SNL Roasts NCAA Over ‘Student-Athletes’ And Takes Shots At Charles Barkley In Cold Open

With all eyes on the upset of the once undefeated Kentucky Wildcats in the Final Four on Saturday night, SNL was savvy enough to open their show with a skit about NCAA basketball. Saturday Night Live also really lucked out with Duke advancing to the Championship Game because they already had a searing take on the “student-athlete” hypocrisy highlighted by breaking news about Blue Devils star freshman Jahlil Okafor.

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, played by Taran Killam, made a shocking announcement during a press conference. The legendary coach revealed that Okafor would be held out of the Championship Game against Wisconsin for an extremely unusual reason… “He has a big biology test on Tuesday. Real big.”

“Guys these are STUDENT athletes. STUDENTS!” Krzyzewski declared. “If they only came to college to play basketball, then we’d all look pretty silly.”

“It’s like I told all my players: College is the most important year of your life,” Krzyzewski remarked.

The satire continued to be thicker than Amber Rose ass, “Look, these guys get paid in education and if we can’t give them that, it’s like they’re being robbed, It’d be as if Duke didn’t pay me my salary of $10 million this year. Hahaheeheahhha! Insane.”

The TNT broadcast team of Ernie Johnson (Beck Bennett), Kenny Smith (Jay Pharoah) and Charles Barkley (Kenan Thompson) attempted to digest the news. That’s when the parody took aim at Barkley’s sometimes misguided college basketball analysis.

“I don’t even like college basketball,” Thompson said in perfect Sir Charles drawl. “They just paying me to sit here for two weeks in March and keep talking til someone hands me a sandwich.”

Barkley also explained that college athletes really do care about their education. In fact one time when he was playing at Auburn University, his studies came before athletics:

“All I thought about was homework. one game I missed all these free throws because I couldn’t stop thinking about my science project. I just couldn’t figure out exactly how much baking soda to put in a volcano. And I majored in volcanoes.”

Kenny Smith chimed in with his dedication to education when he attended North Carolina, “I studied all the time because I’ll be damned if I was the only one in the NBA that did not know the poetry of Emily Dickerson.”

So see, the NCAA really does put the student before the athlete.