MINNEAPOLIS — This Final Four is the fifth anniversary of one of the most effective, if inadvertent, instances of athlete activism in college sports.

This was when the Connecticut star Shabazz Napier, speaking to the news media shortly before the 2014 national championship game, said that he sometimes did not have enough to eat.

“There are hungry nights that I go to bed and I’m starving,” he said.

Within weeks, the N.C.A.A.’s board of directors for Division I voted to lift restrictions on how much teams could feed their players. No longer would there be bizarre hairsplitting over what was and was not a meal (notoriously, serving peanuts did not count, while serving peanut butter did). Now teams can and do routinely give athletes feasts.

This common-sense reform had been in the works and probably would have occurred eventually. But the stark comments by a high-profile player at the N.C.A.A.’s signature event ensured the nearly immediate change and boatloads of attention on the N.C.A.A.’s power over college athletes.