College Basketball: 11 Months of Suckage?
Hear ye! Hear ye! Come one come all. It’s time for the
reading of the biggest and best news in all the college basketball land.
With this knowledge, you might become rich! You can’t miss out!
The final 12-members of the Men’s U21 World
Championship Team were announced Thursday!
Got you all, didn’t I? All right, how about this:
Hear ye! Hear ye! Come one come all. It’s time for the
reading of the biggest and best news in all the college basketball land.
With this knowledge, you might become rich! You can’t miss out!
Fourteenth-seeded Bucknell will score its biggest
victory in its 110-year history over third-seeded
Kansas 64-63 in the first
round of the 2005 NCAA Tournament Friday night before 18,567 at the Ford
Center.
Who could have seen this coming? What drama! What
excitement! Let’s all run around town screaming and defacing public
property!
What’s the difference? A whole lot of your money.
I have a theory.
I like to call August college basketball’s Month of
Suck (MOS) No. 5. Before it was April (MOS No. 1), May (No. 2), June (No. 3)
and July (No. 4).
The incredible chain of month suckage continues all
the way to February, College Basketball MOS No. 11.
We’re entering Month No. 5 of the post-Madness,
post-brackets, post-one-of-the-NCAA’s-biggest-scams, and we’re just dying!
Since when is it big news that Lute Olson hires a
former player as an assistant? C’mon everyone, aren’t we scratching at
insanity’s back a bit too much here? Take a step back from all our college
hoops websites and message boards for a second and look at what happens in
college basketball’s offseason.
Ahhhhh…Nothing!
It hit me this morning when I found myself sitting on
one of my peaceful backyard chairs, writing about how the sprinkler is like
a college basketball game.
I had it all planned out:
The swaying back and forth = the transition from
offense to defense and back again.
The sun shimmering through the tree branches and onto
the water = cameras cracking flashes all around the stadium.
Tree leaves pattering with each rush of water = people
in the crowd pattering with each other about the game.
And then I woke up. I was calling everyone leaves! I
shook my head long and hard to get that idea out of there. It’s like a bad
diet soda mixed with Robitussin…I still can’t get rid of the aftertaste (Note
to audience: if you ever find yourself writing about your sprinkler,
please see your doctor immediately).
But back to the point at hand: the college basketball
offseason is just terrible. All the summer drama and sick headlines belong
with the NBA.
Nike’s new Kobe Bryant new ad campaign and shoe
design. Las Vegas as the site of the 2007 All-Star game. Magic Johnson as
the head of a possible new Vegas franchise. Shawn Kemp and his inspired
attempt to make it back to the League, er, pay his 25 (or so) monthly
child-support payments. Joe Johnson and his affair with the team that
“developed” his $72 million value. The collusion of Antoine Walker and Pat
Riley, and how the heck they’ll work out a contract.
This all happened within the last week. The NCAA would
love to have this much drama in a year!
People love to read about sports. Why? Sports tell
numerous stories that often model our own life. We love to poke into other
people’s lives. How they made it from nothing to become something. Sports
provide a small, simple stage for us to examine life. And for one, there’s
always a clear-cut winner and loser. Sports make it all simple.
But it’s the money that drives the stories, the
collusion, the deceit, the success, the tears, the joy and the pain. College
basketball doesn’t have that element, making it at best more like a fairy
tale than a novel. It’s more Pleasantville than Get Rich or Die
Trying.
Because of its blatant avoidance of money, college
basketball will be nothing more a fantasy land of underdogs, Cinderella
stories, upsets and brewskies. It really is Shoots and Ladders.
College basketball’s essence remains the 65-team NCAA
Tournament, which most people watch religiously every year for only one
reason:
Money.
If it wasn’t for March – the one non-MOS of the year –
no one would question the NBA’s superiority over the college game.
Deep down, even the biggest college basketball
enthusiasts know the news they read on ESPN is nothing more than
recruits, upsets and scandals. It’s not to say there’s never a good story
about the college game, they just don’t come along nearly as
often…especially when it’s not March Madness.
Here in August, we’re entering the climax of all the
MOSs, the dry desert before we get to the mirage. November through February
ease the pain a bit, but still fall dangerously far from March’s pinnacle of
drama.
Still don’t believe me? I’m not the only one with this
opinion.
You know times are rough when Dick Vitale’s latest
column is entitled “Larry Brown era begins in N.Y.”
$10-12 million is a lot for a coach to make in a year.
