Cinderella is dead, and the transfer portal killed her.
For the second year in a row, the Sweet 16 of the NCAA’s March Madness tournament is made up entirely of schools from the power conferences: the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East, and SEC. No Steph Curry and the Davidson Wildcats. No Sister Jean and the Loyola Ramblers. No Shaka Smart and the VCU Rams.
Yes, there is technically a No. 11 seed still alive in the tournament, but there is nothing hardscrabble or underdog about the Texas Longhorns. This is an athletic program worth over $1 billion, an athletic department that spends north of $375 million a year, and a starting basketball roster earning somewhere between $5 million and $8 million.
And its roster is the epitome of why the real Cinderellas are dead.
Not one of Texas’s starters began their college careers at the University of Texas. The Longhorns’ top point scorer, Dailyn Swain, began his career at Xavier. Center Matas Vokietaitis got his start at Florida Atlantic University. Guards Tramon Mark and Jordan Pope started at Arkansas and Oregon State, respectively. And small forward Camden Heide came from Purdue.
To be clear, not every Sweet 16 roster is built this way. Tom Izzo’s Michigan State Spartans boast all five starters as original recruits. Alabama, Arizona, Duke, Houston, and Purdue all have four original recruit starters and just one transfer. Plenty of power-conference coaches still build successful teams the old-fashioned way, rather than paying top dollar through the transfer portal.
The problem isn’t players getting paid. The problem is players becoming free agents at the end of every season.
When you go back and look at those successful Cinderella teams, they were all built around a veteran core of returning productive players, with some superstars like Curry mixed in. But nowadays, as soon as any mid-major player shows even a little productivity, they are immediately sucked up by a power conference school the next season. Under the current system, Curry never would have played for Davidson more than one season, let alone three.
The power conferences even feed off themselves. This year’s college football national champion and Heisman Trophy winner, Fernando Mendoza, left the ACC’s California Golden Bears to go play for the Big Ten’s Indiana Hoosiers (And please don’t ask why a university with a view of the Pacific Ocean is in the Atlantic Coast Conference. That is a subject for a separate story).
No sports league has ever survived a legal framework where literally every player was a free agent at the end of each season. One might think that the Supreme Court would allow the NCAA to create the rules necessary for even a semblance of continuity and competitive balance. Unfortunately, the court has gone in the opposite direction, ruling against the NCAA on multiple occasions.
GAMBLING HAS TURNED AMERICANS AGAINST THEIR OWN TEAMS
The NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL all have antitrust exemptions through labor law that empower them to set player eligibility rules and restrict free agency, but college athletics is a bad fit for labor law.
The only way to bring Cinderella back is for Congress to act and pass a new law granting college athletics the antitrust exemptions necessary to govern a functioning sport.
