Stephen A. Smith serves as a Swiss Army knife for ESPN in terms of the kinds of topics he discusses on the network. But according to one longtime college basketball analyst and former colleague of Smith, his knowledge of the current college basketball landscape isn’t quite up to snuff.
One of the bigger talking points around the ongoing 2025 NCAA Tournament has been the dominance shown by the power conferences within the sport. All 16 teams remaining in the NCAA Tournament are from major conferences.
This has sparked the debate as to whether the recent changes to collegiate sports, most notably the rise of NIL and the transfer portal, have led to the death of “Cinderella” mid-major teams making deep tournament runs.
The cast of ESPN’s First Take discussed this topic on Monday’s edition of the show, with Stephen A. Smith sharing the opinion that a lack of upsets in the NCAA Tournament in the future would lead to the “death of college basketball”.
“If this continues, it will be the death of college basketball,” Smith said.
Former ESPN college basketball analyst and current college basketball analyst at The Field of 68, Jeff Goodman, took notice of Smith’s comments, calling him out for “weighing in on a sport he probably hasn’t watched in a decade.”
“Love that this guy is gonna weigh in on a sport he probably hasn’t watched in a decade or so,” wrote Goodman in a post on X.
Love that this guy is gonna weigh in on a sport he probably hasn’t watched in a decade or so. https://t.co/AUdb2ac6G0
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) March 25, 2025
Goodman’s point has some validity. Unless Smith is discussing someone who is set to be a star at the NBA level, like Cooper Flagg, we typically see Smith’s commentary around college basketball kept to a minimum until the start of the NCAA Tournament each year.
Still, it is particularly interesting to see Goodman publicly calling out Smith, considering they were colleagues for the five years that Goodman worked at ESPN from 2013 to 2018.
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