The Big Ten and college hoops in general has a ton of parity now. The mid majors are throwing everything into hoops. Furthermore, this AAU stuff and year round play has made it so there are a bunch of really, really good players, but of course there are very few elite players. The crazy thing is you go watch Furman play the regional teams in the southeast and by the end of the year those teams, which would probably go well under .500 in the Big Ten, are completely capable of beating pretty much any Big Ten team if they have a decent shooting night.
Someone at my office was saying the other day that Furman may need to come up with a million bucks a year for their coach after one tournament win and no one is batting an eye about them getting the necessary donations. These schools know that two wins in the tournament is a godsend for recruiting the general student body. It's also a godsend if they land a future NBA star. One of my colleagues went to Davidson and he heard that as of a couple years ago almost a quarter of their applications mentioned Steph Curry.
We as Iowa fans get grumpy when we suck in the tournament, but for many of these smaller schools the tournament is viewed as a path forward to getting out of an existential crisis. The higher ed model in the US is simply not sustainable and a bunch of schools are going to close, but the P5 schools ain't going anywhere. But schools like Bradley, Furman, Drake, Wofford, Valparaiso, etc. would sell their soul and give their left nut to get the exposure that Loyola Chicago got with its miracle run a few years ago. It completely changes the trajectory of the school. And the coaches at the smaller schools are all vying to be the next Coach K or Calipari. They'll grind 10x harder than Brad Underwood or Fran or Juwan Howard to grab that next rung on the ladder.