The NCAA Men’s basketball tournament, widely known as March Madness, starts this week, and if you’re an NBA fan it’s okay to leave the professional game for this once a year spectacle. After “Selection Sunday”, millions of people fill out a an NCAA tournament bracket in an attempt to show they have more knowledge than their buddies when it comes to picking games. Many people do so to try to win money.
But for someone who doesn’t watch much college basketball throughout the regular season, someone like me, it feels like an exercise in futility. If I’m going to watch the tournament, I want to watch it for the basketball and not to try to win an office pool. For many, March Madness, which spans across three weekends, is the most exciting sporting event of the year. It has a good case and may very well be just that. It is for that reason that I would say to any big NBA fan to take a quick break from the late March schedule and turn to some opening weekend games and try to catch as much of the tournament as you can.
As a big NBA fan, I tend not to pay much attention to college basketball during their regular season aside from a handful of games. Why watch people play a sport at a level that is not the highest it can be played, unless it is being played by your kids or family members?
College basketball is often sloppy with many miscues, and the talent gap between teams in most contests make the games uninteresting. For the vast majority of NCAA games played, there are zero players who will play in the NBA, and even fewer who will make any kind of impact for an NBA team. We would not watch the Olympics if they had people competing in events who were not in the top four or five hundred in the world at their events, but people go crazy for college athletics. There are great NBA players who do well in the tournament and even win it like recent stars Anthony Davis and Carmelo Anthony, but a lot of great players won’t make it as far as the final four.
In terms of the rules of college basketball, the game could benefit from adopting a style of play much closer to that of the NBA. The short three point line in college results in spacing on offence that makes possessions painful to watch at times. The overuse of zone defences also doesn’t truly determine the better team and is typically the best chance for an undermanned and under-skilled team to win against superior competition. The 35 second shot clock might be the worst rule of them all. The slow and deliberate pace played by some teams is not good for college basketball. It feels like many of the rules are in place to add some parity and to give inferior teams a greater chance of staying in games, and they may be effective in doing so, but they make for a much less exciting and aesthetically pleasing game.
If basketball reasons weren’t enough, the politics and the corruptness of the NCAA as a governing body should make everyone take a step back. People will always enjoy their sports, especially college football and basketball, so people who oppose how the NCAA runs things have a long road to climb. If the exploitation of a large number of teenage and young adults by coaches making millions of dollars and a corporation making billions isn’t enough to convince people to watch professionals instead, it will be difficult to come up with something that will.
With that said, there are a few times where people should tune into major college basketball and football, and the upcoming month happens to be one of those times. Nothing beats the playoff competition in any sport. The combination of the pressure faced by everyone involved, the clutch moments, exciting, unexpected plays, and unexpected heroes make it must-watch. Part of what makes the playoffs exciting in any sport is the chance of any team that gets in winning it all. The NBA has the least parity among major team sports, and we usually know who will be standing near the end come playoff time. Hockey has probably the most parity and the Stanley Cup Playoffs are generally one of the most exciting playoffs. March Madness has that quality. 68 teams get into the dance, and while realistically many have no chance of winning the six (or seven for First Four teams) games it takes to win a championship, there are multiple teams that have a realistic chance. This chance gives the players something to play for. They know that they can win championship or make a run. The lower seeds know it only takes one game for them to make national news. The parity seen in the tournament makes for many toss-up games, which is one of the best qualities of the tournament.
The best though, might be the tournament’s single elimination style format. The longer any playoff series goes, the more likely the better team will end up winning. We see this in basketball most often, while in baseball, the new wild card play-in games have been a success and the five game first round series makes for more upsets than a seven game series would. In the NFL, top seeds get eliminated often with their single elimination playoff. The single elimination results in more upsets seen in March Madness than likely any other sport. The team nature of the sport makes for a higher probability of upsets than in say tennis, where the best five or ten players in the world generally win every major, with fewer upsets in early rounds. The first weekend games tend to provide us with the most excitement and the most upsets. It is always captivating to watch a Cinderella make a Final Four run or a top four seed get bounced early on.
It may seem hypocritical for a staunch NBA supporter to promote the college ranks, but March Madness gives sports fans everything they want in the event they’re tuning in to see. Players giving it their all for their school and fans, the excitement of do-or-die games, and the chance of seeing top seeds lose their opportunity to make history. While I won’t be tuning in to the tournament to watch basketball being played at the highest level, I’ll be watching a sporting even that combines all of the things that make a sport as exciting as one can be. For NBA fans, take a break and watch the spectacle that may be the most entertaining thing you watch in sports this year.
