UConn Huskies head women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, who has made tens of millions of dollars coaching college athletes, believes NCAA sports are “dying” because of everything going on these days.
“On the inside, it’s dying,” Auriemma said about college sports, appearing on Yahoo! Sports Daily last week.
“Because every single day, something comes up to show you a symptom of the disease that we’re suffering [from]. And I’m not saying, ‘Hey, don’t pay the kids. Hey, don’t let them transfer.’ But I think every fan out there, every day they look at Yahoo Sports or pick up any other source of information, and they read about another lawsuit, another coach trying to get away with anything they can, another school trying to do whatever they have to do to win. The more this happens, and the more these things keep being the central focus of the news, the more we’re dying one day at a time.”
Auriemma compared college sports right now to an aging parent.
“College sports is dying,” Auriemma said. “I’ve had parents pass away, and when they were dying on the inside, they didn’t always show it on the outside. On the outside, I think sometimes it looks like, ‘Wow, everything’s great. Look, all this and all that. Look at what we have, look at what we’re doing.'”
Paul Finebaum criticizes Auriemma for ‘disgraceful’ comment
Finebaum ripped Auriemma during an appearance on “The Matt Barrie Show” podcast.
“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.”
Finebaum also ripped Auriemma for his incident with Dawn Staley at 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.”
