I tried to make the argument last year not to panic that no Cinderella team made it to the Sweet 16. A sample of one is not a reason to set off the alarms, especially when that sample of one has happened before. It is certainly not the first time that no mid-major teams seeded 12 or higher didn’t make the Sweet 16, and it certainly isn’t going to be the last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have to admit that I am a little more nervous now that we have a sample of 2 years instead of 1. But the classic reasons that are given are still a little inaccurate. The main reason I hear that Cinderella is dead is because with NIL and the transfer portal, no mid-major team will be able to keep their talent. Its not that I don’t think that is true because it is. But we are fooling ourselves if we believed that didn’t happen in the pre-NIL era. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I do think the NIL era has created a problem that is hurting Cinderella. The classic place that Cinderella would emerge is from the 5-12 and 4-13 matchups. There were typically two reasons for that. The first obvious one is that those 12 and 13 matchups were the 8 best mid-major conference champions – most of the time these were teams who won 28+ games in the season and played in a mid-major conference that was better than people realized. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second one is that typically at least a few of those 4 and 5 seeds were power conference teams that were struggling towards the end of the season. They started off strong, but ran into their toughest part of the conference schedule and went on a losing streak. So, you get a team that is struggling a little and pair them up against a 28+ team mid-major champion who does nothing but win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing that I think has happened with NIL (or maybe was just random luck) is that the 5 seeds did not seem to meet that struggling team as before. Instead, the 5 seeds were St. John’s (the Big East regular season and conference tournament champion), Vanderbilt (who made it to the SEC championship game), Wisconsin (who was the only Big 10 team to beat Michigan before the conference tournament), and Texas Tech (who might be the only one who fit into the team dealing with a losing streak at the end of the season due to a late key injury). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is hard to determine if this is because NIL has balanced out the power structure at the top of the power conferences or simply that the injury bugs didn’t impact as many teams as usual. But it did seem like some of the more vulnerable teams (typically due to an injury) for an upset like North Carolina fell to the 6 and 7 seed lines, where they traditionally fell on the 4 and 5 seed lines (and the 6 and 7 seeds were simply inconsistent teams). At a minimum, you would not normally see a team win both the regular season and conference tournament from a power conference like St. John’s and end up a 5 seed. And before we say that the Big East isn’t a power conference, lets remember that UConn is playing in the national championship and of course, from the Big East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I think the bigger thing that happened this year is all the upsets in the conference tournaments. Normally, the 12 and 13 seeds are teams that won both their conference regular season and tournament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This year, the only 13 seed that won their regular season title was Troy. And the only 12 seed that won their regular season title was High Point (which was also the only 12 or 13 seed that won their game). Cinderella normally came from the regular season champions from the mid-majors, and of the seeds where Cinderella normally showed up, only 2 of the 8 of them were regular season champs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It probably didn’t help matters that after High Point pulled off their upset of Wisconsin, they drew SEC tournament champion Arkansas in the second round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It certainly is a concerning trend. But I am not ready to give up on Cinderella. Cinderella represents the hope of all mid-major schools everywhere. And March Madness is all about hope. I have to believe that Cinderella will eventually be back. The glass slipper will hopefully return, and hopefully return soon. Because even though the clock always tends to strike midnight, the Big Dance is not the same without our princess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I tried to make the argument last year not to panic that no Cinderella team made it to the Sweet 16. A sample of one is not a reason to set off the alarms, especially when that sample of one has happened before. It is certainly not the first time that no mid-major teams seeded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2026-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3693"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3694,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693\/revisions\/3694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}