Wild Stat Shows Incredible Impact Of Transfer Portal, NIL On NCAA Tournament
One of the biggest talking points following the first weekend of the 2025 Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament surrounds all remaining teams hailing from Power 5 Conferences.
The entire Sweet 16 comprises four conferences: the SEC (seven teams), Big Ten (four), Big 12 (four), and ACC (Duke). That's led many people to ask: is the transfer portal and NIL killing the opportunity for "Cinderella teams" to make runs in the NCAA Tournament?
The lowest-seeded team remaining is #10 Arkansas. However, the Razorbacks are an SEC school coached by John Calipari. Not exactly a plucky little mid-major school. In fact, the mid-majors were shut out from the second weekend entirely (so was the Big East, but that's another story).
Perhaps more interesting, though, is the makeup of the teams remaining. Not only are they all from major college basketball conferences, but the majority of the players in each team's starting lineups didn't start at the school they will represent in the Sweet 16.
Check this out:
Of the 16 teams left in the Big Dance, only five have a starting lineup of at least three players who started their college careers at the school they currently attend (Duke, Michigan State, Houston, Purdue and BYU). Purdue is the only team where the entire starting lineup features zero transfer portal players.
Auburn, Ole Miss, Florida, Arkansas, and Alabama only have one starter who began his career at his current school and three teams (Arizona, Michigan and Kentucky) have ZERO starters who aren't transfers. It's wild that half the Sweet 16 starting fives comprise one or fewer non-transfer starters.
The Arizona Wildcats are one of three teams left in the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 who have an entire starting five comprising transfer portal players.
(Stephen Brashear/Imagn Images)
But that's the new age of college sports. Kids go to the bigger schools because that's where they can get the most money. It's simple economics, and I don't blame these athletes at all – I'd do the same thing. Most people would.
Now that players can transfer to a new school without penalty, there's nothing keeping them from staying at small schools after a successful season.
Just look at the transfer portal this year: it opened on Monday and over 700 basketball players have already entered their names.
Why the transfer portal opens prior to the start of the Sweet 16 is another conversation, but that's the current reality.
Now, the question is whether this is "killing" college basketball and the NCAA Tournament. Many people believe that it is.
I'm not one of them. While the "Cinderella stories" are fun, data has shown that more fans tune in when the big programs are involved in the Final Four and National Championship. Upsets in the First Round are cool, but people ultimately want to see the best teams competing at the end.
Duke facing North Carolina in the Final Four in 2022 had more viewers than any of the past four National Championship games. The UConn-San Diego State National Championship game in 2023 was the lowest-rated NCAA Tournament championship on record (14.7 million viewers).
Millions of Americans tuned in to watch North Carolina defeat Duke in the Final Four of the 2022 NCAA Tournament.
(Robert Deutsch/Imagn Images)
While UConn is a massive draw regionally (trust me, I know since I live in Connecticut), they aren't a big draw nationally. San Diego State isn't even a great regional draw. But San Diego State represented a true "Cinderella story." They weren't a top seed (#5 in the South region) and they didn't come from a Power 5 Conference (Mountain West). Turns out, people didn't care.
There was a similar story last year when UConn and Purdue faced one another. Although both were #1 seeds, neither is a school that tends to draw national interest. That led to the 2024 NCAA Tournament Championship being just the second on record to average fewer than 15 million viewers.
More people tune in when schools like Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas, Florida and others are in it until the end. Thanks to the transfer portal and NIL, that's going to be the case far more often than not.