Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Hype is All That's Left for a College Basketball Game in Ruins
By this time next year, in-coming UK recruits D'Aaron Fox, Malik Monk, and three or four other All-Universe basketball players will be celebrating their declaration for the NBA draft and UK followers will revel in the likelihood that half of the lottery picks will be from UK's team--the team that of course will play one season together and then disband.
That's what happens when the games themselves and the season they comprise have become so boring--a consequence of their excessive importance and simultaneous meaninglessness.
Before I go further, let me make this point: the 2015-16 college basketball season was the worst ever in the thirty-plus years I remember being an avid college basketball fan.
Disclaimers: As a UK fan, I lost interest after the woeful loss to IU. At 47, my interest in watching college basketball can't realistically be what it was when I was 27, and playing basketball every chance I got; Generally speaking as a person, I find it increasingly difficult to find anything positive to say about anything.
But now that we have all of that out of the way, here are some observations in support of my main point.
This was the first year I can recall when there were no really, really, good or even great teams on the college landscape. And I'm hardly the only person to make this observation. The #1 spot in the rankings was a revolving door of teams that would look good for a week and then lose to an obviously inferior squad. When the brackets came out, observers noted that cumulatively the #1 seeds collectively had more losses than at any time previously in the history of seeded NCAA tournaments.
There is a difference between parity and the absence of really good teams. Sub-par basketball is not dramatic; it's dull.
Despite efforts to speed up the game, increase scoring, and create greater flow--which is kind of like saying "in an effort to make operas musical"--this season was characterized by low scoring games, dull play, tentative players, and controlling coaches. I wrote in a recent blog that UK and coach John Calipari are prime examples. Calipari makes it a point to recruit the very top talent at every position, and then plays as though it is somehow to his advantage to keep the scoring down and win with defense and rebounding--the strategy of lesser-talented teams.
This year's NCAA tournament has been so boring that the most interesting topic to discuss according to the media was the "controversy" over an Oregon player shooting, and making, a 45-foot three-pointer with less than a minute to go and the shot-clock running out. Bad sportsmanship. Duke had already lost the game. Why was Duke losing and Oregon winning less important than some pseudo-Aristotlean discourse about the ethics of jacking up a 45-footer versus dribbling out the shot-clock? Because that's how damn boring the games themselves have gotten, and how vapid the jackass talking-heads who "analyze" the game have become. Bad basketball and bad pundits: made for each other.
A major factor in the deterioration of the game has been that the money/business side of an always somewhat-seedy operation has completely taken over the college game. When young players already good enough to go straight to the NBA from high school are mandated to take a one-year layover to play for a para-professional "amateur" team, that is when the silly and dishonest status of big-time college players as "amateur" descends into the ridiculous and corrupt.
One sad consequence of the one-and-done trend that has marked college basketball for the last six seasons is the absence of joy and flow the players exhibit in playing the games. The players will never have a chance to bond or even fathom that the time they spend together in "college" could be meaningful in and of itself rather than just a means-to-an-end. Forget the predictable "feel good" stories about players bonding, and coaches bonding with teams. My point is that the demeanor of the players during games gives away that the game has lost the joy and artistry that make it more fun to watch than someone putting up drywall. The first five minutes of the Virginia-Syracuse regional final were so uptight that the players looked like the first person to miss a shot would be sacrificed at halftime.
College basketball has become a symptom of the very system that once made it great. The availability of big money to give college basketball teams big arenas to play in, followed by the proliferation of cable, made college basketball one of the most entertaining programs around. Not long after, the addition of the shot-clock and three-pointer made the game even better. It was highly unusual that a player would leave before his four years of eligibility were up. Michael Jordan--the best basketball player of all time--still did not depart for the NBA until after his junior season. That's how meaningful the college game was a few decades ago.
