Pundits, websites, and television commentators — in sports but also politics and other realms of human endeavor — will frequently exaggerate. Some of this is intentional (click-bait, ratings, starting conversations, etc.), but there comes a point in time when people paid to analyze a given field of activity really do believe in an extreme position.
The constant avalanche of college basketball writing produced over the course of the season has certainly reinforced the claim that many in the sport really do think it’s dying, or something close to it.
Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated wrote an extended piece which is both recent and imbued with an undeniably high level of urgency. It does not seem unfair to say that Davis’s piece carries a doom-and-gloom vibe, a distinct undertone which points to the contention that “college basketball is dying.” Yes, Davis makes some very salient points about the ways in which relevant decision-making committees are constructed, and he offers some solutions to problems (but the shortened shot clock is not a good one). However, if you walked away from Davis’s piece saying, “Hmmm… Mr. Davis thinks college basketball exists in a state of crisis,” you would not be making an unreasonable interpretation of the article.
There really is a crisis mentality among many of college basketball’s most public writers and commentators… enough, at any rate, to gain notice from the larger community of college hoops chroniclers.
This is where our discussion takes on added texture.
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One can say that a sport (or any entity) needs several reforms and yet also maintain that said entity does not exist in a state of crisis. College football’s rulebook is awful, and the people who run the College Football Playoff are — point-blank — idiotic to schedule the New Year’s Six bowls the way they’ve done for the coming set of seasons. There’s so much I would fix in college football if given the chance, and there’s so much the sport has failed to do in the past… but that doesn’t mean I think the sport exists in a state of crisis.
The same is true for college basketball. Like everything else undertaken by flawed and imperfect human beings, college roundball is itself flawed and imperfect. It all brings to mind a saying religious people can readily understand: “If you think you’ve found the perfect church, that’s great. Just realize that by joining that church, it has ceased to be perfect.”
Give me the chance to reform college basketball, and I’d do several things without a second thought. There are so many things about the product which annoy and irritate television viewers in March and at other times throughout the season. Yet — and this is the crux of the discussion — what team sport does not have these problems, pray tell?
Is the NFL — with its absurd interpretation of what is and isn’t a catch — a sport in which all of its most basic rules:
A) make sense?
and
B) honor competitive effort?
HECK, NO!
Is Major League Baseball — a sport whose strike zone was not enforced to the letter of the law for decades — a model of applying rules as they in fact exist in the rulebook? Not even close. The new pace-of-play rules didn’t need official rulebook protections. Umpires just needed to move the game along, given the resources they already had in the first place.
The National Hockey League has struggled for the past two decades for a number of reasons, one of them being that the flee-flowing, open-skating game you see at the Olympics (and which was seen in the NHL of the 1980s) has been smothered by a physical grabfest on most nights.
The NBA is, even now, constantly wrestling with the age-old basketball question of what is and isn’t a foul, and the follow-up question of when officials decide to make certain kinds of calls in certain situations. The NBA has also failed to implement the common-sense reform of enabling officials to call a foul if they see one when going to the monitor to review an out-of-bounds call (or something to that effect).
Other team sports — or the same team sports at professional levels of competition — have their fair share of problems. There’s nothing particularly unique about college basketball in that wider context. The notion that this is a dying sport has never really met the sniff test.
Then there was Tuesday night.
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It wasn’t even March Madness. Heck, it wasn’t even the conference tournament theater of events that’s about to emerge in a full burst of color.
Tuesday night, minus a few preliminary-round games in one-bid conference tournaments, was a regular-season night in college hoops. There was no buzzer-beater in a small conference’s tournament championship game, followed by a wild scene with mascots and players going crazy. No, this was just a regular-season night, wrapped inside the casing many Americans dismiss as “irrelevant” to the season. Only the NCAA tournament is supposed to matter in the eyes of most American sports fans, and yet on Tuesday, college basketball commanded attention with many riveting spectacles.
Kentucky, down nine, dramatically rallied to win at Georgia and remain unbeaten this season. Lots of fans want to see Kentucky enter the Big Dance without a loss, and that source of tension is what made an otherwise-ordinary game against Georgia crackle with added intensity.
Kansas, down by 18, somehow rebounded to beat West Virginia and win an outright Big 12 title, as two of the best coaches in the sport — Bill Self and Bob Huggins — matched wits over the course of 40 enthralling if messy minutes in one of the sport’s most cherished venues, Phog Allen Fieldhouse.
While Kentucky and Kansas were immersed in highly contentious clashes, Villanova was taken to the wire by Creighton before escaping thanks to a clutch basket by Ryan Arcidiacono and a missed four-footer by the Bluejays just before the final horn. Three powerhouse programs narrowly survived on nights when they were well below their best, and as an added bonus, Northwestern beat Michigan in double overtime to capture the interest and fascination of fans in the Upper Midwest.
College basketball POPPED on Tuesday night… and no one was interested in what would happen to his or her bracket, either. The sport busted the notion that the NCAA tourney is the only thing which matters. Compelling theater was its own reward.
That last point is worth magnifying.
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It is very similar to the relationship between college football and NFL ball: No one who loves, appreciates and prioritizes college basketball more than the NBA could seriously claim that the caliber of actual basketball is better. On a broader level, no one could ever credibly state that collegians play sports better than paid professionals do.
However, while never having a credible argument to make when “quality of play” is the focal point of the discussion, college sports fans (and commentators) can always say that their product is better than the professional product as an extension and manifestation of its charms.
What you saw on Tuesday night in college basketball was a tidal wave of emotion, of vibrant life, of boyish enthusiasms you don’t see as much in the more buttoned-down world of the pros. College sports tug on the heartstrings more than the cruel and unforgiving world of professional football. They appeal to a sense of drama, and they unearth pathways toward a specific kind of empathy — not the empathy we feel for any athlete after a rough loss, but empathy toward an 18-year-old athlete who might be confronting a massive sense of public disappointment for the first time in his playing career.
Whether college basketball reforms its fouling/timeout/block-charge policies or not, the sport will always have the snapshots seen on Tuesday night: Kansas players celebrating after a successful and wild comeback; Georgia players dejected after their gallant upset bid failed; Villanova’s players expressing relief after staying on track to get a No. 1 seed; Northwestern players and fans delighting in the kind of victory which has so often eluded the program in the past.
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There’s plenty that’s wrong about college basketball. Yet, there’s plenty that’s wrong about other sports as well, and commentators don’t say that those sports exist in a state of crisis.
March is here, and we got a full dose of it Tuesday night without looking at a single bracket sheet.
College basketball can be better, but like any product worth watching, it has endured a lot of problems in the past, in much the same way that baseball got past its labor problems in 1981 and 1994.
Why does it endure? We saw why last night.
We’ll continue to see why as this month continues.
College basketball, unwatchable and dying? American sports fans are going to be watching this next month.
We can shelve the talk about a sport that’s halfway in the grave.
