The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the annual exercise blending schmaltz overkill and roundball, begins Tuesday amidst a troubled backdrop for college sports.
The popularity of this tournament owes in large part to those office bracket pools and, ironically, the pools speak volumes about the state of the event. Where once someone with a knowledge of the sport figured to do well picking winners using that acumen, now the whole exercise has devolved into a crapshoot, a lottery ticket in which the supposedly best teams frequently find themselves failing to win the thing while some longshots prevail.
Simply put, there are no truly great men’s basketball teams any longer, only a lot of pretty good teams.
Why? Excellent players bolting for the NBA after a year or two of seasoning in what has become a semi-pro operation, players whizzing through the transfer portal like immigrants storming the southern border, and NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) which allows “amateur” collegians to earn seven-figure paydays as professional product endorsers and still remain eligible, all have contributed to a breakdown in the team concept.
It also puts the lie to the student-athlete crap being peddled by those televising this and other college sports events. The days of some college kids at the top level playing for the old alma mater are long-gone, replaced by money-grubbing on a vast scale.
The schools being opportunists in seeking greener conference pastures, coaches pulling in multi-million dollar salaries, networks lavishing monstrous broadcast rights fees on the conferences and schools, are just as guilty as the athletes in turning the whole school spirit narrative into a ridiculous fable. The name of the game is not the sport, but the money that can be extracted from it.
The level of play suffers. Just the past weekend I was watching a semifinal game of the SEC Tournament. Florida won the opening tip and the first Gators player to handle the ball over midcourt fired up a three-point try, and missed.
Opposition Texas A&M rebounded and – stop me if you’ve read this before – the first Aggie to possess the ball in the offensive end of the court fired up a three-pointer. He made it. But the tone had been set.
Also, while watching the Atlantic 10 semifinal between St. Bonaventure and Duquesne that same day, a feature ran hailing the Bonaventure coach as something of an offensive genius. But, the storyteller added, sadly he can’t run as many plays as he used to because he has so many transfer players on his roster they can’t process the entire playbook in a single season.
Bonaventure and all those transfers lost. Duquense went on to win the tournament and become an unlikely NCAA team, the school’s first since 1977. The Dukes won the conference title game despite going 1-15 shooting to start the second half, and finishing hitting just 5 of 29 second-half field-goal attempts and scoring a paltry 21 second-half points. But, hey, they’re going to The Dance!
Elsewhere, three of the four eventual NCAA Tournament top seeds lost in their conference tournaments, including Houston’s 69-41 humbling at the hands of Iowa State in the Big 12 championship. Houston, ranked No. 1 nationally, suffered the largest defeat for a No. 1 team since 1968 when it was, again, Houston coming up well short.
It’s not just college basketball being affected adversely by the money grab.
When legendary Alabama football coach Nick Saban retired after last season, he cited the NIL and the transfer portal as having killed traditional college football.
“You hear somebody use the word “student-athlete.’ That doesn’t exist,’” Saban said.
Veteran St. John’s basketball coach Rick Pitino also has bemoaned NIL, noting, “We’re coaching professional basketball players now.”
It’s not just traditional sports being roiled by NIL. LSU has a gymnast reportedly earning $3.2 million, largely for being an attractive blonde.
Elsewhere, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team has won the right to unionize.
But CBS will continue to spread the student-athlete propaganda, building to the playing of the song “One Shining Moment” at tournament’s end.
And you will be expected to swallow the fib that these are just student-athletes playing a game, a lie on par with you can keep your doctor with Obamacare or I’ll respect you in the morning.
Sam Ross Jr's site 