My wife, bless her heart, isn’t operating with a full basket of knowledge when it comes to college basketball. For instance, she can appreciate the sinking of a tough jump shot (because I gush with praise when one is made).
My wife, bless her heart, isn’t operating with a full basket of knowledge when it comes to college basketball. For instance, she can appreciate the sinking of a tough jump shot (because I gush with praise when one is made). However, she still shrugs her shoulders when the referee calls three seconds in the key.
But, for someone who has had to adapt to her status as wife of a college hoops junkie, Autumn has done pretty well.
Saturday, she took a monumental step up the validity ladder.
“I’m getting sick of Duke,” she said, after the Blue Devils crawled out of a 22-point deficit to beat Maryland by 11 in a NCAA Tournament national semifinal. “I’m sick of the same teams winning or having a chance to win every year. It’s bland.”
She then proceeded to rattle off reasons for finding Duke tiresome; it always seems they have the best players, they win and win and win and the pronunciation of it’s head coach’s last name, (Krzyzewski) follows suit with nothing we were taught in grade school — k’s and z’s are thrown around with utter disregard for our precisely constructed alphabet.
With that, I handed her the remote and put her in control. Because she verbalized what I was feeling. I’m sick of Duke, too. And sick of the Florida State football team. I’m sick of the Los Angeles Lakers, and already I don’t feel that great when I think about the Baltimore Ravens. And I am perpetually nauseated when I think of Major League Baseball and another year of New York Yankees’ dominance.
The Bronx Bombers, and George Steinbrenner’s financial safety net, render the 162-game regular season virtually pointless. The Yanks have won the last three consecutive World Series and are loaded with the league’s loftiest payroll as they pursue number four. Just fast-forward to October and have New York’s finest trophy shop get working on another set of World Series rings.
I guess what I’m saying is that Autumn’s got a point: sports, in general, is fairly monotonous and unashamedly bland.
At the risk of contradicting myself, I must say that some sport is entirely pure and inspiring for the fact that, if the stars have aligned just so, the University of Hawai’i men’s basketball team can turn an otherwise scrapped season into the unlikeliest of NCAA berths. Or, with just the right gameplan, Oklahoma State can shut down one of the more potent offenses in college football history and emerge with the national championship.
But these feats are rare. Even Autumn knows it.
It seems every year around the end of March and early April, the same kind of teams are having their names called as members of the Elite 8 or Final Four.
The schools hail from the major conferences and, in fact, seem always to be in the upper tier of those leagues. We don’t often hear of Northwestern coming out of the Big Ten or see Rutgers primed to represent the Big East. When was the last time Clemson or N.C. State made any noise? Or South Carolina and Vanderbilt?
What schools always seem to be in the hunt when the Bowl Championship Series is trying to decide who will play in the big-dollar bowls? Florida State, Florida, Michigan, Notre Dame. You need not even follow these schools’ seasons to know they will play the role of contenders come January.
And, again, don’t get me started on Major League Baseball. If I hear another plea for Nomar Garciaparra to hurry and have surgery to better prepare himself to lift the Boston Red Sox over the Yankees in the American League, I’m going to spit. Because, while Garciaparra is a great player, his credentials are not such that he can singlehandedly unseat the Yankees, whose pinstripes should be green rather than black.
If we’re in agreement, and this predictable nature of sport irks you as well, I’ve got some bad news. The winds of change are not currently blustering.
Don’t look for Southwest Missouri State in the Final Four or Miami of Ohio in the Fiesta Bowl. Because the NCAA is taking precautionary measures even farther to ensure this doesn’t happen.
The governing body of college sports, when faced recently with the prospect of filling a position on its bowl selection team, nixed the insertion of a gentleman known to be sympathetic second tier Division I schools. Into his place they lifted Western Athletic Conference commissioner Karl Benson, a tad less sympathetic.
The same thing is happening in college basketball, where the teams in the Big Six conferences — Big Ten, Big East, SEC, Pac-10, Big-12, ACC — received nearly all of the 34 available at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament. And then proceeded to get clobbered by the mid-majors in the first and second round.
Why does the NCAA do this? Because they want things to stay just as they are.
By giving Big Six teams at-large bids or keeping the Marshall Universities out of the BCS, the NCAA conglomerate can keep all of the money in the Big Six conferences. Schools are awarded heartily for their participation in the Big Dance or in the BCS, and so are their conferences. Keeping the mid-majors out of these venues ensures those schools will get no money, which ensures that will not get better, which ensures the Big Six will dominate for an indefinite period of time.
Pro football and basketball may provide us new winners with more regularity, but blandness occurs because free agents swap teams with all the facility of a chameleon. And, especially in basketball, many head to the same glittery teams.
And baseball? Only two words are needed to thoroughly explain the MLB’s problem: salary cap. Until one exists, the Milwaukee Brewers and Pittsburgh Pirates will not be featured in the Fall Classic.
And Autumn will continue to find frustration in sport.
