Did NIL kill the upset? Why power conferences just keep dominating in March

Princeton carving up 4-seed UCLA with backdoor cuts in a first-round stunner. Bryce Drew burying a buzzer-beater that vaulted Valparaiso into March lore. The Saint Peter’s Peacocks defying the long odds of a 15-seed and prancing all the way to the Elite Eight. These Cinderella stories probably busted our brackets, but they also helped a generation of American sports fans fall in love with March Madness.

Now, though, in college basketball’s NIL era, that “anything can happen” feeling is fading. The shocking upsets are decreasing, and fewer double-digit seeds are surviving, as the talent and financial gulf between power conferences and the rest of Division I widens.

Last year’s men’s tournament produced only 13 outright underdog wins — tied for the fewest since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985. The Elite Eight comprised only top-3 seeds, tying it with 2007 as the chalkiest quarterfinal round in tournament history. Additionally, for the first time in modern tournament history, we have witnessed three straight tournaments without multiple double-digit seeds reaching the Sweet 16. The only double-digit seed last year to advance to the Sweet 16 was No. 10 Arkansas and coach John Calipari, not exactly a small-conference upstart.

Coaches, administrators and analysts across the sport point to NIL, the transfer portal and risk-averse scheduling as forces reshaping the college basketball landscape and turning the NCAA tournament into more of a showcase for superpowers than a stage for the improbable.

“We’ve had a lack of NCAA tournament upsets in prior tournaments, on occasion,” said Kevin Pauga, Michigan State associate athletic director and scheduling mastermind. “I’m of the opinion that it’s premature for us to make any grandiose statements that things have changed significantly, while also acknowledging that the data over the last year or two is clear.”

The trend of dwindling upsets isn’t confined to March.

This regular season began with ranked teams winning the first 96 games against unranked teams — the longest such streak at any point of a season in the AP poll’s history, according to ESPN Research. The streak ended with unranked Seton Hall‘s win over No. 23 NC State on Nov. 24 in the Maui Invitational.

Upsets, especially by small-conference underdogs, dropped sharply throughout the season. Only 29 small-conference teams beat teams from power conferences this season — a 58.9% decrease from the 2021-22 season, when schools began compensating players for NIL rights.

“Given the way that players can move school to school, across levels, I think it’s certainly possible that roster build and roster management has a lot to do with this,” Pauga said.

Last June, the NCAA settled an antitrust lawsuit that allowed schools to pay athletes directly, giving power-conference programs another avenue to leverage their financial advantage and attract top players from mid-majors. According to Opendorse, a clearinghouse used by schools to process NIL transactions, less than 10% of players earning at least $100,000 through NIL competed outside of the ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten or SEC during the 2023-24 season.

The financial gap consolidates talent at the top and often leaves mid-major coaches with offseason rebuilds. Some tipped off this season with five new starters, and multiple mid-major coaches have talked about selling their programs as pathways to power conferences, even though it sacrifices continuity, a strength of past Cinderellas who made tournament runs.

“A lot of us at our level lose all these players to a higher level and don’t have the money to replace them,” a head coach at a Division I mid-major program told ESPN. “The tournament upsets aren’t happening anymore because there’s just such a big gap in money. Everyone’s got a lot of bills to pay now.”

Scheduling strategy has also shifted in the new landscape. Power-conference teams are playing fewer regular-season games against non-power opponents and opting instead for high-profile neutral-site matchups. Games between the two groups dropped from 666 in 2023-24 to 616 this season.

Multiple mid-major coaches have said the top programs increasingly target only teams in either Quadrant 1 or Quadrant 4 of the NCAA NET ratings, while avoiding teams in the middle of the pack. Miami (Ohio) head coach Travis Steele said scheduling became much tougher after his team won 25 games last season. “Everybody that was taking my calls the years before, nobody was taking those calls anymore,” Steele said on “The Field of 68” podcast. “Couldn’t even get a return [call].”

Pauga, who in addition to his duties at Michigan State helps conferences with scheduling, acknowledges some programs might be avoiding dangerous mid-majors — but says the system still rewards playing quality opponents. The Spartans’ nonconference schedule included a mix of heavyweights such as Duke and Arkansas, along with a handful of schools currently in Quadrant 3, such as Cornell and Toledo.

“This idea that you shouldn’t play good teams [from non-power conferences] is not accurate,” Pauga said. “Are there some schools in the sport that are dodging teams? Certainly. But, at the end of the day, the metrics reward you for beating good teams. You are rewarded for how you perform relative to the quality of your opponent.”

College basketball data analyst Ken Pomeroy noticed another shift: more games this season had much higher pregame win probabilities in his ratings. He says he believes the transfer portal has strengthened elite teams and widened the gap between the top and bottom of Division I.

“The top teams have higher ratings than they’ve ever had,” Pomeroy told ESPN.

The betting markets reflect that wider gap. In the 2021-22 season, non-power conference teams were 16.3-point underdogs on average against power-conference opponents. This season, that number ballooned to 22.9 points.

Point spreads in the NCAA tournament have grown as well, rising from an average of 6.4 points in 2023 to 8.7 last season — a 10-year high. Bigger spreads mean fewer expected upsets and larger margins of victory. This season, games were decided by 15.1 points on average, a five-year high.

Pomeroy says he expects the trend of fewer upsets to continue but isn’t worried that the tournament will lose its magic.

“The basketball at the top is better than it’s ever been,” he said. “People will miss Cinderella runs — and I don’t think they’re going away completely — but it’s single-elimination basketball. It’s amazing theater.”