Charles Barkley was a guest of The Dan Patrick Show this week and as always, ‘Sir Charles’ delivered the goods. Barkley was in New York to record episodes of ‘King Charles,’ his CNN show with Gayle King. Barkley said he would then be headed to Arizona for the Final Four this weekend.
“Man, life is good,” Barkley said as he was welcomed in. “Just getting ready to finish up this Final Four thing and get back to my NBA gig, one more weekend. It has been a fun tournament as usual. Can anybody beat UConn is the big question.” Later in the interview you realize Barkley was talking about both UConn teams.
Patrick posed the question to Barkley, “[Which is the] better product, college basketball or NBA, on the floor, just aesthetically watching?”
Barkley said, “Well the NBA has just become a 3-point shooting contest every night. It’s like they are just going to go out there and roll the balls out and shoot a bunch of 3’s. If they go in, we are going to win and if they don’t go in, we are going to lose.”
After talking about what the next level might look like for star NCAA players such as Purdue’s Zach Edey and NC State’s DJ Burns Jr., the conversation turned to the women’s game where the recent Iowa-LSU game drew the sport’s highest number of television viewers ever.
“I actually kept my whole night open because I wanted to watch both games,” Barkley said. “Caitlin [Clark] was fabulous, it was fun to watch. She put on a show in the biggest moment. And then shoutout to JuJu Watkins, she is going to be the face of women’s basketball for the next however long she stays in college.”
The next topic was gambling, and Patrick pointed out he believes if you were a sports fan who didn’t have a wager on the Super Bowl you were probably in the minority. When Barkley said he watched the two women’s games, Patrick asked him if he had bet on either game.
“As much as I am a gambling degenerate, I have actually never bet on a woman’s sport,” Barkley responded. “I’ve watched more women’s college basketball in the last three weeks than I have all year. We got enough idiots and fools on television who like to act like they know everything about every sport, so I don’t want to get on here like some of these fools on other networks who talk about every sport like they are an expert.”
In fact, Charles said he thinks the word expert needs to stop being used in sports conversations. “There is no such thing, it’s just somebody’s opinion. I hate when they say, ‘ he’s an expert’ and I say, ‘no he’s not he’s just some fool giving his opinion.'”
