The 2025 NCAA Tournament featured several prominent talking points throughout the three-week-long event. Some of which have recently drawn the ire of longtime Fox Sports broadcaster Tim Brando.
In the early portions of the 2025 NCAA Tournament, media members were largely unimpressed with the lack of Cinderella teams making a run deep into the tournament, which some have correlated to the influx of talent entering the transfer portal each year.
In a recent conversation with Pete Mundo of Heartland College Sports, Brando took exception with those starting the conversation that the transfer portal and NIL have “killed” the NCAA Tournament when it comes to “Cinderella” teams.
Additionally, Brando stood up for Houston head coach Kelvin Sampson, who has faced backlash for his comments after the National Championship game.
“I am so sick and tired, I am so pissed off at the way the modern sports media trashes college athletics,” said Brando. “The first two rounds of the tournament it’s, ‘Oh, it’s terrible. Cinderella is dead. The NIL and the portal killed it.’ Then we’ve got this unbelievable second week where the Sweet 16 saw some remarkable comebacks. Little or nothing is said about it. And then in the aftermath of this game, let’s crucify Kelvin Sampson for stating the obvious. ‘It’s incomprehensible that we couldn’t get a shot.’ Now, all of the sudden, he is throwing his guys under the bus?
“That’s what the media portrayal of Kelvin is? That is B.S. with a capital B and S. Those kids love him. I’m sure (J’Wan) Roberts wishes he had made a couple of those bunnies that were given to him that he didn’t put in. How about the missed dunks? We can go over and over where points were lost. First and second half for Houston. But you’ve got to give Florida credit, man.”
Later, Brando was asked specifically whether he believes that the transfer portal and NIL are “healthy” for college basketball. And while he acknowledges that both the transfer portal and NIL need further regulation, Brando certainly doesn’t see it as something that is killing the sport either.
“I don’t think that it’s healthy necessarily. But it’s not the death nail. College athletics hasn’t gone to hell. If we didn’t learn from how the tournament played out… Even after all of the crap that came from the media about Cinderella not being a factor, the top seeds going through and chalk prevailing. What we saw through the week of the Sweet 16 and in this Final Four is that those kids, whether they are getting money or not, are giving their all. Playing their butts off and giving us a tremendous product.
“The three weeks of the NCAA Tournament are still the best three weeks in college athletics. And the Final Four consists of a semi-final Saturday, I think that is the best single day of college athletics. I don’t care what the helmet heads say about the College Football Playoff. It’s not as great a day as the Saturday Semifinals of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. It’s not.”
As Brando alluded to, there were numerous media personalities on a national level declaring that the lack of Cinderellas would be the “death of college basketball”.
Perhaps a larger sample size will come to show that there is a correlation between the start of the transfer portal and a lack of upsets in the NCAA Tournament.
But considering how much buzz there was around the Final Four this season, the sentiment that this year’s NCAA Tournament was in any way not as interesting as others very clearly appears to be a bit of a premature declaration.
