This is an exciting time of the year for me, with two of my favorite “three-week spans” occurring nearly simulateously. Unshockingly, they both revolve around sports and are largely scoped by hatred. First up, the three weeks of every year that I look forward to the coming baseball season.
Spring training starts, fantasy baseball drafts are held (and dominated by me), and there is promise that this season will be different…that this is the season where baseball is not ungodfully boring, where going to games means more than a sunburned neck and a stomach bloated with beer and hotdogs, where…well…where I actually LIKE baseball. I know it’s stupid, and that by the end of July, I will find it hard to care who is getting the most time at 2B for the Colorado Rockies, but for now, it’s comforting to think that baseball exists as anything but a soul-crushing game worth very little outside of number crunching fantasy. I might write again about (fantasy) baseball as the season nears, but for now, will focus on the second reason to love March:
College basketball ends.
Put in its simplest form (which I will immediately complicate with words and “explanation”), this is how I view NCAAB:
College Basketball:Sports::Microcosm of X:X
Actually, that about does it so far as explanation goes. I LOATHE much about sports, but find they ultimately redeem themselves with some small bangle that sparkles my eyes. It’s like sports is an abusive, yet rich and good-looking boyfriend with a diamond necklace in his hand, and I am any woman ever. The NCAA tournament is a very, very shiny necklace.
It probably helps that my analogy holds true even during the trying months of college basketball (i.e. the REST of the season). I slavishly pine over regular season matchups, I look forward to special occasions (”THIS SATURDAY ON ESPN!!! #2 TENNESSEE AT #1 MEMPHIS….THEY’RE NOT JUST FIGHTING FOR TENNESSEE ANYMORE (ESPN)….THE SOUTH HAS RISEN AGAIN!!!!…WE MEAN THAT IN A NON-RACIST WAY!!!! ESPN!!!!”), and I know every hair on the back of my lover’s hand, even if it took getting slapped again and again with it.*
The NCAA tournament, then, is my day in the sun, when I can cart around my charming little lover, and everyone praises me for the choices I’ve made relationship-wise. All that being said, I have developed some coping mechanisms over the years, and learned a few things to make that day in the sun just a little bit brighter. And, because I’m this far into an extended post about a sport I openly hate, I will share them with you:
1.) White stars both a.) happen in college basketball and b.) are important in tournament success.
Their teams may not win the whole enchilada (I’m only trying to prepare you for the endless Tex-Mex references, since this year’s Final Four is in San Antonio…other phrases to slowly immunize yourselves for: any version of “Riverwalk” to discuss a traveling call, or a team’s passage to SA; “alamo” used in reference to a team making a valiant last-second stand, or really any time a team does anything; “deep in the heart of” used to refer either to long range shooting at the end of a shot clock, or a way of nicely saying that black players on the Final Four teams will mostly stay in their hotel rooms after dark, for safety reasons), but there will be one or two white led teams that way overachieve in the tournament and they will be, in hindsight, ridiculously easy to predict. 
Think Wallyworld time for Miami (Ohio) a few years (almost a decade now) back. Generally, these teams will have EXTREMELY good white players, but they will also a very good second or third player who can pick up the slack when the white guy gets tired, and they either play in terrible conferences where no one sees them, or achieve just above mediocrity in great conferences where more athletic teams dominate the coverage. Teams that fall under this category currently include: Stanford (hah…their parents named twins Brook and Robin…did they not know whether they were males?), Notre Dame, Butler (depends on their seed, really…if they get shafted with a 4 or 5 and end up in a bracket with Tennessee or Duke as the 1, I could see an Elite 8 appearance), St. Mary’s and Purdue. Teams that seem to fit this mold but actually suck: Vanderbuilt and Brigham Young. Hilariously, one of the teams I almost guarantee will not live up to expectations is Georgetown, who historically REFUSED to recruit or play white players, and who seems to have a reverse racist on its current roster.
P.S. I know that is not a picture of Wally Sczczczerebizak. It’s Todd MacCulloch, if you really have to know. He’s just a funnier picture than Wally.
2.) Teams whose success is tied to their “playing as a team” or “playing hard, scrappy defense” will not win…anything.
If you do not have at least 1 blue chipping college star, it will be nearly impossible to earn your seed. Failure to have at least one (and in most cases, 2 or more) NBA caliber players will doom you to watching Gus Johnson ejaculating all over himself about how a better team than you was just SPURred to eternal remembrance (his words, not mine) by a guy who is promising to forgo many millions of dollars in the coming months to get one more chance to lead his alma mater (if one calls a school they never graduated from an alma mater) to victory. (I DARE you to follow that sentence). Teams that should worry: Duke (who might also defy the white boy category above, but I think their two best players are Nelson and Henderson over Singler), Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Xavier. Teams that probably fit, but might still have a chance (read as: I irrationally love them for another reason): Louisville and Rhode Island.
3.) Don’t be Kansas.
Look, I know that Kansas has reached about a hundred consecutive Elite Eights, and people use that as an example of how they aren’t REALLY underachieving in the tournament, but…Kansas is routinely one of the best 2-3 teams in the country come tournament time, and they are almost always a top 2 seed. It’s been 5 years since they made the Final Four and 20 years since they won a tournament. In that time, they are the only MAJOR program (UCLA, Kentucky, Duke, UNC) to not go through some sort of slow period, and yet, they have nothing to show for it, while each of those other schools won at least one title. Teams that should worry about this: Kansas.
4.) Freshmen until the Final, older guards after that.
The final nugget for now (over 1100 words by the end of this, somehow) is probably pointless this year, since basically ALL teams are run in some non-negligible way by freshmen. However, it’s something to thnk about when filling out the last few bars in the pool, especially the very last. Greg Oden and Mike Conley lost to 5 guys who had been around the block before in the first year post-bullshit NBA draft rule. I expect something similar this year. Maybe something like Derrick Rose and Memphis losing to UCLA (guided by Kevin Love, true, but LED by Collison). I could also see Kansas State making a run to the final under this rubric, but can’t see them winning it all for the same reason.
*This analogy is now sort of disturbing, both in the way I recognize my obsequience to college basketball and because I don’t believe that domestic violence is ever funny, or warranted. I mean, unless she REALLY deserves it, of course.
