March Whatever

I titled this post March Whatever due to the sense of inevitability and lack of excited that frames this year's NCAA tournament.

The big story is Kentucky's quest for an undefeated season and John Calipari's second national championship, which coincidentally will match the number of final four appearances his teams have had to forfeit (UMass, Memphis). Is there any excitement watching this mix of one-and-done and McDonald's All American players, led by one of America's smarmiest coaches? No, there isn't. It's no fun.

The other stories aren't much better. Every year it seems the tournament gets more and more hyped, more and more corporate, and less and less entertaining. The charm of the tournament is the underdogs, but this year the NCAA selection committee picked underachieving name brands like UCLA and Indiana instead of more interesting teams such as Dayton, Richmond or even Miami. It's a corporate, brand-name tournament played by student-athletes who put far more into the NCAA than they get out.

Finally, there's Carolina. Last year, I had our team winning the national championship as I usually do. That team defeated Kentucky, Duke, Louisville, and Michigan State, the top four teams in the preseason polls, so were a legit threat.  Carolina, Dean-style basketball resurfaced in Greensboro last week for 3.75 games to produce some hope for the NCAA tournament, but one reason for a whatever is this team is probably a year away from a legit pick to go 6-0 and winning another national championship.

So for all those reasons, it's March Whatever for me. Despite that - GO HEELS! 

Here are a few more hoop notes for now, with my picks for the tournament coming tomorrow (Tuesday) night.

Three must-read articles have come out in the last week: my classmate Scott Price's piece in Sports Illustrated about UNC, John Feinstein's column on Syracuse and the ACC, and Barry Jacobs' column on the ACC tournament. 

Scott's piece is worth reading even though it's a little too cynical and broad. I still have faith that UNC will restore the Carolina way and that the University of the People will get it right. Scott quotes my former professor John Shelton Reed quite a bit, too. The SI piece posits that Carolina started losing it's way when Jordan and the Dean Dome turned a plucky and liberal program into a national brand, a process augmented by the world wide leader in sports hyping the UNC-Duke rivalry. 

The common thread through all three articles is the ACC now represents all that is wrong in college athletics. There are no more student athletes, just unpaid workers building a successful brand of entertainment and sports programing (the ESP of ESPN). It used to have a down-home tournament for fans of a geographically-compact conference; now its tournament is an east-coast roadshow in fairness to teams - not schools - that range from south Florida to New England to Indiana.

Worst of all, Feinstein points out that not only has its football-fueled expansion and money-loving ruined the quaintness of the basketball tournament, it has tainted the ACC's highest and mightiest. Who would have thought that Dean Smith's school could host an academic scandal, Duke would ignore two instances of sexual assault, and Syracuse would have to forfeit more than 100 wins due to academic schemes to keep players eligible?

Worst of all, to me at least, these problems are not that hard to fix: make freshmen ineligible, or follow baseball's example of holding a high school draft and if you don't sign with a team you can not be drafted again until you complete your junior year; play fewer regular-season games - 8 in football, 20 in basketball; 25 in baseball.  Those reforms would restore the quaintness of college athletics, keep the athletes in class more, and make sure that academia not corporate, name-brand, money-loving broadcasters set the agenda.

This year's NCAA tournament may make me shrug 'whatever' but these scandals make me embarrassed and ashamed for caring so much about college basketball.