 885 Division 1 players transferred schools. That was the most in NCAA history, and a large chunk of them were good mid-major players looking to move up.
And that record will likely be shattered this year. More than 400 players have already announced their transfer intentions, and more than 80% of them are from mid-major schools.
That’s an alarming trend already, and the new transfer rules being discussed would make things worse.
These two trends, declining mid-major tournament berths and increasing transfers, are dangerously close to intersecting.
If it does, college basketball will change drastically, and not for the better.
Mid-major schools will effectively become training grounds for mid-level recruits, using their performance to draw the interest of schools in power conferences and transfer there. If those type of players don’t see a reasonable path to the tournament from where they’re at, they’ll look for greener pastures.
The power conferences will benefit, bolstering their teams even more and creating an insurmountable talent gap.
Mid-major schools will suffer, losing their best players year after year to the big-name programs.
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And the average fan will suffer the most. Gone will be the underdogs, no longer able to retain the talent to compete against the power-conference schools.
David will be out of stones.
Cinderella will just become another fairy tale.