Fix College Basketball

Give each team two strictly timed 30-second time outs. When the stopwatch hits 30 seconds, put the ball on the floor and start counting five.

Also, you can't call any time out in the final two minutes if the margin is over 10 points either way.

 

My offer is this: Change nothing, not even the fee for the gaming license, which I would appreciate if you would put up personally.

 

What's the impact to either if they lose? A 2 seed instead of a 1?

 

Sure, every game is a small pa rt of an overall big picture, but often those small pieces are often wildly entertaining. It's like asking why care if a Yankees pitcher throws a one-hitter against the A's in May?

Plus, this game along with Louisville and Kansas are huge for Kentucky to build a resume, because the SEC isn't offering many wins that are worth a shit.

Or look at Carolina. Close losses to IU and UK now. Suppose they lose more close games to Duke, Louisville and Virginia, plus a couple headscratchers along the way. Now you've got a really dangerous 4 or 5 seed in somebody's bracket.

 

I just can't get excited about that anymore, I'm sorry. There's not even really a difference among the seeds.

I haven't watched a regular-season college basketball game in I think six or seven years. A lot of what's being said about the NFL and overexposure is the story of college basketball over the last 30 years.

 

Those Saturday or Sunday afternoon Pilot-Jefferson telecasts of USC at Washington circa '85 were always fun to watch.

 

The whining of the little guy is tiresome. The fact is that Division I has become bloated with the arrival of schools with no business at that level. The newest 50 members of D-I are, in most cases, schools that do not aspire to compete with the more established programs in anything else -- students, faculty, research, national prestige etc -- and are only in it to boost local profile and gin up enrollment. And a great number of them, I suspect, have high student fees that subsidize competition at that level. They surely don't have the alumni funding to do it because many are relatively new institutions with suitcase college stamps.

 

Used to be a college basketball nut in my younger days, but that's before every NBA/NHL/college basketball game (well, most for college hoops) was televised nationally. That must be it, since the regular season for big conferences was devalued when the tournament field expanded to 64.

 

Well, that's been like 25 years now, maybe 30.

 

If you had to cover Va Tech basketball, which is an oxymoron, I feel for you.

 

The whining of the little guy is only tiresome if you're not one of them. They "whine" because they get tired of being dicked over by the haves of the NCAA world, and then sneered at because they don't build waterfalls in the locker room to impress recruits.

Smaller schools have the same desire for college athletics that big schools do, and for the same reasons. They want the nationwide publicity that athletics and big upset wins bring them. 90% of the nation can't tell you what state Appalacian St. is in, but by god they know they beat Michigan. They want their students to have, and to grow, school spirit and an emotional bond to the school. They want their recent and more distant alumni to have fond memories and reasons to return to the school, and to donate and make bequests to it. They want their students and alums to have Homecoming, just like the big guys do. They just don't have the luxury of television networks shoveling obscene piles of money at them the way the Power Five schools do, so they have to find a way to make do somehow.

Speaking for the fans of a quite large and well budgeted school, as well as one which is quite well respected academically as well as in research circles, which has been actively and deliberately fucked over by trustees who are substantial financial boosters of another school, eat a big one. If a school can run athletics and chooses to do so, it's no skin off your nose. If it can't afford to and has to step down a league or close programs down due to lack of funds, they should and will after fighting to keep it and failing.

When you get right down to it, college athletics from the most elite programs right down to Podunk U. is completely unnecessary to the core mission, the education of college students.