A free-agent culture: How transfers are killing Cinderella

2:38 | College BasketballAs the beginning of the NCAA tournament nears on Tuesday night, America waits to embrace the next small-school wonder. Fans have scoured their brackets to see if an obscure university—East Tennessee State? UNC-Wilmington? Vermont?—can become the next March darling. But there’s a new reality facing schools outside college basketball’s six power conferences that’s made it exponentially more difficult to author a so-called Cinderella story.

In just five seasons, the sport’s “up-transfer” transfer culture has shifted the landscape of college basketball so dramatically that runs like George Mason from the Colonial Athletic Conference in 2006 and Butler from the Horizon…