This NCAA Tournament is good, actually

A season this great deserves an ending this epic

A pretty funny graphic made the rounds online Monday — a glowering photo of ESPN opinion-haver and future United States President Stephen A. Smith above one gloomy word: “Death.”

This ominous On3 edit referred to Smith’s take, uncorked Monday morning, that the NCAA Tournament’s dearth of upsets and lack of Sweet 16 Cinderellas was so damaging as to presage the wholesale destruction of the sport.

“If this continues, it will be the death of college basketball,” Smith said on First Take Monday. “March Madness owns sports for those four weeks. … What is the allure? That everybody has a chance. That’s what gravitates you.”

Smith is not paid for nuance, of course. But he wasn’t alone in his underlying dismay. We saw a number of arguments like this throughout the weekend, in the (highly active!) Buzzer live chat and elsewhere, as it gradually became clear that the Sweet 16 would comprise just four (power) conferences and basically no underdog stories. The weekend itself was about as perfunctory and demure as a 68-team NCAA Tournament can ever be: few truly classic games, zero major shocks, and just one outcome-deciding buzzer-beater (by Maryland’s Derik Queen).

The reason for the tournament’s chalkiness seems to have been settled on: NIL money and the transfer portal have made the best teams better, and mid-majors worse, and are thus ruining the sport just like everyone said they would. (This argument dovetailed nicely with the opening of the 2025 portal, into which a record-shattering 700 players jumped Monday alone.) This, from Jerry Carino, sums up the thinking: “One of the most disappointing first weekends I can remember. No Cinderella runs. No shocking upsets. No mid-majors still standing. Only two memorable finishes. I hope it's a blip. I'm worried it's not.”

This a reasonable concern. The consolidation of power and money at the top of the college sports are indeed things to be wary of, though it is just as likely that the 2025 first weekend was a one-off, and that we’ll get back to copious upsets and busted brackets a year from now. (Also: People complain about that, too — that too many upsets weakens the field and reduces elite matchups in the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight. People are always complaining about something.)

But here’s the other side to that coin: The basketball last weekend was really, really, really good — better than it has ever been, just like it was all season — and if the tradeoff is a few upsets that didn’t happen, most actual college basketball fans will take it.