March Madness: A True Cinderella Story?

Some call it “March Madness.” Others call it “The Big Dance.” Regardless of what you call it, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball tournament draws millions of viewers every year.

Across the country, sixty-eight teams compete over three weeks and play in a total of 67 games. In addition to the millions of fans who tune in, millions more fill out their “brackets” trying to predict the winners of the games.

But the NCAA men’s tournament has not always been the phenomenon it is today. When the tournament was first played with eight teams in 1939, not much set it apart from the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) founded a year before. Though it is now widely regarded as a second-tier tournament, the NIT was once the preferred college basketball tournament, with many teams turning down invitations to the NCAA tournament in favor of the NIT. It wasn’t until 1950 when the NCAA tournament expanded to include eight “at-large” teams, or teams who hadn’t won their conference, that it began to gain in popularity.

The Rise of the Cinderella Story

The more teams, the more of a sense that anything could happen. Just a few years prior in 1944, the NCAA tournament saw its first “Cinderella story.” The University of Utah wasn’t supposed to play in the tournament, but they took University of Arkansas’s place at the last minute and went on to win the whole thing.

The appeal of the underdog, which grew when the tournament expanded to 32 teams in 1975 and 64 teams in 1985, has proven powerful at attracting fans and viewers ever since. In 2018, people rallied behind the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) when they stunned the top team in the country, University of Virginia, 74-54. In 2022, people were on the edge of their seats as St. Peter’s shocked three big-name schools, including Kentucky, who was ranked number 2 in the country and Purdue, ranked number 3, to reach the Elite Eight.

These David versus Goliath stories are countless. But in analyzing the five men’s NCAA basketball tournaments from 2018 to 2023, it’s clear the NCAA rarely gives smaller schools and conferences much of a chance.

Who gets an invite to the ball?

A total of sixty-eight teams are invited to the tournament, almost half of which get in by winning their conference tournament. The NCAA selection committee (the Committee) then chooses 36 “at-large” teams based on their play during the regular season. The majority of these spots go to teams from the six major conferences, or so-called “power conferences,” in men’s basketball: the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big East, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac 12, and the Southeastern Conference (SEC).

Of the 181 “at-large” teams selected in tournaments between 2018 to 2023, 84% were chosen from the six power conferences. Some of these teams had poor conference records. Twenty-one power conference schools were selected despite losing at least half of their games against conference opponents. Two teams, Iowa State in 2022 and Oklahoma in 2019, had 7-11 in-conference records. That’s seven wins to 11 losses.

But even when smaller conference teams are selected, the NCAA doesn’t make it easy for them. Since 2011, eight teams have had to play in the so-called “First Four” games just to earn their invitation to the tournament.

Between 2018 and 2023, more than two thirds of those “First Four” teams (27 out of 40) were from the 26 smaller non-power conferences. This means some smaller teams were forced to play an extra game even after winning their conference.

The NCAA’s poor treatment of smaller schools does not stop there. The Committee places every team in one of four 16-team regions. The best teams get the first seed in their region. The weakest teams are placed in lower seeds, ending with the 16th seed. In the opening round of the tournament, each first seeded team plays the 16th seeded team in their region, each second seeded team plays the 15th seeded team, and so on until the eighth seed is matched up against the ninth seed.

The Committee almost always places the smaller conference teams in the 12th through 16th seeds. In the five tournaments analyzed, only four power conference teams were seeded 12-16. That means every tournament, twenty small schools are matched against a Top 20 team in the first round.

Looking this closely, it appears as if the Committee is trying to get rid of the smaller schools as fast as they can despite the impact they have made on the tournament and its viewership. After all, while the 2023 NIT final drew in just over a million viewers, over 13 million more tuned into the NCAA men’s final that same year.

If the NCAA won’t treat the smaller schools more fairly, maybe it’s time for the smaller conferences to start their own tournament. That event could be competitive and succeed at drawing its own viewers. It could also remind the NCAA, and the bigger conferences, who makes the tournament fun and exciting.

The Cinderella teams.