Colin Cowherd has spent a long career offering takes loudly and revisiting them selectively. The Elite Eight, however, forced an unusual day of public audit on his FS1 show — because two of Cowherd's running theories had either been confirmed, or quietly undone, and he was willing to say so on air.
The first was NIL, the Big Ten and the SEC.
"I said when the NIL came out, the Big Ten's got more money, and I think they've got better coaching," Cowherd reminded his audience. The numbers, by the Elite Eight, were hard to argue with. "The SEC was 0 and 6 against the Big Ten in the tournament, and a lot of the games weren't close."
That went with Cowherd's second — and more uncomfortable — admission. He has spent years defending old-school college coaches against the newer, more aggressive class of program-builders, and after watching them get ground up in this year's tournament, he was direct about it.
"I love the old-school coaches. Well, they got kicked to the curb in the Elite 8," he said. "I love my old coaches, but the truth is, Dusty May and Tommy Lloyd are elite recruiters, and it has paid off."
May's Michigan was the team Cowherd had publicly backed to win the whole thing. "I had Michigan getting to the Final Four and winning it, and right now, they look as good as anybody," he said. "You watch Michigan — they are the only team that checks every box." Days later, the Wolverines made Cowherd look prescient with a 91-73 dismantling of Lloyd's top-seeded Arizona in the Final Four semifinal, a result that punctuated every argument he had been making about coaching, NIL and modern roster construction.
The second reckoning was about the NBA — and this one was less flattering. Cowherd has argued for years that tanking is a media-inflated problem, not a structural one. This cycle, he backed off.
"I've said tanking is not the number-one concern for the NBA," he said. "If you're not going to allow other ways to acquire Wemby, then people are going to tank."
That is about as close to a mea culpa as Cowherd gets on air. The implication — that the league's current structure makes tanking a rational strategy once a generational prospect like Victor Wembanyama enters a draft class — is one that has been made more forcefully by others in the media, but rarely by someone who spent years pushing in the opposite direction.
Take all three together and Cowherd's loop was tidy: a Big Ten win that validated his NIL theory, a Michigan title run that is validating his Dusty May theory, and a late-career shift to admitting the NBA has a lottery problem. The through-line across both leagues is the same — that roster construction, not just coaching nous, is now the sport's primary lever.
Whether May or Lloyd cut down the nets next weekend is yet to be decided. What is already decided, in Cowherd's telling, is that the coaching generation that won championships by recruiting harder than schemers would ever be forced to is now the dominant one on both sides of the amateur line. He did not pretend he had always seen it coming — but he was comfortable enough with the Big Ten and Michigan numbers to spend a segment admitting when he had been wrong.
For a pundit who built his brand on absolute takes, that counts as news.
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*Originally published on [NBA News](https://nbanews.global/article/colin-cowherd-big-ten-sec-nil-dominance-nba-tanking-elite-eight-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
