ESPN’s Mike Greenberg made headlines on Monday when he proclaimed that the UConn men’s basketball team could make the playoffs in the NBA’s Eastern Conference.
As it turns out, the Get Up host was just kidding. You’ll have to take his word for it.
On Tuesday’s episode of his nationally syndicated ESPN Radio show, Greeny, Greenberg discussed the viral nature of his bold stance. And in doing so, the former Mike & Mike co-host seemed surprised that people ran his comments as if they were serious, as he was merely exaggerating just how good the Huskies are.
“I’m more than willing to admit that I’ve said more than a million stupid things,” Greenberg said. “It just bothered me yesterday because I knew I was kidding. And maybe — look, I grant, if it wasn’t obvious enough that I was kidding, that’s on me, that’s not on anybody else… for what it was worth, if I need to say this out loud, I do not believe that UConn would make the playoffs in the NBA.”
Asked by one of his co-hosts if the Huskies would go 0-82 playing an NBA schedule, Greenberg responded, “They would probably go 0-82, yeah. It would depend on the resting status of some of these other teams. Or, as we’re going to get to in a minute here, it would depend on how hard everybody on the other team was trying not to make their props. Let’s actually get to that,” before transitioning to a discussion about the Jontay Porter gambling scandal.
And that’s why he makes the big bucks.
Yet despite his insistence that he was just joshing around, even Greenberg admitted that it wasn’t obvious he wasn’t being serious when he re-listened to a clip of him saying, “Connecticut would make the playoffs in the NBA’s Eastern Conference.” Rather, he stated that the clip was isolated from the context of it being a running joke throughout Monday’s episode of Get Up.
As somebody who watched all of said episode, I can freely admit that I had no idea that Greenberg was joking. Whether that says more about me or my opinions of Greenberg’s takes — I’ll let you decide. But as a longtime viewer of Get Up, the sight of Jay Williams and Seth Greenberg roasting Greenberg for taking such a stance was hardly out of place. And even ESPN’s own YouTube page posted the comments in a way that presented them as serious.
But while Greenberg might feel as though his comments were taken out of context, he deserves credit for taking ownership of not making it more clear that he was joking. At the end of the day, these are just hypothetical conversations about sports games — even if this particular take was especially egregious.
[Greeny]
