Is college basketball about to say, 'So long, Cinderella?'

After the opening weekend of last season’s historically chalky NCAA tournament, the remaining teams all shared something in common.

For the first time since the NCAA tournament expanded to 32 teams in 1975, every team that advanced to the round of 16 hailed from a power conference.

There were no giant-slaying underdogs for TV viewers to fall in love with, no small-conference afterthoughts punching above their weight class. The lone surviving double-digit seed was an Arkansas team coached by John Calipari and assembled thanks to one of the sport's largest NIL war chests.

A Sweet 16 loaded with nothing but big brands stoked growing concerns in college basketball circles that de facto free agency (a.k.a. the transfer portal) was widening the gap between well-heeled power-conference programs and everyone else. For days, debate raged over whether the absence of the usual March magic was a one-year aberration or the start of a troubling trend.

Would the one-two punch of a soaring NIL market and the lack of transfer restrictions turn out to be “the death of mid-major Cinderella runs,” as former Duke star and current ESPN analyst Jay Williams argued at the time? Or were scorching hot takes like that a wild overreaction to results from a single NCAA tournament?

It’s too soon to definitively answer those questions, but early evidence suggests that teams from smaller conferences have reason to be worried they’ll struggle to compete. Besides Gonzaga, not a single team from outside college basketball’s power conferences has cracked the AP Top 25 so far this season. And high-majors are swatting aside smaller-conference competition with unprecedented ease.

There were 378 matchups this November between high-majors and non-Gonzaga teams from other conferences. The little guy won only 22 of them, according to research by Yahoo Sports.

How does the little guy winning 5.82% of those games compare to previous seasons? It’s by far the lowest winning percentage of the past decade, Yahoo Sports found after examining results from the previous 10 Novembers.

Before this season, non-Gonzaga teams from outside the power conferences have always won at least 9.92% of their November matchups against high-major opponents. As recently as three Novembers ago, non-Gonzaga mid- and low-majors defeated power-conference competition more than 16% of the time.

For smaller-conference programs, the outlook doesn’t get any rosier when viewed through the lens of more sophisticated metrics.

College basketball statistician Evan Miyakawa ranks the Big East as his lowest-rated power conference so far this season (fifth overall) and the Atlantic 10 as the highest-rated of the other 26 leagues (sixth overall). The conference strength gap between the Big East and Atlantic 10 is larger than the gap between the Atlantic 10 and the Big Sky, Miya’s 17th-rated conference.

Ken Pomeroy has used a proprietary formula to rank college basketball teams and conferences since 1997. As of Sunday night, the ratings gap between Pomeroy’s weakest power conference and his strongest non-power-conference was 7.36. That’s larger than any end-of-season gap since Pomeroy began doing rankings, he told Yahoo Sports.

“This year should be the biggest gap,” Pomeroy predicted.

Those numbers reflect the concentration of talent at the power-conference level as transfer restrictions have loosened. In 2021, the NCAA D-I Council approved a one-time transfer for all college athletes without the need to sit out a year. By 2024, legal pressure forced the NCAA to eliminate all restrictions entirely, enabling athletes to transfer as often as they want without penalty.

Player retention went from difficult to near-impossible for cash-strapped, small-conference programs when athletes gained the ability to sign NIL deals in 2021 and when the market started to skyrocket a couple years later. Last spring, potential high-major starters in the transfer portal could expect to receive offers in the mid-to-high six figures. The most coveted top-tier transfers commanded seven figures.

Reigning Mountain West player of the year Donovan Dent averaged 20.5 points and 6.4 assists last year for New Mexico. He reportedly received a $3 million NIL deal for transferring to UCLA for his senior season.

Potential late-first-round pick Yaxel Lendeborg could have entered the NBA Draft or stayed at UAB after a stat-sheet-stuffing junior season. He instead opted to transfer to Michigan for an NIL deal similar to Dent’s.

“In the past, if you did a good job evaluating and a good job recruiting and you found guys who were a notch above your level, they wouldn’t leave because they’d have to sit out some place,” former Fairleigh Dickinson and Iona coach Tobin Anderson told Yahoo Sports. “Now with the portal and nonstop free agency, a good low-major or mid-major team for the most part is going to lose its best players every year.”

Deep-pocketed high-major programs also have access to talented prospects who wouldn’t have been playing college basketball in previous eras.

Because the soaring NIL market made playing top-tier college basketball more lucrative than playing in the G League or overseas for professional teams, underclassmen returned to college in record numbers last spring. Dozens of international prospects have also come stateside to play college basketball, some 21- or 22-year-olds with several years experience competing against professionals, others supremely gifted teenagers with NBA aspirations.

Then there’s a talented freshman class that has so far outperformed sky-high expectations. It isn’t just projected top-three picks Darryn Peterson, AJ Dybantsa and Cameron Boozer either. North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson, Louisville’s Mikel Brown, Arizona’s Koa Peat and a long list of others have also made instant impacts.

The result is that the talent level across college basketball is as high as it has been in years.

And the best of it is concentrated in the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC and Big East.

While the transfer portal does work both ways, mid-major coaches say that it’s tougher now than it was five years ago to find power-conference players seeking to drop down a level in search of more playing time. The NIL money available to a SEC or Big Ten benchwarmer often surpasses the market for a SoCon or Horizon League starter.

As Oakland coach Greg Kampe told Yahoo Sports last year, “The money has changed the dynamic completely. They’re not going to come down as often anymore.”

The potential impact of NIL and the loosening of transfer rules did not receive as much national publicity for the first few years because it didn’t detract from the magic of March. The NCAA tournament retained its egalitarian appeal. Underdogs toppled heavyweights.

In 2022, 15th-seeded St. Peters shocked Kentucky and Purdue on its way to the Elite Eight. In 2023, Fairleigh Dickinson became the second No. 16 seed to win an NCAA tournament game, 15th-seeded Princeton advanced to the Sweet 16 and Florida Atlantic came within a Lamont Butler buzzer beater of playing UConn for the national title.

No one emerged from small-conference obscurity to make the 2024 Sweet 16, but five double-digit-seeded mid-majors pulled first-round upsets. Oakland ambushed Kentucky. Yale toppled Auburn. James Madison waylaid Wisconsin. Grand Canyon took down Saint Mary’s. And Duquesne edged BYU.

Then came the discourse-shifting opening weekend of last season’s NCAA tournament. And an opening month to the current season that has only fueled worries that the gap between college basketball’s haves and have-nots is increasing. Now even the architect of one of the most stunning upsets in NCAA tournament history is growing concerned about the future of the sport.

On March 13, 2023, Anderson enthusiastically proclaimed, “We just shocked the world,” after Fairleigh Dickinson’s unthinkable first-round victory over mighty Purdue. Less than three years later, Anderson worries that enchanting underdog stories that draw casual fans to college basketball every March may start to disappear.

“The whole thing has changed so fast,” Anderson said. “I’d be shocked if you see a whole lot of upsets again in the NCAA tournament as long as this keeps going on. It’s much, much harder now than it used to be.”