Chalk Talk
Four No. 1 seeds will play in the men's Final Four. Anomaly or new normal?
After spending the weekend in Atlanta, where I wrote about Tom Izzo, an insanely good freshman and Auburn, an insanely good basketball team, I’ll soon head to San Antonio for the men’s Final Four. Since I know some college sports folks read this newsletter, here’s my first shot at Final Four networking: If you’re also going to be in San Antonio, shoot me an email. I’d love to meet up. And if you don’t work in college sports, you can still shoot me an email, too, since I genuinely enjoy ones that aren’t PR pitches about the best pillows for air travel. Anyway, some men’s tournament thoughts below.
Chalk Talk
At any NCAA tournament site, there’s the promise of The Pregame Storyline(s), many of them completely bogus. Some are created by the media, which is a pretty broad group this time of year. But some are drummed by the coaches, who are typically experts at using a microphone to reach their teams.
On Saturday, for example, Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said he wouldn’t let Michigan State coach Tom Izzo frame the Spartans as the “underdog.” Immediately, the underdog Pregame Storyline was born. Auburn, mind you, is the top overall seed in the bracket. In the regular season, they were the best team in the country’s best conference. After they beat Michigan State, Pearl said he knew he had better players all along. But in the lead-up? He wanted his Tigers to feel like the little guy. Izzo, he reasoned, had never lost to an SEC team in the tournament. Izzo, Pearl went on, is Tom freakin’ Izzo, a Hall of Famer who’s been to eight Final Fours.
Sunday night, Johni Broome, Auburn’s star forward, admitted that the tactic worked. Point for Pearl, then. But the truth is that, by the end of the first weekend, any actual underdogs had completely vanished from the bracket. After two rounds, the tourney didn’t have a George Mason, Loyola-Chicago or Florida Atlantic. It didn’t even have a San Diego State. The lowest seed in the Sweet 16 was a 10, though it was John Calipari’s Arkansas squad, built with name, image and likeness (NIL) money from billionaire chicken magnate John Tyson. In the Elite 8, there were four one seeds, three two seeds and a three seed. And now the four No. 1s — Auburn, Duke, Houston and Florida — will play in the Final Four.
It’s the first time since 2008 that the top four teams are left standing (and only the second time since the tournament expanded in 1985). The easiest explanation is that uncapped NIL spending, coupled with an elimination of all transfer restrictions, has consolidated top talent among a shrinking group of elite teams. Those teams can poach mid-major stars for their benches, offering six-figure salaries. Along with adding transfers from Purdue and Syracuse before the season, Duke poached one of its starting guards from Tulane. A few years back, Auburn brought in Broome from Morehead State.
Of course, there’s also a lot of randomness to the tournament, meaning the bracket won’t be this chalky every year. Houston beat eighth-seeded Gonzaga by five, then fourth-seeded Purdue by two. Florida beat eighth-seeded UConn by a bucket. Colorado State, a 12 seed, upset Memphis in the first round, then lost to fourth-seeded Maryland on a buzzer beater. Drake, an 11 seed, beat Missouri in the first round. It just then drew a terrible matchup with Texas Tech.
NIL has been a factor since the summer of 2021. The NCAA first loosened transfer rules around then, too. In 2023, though, Florida Atlantic (a 9 seed), San Diego State (5), Miami (5) and UConn (4) made up the Final Four. There will be Cinderellas again. But the reality is that the gap between rich programs and everyone else is wider than ever, so the path for the next Cinderella is a lot more treacherous. This Final Four is an imperfect data point, yet it’s a data point nonetheless.
“I think you may have seen that in the football playoff too, the teams that were most invested in their student-athletes were the teams that were able to be able to advance,” Pearl said in Atlanta. “I would love to see us get to a place where we feel like we're truly playing for a national championship because we're all playing by the same rules. I'm really pleased that we're able to invest in our student-athletes. The NCAA was late to doing that. … But there are more guidelines in professional sports for how you compensate your athletes than there are right now, and we've got to find a way to figure that out.”
That veers into a whole other discussion, one that has to include collective bargaining and whether athletes should be considered employees of their schools. Collective bargaining agreements, negotiated by players and owners in the pros, include rules to create some measure of competitive equity. Trying to scale that for college sports is complicated, to say the least. There are 364 Division I basketball programs. Starting in July, schools will likely be paying athletes directly for the first time, up to a cap, though a huge chunk of that 364 will opt to not. So that major change, contingent on a settlement of House v. NCAA in April, will do little, if anything, to reach Pearl’s vision of one set of rules for the whole tournament field.
Paring down tourney access — like, say, by expanding but eliminating some automatic bids for small conferences — would be a worse case for Cinderella. A full overhaul of the tournament — like, say, to only include schools that pay their athletes with university money — would mean eliminating the idea of Cinderella in a much grislier, pronounced way. A few commissioners and ADs have pitched that second idea to me, a clean split of two D-I leagues, saying it feels both dystopian and potentially practical in the long run. March Madness, the NCAA’s biggest event, seeing that it doesn’t run the College Football Playoff, has always thrived on the possibility of a miracle run by a tiny program. Sure, Auburn, Duke, Houston and Florida will likely play some incredible basketball in San Antonio. I’m very much looking forward to it. But the Final Four really matters because there was once a diverse 68, which means Auburn, Duke, Houston and Florida can’t exist in this way, in this context, without American, Mount St. Mary’s, New Mexico State and High Point, to name just a few of their foils. There is, narratively, an interdependence that no amount of spending could change, no matter how much the biggest spenders might try.
After I published my coverage of Auburn-Michigan State on Sunday, I peeked at the first two Washington Post comments out of curiosity (I know, I know, never read the comments). I suspect the snap reactions, pasted in italics below, are shared by a lot of basketball fans. Let them be a warning for those shaping the future of college sports. And if it provides a small dash of comfort, let me say this tournament could still be an outlier in the grander scheme.
Four #1 seeds is b o r I n g
Well I guess I can kiss goodbye my yearly devotion to March Madness. The four #1 seeds in the Final Four. BORING.
Thankfully your substack commenters are much more intelligent