Everybody loves March Madness and the NCAA Tournament. Everyone that is except for Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy.
Shaughnessy is a legendary sportswriter and was honored by the Baseball Writers Association of America with their career excellence award. But he’s never been known to excitedly embrace change when it comes to sports and can often take a contrarian point of view.
When it comes to the NCAA Tournament and the changing landscape of college athletics, that is no exception.
On the eve of March Madness, Shaughnessy took to the Globe to write a scorched earth column about the sanctity of the sport being ruined and how NIL and the transfer portal have made it a farce.
No thanks, Basketball America. I’ll be sitting this one out. I’m not sure I’d watch the Monday, April 7 men’s championship game if they played it in my driveway.Seriously. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament used to be great, but I have a hard time understanding how folks invest dollars and emotions in today’s farce that has almost nothing to do with colleges and universities.
Shaughnessy peppers his column with scathing critics from Leo Papile, who is a former personnel director with the Boston Celtics, with complaints you would expect to see from people of a different era talking about modern day sports. And if you were hoping for a Bob Cousy shoutout in honor of Chris Russo in the ultimate display of generational clashes, you were not disappointed. There’s also a shoutout to kindred spirit Phil Mushnick at the New York Post and one of his typically curmudgeonly columns that contains thoughts about college athletics that are so absurd that it’s not even worth linking to.
I’m not expecting a return to Holy Cross winning the 1947 NCAA championship with freshman Bob Cousy and a roster of legitimate student-athletes (probably Classics majors) who had no home court and practiced in a surplus naval airplane hangar atop little Mount Saint James in Worcester. I’m not asking for “Big Daddy D” Lattin and four little-known Black teammates from Texas Western beating Adolph Rupp, Pat Riley, and Kentucky in 1966, or Brad Stevens having Butler running the picket fence against Duke in the 2010 final.Clearly, cash and cheating long ago corrupted the sweet amateur status of college basketball and it’s been decades since most of the players on the court had real connection to the schools represented on their jerseys.
What has led to the desecration and destruction of the NCAA Tournament? The transfer portal and NIL of course. He even calls out St. John’s guard Deivon Smith as an example as someone who has transferred multiple times and played 137 games of D-I basketball.
But as we start the 2025 men’s tournament, it’s also clear that TV money, NIL money, and the transfer portal have broken a once-great product and frayed lingering threads that once connected the athletes to the schools they represent. Players who are unhappy with their compensation or playing time rush to transfer and some big-time men’s basketball rosters turn over annually. Big-time NCAA men’s basketball has become professional basketball without the rules that govern the NBA.
Take a look at St. John’s guard Deivon Smith. He’s 23 years old and this is his fourth NCAA Division 1 school. He’s moved from Mississippi State (2020-21) to Georgia Tech (2021-22 and 2022-23) to Utah, and finally landed at St. John’s with Pitino. He’s played five full college seasons, a total of 137 games!
Shaughnessy cites coaches like Tony Bennett and Jay Wright who stepped away from college basketball because of the demands of the new era. He also references Pitino at St. John’s and John Calipari at Arkansas later in his column as examples of coaches who have historically flouted NCAA rules but can now run roughshod over college athletics above the table.
But what Dan Shaughnessy doesn’t mention is that players have the same freedom that coaches have always enjoyed to chase bigger paydays and better gigs at more prominent universities. Was it tearing at the fabric of college athletics when Pitino climbed the coaching ladder from Boston to Providence to Kentucky? What about when Calipari went from UMass to Memphis and then the Wildcats?
While there is handwringing from folks that may yearn for the days of no three point line and freshmen being ineligible, the NCAA Tournament is more popular than ever before. Which is good because there’s no way the NCAA could fit all those fans in Dan Shaughnessy’s driveway. Last year’s tournament set record viewership numbers through the first weekend of March Madness and over 12 million watched the Final Four even though it was on cable.
Shaughnessy’s kicker is a complaint that, “It’s 2025 and the NCAA Tournament is professional basketball.” But that doesn’t really seem to bother anyone other than him. And maybe Phil Mushnick.
