By Brett Daniels
The Sweet 16 is set and features a record seven teams from the SEC, four from the Big Ten and Big 12, and Duke the lone representative of the ACC. For the first time since 2019 there will be no representative from a non-Power Four or “mid-major” conference. This comes just two years after the 2023 Final Four featured San Diego State (Mountain West), Florida Atlantic (American Athletic), Miami (ACC), and eventual champion UConn (Big East). The highest remaining seed is No. 10 Arkansas who upset No. 2 St. John’s to make it into the second weekend of the tournament.
Fans of smaller conference teams can expect this trend to continue across all sports as the “haves” will continue to pilfer smaller school’s rosters with bigger NIL deals and more exposure for a potential jump to the professional level. The 2023 Florida Atlantic Final Four team featured coach Dusty May who will be coaching Michigan next weekend in the Sweet 16, center Vladislav Goldin who now plays for May at Michigan and guards Alijah Martin (Florida) and Johnell Davis (Arkansas).
In an interview with “Hoop Guidance,” St. John’s coach Rick Pitino stated that he wouldn’t be recruiting high school players in 2025 and would be concentrating on transfer portal players. Pitino further went on to say that if a five-star high school player wanted to play at St. John’s, he wouldn’t take him because you “can’t win big with high school players.”
This trend also extends to the college football space where the two teams that played for the National Championship in 2025 had multiple transfers filling key roles. Both starting QB’s, Will Howard for Ohio State and Riley Leonard for Notre Dame, played college football at Kansas State and Duke, respectively, the season before. Ohio State was a little more transfer heavy than Notre Dame with RB Quinshon Judkins (Ole Miss), C Seth McLaughlin and S Caleb Downs (Alabama) playing prominent roles in their team’s success while Notre Dame featured WR Beaux Collins (Clemson), RJ Oben (Duke) and K Mitch Jeter (South Carolina) who hit several key kicks to send the Irish to Atlanta, in addition to Leonard.
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“Roster poaching” has become such an issue in football that many coaches have elected to not have a spring game to prevent other coaching staffs from scouting their second and third team players to “poach” them in the spring portal window.
Georgia’s Kirby Smart has decided to hold the annual G-Day Spring game but elected not to have it televised to presumably force other coaches to buy a ticket and come scout the Dawgs reserves in person. It’s an unfortunate development for high school players who will lose out to a transferring college player with game experience and multiple years in strength and conditioning.
This also allows coaches who might be great at X’s and O’s but not great at evaluating or developing talent to plug holes on their roster (or in the case of basketball remake your roster completely in the offseason) and compete with the programs that recruit and develop well.
The transfer portal and NIL have remade college sports in a way that robs potential Cinderella teams of the one thing that can even the playing field between above average and elite talent: continuity. Gone are the days when a coaching staff can bring in a group of players that are not quite good enough for the elite teams or possibly were overlooked in the recruiting process, develop them over the course of three or four years and have a championship window.
The clock is striking at midnight, and Cinderella is turning back into a pumpkin.
