Mundane Madness

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with Jay Bilas where he said that the NCAA was faced with a serious problem. The problem, he said, is that the average person feels that the college basketball season is 45 days (conference championship tournaments followed by the NCAA Tournament). Though he didn't, Bilas could point to this article by Frank Deford (and his mutton chops) as exhibit A.

He then went on to suggest a number of options for resolving the interest issue, such as doing away with the NIT, adding more preseason tournaments, and making Selection Sunday occur before the conference tournaments. While these are all viable ideas that would improve overall interest, he’s missing the point.
The larger issue at work here is that as a sports fan, continuity from year to year is an essential component of identifying with a team. What if the Celtics had Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce one year, then the next season they were all gone and were replaced by, say, Jeff Green and Rajon Rondo, only Green and Rondo left after that season and they had to be replaced? That set of circumstances and that much player movement would make it pretty difficult to forge any kind of connection with the team. So much personnel turnover disrupts any sense of stability and normalcy that could develop, and what you’re left with as a fan is the relatively hollow experience of rooting for your favorite color scheme. When you don’t know if a player is going to be there six months down the road, how can you feel loyal to him in the present?
This question brings us back to Bilas’ observation about college basketball’s dilemma. He is 100% correct in his assessment that the average fan has little interest in the 30+ game regular season grind that goes on between November and early March. The ratings support this, as they have- for the most part- been in steady decline over the course of this decade until this year. Many of the games carry little meaning, especially when teams with over ten losses are still making the NCAA Tournament, and many of these games lack the sizzle and late-game excitement that seems to come naturally each March. However, considering the meteoric rise in popularity of the NBA over the last few years, it would seem that there has never been a more opportune time for regular season college basketball to undergo the same increase in prominence. People are craving basketball like never before, yet even a huge regular season game gets smashed in the ratings by a routine college football game. The reasons are many, but ultimately we have to ask ourselves the simple question of why we watch the games. To me, the answer is fairly obvious: we want to see players we like on teams we like beat players we don’t like on teams we don’t like.

The problem with college basketball, then, is that this traditional notion of loyalty to players and teams is now only 50% true. The rivalries between teams remain a constant, and always will. Duke-North Carolina will draw huge crowds and huge TV ratings no matter who is on their respective teams. However, it has become impossible to predict who is going to be on each team year to year. Gone are the days where you could watch a player develop from a fringe player as a freshman into an NBA-caliber star as a senior. A player like Christian Laettner could never exist in today’s climate; he would surely jump to the NBA after averaging a 16-10 as a sophomore on a Final Four team. When players are free to jump to the pros after one season, how can you follow their careers and forge any kind of connection to them? They rarely show any interest in the tradition of their school and program, and are there only because the NBA forces them to be. Somehow I doubt Michael Beasley grew up dreaming of the day he’d don the purple of Kansas State…
With constant turnover, teams never develop an identity. A team needs an identity for fans to feel something beyond just rooting for laundry. Throughout the 80s and early 90s, working-class Bostonians loved the Celtics because of the attitude Bird, Parish, and McHale brought to the Garden every game.

The players (at least seemingly) cared about the fans and the tradition, and they got unconditional support in return. The flaw of this comparison is, of course, that college is a defined, four year period, whereas an NBA career lasts as long as the player can be effective. In college a player can’t be on a team for over four seasons, so from the start of his career he’s on borrowed time. However, the passion of college fans is such a ramped-up version of pro fans that over the span of a four year career one can cram in a lifetime’s worth of rooting. In a sense, the brief period of a college career makes it that much more special, because you know from the start that you must enjoy the experience while it lasts. When a player packs up and leaves early, it stings because you were just getting to know their game and how they made the team work. Unfortunately, this happens so often now that we have all become numb to it, and simply accept that every year is going to bring something completely different and unrelated to the season before.
While to some it may be refreshing to have new teams rising up only to tumble back down the following year, this idea essentially values randomness in each season. It says that building an identity over multiple years is for suckers, because the NBA can call for your best players at any time. If you don’t get on the “one and done” train, your program is going to get left behind, and won’t be playing in March. Most of us instinctively love having some sense of order in the sports world. This order can change over time, but the shifts have to be gradual enough for us to be able to process and understand them. When there is no continuity from year to year within both your own team and college basketball as a whole, it’s easy to turn one’s attention to the pros or another sport. Why watch your team plod through a regular season game that means so little both to them and to you? I would say to Jay Bilas, were he to walk into my office right now, that we watch in March for the great finishes and remarkable competition. Whether our own favorite team is in the tournament no longer matters; for many casual fans, “their team” has become just a clone of the others in a different colored shirt. Maybe there’s something to cheering for the prettier uniforms, after all.