Basketball analyst Mark Titus offers grim analysis of March Madness tournament: “I think the Cinderella stories are in danger”

You may not be the biggest college hoops fan, or even the biggest basketball fan, but every year the Big Dance captivates you, me and everyone we know. Right around this time every year, the top teams in the country go toe-to-toe to be the last one standing by the end of Final Four weekend. There may be a trophy to hoist once it’s all said and done, but there are no more glass slippers, and it looks like the clock has struck midnight on the Cinderellas.

Midnight for Mid majors?

The NCAA Tournament has more or less remained the same for decades. If we overlook those silly “First Four” games that were added a handful of years ago to bring in a few more advertising bucks and a few more ticket sales, it’s essentially the same structure as always.

College basketball however is anything but the sport we grew up knowing, loving and following. There have always been powerhouses. There have always been programs that were staples in the tournament. And yea, those teams were probably in the final boxes of the brackets you filled out every year. Teams like Kansas and Kentucky and North Carolina and Duke were fan favorites, but you also had those bracket busters like Florida Gulf Coast and Northern Iowa and Saint Peters who went to the Elite 8 as a 15 seed.

The mystique of the tourney is held in the brackets. No sport, amateur or professional, domestic or abroad garners the kind of attention that the NCAA Tournament does. People who haven’t watched a second of college basketball scramble to enter their brackets and for three weekends in the spring, the entire country is under the spell of the Big Dance.

NIL shaking up the Big Dance

Unfortunately, that spell seems to be wearing off thanks to the reshaped rules of college basketball. With the new aged rules and regulations of the NCAA, NIL money and transfer portals look like they have killed off the Cinderella stories that enchanted us with small mid major schools and enamored us with the tournament.

Mark Titus, who is Barstool Sports’ college basketball expert and host of the “Mark Titus Show” podcast, was on the Rich Eisen Show, and talking about how this could mark the end of the Cinderella era (17-18 minute mark). Bobby Bones, who was filling in as host for Eisen on Tuesday asked if the NIL is stacking the deck for the top programs, Titus answered, “I don’t think so yet, but it seems that way… I don’t think the four teams being in the Final Four are because of that (NIL deals). I do think (it’s caused) the lack of Cinderellas in this tournament.”

Here are the facts. There were just seven upsets in the first round of the tournament. Out of 32 games, just seven lower seeds beat higher seeds and two of those games were 9 seeds beating 8 seeds. In the next round, four teams pulled upsets to get to the Sweet 16, although one of those was Michigan’s win over Texas A&M in the 4 vs. 5 match up.

Final four starts on Saturday

Titus went on to say, “Seeing a 13 or 14 seed get to the Sweet 16, that sort of thing that didn’t happened in this tournament, I am worried that that’s going to become the norm moving forward… You saw it this year, how many small schools that won one game in the tournament are bringing back their coach next year? St. Marys and Gonzaga? Every other small school that won, every coach and every player just immediately went somewhere else.”

Now here we are, heading to the Final Four in San Antonio with four No. 1 teams for just the second time in history and first time since 2008. That’s not to say the games this weekend aren’t shaping up to be great. You want to see the best teams playing to win the title, but would like a bit of pixie dust sprinkled on some Cinderellas along the way.

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