It is a tricky time of the year to be a college basketball fan.
The sport seems so far away, yet so incredibly close that you can hear the student section roaring when Willie McDunkaroo scores the game-winning bucket against a rival. All this makes the general college basketball fan rather sad and, unfortunately, a bit fickle.
College sports fit in the same bucket as far as politics and religious beliefs are conferenced — as in: everyone has an opinion on the topic, most certainly the right one; if your thoughts on the matter differ, then you can go straight to Hell (with or without a handbasket… depending on accommodations).
With college basketball being in the offseason limbo stage, a stream of the usual stories will run across most college basketball news wires: player commits here, player decides to turn pro (overseas) after all, and some players will get arrested or will have trouble making the grade.
That is where the not at all fun begins.
Unless the player is on your team and is not leaving said team, shame-shame on that player for not living up to his end of the bargain. You know, whatever the actual free-labor in big business end of the bargain happens to be. We will scold teenagers for transferring out, not committing to your favorite team, and probably condemn those young athletes whenever they get arrested or make a mistake which results in them losing eligibility via NCAA rules (whatever they are).
Let’s focus on that last part — the part in which other people judge teenagers for getting arrested or failing to meet eligibility requirements through good test taking: What is the benefit here? To put it more simply: do you truly value education THAT much and/or care THAT much about a guy you never met (and never will meet) getting caught drinking under age?
The latter is an easy subject to touch on, because there is almost a zero percent chance that you care THAT much about it. If you do, you must be one of the few grown folks roaming the Earth to never drink under age or break any sort of law which exists (no matter how minuscule or astronomical you consider it). Or… you could be one of the teenagers who are bashing them, while also drinking under age, who are judging them because they should know better or something — likely something, but we will get to that in a minute.
Here is the deal: None of you actually care about other people getting arrested UNLESS it alters your daily life. Unfortunately for those sickos with a warped perspective, a kid becoming ineligible for your favorite team apparently effects your life enough that you feel need to beat your hot takes to the ground by way of a 1,000-word Facebook rant on that athlete’s irresponsibility (presumably, with a forty in hand). Seriously, you tell me all the people in your town, that you somehow know by name, that get arrested. Tell me you get THAT riled up about it. I’ll wait…
*(Your many Google searches later)*
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But what about education, Joe?
Yeah… what about it?
Maybe these guys don’t value it like you do. I mean, that is if you do truly value it. One can only assume if you’re Walter McEducation that you never spent a second of your college life outside your dorm, studying like a banshee to become the next Steve Jobs (where did he get his degree from?). If that is not that case, though, then I suppose that means you only value education when it provides you the platform to tear down a young person from a distance because you get-off on doing so, or because you’re just a jerk… and, yes, a slew of other negative things.
Hold on, there’s more.
They are kids. Children. Youngsters. Barely past the age of puberty and certainly too young to be considered “old enough” in the general work force to be put in a position of such great responsibility — the type we lay upon these guys when they hit campus as freshmen (around 18 or 19 years of age).
At what age am I allowed to start judging all your decisions as a human? Do I get to start as young? Did you not make any mistakes between the ages of 18-22? Literally, any at all? I’m not talking strictly about grades, or underage arrests, or cheating on an exam; I am talking about any regrets, poor decisions, bad oral comments (because Twitter wasn’t around yet to expose you as a youth as a {insert whatever horrible thing you said in 1998 here}. Again, I will wait for your response…
*(You rationalizing all your 18-22-year-old self’s mistakes later)*
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At the end of the day, who cares?
Seriously, who in the living hell cares about kids making poor decisions when they are kids? Also, as we touched on earlier, some of the things we use during the offseason to scold these guys for — such as bad grades — might be something they don’t value, because outside of providing the service of playing basketball for free FOR YOU on TV a few nights a week, they would otherwise prefer to be anywhere other than Club State University.
Ugh. I know. I know. I am speaking to a brick wall. I know the excessively crazed fans in college basketball do not want to know that I think they’re caring about such relatively trivial things such as getting emotional about the lives of other people they will never meet, but that is a large reason why we are having this discussion to begin with.
If any of this went over your head — I’m speaking to the crazed fans here, not the rational ones — simply go back to the part about you being a jerk and merely add “ignorant” to the growing negative traits I am scribbling for my next column called, “The 10 Worst Human Traits in Horrible Humans” (for what it is worth, it is actually a 345-page slide, but I labeled it as only 10 because it is more clickbaity — does that make me horrible, too?).
