March Blandness

It seems like Shank's off the NCAA Tournament bandwagon, and maybe with good reason:

The men’s NCAA tournament used to be great. But now that it’s professional basketball? No thanks.

March Madness! How’s your bracket looking? Got tickets to the big subregional in Providence this coming weekend? Do you think Rick Pitino and Coach Cal could match up on Saturday? Is Cooper Flagg better than Bill Walton? How about that Dan Hurley, huh? Think we’ll see a No. 16 beat a No. 1? Do you hate Duke?

Sweet 16 . . . Elite Eight . . . Final Four . . . Whee!

No thanks, Basketball America. I’ll be sitting this one out. I’m not sure I’d watch the men’s championship game if they played it in my driveway on Monday, April 7.

Seriously. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament used to be great, but I have a hard time understanding how folks invest dollars and emotions in today’s farce that has almost nothing to do with colleges and universities.

“With the Power Four conferences, it’s fraud in terms of terminology,” says Leo Papile, former player personnel director of the Celtics (14 seasons) and presently a senior adviser with the Clippers who founded the Boston Athletic Basketball Club (BABC) 48 years ago. “They use the term ‘student-athletes.’ That’s fraud. If you brought that to trial, it would be very easy to prove that that does not exist. I’m not a scholar, but I know that in order to get a degree, you can’t bounce around three or four schools in four years.”

True that. Not that anyone cares anymore, but when we watch the big schools in this tournament, it’s impossible to buy the notion that we are watching students at play. Oregon traveled more than 26,000 miles to play its Big Ten schedule — yes, Oregon is in the Big Ten — this season. That’s more than the circumference of the Earth. Think those kids are cracking the books or interacting with their schoolmates?

Today’s NCAA basketball is unregulated professional basketball. Frothy fans boost their favorite school, screaming their heads off for skilled professional players, most of whom have zero allegiance to said college, and some of whom maybe never set foot in a classroom or interacted with anyone on campus outside of the athletic department and compliance office.

I largely agree with this, because it is really stupid having a West Coast college like Oregon in the Big Ten (Stanford's also in the Big Ten, or maybe it's the Big Sixteen now) and the NIL money's why all this is happening.