The first weekend of the 2025 NCAA Men\u2019s Basketball Tournament was noticeably devoid of the usual madness we\u2019ve come to associate with the sport in the month of March. That has Stephen A. Smith worried. <\/p>\n
With only one double-digit seed remaining in the Arkansas Razorbacks, many are willing to proclaim the end of mid-major programs making runs in the NCAA Tournament, due to the advent of NIL and the Transfer Portal. Since the Cinderella runs are what the masses have come to love about the sport, Smith believes college basketball could be in major trouble if the illusion disappears, and this trend continues.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf this continues, it will be the death of college basketball,\u201d Smith said, via First<\/em><\/a> Take<\/a><\/em>. \u201c\u2026 March Madness owns sports for those four weeks. \u2026 What is the allure? That everybody has a chance. That\u2019s what gravitates you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 This story is developing and will be updated. <\/em><\/p>\n The post Stephen A. Smith warns lack of Cinderella runs will be \u2018death of college basketball\u2019<\/a> appeared first on On3<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first weekend of the 2025 NCAA Men\u2019s Basketball Tournament was noticeably devoid of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}