Loyola-Chicago Is a Dying Breed of Cinderella
The Ramblers have taken March Madness by storm en route to the Final Four. They almost missed the NCAA tournament altogether. Loyola’s run sheds light on the state of mid-majors—and the type of underdog stories that have become increasingly hard to come by.
You almost never heard about Sister Jean.
Loyola-Chicago was about 10 minutes from missing the 2018 NCAA tournament. The Ramblers won 14 of their final 15 games in Missouri Valley Conference play to run away with the league’s regular-season title, but still had to win three consecutive games at the MVC tournament in St. Louis—a.k.a. Arch Madness—to secure an automatic bid to the NCAAs. Their first game in the conference event came against Northern Iowa, seeded ninth in the 10-team league, and the Panthers put the Ramblers on the ropes. UNI held Loyola to 33 points for just shy of 30 minutes of game action, leading by four as the clock ticked under 11 minutes.
The Ramblers saved the day—as has become evident on their trip to the Final Four, they’re quite good at this. But if they’d lost, they would not have had a chance to win their way into America’s hearts during March Madness. The NCAA’s selection committee would have excluded the Ramblers from the bracket, a statement we can make definitively because of the official seed list. Even after winning the MVC tournament, the Ramblers were 46th in the committee’s rankings, below the final four at-large selections that played in the First Four games in Dayton, Ohio. Before the tournament, I wrote about how the Ramblers were good enough to be a no. 9 seed, but the committee apparently believed that Loyola’s résumé was not worthy of a spot in the field at all were it not for the MVC tournament triumph that mandated its inclusion. If Loyola had lost to UNI, the committee would have plugged the MVC tournament’s eventual winner into the bracket as a no. 14 or no. 15 seed, giving a dozen higher-seeded teams a slightly easier first-round matchup and the world a less interesting NCAA tournament.
One loss in St. Louis, and America never meets the greatest nun in sports history; the “One Shining Moment” montage is down a buzzer-beater and two game winners; I never get the chance to fire off all of my jokes about Harry Potter scarves; a new generation doesn’t hear about the importance of the 1963 championship run put together by a majority-black Loyola starting lineup; nobody gets to produce licensed Sister Jean gear; nobody gets to produce bootleg Sister Jean gear. Loyola’s 33-year NCAA tournament drought would have become a 34-year NCAA tournament drought, and the college basketball world would have kept spinning.
There are other stories you never got to hear about this March. Saint Mary’s was ranked in the final AP poll of the season, picked by voters as one of the best 25 college basketball teams in the country. The committee apparently didn’t find the Gaels good enough to warrant one of 36 at-large bids. (The other three times a team ranked in the final AP poll has been excluded from the tourney—in 1993 with UNLV, in 2004 with Utah State, and in 2014 with SMU—non-major schools were also the victims.) Some pointed out on Selection Sunday that USC’s RPI of 34 was the highest ever by a major-conference team that was left out of the tourney, but that distinction intentionally omitted non-major schools, which are often excluded with higher RPIs. Just this year, Middle Tennessee was left on the cutting-room floor despite having an RPI of 33 and compiling a 16-2 record in C-USA play. And while we all fawned over UMBC’s stunning 16-over-1 upset against Virginia, we’ve long forgotten about the team that dominated UMBC’s league all season. Vermont went 15-1 in America East play, with 13 double-digit wins and a single one-point loss; the Catamounts were likely never brought up in the committee room after their conference tournament defeat.
The NCAA once went out of its way to make sure non-major teams were represented in March. In recent years, however, the committee has shown little interest in including more than the bare minimum number that is necessary. Spectacular small-league teams such as Loyola make the tournament richer; too often, they have been cast aside under the greedy and false pretense that shunning them in favor of .500 teams from larger leagues will make the people who control college basketball richer.
Defining what exactly constitutes a “major,” “mid-major,” or “low-major” college basketball program can be tricky. Kyle Whelliston, the writer who once urged fans to open their hearts to non-power-conference college basketball teams on the glorious, now-dead The Mid Majority, noted in the site’s final entry that the day he tried to define “mid-major” in a post was “when this officially stopped being fun.” No matter what definition is used, one thing is clear: Fewer mid-majors are getting selected to the NCAA tournament than ever before.
Twenty years ago, in 1998, the committee gave out at-large bids to Western Michigan (from the Mid-American Conference) and Illinois-Chicago and Detroit-Mercy (from the Midwestern Collegiate Conference, now called the Horizon League). When George Mason stunned the world by reaching the Final Four as a no. 11 seed in 2006, it did so thanks to an at-large bid, having failed to win the Colonial Athletic Association tournament. Same goes for 11th-seeded VCU in 2011, also an also-ran from the CAA. Between 1995 and 2005, UNC Charlotte made the tournament eight times despite winning the Conference USA tournament only twice. UNC Charlotte got six at-large bids in a span of 10 years!