Kentucky's super-talented and deep championship team of 1996 was led by two great players who stayed all four years: Tony Delk and Walter McCarty. Ron Mercer even stuck around for a second season after that championship before he went to the NBA. Kentucky's 1998 team was characterized by a group of players who I really believe thought winning a national title for UK was the most important thing in the world--when it came to basketball anyway--even more important than a possible NBA career. Sure, those players were not the NBA stars-to-be that the current teams are, but there is no question that for them to wear the Kentucky jersey and win an NCAA title for UK gave them the joy and desire to play and win. The players today know why they are there and it ain't "for the love of the game;" let's not pretend otherwise.
This year, no one has looked terribly interested in playing basketball--as though the entire season has been a four-month NIT tournament in disguise that will mercifully come to an end this weekend, so we can watch more exciting things like golf tournaments and spring training baseball games (yes, that's a joke).
That's because the big money and big-time media coverage that made college basketball so exciting not long ago have now made it a dull, mechanical, big-money operation that has zapped the joy and desire out of the games themselves. UK fans once-upon-a-time would still be lamenting the loss to IU and insisting over beers that UK would have given UNC a much better game than IU did. Not until late September came around, and Midnight Madness suddenly was right around the corner, would fans turn their focus to the upcoming season. And the concern--believe it or not--would be how good the team would be--not how high the recruiting class was ranked or how many projected lottery picks would bolt from the program ASAP. Nothing says "It's been my dream to play for UK and I love playing for the Big Blue" than "I want to get out of here as soon as I can because the only reason to play is for the big bucks."
Spare me the argument that it's good for the players and their families that the players get big-money pro contracts as soon as they can and that Calipari is some "genius" for figuring out how to use the one-and-done loophole to his advantage. Calipari has done an excellent job recruiting and shown he can coach well in high-stakes, pressure-packed NCAA tournament games. He and UK are hardly the sole sources of college basketball's demise.
In fact, it may be no one's fault: just a simple reality that nothing stays great forever. What's too bad is that college basketball in its present form isn't going to go away: the low-scoring games, the lack of chemistry and artistry to how teams play, and the overly-serious approach the coaches implement will only harden and further deteriorate the quality of play. And on top of all that is the undeniable reality that the conflict over the "amateur" status of college basketball players and the tons of money swirling about the game has reached a point where the game is broken. If anyone truly cared about the financial well-being of college basketball players, they would be paid like the young pros they are, and how soon they got to the NBA--if they were good enough at all--would not cast the giant, dollar-sign shaped shadow over the college game the way it does now.
Not that anyone will listen, but I have some recommendations:
The regular season has become incredibly dull because it is saturated with pre-conference games that are deliberately non-competitive followed by a conference schedule of redundant match-ups that tell us little about how good anyone really is because no one will play a competitive non-conference game unless it includes a week-long vacation in Hawaii or the Bahamas. The point, of course, is to rack up as many wins playing at home against teams who have no chance of winning before the "grueling"conference schedule kicks in and teams have to go into hostile opponent's arenas to gut out tough wins over conference opponents. Why? Because the regular season is now nothing but a means-to-an-end for the NCAA tournament: three months of dull basketball is not the formula for a final three weeks of excitement. But the formula is in place: win as many games as possible, get as high a seed as possible, get the easiest bracket as possible, and a Final Four birth has the highest odds of happening. Yeah! How exciting!
The most exciting weekend of this past season came in late January when the SEC and Big 12 took a break from business-as-usual and played games against one another in a day-long, inter-conference challenge. It was refreshing to see SEC teams play someone besides someone from the SEC. Florida upset West Virginia, Oklahoma beat LSU in the final minute, and Kentucky took Kansas into overtime before losing. Why can't the entire regular season be more like that? Why can't both the regular season and the NCAA tournament be exciting, instead of neither? For example, why does Kentucky play Illinois St. but no longer will play IU? Why does UK play Arizona State instead of bordering Virginia? Why does UK--like all other major teams--make it a point to play as few competitive games home-and-away as possible? What does anyone --the fans, coaches, or players--get from watching Kentucky beat Illinois St. in Rupp Arena? What cause for celebration! The game is dull, the outcome is predictable, the players do not learn about the weak links in their games, they don't improve by playing such a game, and the coaches have nothing to work with in order to figure out how to make the team its best.
