As I write this, we are three days out from a Final Four on the men's side that includes #1 seeds and only #1 seeds.
There's a great deal of sturm und drang about this. People are calling this the most boring NCAA tournament ever, and it's hard not to disagree. Not only do we have no cinderellas in the Final Four, but we also didn't get anyone seeded lower than a 12 winning in the first round.
Unless you're an underdog hater like Colin Cowherd, this makes for a boring and somewhat depressing tournament. It does for me, at least. As I've said often in this space, upsets are the primary reason I'm a sports fan and sportswriter.
Unfortunately, it's not enough for a lot of people to say "this year, the tournament sucks" and leave it that. They want explanations. They want reasons. They want answers.
And so it's not surprising that a big part of the college basketball twitterverse is blaming NIL an the transfer portal. There's graphics going around showing how a majority of Final Four starters began their career elsewhere. The teams with the most NIL money and pull will always get the best players, so they will always be the same teams battling out for titles, and the little guy can go pound sand.
No one wants good things for the little guy more than I do, and I agree that, in general, the programs with the most money to give will attract the best players. But I'm finding the claims that go farther than that to be a bit spurious.
Firstly, this is neither the first year that the Final Four were the four #1 seeds, nor is it the first where teams seeded 13 or lower failed to win a game.
Secondly, is Auburn really a top-four school in NIL money for men's basketball, or anything basketball? I haven't seen anything saying they are, and I'm skeptical. I have similar doubts about Houston, and somewhat about Florida.
Thirdly, while the best mid-major players do indeed spurn their programs to go on to high-majors, high-major benchwarmers are transferring to mid-majors so they can get some playing time.
My hometown team, Akron, went 17-1 this year in MAC play, their best mark ever, despite being picked around 3rd-5th because they lost too much production from last year. It's in no small part thanks to the contributions of transfers from North Carolina, Ohio State, and West Virginia.
I've said this multiple times in my columns, but I think it bears repeating: kids want to play, and they will go where they can play. They want to play even more than they want money. The number of kids who will happily take a lot of bank just to sit on the bench at Kansas or Kentucky or wherever are negligible, in part because you have to be really good to begin with for Kansas or Kentucky to even want you, and getting to that level takes some ass-busting.
This, then, means the best players will be at the richest, most blue-blooded schools, and then the next level of kids will be at the better mid-majors and the lesser high majors, and the next level will be at rank-and-file mid-majors, and so on down the line.
Which is the way it has been for a long time, well before NIL and the transfer portal. Those mechanisms shuffle the deck, but they don't stack it any differently than it always has been stacked.
At least, that's what I believe, which means I believe this year's tournament is an outlier, and we will be back to normal in the next tournament or two. If not, I'm prepared to revisit the issue. Until then, I will be glad for players that they can switch schools and get paid as easily as adults of their age should be able to.
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