How is it that all of these dumpy little schools have good basketball teams?

elbow in, off the index finger

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it's cheap to field a team

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Indoor hand soccer

A lot of them aren't really that good

But all the conferences get a team in

That's why they are here

It's the UConn/Gonzaga principle... not everyone is a P4 football powerhouse. Hell, half the P4 teams are not powerhouses, they just ride conference TV money.

Basketball also has TV money, second best in the NCAA. And it's a whole lot easier (and cheaper) to assemble a competitive team via different means.

UConn and Gonzaga, and a lot of the P4 teams that don't excel in football- save your NIL to assemble top talent annually. Return some talent each year, add in new, and voila, you have a good team.

Lower tier teams- solid coach develops a scheme, you recruit each year to that scheme, those guys stay and improve (and become more familiar with that scheme as well). Bob who was brought in to be a slow, tall white rebounder and shoot spot up 3's, by his junior year he's a decent 3 pt shooter.
Coach runs a heavy-motion offense; by year 3 (for the player) his players can run that smoothly enough that it can give any team fits to defend.

Plus as somebody said, basketball has a lot of skills that you can do by yourself. Shooting, all you need is a ball and a hoop. Dribbling, all you need is a ball.
Who was it that said his court was on a slight hill? And if he didn't hit the baseline jumper, he'd have to go run down the hill to retrieve the ball... that honed his shot.

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All small schools have to win their tournament. So they have a team that is playing its best basketball of the year and is hot against a big school that may have had a mediocre to bad end of the year

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Yep, beat me to it

Winning basketball has a lower barrier to entry.

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Winning basketball has a lower barrier to entry.

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So what’s your excuse this season with such a low barrier? If it’s so easy, why hasn’t horn done it this year? All it takes is money. Right, pistol cowboy?

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Talent trumps schemes, and talent + schemes beats talent. That's over a season.

LSU for example, could not bring in a coach who runs the Princeton Weave (or whatever it's called), recruit "down" to that scheme, and win consistently in the SEC. Even with an experienced team running it well a couple years down the road, they might catch one good team, say Kentucky... but Tenn, Auburn, Fla etc would look at that film, see the weak links (and there would be many), and devise a way to beat it. A couple good teams tweaking what was done, and it would become blowouts.
*the only time that could have worked was with Vandy, with their weird bench layout- teams were at opposite baselines, so you'd go a half with being unable to communicate with your defense, etc. And that still didn't work beyond bare minimum, occasional success.

At P4 level in conference, you need players able to compete, AND you need a coach who can effectively counter what the other coach does. With Pearl, Oates, Barnes, Calipari etc, that sets the bar pretty high. We joke about Calipari, but if he sets his mind to a specific style of play, and you get some continuity (not a whole lot, but more than Kentucky returned) across seasons, he's a tough guy to coach against.

Now, single game, anything can happen. Someone gets hot and the other team gets cold, and you can see Yale beat Auburn, Robert Morris scare the piss out of Bama, etc. That's rare to see last the entire tourney, much less a whole season. More often you see something like Omaha-St Johns, where the lesser team plays over their head and the better team is off, and you get a close half... but end up with a 30 pt blowout.

For LSU, I would say McMahon doesn't seem to be able to get the elite talent necessary to just overwhelm someone, or even enough to complete a game. He's a good enough coach/schemer that the team is solid for a half or 3/4 of the game, but they can't finish. And as we saw, eventually you lose the team when they can't see a way to win going forward.