The dull play and super-serious, super-controlled approach of the coaches has led to once-unfathomable breakdowns in basic basketball plays. How did taking all of the joy and fun out of playing basketball help Northern Iowa--a team that beat UNC--somehow not be able to inbound the ball to the point it blew a twelve point lead with 44 seconds to go? My point is that making the game mechanical, predictable, and as non-spontaneous or artistic as possible does nothing for making the play more fundamentally sound. Texas A&M's comeback against N. Iowa was less about anything amazing the Aggies did than a harsh example of how dysfunctional the game has become. In-bounding the freaking ball is now something else to stress out about and dissect endlessly.
So, for whatever it's worth, make the pre-conference schedule more competitive, and in turn, shorten the conference season so that it isn't the hum-drum round-robin same old thing over and over again that it has become. No need to play every conference foe home and away every year. Play half of conference opponents only once, home this year, away the next, and play only half both home and away. Then after two years, switch up who plays whom only once and which teams will meet twice.
Get rid of the worthless postseason conference tournaments. Even coaches like Calipari have out-right said they don't like them. How many times do teams have to play each other and beat other before something is settled? Getting rid of the postseason tournaments would give teams more chance to rest and nagging injuries to heal. Besides, the tournaments are worthless. They serve no purpose but to make money, and when that is the only purpose to a human endeavor it becomes the worst version of itself it can be. Winning a postseason conference means nothing. Austin Peay was not going to beat Kansas, and Kansas would gladly trade its Big 12 Conference Tournament title for a re-match with Villanova where they might resemble the team that could score in the 70s as it did when it plowed through the Big Twelve regular season.
Imagine a UK season that begins with away games at Virginia and Indiana, (oh my God, UK could start 0-2? Even the football team doesn't do that!) followed by home games versus Ohio State and Maryland, and then throw in some automatic wins before the annual showdown with Louisville. Then go out west and play Oregon, or up east and play Syracuse on the road? Why not a head-to-head versus West Virginia or nearby Butler? An early season schedule like that would undoubtedly be more exciting than opening with Albany and New Jersey Institute of Technology, opponents who have no chance of giving UK a competitive game much less beating them. Such a challenging early season schedule would seem to be just the thing for UK teams that for the foreseeable future will be comprised of "freshmen" who won't have four year to mature and improve.
And Louisville was just as bad as UK when it came to early season scheduling: the same idea was at work--rack up as many wins as possible before the conference season starts and play the odds to get the highest seed and best draw possible (assuming there is no self-imposed postseason ban).
In any case, the pre-conference schedule for UK that I humbly suggest would be more entertaining for a regular season dominated by two-and-a-half months of games against Georgia, Auburn, Arkansas, etc.--games either UK will win by blowout or lose to the confusion and consternation of the fan base.
As for this year's final four, the best thing about it is that this season will end. The semi-final match-ups are appropriately dull and predictable. Oklahoma already blew out Villanova in December, and while I'm sure the Final Four match up will be more competitive, Oklahoma will likely control and win a game Villanova will do everything to slow down and make as dull as possible. UNC is talented but has underachieved, yet they are going to make it all the way to the title game without a seriously competitive game.
To make things worse, the NCAA has to schedule the Final Four in some giant sports dome in Houston that has shown itself to be shooter-non-friendly--just what the game needs for its jewel moment. The last time this site was host to the Final Four--which obviously ought to be display of the most impressive, exciting, and competitive basketball of the season--UConn and Butler set a tournament record for offensive futility in the 2011 title game. Maybe this year will be an inspiration if the four teams actually hit outside shots and play games that don't end in the 50s. Personally, I think college basketball has gotten so bad the Final Four should be televised in black-and-white--or only broadcast over the radio. Then the intelligentsia of America can debate the ethical and tactical variables that determined the games' outcomes while reminding us regular people how college basketball makes its players and coaches into the best versions of human beings the universe has ever known.
And then a football school, Oklahoma, beats a basketball school, UNC for the title in the last game of a season that can't end too soon.
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