March Madness 2012: Breaking Down the Anatomy of a Cinderella

All Cinderella teams are different. Yet in many ways, they're all alike too.

We're typically lucky enough to see one Cinderella team in each new rendition of the NCAA Tournament. These teams barely get in the tournament in the first place, and they aren't given a chance to do anything once they get in. When they do, well, that's when they become Cinderellas.

But what exactly makes a Cinderella? Is there a kind of DNA that all Cinderella teams share? Is it possible that we might be able to determine what this DNA looks like?

Good questions. Here are the answers?

Straight Outta Some Really Obscure Conference

College basketball is an elitist enterprise. All things revolve around the power six conferences, where teams have the resources to lure the best coaches and the best recruits from around the country to form basketball powerhouses.

Cinderella teams do not hale from the power six conferences. They come from strange, exotic conferences that bear names like the "Colonial Athletic Association," the "Horizon League" and the "West Coast Conference."

More often than not, the only way to get into the NCAA Tournament from one of these conferences is to win the conference tournament. Indeed, the smaller conferences are no country for at-large bids.

Winners of the smaller conference tournaments are given a pat on the back and a low seed. It's as if the selection committee is saying, "Great job, now go and meet your doom."

Most do just that. But every once in a while...

Long is the Way, and Hard

No Cinderella team has ever walked an easy path. These are lower-seeded teams we're talking about, and things are arranged in a way where no lower-seeded team will ever have an easy time in the Big Dance.

Cinderella teams have no choice but to pull off a few upsets to advance further and further into the tournament. 

Take the 1985 Villanova Wildcats, for example. To get to the championship game, they had to overcome No. 1 Michigan, No. 5 Maryland and No. 2 North Carolina. Once in the tournament, they had to defeat Patrick Ewing and the No. 1 Georgetown Hoyas.

They accomplished that by making nearly 80 percent of their shots, a performance for the ages.

Villanova's path in 1985 is about as difficult as it gets, but it's also par for the course for Cinderella teams. They accept whatever challenge is laid at their feet, and they just keep winning.

Wizard Head Coach

Teams that would go on a Cinderella run through the tournament require a little bit of magic to get the job done. It helps to have a leader at the helm who is actually capable of conjuring magic.

Cinderella teams can't hope to match the collective talent of many of their opponents, but nowhere is it written that the coaches in charge of the talented teams have to be smarter and wiser than the coaches in charge of the not-so-talented teams. Coaching is a game anybody can win.

In recent seasons, we've seen this point proven by Butler's Brad Stevens and VCU's Shaka Smart. Stevens took the fifth-seeded Bulldogs all the way to the tournament final against Duke in 2010, and he took them back there again in 2011. Smart took his Rams all the way to the Final Four in 2011 after entering the tournament as an 11 seed.

For Stevens, it was all about remaining calm and preaching fundamentals and defense. For Smart, it was all about preaching Havoc. Both strategies resulted in great things.

Whether we're talking about Stevens, Smart, Jim Larranaga or whoever, the wizards in charge of Cinderella teams all manage to accomplish one thing: they make a team much better than the sum of its parts. It's all about team basketball and a will to win, and those things come straight from the coach.

The Hidden Gem Player

Wizard head coaches and varying styles of team basketball are all well and good, but every Cinderella team needs to have at least one standout player to rally around on the court.

To name just a few examples, Stephen Curry spearheaded Davidson's run to the Elite Eight in 2008, Billy Donovan led Providence's charge to the Final Four in 1987, Bryce Drew came up big for Valparaiso in 1998 and Gordon Hayward established himself as a bona fide star during Butler's run to the final in 2010.

When players like these explode in the Big Dance, that's when it becomes apparent that basketball recruiting is not an exact science. If it was, these hidden gem players would have ended up at bigger, more powerful schools with bigger, more powerful programs. 

But basketball recruiting is not an exact science. That allows these hidden gem players to slip through the cracks only to come back to bite the programs that whiffed on them in the NCAA Tournament.

That Little Something Extra

When it comes to pinpointing what makes a Cinderella team, smart head coaches, good team play and hidden gem players are all real, tangible things.

But there are intangible things that go into making a Cinderella team too. It just depends on what you can to call these things. 

Is it luck? Magic? Divine favor? Destiny?

Whatever it is, there's always something strange going on whenever a Cinderella team emerges and proceeds to make a run through the tournament. This something leads to timely calls, key mistakes on the part of their opponents and, of course, key buckets, all of which serve to shatter the preconceived notion of what should be happening in a given game.

Once that notion is shattered, all bets are off. That's when the miracles that define Cinderella teams tend to happen.

The first couple entries in this list make it easy to draw up a list of possible Cinderella teams. All you have to do is single out the teams that come from small conferences and that are facing a tough road through the NCAA Tournament.

Narrowing down the list and ultimately pinpointing which team (or teams) is are bout to go on a Cinderella run through the tournament is significantly more difficult. It's oftentimes hard to tell which teams have wizard head coaches capable of inspiring outstanding team basketball, and it's even harder to tell which teams have hidden gem players. These are things we typically don't find out until a team is already in the midst of an improbable run through the tournament.

And of course, trying to pinpoint which team has a little magic in it is impossible altogether. March Madness magic is invisible right up until the point when it's not.

So despite the fact that all Cinderella teams do indeed share a certain DNA, there's really no way to spot which teams have it until their Cinderella run is well underway.

And that, my friends, is the beauty of it.