There's been a lot of discussion recently about the health and sustainability of the current iteration of college basketball. A lot of the conversation centers around negative trends and the professionalization of the sport, but basketball broadcaster John Fanta doesn't see it that way.

He recently sat down with Front Office Sports to double down on his opinion that college basketball has never been in a better place.

Advertisement

"First and foremost, if you look at any analytics, we’ve never seen teams playing at the level that they’ve been performing at. That’s led us to the last two years of Final Fours that have just featured historically great teams," Fanta said.

Fanta also spoke about the financial options college players have now and why that compels them to stay in school if they're a fringe NBA draft pick. He believes this dynamic ultimately helps the talent in the sport.

"When you look at that, that many of the best players that are teetering are staying in the college game, it’s leading us to having some tremendous, tremendous teams and depth of teams in college basketball," he said.

Advertisement

While NIL has drastically changed the landscape of college basketball, Fanta believes something else is truly the underlying reason for why the sport has been transformed.

"To me, the portal is the big thing that really changed the axis of the sport because you can transfer however many times you’d like and there’s no restrictions. In a perfect world, I’d like to see players be allowed to transfer once, and then any ensuing time you do it, there has to be something like having to sit out a year. That doesn’t seem realistic, though," Fanta opined.

The discourse surrounding college basketball will be fascinating to follow heading into the new season this fall.

Contact/Follow @College_Wire on X and @College_Wires on Threads. Like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of college sports news, notes, and opinions.

Advertisement

This article originally appeared on College Sports Wire: John Fanta believes college basketball is better than it has ever been