I included this post in another thread...but it's just as relevant here. Everyone's favorite, Grantland.com, has published a thoughtful, if a little alarmist, Chuck Klosterman piece about how the colleghe bball landscape may further change if Kentucky wins the title this year:

Kentucky's Death March - They're going to win. And what happens next will be really bad for college basketball.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...ege-basketball

"So let's assume Kentucky succeeds. Let's assume they rampage through their final two games. It will disprove a lot of lingering suspicions about what does (and doesn't) work. It will mean that winning a title with freshmen and sophomores is not only plausible, but logical and inarguable. That realization will knock the system out of balance. Right now, there are always two foolproof arguments against the Calipari ideal — it reflects badly on the university, and it breaks down in moments that matter most. No one is going to emulate a program with a bad reputation if the end result is the same as doing things the way they've always been done. But that argument evaporates the moment Calipari climbs a ladder and cuts a net. If Kentucky is simultaneously the most straightforward finishing school for future professionals and the best place to win a national championship, there's no reason for a blue-chip high school senior to go anywhere else. Calipari will dynastically dominate with a revolving door of sheer horsepower, and the only way other schools will be able to respond is by becoming exactly like him.

Now, I'm not suggesting that every single college will turn into a clone of Kentucky, because that's impossible. There aren't enough good players in America for that to happen. But Calipari's scheme will become standard at a handful of universities where losing at basketball is unacceptable: North Carolina, Syracuse, Kansas, UCLA, and maybe even Duke. These schools already recruit one-and-done freshmen, but they'll have to go further; they'll have to be as transparent about their motives as Calipari is (because transparency is the obsession of modernity). If they resist, they will fade. And the result will be a radical amplification of what the game has already become: There will be five schools sharing the 25 best players in the country, and all the lesser programs will kill each other for the right to lose to those five schools in the Sweet 16. It will skew the competitive balance of major conferences and split D-I basketball into two completely unequal tiers. Final Four games will look more and more like sloppy pro games, and national interest in college basketball will wane (even if the level of play technically increases).5 In 10 years, it might be a niche sport for people like me — people who can't get over the past."