The NIL March Madness Cinderella isn’t dead. She’s just been priced out of the building.
This year’s tournament has been genuinely fun to watch. Good games, wild finishes, chaos in spots. But if you’ve been waiting for that one team, the one with the funny mascot and the coach nobody’s heard of and the six guys who’ve played together for three years and just refuse to lose, she hasn’t shown up. Chase Johnston hit his first two-point shot of the season to beat Wisconsin and the whole country lost it for about 18 hours. Robbie Avila finally got his NCAA Tournament moment and looked every bit like the “College Jokic” people have been calling him. Those were real, good moments. Both teams were out by Saturday afternoon.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern.
What NIL March Madness Has Actually Done to Mid-Majors
Before NIL, mid-major programs had one real advantage: roster continuity. They couldn’t out-recruit Duke or Kansas. They couldn’t offer seven-figure NIL packages. But they could keep a guy for three or four years, build something real, and show up in March with a team that actually knew each other. That was the formula. That’s what made those runs possible.
The transfer portal blew that up. Before NIL, fewer than 15 percent of mid-major all-conference players transferred to a power school after a breakout season. That number is now closer to 75 percent. A kid has one good year at Saint Louis or High Point and he’s gone before the portal even cools down. Mid-major coaches are now essentially running a development pipeline for the programs that can outbid them.
And the gap in resources is not subtle. The average NIL collective funding for a power conference school runs around $9.8 million. For mid-major programs, it’s closer to $1.4 million. That’s not a competitive imbalance. That’s a different sport.
BYU Paid $7 Million and Lost to an 11-Seed That Flew Overnight
Here’s the part that should make you laugh. BYU landed AJ Dybantsa, the consensus number one recruit in the class, with an NIL package estimated at $7 million. The kid led the nation in scoring. He put up 35 points and 10 rebounds in the first round. Texas, the 11-seed they lost to, played a First Four game in Dayton on Tuesday, flew overnight to Portland, and beat BYU by eight on Thursday.
BYU spent more money on one player than most mid-major programs spend on their entire roster and went 23-12, finished 10th in the Big 12, and got bounced in round one. That’s not an argument against players getting paid. Dybantsa earned every dollar. But it is an argument that buying a roster and building a team are two completely different things, and NIL has made a lot of programs confuse the two.
The NIL March Madness Cinderella Will Come Back. Appreciate It When She Does.
None of this means the Cinderella is dead forever. It means she’s rarer, and that matters.
We had High Point nearly pull off back-to-back upsets before Arkansas put them down. We had Robbie Avila in goggles and a leg brace dropping 12 and 5 assists in a blowout win over Georgia while St. Louis fans chanted his name. Those were genuinely great moments and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But a first-round win and a second-round blowout loss isn’t a Cinderella run. It’s a cameo.
The last real run, the kind where you’re clearing your Sunday plans and telling people who don’t watch basketball to start watching, that was NC State in 2024. Before that, Cinderella was already getting harder to find. Last year’s tournament had all four one-seeds in the Final Four. The first time that had ever happened. The Sweet 16 in 2025 was the first time since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 that every team in it came from a power conference.
That trend is not going away. The NIL March Madness Cinderella is becoming a scarcer resource, and scarcity changes the value of a thing. When a program from a conference nobody watches, with a roster full of guys who stayed because they wanted to, makes it to the Elite Eight on great basketball and zero budget, it is going to feel unlike anything we’ve seen in years. People are going to completely lose their minds. It’ll be the sports story of the year.
It will happen again. We just don’t know when. And honestly, the waiting might make it better.
