From Cinderella to Contender: The Complicated Aftermath of a Final Four Run

A magical run can elevate everything for a men’s basketball program: conference, money and expectations. It can also make sustaining success far more difficult.

On Friday, April 2, 2010, the young children of Butler’s basketball coaches sat down just off the playing surface at mammoth Lucas Oil Stadium and ate Happy Meals as their fathers worked. This was the day of the Cinderella Bulldogs’ open practice at the Final Four, an event unlike anything in school history; the endearing courtside family scene juxtaposed the mom-and-pop nature of the Butler program with the vastness of the moment.

Three days later, the Butler players quaintly charmed America by going to class on the day of the national championship game, then bused seven miles downtown from their campus to play Duke that night. The Bulldogs came shockingly close to winning it all, with a half-court buzzer beater from Gordon Hayward hitting the backboard and rim before bouncing away.

Butler’s Gordon Hayward goes up for a shot against Duke in the 2010 NCAA men’s basketball championship game. | Rich Clarkson/Sports Illustrated

Butler was clinging to its mid-major ethos, but change was coming. It went back to the national championship game the following season, and a year after that announced that it would leave the mid-major Horizon League for the fringe high-major Atlantic 10 Conference. That was step one up the ladder.

When the decidedly high-major Big East Conference then fractured along football lines, it aligned with Fox Sports and made an all-in return to its basketball roots. Private schools Creighton and Xavier fit the mold for membership. Many thought fellow Catholic universities Saint Louis or Dayton could join them. But there was a non-Catholic, basketball-first private school that was running hotter. Butler got the call.

From 2010 to ’13, the upstart Bulldogs played in two championship games and upgraded two conferences, reaching one of the premier basketball leagues in the country. It underscored the paradigm-shifting power of a great run in the NCAA tournament for small schools with big upsides and bigger dreams.

John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated

“The Final Four—especially the two of them back-to-back—changed the trajectory,” says Butler’s athletic director at the time, Barry Collier, who has since retired. “There wasn’t a lot of clamoring to change conferences, but the opportunities came about quickly. The Horizon was a good league for Butler, but the opportunities to move to the A-10 and Big East were no-brainers.”

Similar, albeit slightly less meteoric, changes in station transpired elsewhere this century. Six other traditional non-power programs have played in the Final Four in the last 20 years with relatively low seeding, and all of them have changed (or will change) conferences sometime thereafter. It has become a 21st century axiom for mid-majors—make the biggest stage of the Big Dance, and big opportunities will follow.

• George Mason, a No. 11 seed, reached the Final Four in 2006 as a member of what was then known as the Colonial Athletic Association, now the Coastal. You may remember Jim Larrañaga’s celebratory shadowboxing as the Patriots moved through the field. By 2014, they were in the A-10.
• Five years after Mason’s run, Virginia Commonwealth also crashed the Final Four out of the CAA as a No. 11 seed, shocking Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State and Kansas in succession. In 2013, VCU moved to the A-10.
• Wichita State roared into the last weekend of the 2013 tournament as a No. 9 seed out of the Missouri Valley Conference, putting eventual champion Louisville on the ropes. Then the Shockers, led by future NBA star point guard Fred VanVleet, followed it up with a 35–1 season that earned a No. 1 seed. By 2018, they had joined the American Athletic Conference, now known as simply the American.
• In 2018, Loyola Chicago and Sister Jean and the Harry Potter scarf-wearing fans came out of the Valley as a No. 11 seed to make the Final Four. Five years later, the Ramblers were in the A-10.
• The 2023 season saw two gate crashers at the Final Four: ninth-seeded Florida Atlantic of the Conference USA and fifth-seeded San Diego State of the Mountain West. FAU quickly moved into the American the following season, while the Aztecs are ticketed for the reformed Pac-12 this fall.

(Five other schools have made the Final Four this century from outside the power-conference football cabal and ultimately upgraded leagues, but they’re in a different subset than the above eight programs. Marquette went from Conference USA to the Big East in 2005, two years after its Final Four appearance; Memphis went from CUSA to the American after an ’08 title game run; Louisville went to an ’05 Final Four as a CUSA member, then made 2012 and ’13 appearances as a Big East school and now is in the Atlantic Coast Conference; Gonzaga played in the title games in 2017 and ’21 as a member of the West Coast Conference and is bound for the new Pac-12 in the fall; and Houston, which went to the 2021 Final Four as a member of the American before joining the Big 12 in ’24, whereupon it made another Final Four. All those programs were already traditional basketball powers before those Final Fours, and in the cases of the Cardinals, Cougars and Tigers, the conference realignments were more about football than basketball.)

The reasons for making those moves are obvious: gains in enrollment, tuition and selectivity for the university as a whole; better economic footing for athletics. 

A 2020 research paper published by the Journal of Sports Economics found that enrollment boosts two years after a private school’s men’s basketball team had a “Cinderella run” to the Sweet 16 or farther were worth “approximately $7.3 million in 2012 dollars” in increased tuition. That number would obviously be significantly higher today. There is tangible power in the publicity that accrues from a couple of upsets in March Madness.

