Florida Basketball enters the Sweet 16 with its dream of winning a national title for the first time since 2007 still intact. The Gators were given a scare by back-to-back defending champs UConn, but the quality of Todd Golden and crew shone through down the stretch as Florida avoided the upset.
As the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament played out, most of the country avoided an upset, and apparently, that is a problem for the rest of America.
Florida Basketball: No Fairy Tales
Stephen A. Smith took to the airwaves to give college basketball a stern warning after the bulk of the top seeds all advanced and the only real upset in the tournament was Arkansas beating St. John's, McNeese State beating Clemson, and Colorado State beating Memphis:
"If this continues, this will be the death of college basketball. Because college basketball — listen to what I'm saying — this has no effect on the lure of college basketball during the season. But March Madness, the madness of March, owns sports for that 4-5 week period."
Ignoring the fact we are one year removed from 14-seed Oakland beating 3-seed Kentucky and 11-seed NC State making it to the Final Four, along with being two years removed from 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson beating Purdue and 9-seed FAU making it to the Final Four against 5-seed San Deigo State, there are some key flaws with this argument.
The first is that people love to talk about Cinderellas, but no one actually likes to watch them. For example, in 2023, that FAU versus San Diego State game drew 11.8 million viewers while airing on CBS. That was down from the 17.6 million viewers the UNC versus Duke Final Four matchup drew in 2022, and that game aired on cable.
You can backtrack through the years for this phenomenon, including in 2006 when Florida faced George Mason in the Final Four. It drew 14.4 million viewers compared to the 17.5 million the UNC versus Michigan State Final Four game drew in 2005.
The other key part of musing about the lack of Cinderellas and claiming it will be the "Death of college basketball" is that you openly admit you don't watch college basketball except for March Madness.
It was fantastic for the rest of us who watched Florida take on the SEC this year. Even when Florida lost to Kentucky to open SEC play, it was awesome because two teams played at a high level with intensity.
But the final grand irony from the Cinderella fanboys is that they are the same crowd that whined and moaned about how the regular season for college football is now meaningless because of expanded playoffs. In their world, they are begging for Florida's 30-4 regular season record to mean nothing so that they can get their one shining moment of an eventual Rent-A-Center Manager having the game of his life before he gets blown out by 20 in the next round in a game they aren't going to watch.
So rather than whine about the lack of Cinderella, we could just celebrate the Florida Gators. Walter Clayton Jr. is awesome. Alijah Martin and Will Richard are awesome. All the bigs for the Gators are fun to watch. Players on the bench are engaged and just excited to participate in the ride. Florida is killing it with their TikTok game.
On Thursday, we get the Gators versus the Crab Five.
If you don't like that, they you just don't like college basketball.