This year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament has so far maintained many existing trends in college basketball and college sports as a whole.

Below are 10 facts about the Sweet 16 and how the participants fit into the financial and strategic landscape of college hoops.

(1) Texas is the only double-digit seed left but has the nation’s largest athletics budget.

There has been lots of talk on social media this week about whether No. 11 seed Texas qualifies as a “Cinderella.” The Longhorns have had one of the three largest athletics budgets in the country in every season since 2018, and their spending has further separated from the pack recently. In the 2024-25 school year, the school spent a record $376 million on sports, more than $50 million ahead of second-place Ohio State, according to Sportico’s college sports finances database.

Texas isn’t exactly a financial powerhouse in basketball, specifically. The team’s operating budget of $15.1 million in 2023-24 ranked just 23rd in the nation, per EADA data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education, but it’s still higher than the school’s next opponent, the Purdue Boilermakers ($12.9 million). It’s safe to say that the slipper doesn’t quite fit this SEC program.

(2) There are no mid-majors in the Sweet 16.

For the second consecutive year, but only the second time this century, every Sweet 16 team is from a power conference. The West Coast Conference’s Gonzaga, which made the third round of every tournament between 2015 and 2024, is absent this year, and so is recent March Madness finalist San Diego State—and any other mid-majors.

(3) There was a below-average number of early round upsets for the third straight year.

Pundits say college basketball Cinderellas are dead and that NIL and the transfer portal are guilty of their demise. Athletes have the opportunity to make much more money at high-profile schools than they did just five years ago, and the NCAA’s new transfer rules allow talented players to move from smaller programs to bigger ones with no downside. These changes have weakened teams from smaller conferences.

Indeed, there were no first-round wins by teams seeded 13 through 16 for the second straight year; that happened just once between 2008 and 2024. Furthermore, the seeds of the teams in the Sweet 16 add up to 60 or less for the third consecutive year. That was only true in six tournaments between 1985 and 2023, and never three times consecutively. 

(4) The largest financial disparity of any matchup is Duke vs. St. John’s.

The biggest financial mismatch of the early rounds produced a thrilling ending. Kentucky, which reported a budget $25.4 million more than Santa Clara in 2023-24, drilled a buzzer-beater from near half court to force overtime against the Broncos before winning 89-84.

But due to the lack of early round upsets, there are no schools remaining with minuscule budgets, and therefore no third-round matchups with huge financial disparities. The biggest spending gap belongs to Duke and St. John’s—the Blue Devils’ expenses of $25.4 million were 53% more than those of the Red Storm—but most of the remaining teams are operating on an even playing field. Big Ten rivals Nebraska and Iowa have budgets separated by just $781,000, while Sweet 16 foes Michigan and Alabama have the smallest spending gap of $411,000.

(5) Iowa State has the smallest men’s basketball budget in the field.

The Cyclones took out the tournament’s top spender, Kentucky, with relative ease in the second round, but Iowa State is the stingiest program remaining. The school ranked 72nd in the country in 2023-24 with $9.8 million in men’s basketball expenses.

(6) Alabama is the only school this year to make the men’s Sweet 16 and the College Football Playoff.

In an era when the biggest athletic departments have more spending power than ever, it is still proving difficult for schools to be successful in both football and men’s basketball. Alabama’s accomplishment, however, is not unprecedented. Tennessee qualified for the CFP and made the Sweet 16 in 2025, Michigan did so in 2022. Alabama previously did it in both 2021 and 2024, even winning the football national championship in the former year.

(7) 37 of the 80 starters in the Sweet 16 transferred from another D-I school.

The Sweet 16 starter transfer number is actually down from 51 out of 80 last year, the final season for athletes who gained an extra year of eligibility from the COVID pandemic. Three teams this year have been built entirely through the transfer portal: St. John’s, Texas and Michigan. There are, in fact, starters still in the tournament who began their careers with Texas and Michigan, but they currently play for St. John’s and UConn, respectively.

Other teams have turned to the old-school method of high school recruiting to secure their talent. Michigan State is the only team in the field whose second-round starters all began their college careers with their current team. Duke, which typically leans into lineups of “homegrown” underclassmen, would have also fit that description if not for an injury to regular starting center Patrick Ngongba.

(8) The majority of Sweet 16 teams have an international starter.

As basketball has gotten more global, there has been a rise of international players in the NBA, with the most ever foreign-born All-Stars this year. College basketball has undergone a similar shift, as 12 of the 80 Sweet 16 starters this year are international, up from just four in 2016.

(9) This is the tallest Sweet 16 in years.

A few of those aforementioned overseas players, such as 7-foot-1 Croatian Tomislav Ivisic on Illinois and 7-foot-2 Lithuanian Motiejus Krivas on Arizona, also happen to be very tall. They are part of a larger trend (no pun intended). The average height of this year’s Sweet 16 teams, weighted by minutes played, is 78.5 inches according to KenPom. That’s way up from last year’s Sweet 16 average of 77.9, which was already the tallest since 2019.

(10) The average Sweet 16 head coach is 57 years old.

There are four septuagenarians coaching in the Sweet 16—Kelvin Sampson at Houston, Tom Izzo at Michigan State, Rick Pitino at St. John’s and Rick Barnes at Tennessee—and only four of the 16 are younger than 50. No 70-year-old head coach has won a national championship since Lute Olson with Arizona in 1997, which was coincidentally the last time that a school west of Waco, Texas, won the national title.