The first two weekends of the NCAA basketball tournament are in the books and much has been learned. It has been the year of the chalk as all four of the one seeds will play in the Final Four. Even crazier being that three of the two seeds were in the elite eight. Although it is apparent that NIL has affected the landscape of college basketball, many didn’t believe it would affect the tournament.

I would agree it has and will continue to without change. As top seeds continued to win this March, I began to question how they had all gotten so good. That is when I looked into where they had begun their college careers. Many being at smaller schools which had one brought upsets to the tournament. A great example is FAU, whose past Final Four team had three starters and their coach on different teams in the tournament this year.

It feels like the old way of college ball where we would complain about a player going to the NBA, not another school. Programs are suffering and so are their fans as great players are just not staying in the same place. Schools like Minnesota as of late seem to simply be used as a stop to show off your game. This is evident as we saw Elijah Hawkins playing for Texas Tech in the tournament and Pharell Payne for Texas A&M. Crazy enough it isn’t the players’ faults as the money being offered is at such high levels.

In the new money driven landscape of the NCAA, players are choosing to go to schools with larger budgets than be a part of a special run in March. This is separating programs into classes which will be very tough to break. Look at Duke forward Cooper Flagg who is making over 4 million in NIL this season. He is making all kinds of money but also building up the Duke name. The school is making more money off him to use in future NIL deals which will continue to grow their program. However, on the other side we have programs fighting to get lucky on a freshman who will give them one good year. 

Putting together all the pieces will continue to become more and more impossible to the point where division one ball will have to be minimized. Only few programs will be able to keep up with the funding, leading to few doing the winning and other schools wanting better chances at championships elsewhere.

However, I do believe there is a solution. Adopted in professional sports is the idea of a salary cap which limits the amount of money that teams can spend on players. This keeps the games fair by allowing all teams the same shot at players financially. I believe that could be done by sport giving each school a certain amount of NIL spending per year. Yes this would still mean college players are being traded and released, however it will also make watching the game more fun and competitive again come tournament time.

That being said, the two games this weekend will be a remarkable level of college play that we would never see in a Final Four again if changes are made. We will see the Florida Gators take on the Auburn Tigers and the Duke Blue Devils take on the Houston Cougars. I hope you tune in and watch the games best while considering changes that could be made to conserve the landscape of the game. With proper changes we just might see our Gophers in the Final Four sooner rather than later.