Few basketball players know March Madness quite as well as Jalen Rose. Before he was a 14-year pro in the NBA, before he became a multimedia personality, he was a member of Michigan's vaunted Fab Five, helping to lead the Wolverines to back-to-back national title game appearances in 1992 and 1993. Those teams helped usher in a new era of college basketball; so, as the sport is once again undergoing rapid change with the transfer portal and NIL, who better to ask than Rose about what comes next — and what it means for the men's NCAA Tournament?
March Madness has started to feel a bit different in recent years, with early-round upsets becoming increasingly rare and the gap between the haves and have-nots seemingly larger than ever before. But Rose isn't nearly so pessimistic. In fact, while Cinderella has taken a few years off, he thinks there's more opportunity for upheaval — and the chaos we've come to know and love — than ever before.
The truth about Cinderellas: They were never winning it all
First, some harsh truth: "I gotta tell you a secret," Rose told FanSided. "While we celebrate March Madness ... Cinderella never wins it all. A No. 5 seed or below is gonna win a championship by the last decades, analytics every time."
He does have a point. Yes, it's true that the opening round of the men's NCAA Tournament has felt disappointingly uncompetitive in recent years — this year's Big Dance only saw one team higher than a No. 11 seed pull an upset, and precious few top seeds even had to sweat. And NIL is a likely culprit, as power-conference programs with deeper pockets can poach experienced contributors every offseason from the same mid-majors they might face come March. There's something lost when the tourney loses that element of early unpredictability, as Rose himself fully acknowledges.
But for all the memorable upsets March has brought us, it's not like this sport has been a paragon of parity even before the transfer portal came around. Sure, it was more wide-open than, say, college football, just by virtue of roster size and different draft requirements. Still, it's important not to overstate things; college sports have always been defined by a resource gap. If anything, Rose argues, the extent to which NIL has toppled the existing hoops hierarchy is a good thing for the little guy in the long run.
The next Cinderella might be bought, not built
It used to be that mid-majors would have to wait for all the stars to align to have a chance at a meaningful tournament run. Now, though, all that's really needed is a deep-pocketed booster or two.
“The school that jumps up and decides, you know what? We’re gonna invest in our team — that’s what’s gonna be the difference," Rose said.
He has a point. Yes, it certainly makes life tougher for coaches to have to constantly start from square one every offseason, especially when they don't have the resources to keep the players they scouted and developed. But for as much as player movement has made it harder to compete on the national stage, it's also leveled the playing field: As we saw with UNC's flailing coaching search, even being a blue blood doesn't guarantee you anything in an era when players can get paid anywhere.
Yes, programs like, say, Belmont are going to have a hard time competing financially with Tennessee. That said, the talent pool is wider than ever before, spanning across whole continents, and those mid-majors can also pull from below them on the food chain. Plus, all it takes is a bit of money for these schools to have access to the sort of roster they could've scarcely dreamed of previously. The floor might be lower for would-be Cinderellas, but the ceiling is also higher.
“It can happen," Rose said, when asked if he thinks smaller schools will go on deep tournament runs moving forward. "I believe it will happen. It just didn’t happen this year.”