The Ugliest Game in College Basketball History
A whole lot of stuff combined to make this atrocious
Modern basketball has a hard time being ugly.
We’ve come a long way since James Naismith nailed up the peach basket. Our athletes, conditioning, preparation and training are light years better—it’s not that long ago that smoking butts at halftime was en vogue even for the players. Older games featured brutish physicality, and not just because entering the lane was a recipe for a black eye; punches got thrown on more than one occasion, as was still the case in the NBA at the time. The purists will tell you that the extra pass for a wide-open 12-footer was the best play in the sport; they’ll also need new pants if someone even whispers the word Maravich.
People shoot threes now. People dunk now—did you know that you couldn’t dunk in a college basketball game for 10 years in the 60s and 70s, or that the rule against players dunking during warmups wasn’t ditched until 2015? Style is allowed. Fun is encouraged. We’re in a better place.
And so we’re spoiled, and I’d be the first person to admit it. When I think back on bad basketball, the nadir for me will always be the 2002 NCAA Championship game—just an unwatchable rock fight of a basketball game whose second-best participant was probably Dane Fife. That might be more the tasters’ choice for pure trash basketball—I recall nursing a sullen fury that Maryland, a high-octane offense putting up nearly 90 a game and blessed with Very College Basketball Dudes Juan Dixon, Steve Blake, Lonny Baxter and Chris Wilcox, had been drug into the gutter with/by an abominable Indiana team that didn’t have a single shot creator on its roster*. The best player Indiana played against that tournament, outside of the Duke upset, might have been Kent State’s Antonio Gates—you might remember him more fondly as a Hall of Fame tight end for the Chargers, where he went pro in something other than basketball.
* - “Oh but Jared Jeffries!” Jared Jeffries made Jarrett Allen look like John Stockton off the bounce. I could not understand for the life of me how he was a lottery pick. But on the plus side, he couldn’t shoot and wouldn’t rebound, even though he was 6-11.