The Morning: Selection Sunday

Recent changes in college sports have made March Madness even more unpredictable

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story March 17, 2024 By Billy Witz Good morning. The N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments begin this week. Here's why the brackets could be more unpredictable than ever. Indiana State playing Murray State. Joseph C. Garza/Tribune-Star, via Associated Press Picking a winner Happy Selection Sunday! Green beer and lucky leprechauns aside, today is one of America's great (unofficial) holidays. It's the day the 68-team brackets for the N.C.A.A. men's and women's basketball tournaments are revealed. Tonight's unveiling of the matchups may bring back a feeling you haven't had since digesting the prompt for that 10th grade U.S. history essay: What in the world do I make of all this? Did Duke get a favorable draw? What's the path for my school? Which No. 12 seed looks like a Cinderella? Where the heck is McNeese State? Is Cream Abdul-Jabbar in the field? And how come the Fairfield women's team is called the Stags? No matter how much basketball you've studied since November — poring over KenPom ratings, streaming games from obscure conferences, reciting the eight-player rotations of the Purdue men and the South Carolina women before you go to bed — there is so much uncertainty when it comes to filling out your bracket. Picking winners has never been simple — remember, over all these years, there has never been a perfect bracket — but recent changes to the sport have made it more unpredictable than ever. I'll explain them in today's newsletter. New rules Three years ago, under mounting legislative and judicial pressure, the N.C.A.A. changed two major rules. It allowed athletes to make money from so-called name, image and likeness payments, and it eased restrictions on players transferring from one school to another. Those changes — prompted in part by a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the N.C.A.A.'s authority — have upended the top levels of college sports. Nahiem Alleyne of the St. John's Red Storm. Sarah Stier/Getty Images Transfers happen through a system known as the portal, which works something like an online dating service: If players want to change schools, they put their names in the portal, and coaches at other schools can then recruit them. With the introduction of N.I.L. payments, those recruiting offers now come with a payday — at least, one that can be handled above the table. This has created something akin to free agency in college sports. Consider Nahiem Alleyne. He played for Virginia Tech in the 2021 and '22 tournaments, won a national championship at Connecticut last season, and is now trying to go again with St. John's this year. He is hardly an outlier. Celeste Taylor starred for Texas when it reached the Elite Eight in 2021. She got to the second round last year with Duke. Now, she's trying to carry Ohio State to its first women's Final Four since 1993. This year's field All this tumult has coincided with the rise in attention on the women's game — turbocharged by the popularity of Iowa's Caitlin Clark, whose offensive wizardry makes her games appointment viewing. In fact, many of the sport's most compelling story lines this year are in the women's tournament. Last week's bench-emptying brouhaha between the defending champion, L.S.U., and top-ranked South Carolina adds some spice — especially if the two meet again in the Final Four in three weeks. Can South Carolina, with an entirely new starting lineup, do what last year's team could not: add a championship to an unbeaten regular season? Does Geno Auriemma, the coach of UConn, have one more title run left in his injury-ravaged team? Will Oregon State, left behind when its fellow Pac-12 schools abandoned the conference last year, make a run to the Final Four? The men's tournament might lack the dramatic story lines or the star power of the women's, but it could make up for that with unpredictability and dramatic finishes, thanks to a field that is more balanced top to bottom. A year ago, two unheralded programs — San Diego State and Florida Atlantic — staged a Final Four thriller, which ended with Lamont Butler's sinking a go-in-or-go-home jumper at the buzzer to send San Diego State to the championship. This year, both upstarts will be back in the field. So will Purdue and its 7-foot-4 center Zach Edey, who hopes to avoid being slew by another David after last year's loss to No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson. And UConn, which last year won its fifth title in the last quarter century — more than blue-blooded Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana and U.C.L.A. combined — is a fitting avatar for the moment. With all the changes to college sports, is such unpredictability the new normal? It may be too soon to say. 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