If you’ll allow me to temporarily use a clumsy definition of “mid-major” for the purposes of this piece, let’s say the “mid-major” label applies any school that isn’t in one of the five football power conferences, their predecessors, or either the defunct or current versions of the Big East. In the 20 NCAA tournaments from 1995 to 2014, the selection committee extended at-large bids to an average of 8.9 schools fitting that definition, the high being 12 in 1995, 1998, and 2004. In half of those years at least 10 such teams landed at-large invitations. Since 2015, the committee has invited no more than seven such teams in a given year, bottoming out with last year’s four. You’d think this trend would be reversed, considering over that time frame the number of at-large bids has increased from 32 to 36 as the size of the tournament field has grown from 64 to 68. But no: With more available spots, the committee has rewarded fewer teams from mid-major leagues.
This isn’t entirely due to a meaner, greedier committee. As the years have passed, power conferences have consolidated their power, adding schools from smaller leagues that have achieved success in March Madness. In 1998, the five football power conferences and the Big East featured 67 college basketball programs. Today, they count 75. Utah made the Elite Eight when it was a member of the Western Athletic Conference; Xavier made the Elite Eight when it was in the Atlantic 10; Butler made the national championship game twice when it was in the Horizon League; Louisville won the tournament when it was in the Metro Conference. Now, all of these schools are in major conferences.
If we tighten the definition of “mid-major” to exclude any programs from leagues that sponsor FBS football, the picture of who has been included in recent tournaments grows even bleaker. Just one such conference, the Atlantic 10, secured any at-large bids this year. Schools that succeed in basketball are flocking to these football-centric leagues too, even if they don’t have football teams. Wichita State, which until last year was part of Loyola’s MVC, parlayed its 2013 Final Four berth and general Missouri Valley Conference dominance into membership in the American Athletic Conference. There has been talk that Gonzaga will ditch the West Coast Conference for the Mountain West beginning next year. The A-10 is basically the last hope for non-football schools—it’s the league George Mason and VCU moved up to after leaving the CAA.
The selection committee is not an idle bystander to larger leagues stealing the biggest fish from smaller leagues’ ponds. In fact, it has helped prompt this exodus by basing its decision-making process on a variety of metrics that strongly emphasize the quality of teams’ opponents. The committee leans on metrics such as strength of schedule and RPI, in which playing a strong opponent boosts a team’s résumé even if it loses, and in which playing a weak opponent hurts a team’s résumé even if it wins. Joining a league with a better reputation makes it easier for a given team to make the tournament; likewise, every team in a given league becomes more likely to make the tournament if that league adds a strong team.
And remember, getting teams into the tournament ultimately makes college sports leagues money: The tournament is the NCAA’s only event that pays a cash reward. A team making a tournament appearance earns $1.67 million for its conference; each subsequent win in March Madness earns the league an additional $1.67 million. Every conference wants to add teams that have a higher potential for NCAA tournament wins because that success can boost the entire league’s finances. Every school wants to join leagues with more NCAA tournament–caliber teams because that prize money is evenly split throughout the conference.
The committee doesn’t openly discriminate against teams from smaller leagues, but it has adopted a variety of stances that make major-conference membership a virtual necessity to earn an at-large bid. As schools have responded by realigning and leagues by consolidating, the committee has seemingly decided that it no longer needs to do its due diligence in scanning the nation for potentially great teams in low-profile leagues. All the programs that are considered now come from the same eight or so conferences, creating an easily ignorable underclass.
CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus admitted to Chris “Mad Dog” Russo on Sirius XM Radio last week that his company isn’t thrilled with Loyola’s incredible run. According to McManus, the network would’ve preferred if Kentucky had made the Final Four instead, as the Wildcats have so many times before. “From a television standpoint, you really root for the big teams. [Kentucky’s Sweet 16 loss to Kansas State] was not good for us. ... Kansas State winning—I have nothing against Kansas State as a school or a team—but that really hurt us.”
McManus went on to say that while Loyola’s tournament success is “a great story” and Sister Jean is “terrific,” the Ramblers’ presence is “not the best of all scenarios for [CBS].” I imagine a Fox executive openly stating that his network was rooting for the Cowboys to make the Super Bowl would be met with widespread public rioting, but in college basketball we have come to understand that those in power can talk about the majority of Division I teams in this way.
It’s true that the blue bloods of college basketball draw high viewership numbers. Sunday’s game between Kansas and Duke was the highest-rated Elite Eight broadcast since 2005, when Kentucky played Michigan State. (To be fair, some viewers may have tuned in to CBS to see porn star Stormy Daniels talk about her alleged affair with President Donald Trump on the subsequently programmed 60 Minutes.) The two previous ratings highs, in 2015 and 2010, also came in games that featured Duke. Thursday night’s Kentucky–Kansas State game was the highest-rated Sweet 16 game on a Thursday since 2011, although it was lower than last year’s Kentucky-UCLA Sweet 16 clash, which was played on a Friday. The highest-rated national championship games of this millennium? Duke-Wisconsin, Duke-Arizona, North Carolina–Illinois, and Maryland-Indiana.
The March Madness TV contract keeps the NCAA rich, with CBS and Turner Sports literally paying a billion dollars per year to the association. It’d make sense, then, for the NCAA to do everything in its power to please these networks, and to keep the ratings high so that contract can grow even bigger in the future. If it ever came down to the selection committee having to pick between putting Middle Tennessee or UCLA in the tourney—just a hypothetical!—it would be foolish not to pick UCLA.
