During last year’s NCAA Tournament, basketball fans complained about the lack of a team-focused Cinderella storyline to define the event. The only double-digit seed to advance to the Sweet 16 was Arkansas, out of the SEC, coached by Hall of Famer John Calipari. That’s hardly the kind of underdog we’re used to seeing.
In 2023, Princeton made it to the Sweet 16, Florida Atlantic lasted until the Final Four, and Fairleigh Dickinson University beat No. 1 seed Purdue. And we’re unlikely to ever see a repeat of 2022, when Saint Peter’s made the Elite 8.
The 2025 tournament was one of the “chalkiest” of all time, meaning the teams that made the final rounds were pretty much the ones you’d expect. It was actually just the second-ever Final Four in history that featured four No. 1 seeds.
There are a few factors that account for the change. One is the evolution of the transfer portal—which has turbocharged the process of players transferring from school to school during their college career.
Another is that name, image, and likeness (NIL) rules that allow student-athletes to receive financial compensation fundamentally changed the shape of college sports. Over the past few years, the markets for players have exploded.
Third, teams at the top levels of basketball are simply better than ever, making it much harder for the mid-major programs to compete in even a single game setting.
But look at the rosters of the best teams in the country, and you’ll find plenty of Cinderella DNA in there.
Three March Madness stars are born
If you remember a single player from last year’s NCAA Tournament, it’s probably Walter Clayton Jr., the All-American point guard who led Florida to the national championship with heroic second-half performances. But Clayton wasn’t always an All-American. In fact, he had higher-profile scholarship offers to play football out of high school than basketball, but he preferred the court to the field.
So he passed up on the opportunity to play football at Georgia, Notre Dame, Tennessee, and other power programs to play basketball at tiny Iona College, a school with fewer than 4,000 students more than 1,000 miles from his hometown of Lake Wales, Florida.
Iona is a regional mid-major basketball powerhouse, and at the time, its coach was Hall of Famer Rick Pitino. Clayton made a name for himself, winning MAAC Player of the Year as a sophomore and leading the Gaels to an NCAA Tournament appearance in 2023. He then entered the transfer portal, went to Florida, and the rest is history.
If that’s not an underdog story, I don’t know what is.
In the National Semifinal, Clayton and the Gators defeated top-seeded Auburn, a team led by Johni Broome, another Florida native who had been overlooked coming out of high school. Broome didn’t have any high-major offers, so he committed to Morehead State in the Ohio Valley and became a superstar there.
Two years later, Broome transferred to Auburn, earning a hefty sum after proving his worth at the mid-major level. He won SEC Player of the Year in his third year at Auburn. He was the second-consecutive recipient of that award to have started their career outside of the power conferences.
Tennessee’s Dalton Knecht won SEC Player of the Year in the 2023-24 season. He was a junior college player coming out of high school, needing to make up the grades and ability to play at a higher level. Now Clayton, Broome, and Knecht are all playing in the NBA.
Fresh faces, unlikely journeys
This is college basketball’s “Year of the Freshmen,” filled with superstars who have been household names (at least in basketball circles) since they were in eighth grade, such as AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, and Cameron Boozer. But there are plenty of Cinderella stories to follow as well.
The best player on perhaps the best team in the country, Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg, didn’t have the grades to play Division I basketball out of high school. He had to face significant adversity, going across the country to play junior college ball in Arizona. Over three years, however, he evolved into a dominant junior college player, and signed to play for the University of Alabama-Birmingham, a mid-major program.
After two seasons at Alabama, making the conference first team twice, he transferred to Michigan, having earned a college degree. (He could continue playing thanks to the Pavia waiver). Just five years ago, he wasn’t sure if he’d get a high school diploma. Now he’s got a chance to win a national championship at the elite college level.
Melvin Council Jr. climbed the ladder from junior college to Wagner College (a school in one of Division I’s weakest conferences) to St. Bonaventure University (a school in the Atlantic 10, one of the better non-power conferences in Division I) to become one of the best players for Kansas—one of the most storied programs in college basketball—in the mighty Big 12 Conference.
Purdue’s Oscar Cluff moved to the U.S. from Australia in 2021 to play junior college ball, then made stops at Washington State and South Dakota State universities before landing at Purdue this season. Iowa’s Bennett Stirtz started his career in Division II. Texas Tech has three starters who began their careers at mid-major programs outside the five power conferences. Ben Humrichous, now at Illinois, previously played for a school that wasn’t even part of the NCAA.
New kinds of March Madness success stories
These are the Cinderella stories that are emerging for March Madness 2026: meteoric rises focused on individuals, not teams. What’s interesting is how certain schools have adjusted—and thrived. A mid-major program like the one at Belmont University has watched players it recruited out of high school depart for schools like Florida (Will Richard, now in the NBA), Maryland (Ja’Kobi Gillespie, now at Tennessee), and North Carolina (Cade Tyson, now at Minnesota).
Instead of those players making up a formidable team for the Belmont Bruins as upperclassmen last season, they competed in the NCAA Tournament on different teams, with Richard winning the national championship alongside the aforementioned Clayton, as well as a few other mid-major transfers with the Gators.
Belmont has had to find new waves of players each year to replace departed stars, or develop younger players into stars, only to watch them get picked away as well. The team consistently loses top players, but keeps winning games anyway.
The Bruins had a strong season this year, going 26-6, but were eliminated in the quarterfinals of the Missouri Valley Tournament and did not qualify for the Big Dance.
It’s always a terrific March Madness story when a mid-major star player decides to stay at their school, passing up a bigger payday. And watching young players navigate successfully from a smaller school to the national stage can be gratifying, too.
But as college sports change, so must the lens we use to look at the narratives behind them. Belmont University’s consistency in spite of so much upheaval shows that there will always be great mid-major teams vying to be Cinderellas. They might just be harder to come across.