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It is, but the rest of us need to move on and hopefully they will join us.

Breylon Charles is in the portal, too. He had a good spring.

All it takes is the RIGHT player to hold out at just the right time and his "hard line" stance will turn to quicksand. Say they make the playoffs last year and Cam Ward threatens to hold out. Cristobal's going to kick him off the team?!? Give me a break. No, some donor will step up and pay him and it would never be made public.

Houston didn't join the Big 12 until 2023. So you left them off of at least 2019. Missed Nevada in 2018. Mostly, though, 1-2 teams outside of the P6 conferences make the Sweet 16. I think if you look deeper at the bracketing, though, some of that is manufactured by the seedings and pairings. Almost every year the 2 best, or 2 of the top 3 "Mid major" teams are pitted against each other in the first round. Or they are setup against a powerhouse in the round of 32 (see FAU in 2024. Had they beaten Northwestern they would have had to face top overall seed UCONN next). Get past that, and they face San Diego St or UAB in the Sweet 16. That's the 3 best mid-majors in the tournament, all lined up to face defending National Champ UCONN. 2024 was the worst year for it. Look at some of these first round pairings: East Bracket: 5 San Diego St vs 12 UAB West Bracket: 5 Saint Mary's vs 12 Grand Canyon 7 Dayton vs 10 Nevada Midwest Bracket: 5 Gonzaga vs 12 McNeese (30-3) When you look at schools who come from G5 conferences (not counting all the basketball only schools), only FAU and Utah St were given first round games against schools NOT in other G5 conferences. Go back through your 2021-2024 brackets and you'll see a lot of the same. This year, 2025, you didn't see it as much. Why? Not sure, other than there really wasn't a G5 school, or even a collection of them, that looked like they would really threaten to go deep into the tournament. Up until the free transfer floodgates opened after 2024, mid-majors had an advantage over the schools chasing 1 and done NBA lottery types because we could keep a team together for 4 years and beat them collectively. That's been the case since Butler and Wichita St led the way in the late aughts and through the 2010s. Those days are long gone.

More coming 🥷