The bright lights of March Madness’ opening weekend have come and gone.
It is still the best weekend of the year for any sports fan, and yes, I will still take it over the College Football Playoff because of the sheer reach of it all. It is the only sporting event where schools like Cal Baptist or Siena can suddenly become part of the national conversation, where the country can meet a place like High Point University in real time, and where a fan can talk themselves into believing anything is possible for 48 straight hours.
But has it lost a little bit of its shine?
Yeah, a little.
I hope the last two years are more of an outlier than the norm. I could be wrong. But when the lowest remaining seed after opening weekend is 11-seeded Texas, it does make you wonder what exactly counts as a Cinderella anymore. Texas came out of the First Four and is now headed to the Sweet Sixteen after knocking off BYU and Gonzaga. It is an impressive run on paper, but it is also not exactly a story about some plucky budget program riding a bus into town.
Per FRS reporting, Texas men’s basketball reported $22,403,330 in FY 2025 and $15,459,259 in FY 2024, both top-20 type spending figures nationally. And that is before you even get to the broader machine of Longhorn Athletics, with Texas reporting $375,887,077 in total athletic department expenses in FY 2025. Shout-out to Extra Points Library for those numbers.
Cinderella, apparently, has expensive taste. She is not taking the pumpkin ride home. She might be boarding a private jet.
That gets to the larger tension around this tournament. We still love the event because the drama is real, the games are still tense, and a single weekend can make a coach, a player, or a school feel mythic.
Iowa, a No. 9 seed, stunning defending national champion Florida on a late three-pointer to reach its first Sweet Sixteen since 1999, absolutely qualifies as a March moment. St. John’s reaching its first Sweet Sixteen since 1999 on a buzzer-beater had that same kind of electricity.
But the classic Cinderella archetype, the truly under-resourced giant killer, feels harder to find.
Some of that is money. Some of that is the transfer portal. Some of that is revenue sharing and collectives. And some of that is realignment, which Dan Wolken pointed out in a really useful way.
In 2016, the average pre-tournament KenPom ranking for 15 seeds was 124, for 14 seeds was 105, for 13 seeds was 84, and for 12 seeds was 73. In 2022, one of the wildest recent tournaments, those averages were 140, 134, 83, and 61. This year, the averages dropped to roughly 179 for 15 seeds, 142 for 14 seeds, 113 for 13 seeds, and 76 for 12 seeds. The point is pretty clear: the quality of many of the auto-bid teams filling those Cinderella seed lines has slipped.
That does not mean the sport is broken. It does mean the ecosystem is changing.
Matt Brown made a related point with the almost-Cinderellas. Plenty of strong mid-major teams were good enough to make noise, but never got the chance because they lost in the wrong weekend. San Diego State, Grand Canyon, Belmont, Stephen F. Austin, and UNC Wilmington were all held up as examples of teams that easily could have been dangerous in the bracket had they survived their conference tournaments.
Which brings us to the argument that bubbled up all week … scheduling.
Ben McCollum, who is finally getting his due after years of dominating Division II and now taking Iowa to the Sweet Sixteen in his first season there, gave one of the more honest quotes of the tournament when he said, “I see a lot of the perspectives of high-majors not wanting to play mid-majors, and I’d be one of them. You’re not rewarded for the NET, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
That is the whole issue in one sentence.
Frank Martin took it a step further last week, saying the NET formula “rigged the whole system to protect the big conferences” and adding, “I was in the meetings, I know what happened.”
I still think “rigged” is too strong, even if “flawed” absolutely is not.
Scheduling is essentially Tinder with budget lines.
If you are a mid-major or low-major, you cannot be too good or too bad. If you are too good, nobody wants to pay you to come beat them. If you are too bad, your value drops because playing you hurts NET metrics, weakens your résumé, and leaves home fans asking why this game is even on the schedule. The numbers have to make sense, the optics have to make sense, and everybody is trying to avoid being the loser in the arrangement.
Then add in-state dynamics on top of that. A power-conference team loses to little brother, and the problem is not just the loss. It is paying for the loss. It is the local recruiting hit. It is the coach asking a question about it for three months. Yes, ticket sales may spike for the game, but the basketball budget still takes the guarantee hit while that gate bump often flows back to the department, not the program itself.
On the other hand, many mid-majors playing buy games do not even keep most of that money. In many cases, guaranteed revenue is returned to the athletic department’s general fund. Travel is usually budgeted separately by the department at the start of the fiscal year. The basketball program may take the beating, but the broader department takes the deposit.
Now add NIL and revenue sharing to that equation, and things get even weirder.
Some smaller schools are stacking extra buy games because that money can help support a collective or revenue-share strategy. There are even middlemen helping arrange those deals. So in a very real sense, big-time programs may be helping fund the roster-building efforts of the teams they are trying to avoid.
High Point coach Flynn Clayman gave the best frustrated version of that after his team’s opening-round win, saying, “Looks pretty obvious to me that high-majors need to play mid-majors early in the season. Because they said we didn’t play nobody. We played somebody now.” He followed that with, “Feels unreal. Because I know how good of a team we had. But nobody would play us. Just like they wouldn’t play Miami. But they’ve got to play us in this tournament.”
Miami coach Travis Steele came at it from a similar angle after his loss to Tennessee: “A lot of it’s analytically driven. There needs to be adjustments made.”
He added that fans want to see those games, that both fan bases want brands on the schedule, and that the current setup can feel like a lose-lose.
And then came Purdue coach Matt Painter with the cold-water response. After Purdue’s first-round win, Painter pushed back on the idea that high-majors simply refuse to play mid-majors, saying, “Every high-major plays mid-majors,” and arguing the real issue is which mid-majors make sense within a system that still heavily rewards schedule management. His larger point was fair: if coaches on the mid-major side were sitting in a high-major chair, many would make the exact same choices.
That is what makes this debate so sticky. Everybody is telling part of the truth.
Mid-majors are right that the current setup can box them out. High-majors are right that the system gives them every incentive to be selective. Athletic departments are right to think about budgets. Coaches are right to think about optics, recruiting, résumés, and survival. Nobody wants to take on extra risk for the sake of somebody else’s narrative.
That is why scheduling for 2026-27 will be fascinating. Teams like High Point are now too visible to dismiss, but maybe still dangerous enough to avoid. Charles Barkley even went on air and declared Auburn would play High Point next year, so maybe that pressure campaign is already starting.
And that may be where March still matters most.
Even if the slipper costs more than it used to, even if Cinderella now has a seven-figure NIL ecosystem, a transfer-heavy roster, and a coach who knows exactly how to weaponize modern roster construction, the tournament still reveals the sport’s fault lines better than anything else we have. It exposes how budgets work, how scheduling works, how metrics shape behavior, how realignment has hollowed out parts of the one-bid world, and how quickly the label of “mid-major” can shift depending on who is cashing the checks.
So yes, the shine may be a little dimmer.
But the stories are still there. They are just different now.
