After chaos, will a better tournament emerge?

Someday, the changes might end up working for everyone. The NCAA Tournament will improve because fans will recognize more names on the backs of the jerseys, and the NBA will benefit because more teenagers can grow up on someone else’s dime.

That’s the way Jay Wright sees the future, anyway.

But in the meantime?

“It could be a mess for three or four years,” the Villanova coach conceded this week.

In a sport that long has promoted the madness of March, there’s now a different kind of chaos and it doesn’t figure to die down after the Final Four. The longoverdue arrival of name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation has transformed the way players are recruited, and the convenience of the modern transfer portal has made retaining them more difficult than ever.

It is no wonder that teams like Miami and Iowa State, who met in the Sweet 16 on Friday, seemed to come out of nowhere. Both relied heavily on players who started their careers at other programs and neither really understood what they had until a couple of weeks ago.

Even for a master program builder like Kelvin Sampson, whose Houston Cougars were vying for a second consecutive Final Four trip Saturday at the AT&T Center against Wright’s Wildcats, construction projects come with extra challenges these days.

“It’s hard to build in cement now,” Sampson said. “Everything is almost in sand.”

Just think about everyone’s favorite feathered tournament sensation, the precocious Saint Peter’s Peacocks. Hailing from a tiny school in New Jersey, they