There’s always a rudderless feeling to the end of college basketball season.
I love baseball, but it’s hard to get terribly worked up about anything happening in April. My house has always been ride-or-die with the Nashville Predators, but they’re eliminated from the playoffs and if you put a gun to my face and forced me to name 10 NHL players, non-Preds division, I think there’d be a smoky crater where my head used to be.
There’s still the NBA to get my basketball fix, but the differences between an NBA game and a college game are striking and, at least for this year, I devoted way more of my time to being immersed in college basketball. I’m knowledgeable but not invested yet, partly (probably) due to my NBA team agnosticism since being a snot-nosed Bulls fan during the Jordan days. I like players, but rarely for good reasons and sometimes for really strange ones and teams just overall don’t hold my imagination as well.
(Although I’m beginning to feel feelings for the Light The Beam Kings.)
There’s a big sense that something massive passed us by but we can’t put it into proper perspective because we’re immediately pivoting to the next thing on the college hoops carousel. Right now it’s coaching silly season, the transfer portal is ablaze and players are deciding whether or not to forgo their educations for the millions of dollars they could earn playing basketball, in America or elsewhere.
The surest sign that we’re bad at educating people in this country is how often we’re able to frame—successfully!—that making millions of dollars instantly, with a few signatures, is a choice reasonable people should consider turning down or delaying so they can pursue a history degree.
There’s a lot to hold in, and it will probably be summer before we can align it all into something resembling context, and longer to fill in the cracks. There are 350+ Division I teams and while some are worth ignoring entirely, most have stories and backstories and layers and history. There’s too much happening, and too much will continue to happen until morale improves.
Excess. Excess is what college sports has always done best.