As the beginning of the NCAA tournament nears on Tuesday night, America waits to embrace the next small-school wonder. Fans have scoured their brackets to see if an obscure university—East Tennessee State? UNC-Wilmington? Vermont?—can become the next March darling. But there’s a new reality facing schools outside college basketball’s six power conferences that’s made it exponentially more difficult to author a so-called Cinderella story.
In just five seasons, the sport’s “up-transfer” transfer culture has shifted the landscape of college basketball so dramatically that runs like George Mason from the Colonial Athletic Conference in 2006 and Butler from the Horizon League in 2010 and 2011 are dramatically more difficult.