Meet the real villain behind the death of Cinderella in the NCAA tournament

Dan Wolken Sat, March 21, 2026 at 3:54 PM UTC

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As we endure a second straight year without much mid-major magic in the NCAA tournament’s opening weekend, plenty of fingers will be pointed at the current NIL and transfer environment for killing Cinderella.

That may or may not be true. Two years is still a small sample size, and if a couple close games go the other way — Santa Clara, Siena and Wright State all had great chances in the final few minutes to take down blue-blood programs — we’re having a totally different discussion.

But, in the aggregate, I’ll acknowledge it certainly felt like the first round of the NCAA tournament was top heavy. A lot of blowouts — the first-round average margin of victory was 17.4 points, the highest since the tournament expanded in 1985. A lot of 12, 13, 14 and 15 seeds that looked significantly outclassed.

The transfer portal is an easy bête noire in this discussion. All the power conference schools are scouting mid-major rosters, and anyone who shows promise at a lower level is being offered big money to transfer. Again, I’ll acknowledge this isn’t great for mid-major programs. From a 30,000-foot view, it is harder to maintain talent and continuity across the bottom 270 or so programs in the sport.

In terms of how it’s specifically affecting the NCAA tournament, however, there’s another factor that deserves more of the blame than it’s getting.

Conference realignment.

If Cinderella is indeed on life support, it’s far more likely that the mad rush since 2010 to draw up coast-to-coast, mammoth football conferences was what put her in the ICU in the first place.

Mid-majors had proud history in NCAA tournament

Go back 15 years and look at some of these conferences that produced the iconic mid-major teams of recent vintage like Butler, VCU, Wichita State and Loyola Chicago. They are almost unrecognizable today, and you can trace the reason directly to the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC gluttonizing themselves into amorphous blobs and creating a domino effect that significantly weakened dozens of conferences below them.

And yet all those conferences continue to get automatic bids, and the quality of teams filling those slots has undeniably gotten weaker.

No. 12 High Point is the lowest seed left in the tournament and one of only four double-digit seeds remaining. (C. Morgan Engel) (C. Morgan Engel via Getty Images)

Let’s look at 2016 — just 10 years ago. The average pre-tournament KenPom ranking of the No. 15 seeds was 124, the average No. 14 seeds was 105, the average of No. 13 seeds was 84 and the average No. 12 seeds was 73.

Four years ago, in 2022, we had one of the craziest tournaments ever. Here were the KenPom averages: No. 15 seeds were 140, No. 14 seeds were 134, No. 13 seeds were 83, No. 12 seeds were 61. (In that tournament, a 15 seed won a first-round game, two 12 seeds won first-round games and the 4-13 games were decided by a total of 18 points.)

This year? It’s a totally different story. The 15 seed average is around 179, the 14 seed average is roughly 142, the 13 seed average is 113, the 12 seed average is 76.

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As you can see, it’s very clear in the numbers that the quality of automatic bid winners filling these Cinderella seed lines has declined over time. The same conferences that put good teams in the tournament are now producing weaker champions. And that’s happened at the same time fringe NBA prospects are staying in college longer because of NIL, making the top layer of the sport stronger.

But when you’re talking about the NCAA tournament, where a limited number of teams from that top layer are playing the cream of the crop from smaller conferences, it’s crucial to understand that many of those conferences are now a shell of what they once were due to realignment.

Realignment erodes lower-level conferences

When the Big East reformed as a basketball-only league in 2013 because it got tired of being jerked around by football realignment, it weakened the A-10 by taking Xavier and Butler, and the Missouri Valley by inviting Creighton. The A-10 responded by taking VCU and George Mason from the CAA, Davidson from the Southern Conference, then Loyola from the Missouri Valley several years later.

The Valley, having lost Creighton, Loyola and Wichita State (which bolted to the American), backfilled with Belmont and Murray State, which took the two best programs from the Ohio Valley Conference, which in turn added Little Rock and Western Illinois.

Meanwhile, the American losing SMU, Houston, UCF and Cincinnati to power conferences sparked a raid of Conference USA, which caused that league to take a grab bag of schools from the CAA, Atlantic Sun and Missouri Valley.

This has happened over and over across all these realignment moves. As one league scrambles for survival by taking the best members of a league just below them in the pecking order, it erodes the strength of each conference down the chain.

For a long time, leagues like the MVC, CAA and Horizon could reliably put competitive 12 or 13 seeds in the tournament because they had a core of solid programs and good brands. Now, the membership of those leagues is totally different, but they’re still getting the same automatic bids.

You don’t even need to mention NIL or the transfer portal to see very easily how the quality of teams filling those bids could slip, which is now showing up clearly in the numbers. And if you get a year like this one where several of the No. 1 seeds in the mid- and low-major leagues lost their conference tournaments, it takes the quality of the No. 12-15 seeds down another notch and you end up with the kind of blowouts we saw on Thursday and Friday.

The NCAA tournament is not a microcosm of the sport. College basketball has never been as equal as the March Madness branding makes it look. With 350-plus teams, the gap between the haves and have-nots has always been massive.

But in a one-off event like this, how you sort the teams in the field matters significantly. If the 100th-best team in the country was a typical 14 seed a decade ago and now the typical 14 seed is the 142nd-best team, that’s a huge difference driving a decline in upsets.

Is that an issue the NCAA needs to address? Perhaps. But if we’re going to worry about the death of Cinderella, we need to correctly identify what killed her. NIL and the transfer portal are only part of the story — and maybe even the smallest part compared to 15 years of realignment shock coming home to roost.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Sports”