And so, the tournament planners are trying to hide Loyola as best they can. Given the option to choose Loyola’s time slot, CBS-Turner decided to give it the earliest slots in the Sweet 16, Elite Eight, and Final Four. Because larger audiences typically tune in for the later slates, Loyola is asked to play earlier, so the networks can maximize their total viewership by putting the teams Americans actually want to see in prime time.
There’s one problem with this logic: Contrary to the commonly accepted belief that NCAA tournament underdogs hurt TV ratings, there is ample evidence to suggest that people really like watching Cinderellas. Loyola’s Elite Eight game was the second-highest-rated Elite Eight game in the early Saturday time slot since 2011, when another Cinderella, Butler, was in that space. Three of the Ramblers’ four games have seen double-digit percent increases in viewership from those in identical slots in 2017; the fourth was down 1 percent from a game featuring Michigan.
Viewers also wanted to watch UMBC after the no. 16 seed Retrievers turned the tournament on its head by defeating top-seeded Virginia. Turner tried to hide the game on TruTV, the channel nobody can seem to find; the result was the highest-rated TruTV basketball broadcast since the channel began carrying the tournament in 2011, by a huge margin. This is a trend. The 2011 Final Four game between Butler and VCU, two mid-majors, actually drew more viewers (14.2 million) than the 2012 Final Four game between Kentucky and Louisville (13.9 million), two in-state rivals that are among the sport’s supposedly biggest draws. So did the 2013 Final Four matchup between Louisville and Wichita State (14.5 million), also in the same time slot. CBS might think it should root for Kentucky, but the data show that more people were interested in seeing the Cardinals play the upstart Shockers than their brand-name in-state rival.
Only once in the 21 years for which we have available data has the early Final Four game drawn higher ratings than the late Final Four game. The team America tuned in to see? George Mason, in 2006, whose matchup with Florida drew 1.3 million more viewers than the later game between LSU and UCLA. That means people sat down to watch George Mason and then turned off their TV for the theoretically superior matchup. The 2010 championship game between Butler and Duke has the second-best ratings of a title game this decade, behind Duke-Wisconsin.
It truly follows the fairy tale. The selection committee and CBS-Turner have decided that the tournament’s most beautiful teams should be locked in the basement, under the pretense that everyone would prefer to watch their ugly stepsisters. But no matter how hard the networks try, our eyes are naturally drawn to Cinderella.
Before UNLV demolished Duke by 30 points in the 1990 national championship game, the Runnin’ Rebels had to play in 5,000-seat gyms at Big West schools like Cal State Fullerton and Pacific. And one night, in late February, they lost.
The UC Santa Barbara Gauchos topped the Runnin’ Rebels 78-70 in front of a crowd of 6,387 in a gym that was designed to fit 6,100. UNLV would go on to win its next 45 games, including the national title. And at the time of UCSB’s upset, the program’s media liaison said, “my ears felt the same as they did after an AC/DC heavy metal concert when I was an usher.” Those 1989-90 Gauchos had only one win over a major-conference team, but became one of three Big West squads selected to the NCAA tournament, ultimately notching the school’s first and only tourney win. It was the last time the Big West ever received three bids; the league hasn’t gotten two since 2005. It’s hard to imagine the Big West ever getting two bids again, or any team like UNLV (now in the Mountain West) ever existing in a similar conference.
I truly love the college basketball system that bred Brobdingnagians in Lilliputian leagues, forging themselves in hole-in-the-wall gyms across the nation before finding out how big they are on the game’s grandest stage. But that system is dying. The committee’s tendency to avoid selecting dominant teams from smaller leagues if they slip up in conference tournaments has made it too risky for those teams to stay put. This trend not only leads to a less diverse pool of at-large bid recipients, but it also ensures the recipients of auto bids from weakened leagues will generally be worse.
And the system is dying for such a dumb reason. Underdogs wouldn’t be underdogs if they didn’t have inherent disadvantages—they have fewer fans, less-talented players, and apparently must turn to nonagenarian nuns for scouting advice—but there is nothing romantic about the committee methodically overlooking these teams because the companies that pay the NCAA billions of dollars are too stubborn to reconsider their flawed logic about whether the public wants to watch underdogs.
I wish we could change this. We can keep watching Loyola with rapt attention, just as we watched George Mason, Butler, Wichita State, and VCU in the past, and it apparently won’t matter. The TV networks have already decided we’d be happier if a team that went 8-10 in ACC play were in San Antonio in Loyola’s place. However, there is something we can do: There are 351 Division I teams, and chances are the closest one to where you live isn’t a powerhouse. I’m not saying you have to buy season tickets, although if you’re interested, they’re probably very reasonably priced. Every once in a while, just check your local program out. (Trust me: I regret not checking out Loyola-Chicago basketball when I lived nearby.)
College basketball’s powers that be might have already decided that America is not interested in learning the stories of these spectacular smaller-league teams, and will continue to facilitate a system that limits these schools’ opportunities to introduce themselves to the world. But they can’t stop us from learning those stories if we really want to find them.