Collier estimated that Butler’s athletic revenue increase after leaving the Horizon was “a factor of 15 or 20.” Not only was there more money through conference media rights and NCAA tourney shares, but also more access to the tournament. The Horizon has been a one-bid league since 2009, while the A-10 has averaged 2.8 bids in that same span and the Big East has averaged 5.9. With no safety net, the tournament pressure in a single-bid conference is immense.

But here is the life after Cinderella reality: The magic is difficult to bottle. Sustainability is elusive.

Most of the coaches who authored special runs mentioned above inevitably moved on: Brad Stevens, gifted prodigy, left Butler for the Boston Celtics; Larrañaga left George Mason for Miami and another first-in-school history Final Four; Shaka Smart departed VCU for Texas (which didn’t work) and Marquette (which has, for the most part); Porter Moser moved from Loyola to Oklahoma; Dusty May went from FAU to Michigan.

The exceptions: Gregg Marshall stayed at Wichita State in part because of a toxic reputation, which led to a resignation settlement in 2020 after an internal investigation of alleged physical and verbal abuse; Brian Dutcher, who was 63 years old when he took San Diego State to the title game, isn’t looking to move.

George Mason coach Jim Larrañaga with his team during the 2006 NCAA tournament. | Greg Nelson/Sports Illustrated

Even though those runs elevated programs, there was still another level of opportunity for talented coaches: more salary, bigger operating budgets, better facilities, improved recruiting clout. And, in the current climate, more NIL funding. 

In addition to coaching turnover, there is the toll of increased competition. More bids might generally be available in leagues like the A-10, American and Big East, but there are more good teams battling for them. Moving up often means starting in the bottom echelon of a new conference—and maybe staying there.

Butler, which made the biggest jump of any school, departed the Horizon League 14 seasons ago. Its conference winning percentage in the A-10 and Big East regular-season games is .450, with five NCAA tourney bids under five different coaches. (A sixth coach is on the way after Thad Matta retired this week.) In its final 14 Horizon seasons, the winning percentage was .778, with eight NCAA bids under three different coaches.

George Mason has won at a .478 clip in 13 A-10 seasons, with zero NCAA bids under four coaches. In the Patriots’ last 13 years in the CAA, they had a .667 winning percentage and four bids, all under Larrañaga.

Wichita State’s nine seasons in the American have yielded a .565 winning percentage and two NCAA bids under three coaches. The previous nine seasons in the Missouri Valley were dominant: a .803 winning rate and seven bids, all under Marshall.

Through four seasons in the A-10, Loyola’s winning percentage is .486 with zero NCAA bids under Drew Valentine, Moser’s successor. The Ramblers won 75% of their games in their final four years in the Valley with two NCAA bids, with three of those seasons under Moser and one under Valentine.

FAU’s three seasons in the American have produced a .611 winning clip and one bid, compared to .720 and one bid in the last three years in CUSA. The more stark dividing line for the Owls is with Dusty and post-Dusty—he was 32–6 in his last two seasons of league play, one in each conference, whereas successor John Jakus is 19–17.

Of all the Cinderella strivers, VCU’s performance has remained the most consistent across different leagues and coaches. In fact, it’s improved slightly. The Rams have won 72.5% of their A-10 games and earned 10 NCAA bids in 14 seasons, compared to a .703 winning rate and five bids in the previous 14 in the CAA.

No. 11 seed VCU’s Joey Rodriguez (12), Ed Nixon (50) and Brandon Rozzell (32) celebrate after beating No. 3 seed Purdue in the 2011 NCAA tournament. | John Biever/Sports Illustrated

By and large, there are trade-offs associated with a big leap after a Cinderella run. With more money and more exposure often comes more competition and more losses. And for some schools, attempting to retain the gritty underdog identity that got them there can actually be an impediment.

The family feel at Butler wasn’t just manifested in Stevens’s kids eating Happy Meals at the Final Four. The Butler Way, as the program’s philosophy came to be known, was rooted in a fundamentally old-school approach to basketball. Games at historic Hinkle Fieldhouse, one of the great venues in the sport, have always been trips back into the past.  

The Bulldogs, understandably, wanted to retain that program DNA as they moved on into new realms. That partly informed the decisions to hire former player and assistant LaVall Jordan as head coach in 2017—he took Butler to the NCAA tourney his first year, but then had losing seasons in three of the next four and was fired.

Next man up was another throwback guy, former Butler player, assistant coach and one-year head coach in 2000–01, Matta. That definitely didn’t work out, with four straight losing seasons in Big East play.

Whether the school tries to keep it in the family one more time or not, the larger reality is this: Butler has to raise and spend money like the Big East programs it’s trying to beat.

“It’s not because we’re in the wrong league,” Collier says of the program’s recent struggles. “I think Butler continues to try to figure out how to support athletics in this current environment. 

“The need to fund athletics at a higher level is obvious. It’s a matter of providing resources to leverage athletes to support Butler as a whole. I think you need to be in the ballpark [in terms of NIL war chest], but you don’t need every dollar somebody else has to be able to compete.”

The dream of a Final Four run dances in the heads of every mid-major player and coach in this year’s NCAA tournament. Butler and a few other schools have lived the dream this century, having the time of their lives along the way. What comes next for Cinderella can be rewarding and enriching—and humbling. Life after the run isn’t always easy.

The magic is ephemeral. Bottling it is difficult. As Collier says, “Better count your blessings while you have them.”

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