For the second straight year, the Sweet Sixteen is bereft of any true Cinderella teams with all participants coming only from major conferences. While many are proclaiming Cinderella is dead, Dan considers the current landscape of collegiate athletics and proposes a solution that just might save the glass slipper.
Dan Patrick: “Second straight year in which every Sweet 16 team is from one of the five major conferences…Now you can say, okay, is this the future here? Is this where we're headed that it's going to be the have and the have-nots and we won't have Cinderella's?
Do I think this is the future or an aberration? I think it's more of the future here of these Power Five conferences. And I read off a lot of the salaries that they're dishing out to their players. Iowa and Nebraska are the lowest of the Sweet 16 at $7.2 million. We got a couple of schools at $11 million. Well, that's only going to rise. The question is, if you're a mid-major, how do you compete?”