Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the 98-year-old team chaplain for Loyola-Chicago men’s basketball, thinks God likes college basketball more than the NBA.
Sister Jean reignites the annual NBA vs. college basketball debate
She’s the media star of a Final Four circus.
Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports
She adds:
My view is God would take issue with an organization that’s making $857 million in TV money for a basketball tournament and not paying its players. But Sister Jean has a closer relationship with God than I do, so maybe she knows better. Reasonable people can disagree about this subject.
Sister Jean has now waded into one of the hottest, most evergreen debates in sports: Which is better — the NBA, which has less raucous arena environments but a higher quality of play (and actually pays its labor), or college, which has often terrible play but is packed with emotion and sometimes gives us incredible Cinderella runs like Loyola’s?
Sister Jean has become the star of this year’s NCAA tournament.
She gained notoriety during a brief feature on Turner’s broadcast of Loyola’s first-round win against Miami. She famously picked the Ramblers to lose in the Sweet 16, but her team has drastically outplayed expectations and gotten to San Antonio as a No. 11 seed.
(She was delighted that her bracket turned out to be wrong.)
I do appreciate this take, though:
Thank you, Sister Jean.
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