The NCAA women's final four tips off tonight in Tampa with the men's last game starting tomorrow in San Antonio.

William Brangham has a look now at the ways in which the games are shifting. William.

Umna, this year's tournaments are unique in part because they feature a large number of players who previously played for a

different school. That's thanks to big rule changes in the NCAA that let athletes easily move

between schools. So to help break all this down and explain the broader impact on college sports,

we are joined by Jesse Doherty. He's a reporter at the Washington Post who covers

the business of sports. Jesse, thank you so much for being here. Help us understand the big

changes that are underway now with athletes able to enter what is called the so-called transfer

portal, which allows them to toggle between schools. How is that impacting the game and more specifically this tournament?

Yeah, the reasons for it are really twofold. On one side, there's the transfer portal piece and then very, very interconnected. There's name image and likeness money, which we more colloquially refer to as NIL.

So about three, four years ago, the NCAA started to loosen transfer rules.

At the same time, they allowed athletes to start monetizing their name image and likeness

effectively get paid, whether by brands or boosters.

And what happened is that basically annually, athletes started switching schools because now the NCAA

have far fewer restrictions on needing to sit out or needing to sort of spend time away from the

game when you did switch programs.

And at the same time, being able to make that NIL money, programs start bidding on these

players sort of like free agents in professional sports.

So that's all culminated in an era of extreme player movement, which has affected both

the men's and women's brackets. On the men's side, for example, more than half the players

in this year's 68 team tournament field had played for a previous D1 team before this season.

It's just an astounding number. So really, I mean, for the fans, it's just it's hard to follow

...