I would say I realized it was the official kickoff for the stretch run of college basketball as confetti rained down on the Georgia Bulldogs at SoFi Stadium and I found myself thinking instead about Max Abmas. This would not be true, for two reasons:
I wasn’t watching the CFP title game. Once it became apparent that Georgia had the best 11 players on the field at any given time, I found something else to do.
I was thinking about Joel Soriano. Dude’s a hoss.
But we’re here now: eight full weeks remaining in the regular season. Sixty-one days until Selection Sunday. Fourteen more chances for Providence to work its devil magic against whomever is around. Nothing is more fun than college basketball, except for sex and/or a good book while you’re trapped inside during a blizzard. Your mileage could vary.
I was thinking about the seminal moments of the basketball season at this point. The four-overtime Alabama/North Carolina thriller. TCU and Baylor exchanging haymakers. Arkansas continuing to do the most, at all times. Big Gradey Dick Energy. A world that might not have Duke or North Carolina in the top-25. Charleston and Florida Atlantic having the proverbial Year for the Ages. John Calipari looking sad as his team fails to adjust to anything an opponent does. Eastern Illinois scoring the upset of the decade against Iowa and turning Fran McCaffrey a shade of burgundy we don’t even have a name for yet. The Pittaissance. We’ve already enjoyed so much, and there’s still so much to go.
I just wanted to take a quick second to do a couple of things: one, thank you for reading and/or sharing. This whole thing is a labor of love and a poorly-formed romance letter to and about college basketball, and if you’ve enjoyed any of it, that makes my heart sing like Celine Dion. If you’ve hated it, that’s fine too; holding out for universal acclaim has always been one of the things that stopped me from doing things like trying, and we’re getting away from that in 2023.
Second: weird. It’s time to get weird. Because 2023 needs the weirdness. We need a year like 2016, where untraditional powers like Oregon and Cal wound up being top-four seeds and Syracuse lurched in as a 10-seed and wound up going to the Final Four. The Louisville scandal broke that year (the one with the hookers, in case you can’t keep track). Tyler Ulis was SEC Player of the Year in an SEC that also featured Jamal Murray and Ben Simmons. Tubby Smith was named Coach of the Year by The Sporting News after going 19-13 at Texas Tech; an inspired choice, one that 2016 deserved.
That was the same year Austin Peay won four games in four days at the Ohio Valley Conference Tournament to win the whole damn thing as the No. 8 seed, something I got to experience first-hand as the single wildest stretch of deliriously happy sleeplessness I can ever recall. And I want that for all of us; I want things so wild and out of the ordinary that we’ll talk about them, hold them as emblems of hope and joy years later.
That’s college basketball. That’s why we care about this dumb sport, because it transcends us on a human level in a way we wouldn’t expect otherwise. TCU beating Georgia in football might happen once in a hundred tries, when every single thing breaks perfectly for the Horned Frogs and Georgia comes down with a team-wide case of typhoid. Georgia has created a machine that shouldn’t be trifled with on the football field, and 15 games proved that no one is within hollering distance of their level at this time. No amount of luck and good bounces can fix that for an opponent; they might get a few points they might not have otherwise, a stop that would usually go for six if not for the shoestring tackle… but the machine stays the machine. It chews up data and spits out comparable results.
Northern Iowa upending Texas and Texas A&M in a neutral site on the same weekend was only foiled by double-overtime and a 25-point outburst by Alex Caruso seven years ago. It happens every March. Pay close enough attention, know what to look for, and you can see a version of it happening every day. We’ve got eight more weeks of this year’s edition, before we get to the majority of conference tourneys and then the Big Dance itself. Make the most of it.
I had almost forgotten about that '16 Texas meltdown versus UNI. Thanks for the painful reminder.