Stephen A. Smith: Lack Of Upsets In NCAA Tourney Will Be ‘Death Of College Basketball’
Stephen A. Smith is bored with the NCAA Tournament.
With the first two rounds in the books, all the mid-major teams have been eliminated and only the Power Five remain. In other words, we're not getting a Cinderella story this year.
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"If this continues, it will be the death of college basketball," the outspoken ESPN host declared on Monday's episode of First Take.
After colleague Seth Greenberg, a longtime college basketball coach, looked shocked by the bold statement, Smith explained.
"Listen to what I’m saying, coach. This has no effect on the allure of college basketball during the season," Smith said. "But March Madness, the madness of March, owns sports for that four-to-five-week period beginning somewhere in March through the early part of April. Owns sports."
In Smith's opinion, the popularity of the NCAA Tournament can be mostly attributed to the fact that people love upsets. They want chaos, bracket busters and a Cinderella story.
Because we live in the modern era of NIL and the transfer portal, though, the longtime ESPN host says these smaller, mid-major programs won't be able to recruit the players they need to compete and go deep in the tournament.
"If there was no NIL, if there was no [transfer] portal, and you have the mid-majors go 0-6 in the second round, please, we ain’t sweating that," Smith said. "What you don’t want is a situation where nobody has a chance because those players from the mid-majors say, ‘You know what? We’re going to get some money from Kentucky. We’re going to get some money from UConn. We’re going to get some money from some other program that we can’t get here.’
"You don’t want that to be the reason you have these kinds of results in the NCAA Tournament. If people continue to get to point to that, then college basketball, as we knew it — which to me is all about March Madness — will cease to exist. Because there’s no madness."
March isn't mad enough for Stephen A. Smith
(Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images)
It's an interesting hypothesis, Stephen A.. But so far, ratings for the NCAA Tournament are not suffering. On Friday, CBS Sports and TNT announced that they'd delivered the most-watched NCAA Tournament first round ever — averaging 9.1 million viewers.
Something tells me all those people won't stop watching just because Norfolk State and Wofford are out.