The Seductive Charms Of College Basketball Tournaments
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
The most wonderful time of the year, of course, is the period in March when the college basketball conference tournaments and the NCAA Championship games are played.
I know this is true because (1) it is the most fundamental sort of a priori knowledge and (2) if one Googles “basketball” together with “most wonderful time of the year,” as I just did on a hunch, over 27,000 hits result.1 [Sigh]
This basketball tsunami is now the only sports spectacle that I still enjoy without a trace of ambivalence.
It is also the only season of the year that recalls the time when I was a middling sports fan. Other events that formerly carried some significance for me have somehow faded.
The Super Bowl? I’m pretty sure that’s over for this year, right?
The World Series? Let’s see - it wasn’t the White Sox, was it? No. That was two years ago. Or was it three? Maybe the Yankees? No, I knda recall our neighborhood designated Yankee-hater being too happy for that. Well, I’m sure the team that won had good pitching and big bats, put out 110% effort, and played one game at a time.
The BCS? Give me a break.
The Conference Tournaments
In fact, the conference basketball tournaments may have become more enjoyable to me than The Big Dance (the outcome of the most recent polling of my multiple personalities has been delayed because the count is being contested by one of my alters). There are loads of games that are exciting but there is a lack of the angst associated with the “win or you’re out forever” tension of the NCAA tournament.
In this plethora of tournament games, the law of large numbers is the viewer’s best friend. It’s a bit like the strategy of “Laugh-in.” That show consisted of bursts of rapid-fire jokes; if you didn’t laugh at joke #234 or #235, you knew #236 was already on the way and it might prove a winner.
The game you’re watching at the moment may be dull, but ESPN probably has another one in progress that might prove interesting and, if not, well, there will be still another game in a few minutes. As I think about it, this is the only time of year that I actually check TV listings to figure out my viewing schedule.
The odds favor at least a few upsets, the emergence of a Cinderella Team, and the breakthrough of a superstar who somehow escaped notice during the season. The statistical oddity would be if none of those took place.
And, in spite of the fact that every third basketball team seems to have been discovered doing something scandalous (in contrast to the other 2/3 that haven’t been caught yet), that some coaches are even saying publicly that they blow off conference tournaments to prepare for the NCAA playoffs, and that this is not a stellar year for high-quality play, I still get excited on these days with games broadcast from 10:30 AM until 1 or 2 AM the next day.
That, my friend, is true security.
I need to know who wins the Colonial Athletic crown, and who triumphs in the American East and the Mountain West. That I can’t remember which games I watched, let alone who won, the next day is inconsequential. And just when you think you’ve got it under control, there’s a Division II or Division III game flashing on the screen.
In the four ACC tournament games yesterday, all four higher seeds lost. That’s four upsets in one day in one conference tournament.
Ya gotta love it.
But now, I must join a game already in progress.
Footnotes
- Not all of these, of course, are going to be part of the “basketball is the most wonderful time of the year” themes, but of the first 100 hits, my estimate is that over 90% express thoughts congruent with my own ~back~
