Paul Finebaum found it ‘disgraceful, embarassing’ of Geno Auriemma for saying college sports are ‘dying’

Week 1 of the college football season was great, with exciting games and great storylines from Baton Rouge to Eugene.

But Sunday morning, in his regular appearance on The Matt Barrie Show podcast, longtime ESPN college football commentator Paul Finebaum had different matters on his mind. And a different sport.

Namely, Finebaum was thinking about UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, and the argument he made last week that college sports are “dying.”

“I realize he’s a Hall of Fame coach, and I realize he’s one of the greatest, if not the greatest, in his field, but … he said ‘college sports is dying,’ and Matt, I didn’t see any evidence of that yesterday,” Finebaum told Barrie.

“We have said this, and we’ll say it again, it is a sport in chaos. The moral decay of what we talk about is at a level we’ve never seen, but it just doesn’t matter once we flip the calendar to September and Saturdays. The scene in Tiger Stadium, the scene in Ann Arbor, the scene in Oregon, in Atlanta, that is not a sport that looks like it is ready to be given his last rites.”

It can be difficult to balance the way that college sports are growing in popularity amid a period of such intense change, and Auriemma is one of many coaches to claim the sky is falling. These incendiary comments from coaches don’t typically land well, and that was the case last week after Auriemma’s appearance on Yahoo Sports Daily. Most see leaders like Auriemma merely complaining that their job has gotten harder.

Twisting the knife on Barrie’s podcast, Finebaum said Auriemma’s whining about the state of college sports was just another chapter in his “farewell, infamy tour” after a similarly petulant dust-up with Dawn Staley during the Final Four:

“And Geno, I didn’t think your behavior could have been any worse than when you lost in the semifinals when you wouldn’t shake the hand of your opponent, Dawn Staley, but you managed to go one rung lower on your farewell infamy tour that is beginning to be disgraceful, embarrassing, especially somebody who should be the example of the greatest of all time.”

For years, coaches have dominated the messaging around the expansion of college athletes’ rights. Framing the changes this way has contributed to the general perception that college sports are a mess. Perhaps the tide is turning as commentators like Finebaum call out the hypocrisy from coaches and articulate a clearer lay of the land to everyday fans.