College Basketball vs. the NBA

They're not supposed to be the same

A top prospect for the class of 2033

The NCAA basketball championship tournament— their trademarking is so aggressive now that I’m not sure I’m allowed to even refer to it as “M*rch M*dn*ss” without paying a license fee—is happening now, which marks the traditional high point of the college basketball season. Unfortunately, it also marks the high point of “NBA-Hole Bad Take Season,” with tons of people who don’t watch college basketball during the regular season tuning in, and then complaining that it’s not the same as the NBA.

This takes lots of forms, and it’s a little tough to say which of them I find most irritating. On a philosophical sort of level, I think it’s probably putting guys like Charles Barkley on the studio to comment on the games. Barkley’s main gig is commenting on NBA games, and he sometimes barely seems to be watching those, making him thoroughly useless as a commentator on college hoops, save as a source of unmoored disdain.

As conceptually annoying as Barkley’s presence is, he’s at least somewhat genial. The more viscerally irritating Bad Takes are mostly on social media, and take the general form “I don’t know why anybody would watch this, these kids can’t make shots as well as NBA players.” Which is true on a really facile level, but also fairly comprehensively misses the point, which is that they’re not supposed to be identical.

This is why the two have traditionally been structured very differently, to the point of having different rule sets— a longer shot clock in college, greater freedom to play zone defense, five rather than six fouls before disqualification. The two levels are prioritizing different things— the NBA has always been arranged to maximize the impact and exposure of individual star talents, while college has had more of a team and system focus.

It’s absolutely true that the players in the NCAA tournament are not, on average, as capable as the players in the NBA. But there’s more to basketball than just physical ability, and those of us who prefer the college game do so because we give greater weight to some of those other aspects. This is reflected in the tournament moments that college hoops fans particularly cherish— NC State’s defeat of Houston, Villanova over Georgetown, etc.— which saw less-talented teams defeat collections of future NBA stars. I don’t think anybody would deny that the “Fab Five” teams at Michigan in the early 1990’s were the most impressive collection of individual basketball talents in the country for those years, but they never won a title because they came up against Duke and UNC who were less physically gifted but played better as a team.

I don’t want to watch a version of basketball where eight guys stand around watching two other guys play one-on-one for ten seconds— I want to see longer possessions, with guys moving and cutting and passing. I want to see full-court presses, match-up zones, and other unusual defensive schemes that lift the game above a contest of raw talent. That’s the game that I love, and those aspects have traditionally been more prominent in college than in the NBA.

This is not exclusive to college basketball, any more than crazy physical talent is completely absent from the college game. If you can get NBA-level athletes to play a real motion offense, it’s a beautiful thing— the Jordan-era Bulls ran an actual offense, as did Duncan’s Spurs teams, and the best of the Curry Warriors teams. The structure of the NBA as a product, though, gives a lot more room for it to become just four guys standing around watching one guy “create his own shot,” and I’ve always found that infuriatingly unwatchable. The NBA at its very best has always been great, but you don’t have to go far down from the peak before I find it really hard to take.

Unfortunately, you’ll notice the word “traditionally” appearing a lot in the above. The sad fact is that over the last decade or two, the structural gap between the leagues has closed a bit, to the detriment of the college game. The NBA-Hole Take is still wrong, but it’s less wrong today than it was in the 1990’s. There have been rule shifts to move the college game closer to the NBA—most notably the shortening of the shot clock— and also a kind of systemic flattening of the game that I think is largely a result of the “one and done” era of scholarships. The very best players coming into the college game over the last twenty-ish years have been doing so with an increasingly open level of cynicism, viewing it solely as an obligatory stop before moving on to the NBA. Coaches who want to rent these players for their one year in the NCAA have powerful incentives to play a style that is as NBA-like as possible, to maximize the opportunities for their mercenary frosh showcase their individual skills enough to move up the NBA draft. This has sucked out a lot of the variety that made the college game so attractive to me.

I was particularly reminded of this by the early segments of the latest Bill Simmons podcast, where he and Ryen Russillo discuss the NCAA’s. Talking about Mike Krzyzewski’s retirement, Simmons wonders whether this is the end of the college basketball mega-coach— if Krzyzewski and Roy Williams (who retired last year) and Jim Boeheim (who’s clearly near the end of his career) and John Calipari are the last coaches who will seem larger than the game. Even the top remaining coaches don’t have the same towering stature that guys like John Thompson or Dean Smith had back in the day.

Simmons says that “something changed” a decade or two ago, and to my mind it’s pretty clear what that was: ESPN got rights to NBA games. The real heyday of college basketball was in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when ESPN was new-ish, and NCAA hoops was its flagship winter product. When that was the situation, they poured a lot of effort into elevating college basketball, which due to the time-limited careers of the players meant boosting the profile of the coaches who would be there year in and year out. They still covered the NBA, but didn’t have as much incentive to hype it, because they weren’t carrying the actual games, just running highlights. Since they got NBA rights in 2002, there’s been a steady increase in the amount of pro basketball content on the networks, and a corresponding decrease in the profile of college basketball.

The reason you’re not likely to see a new coach with the status of Mike Krzyzewski is that Krzyzewski’s lofty status was largely a creation of ESPN back in the day, and they simply don’t have any incentive to do that any more, not to anywhere near the same degree. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, hyping the NCAA was a tool for ESPN to compete with the rest of sports, but today it would be competing with itself. And there’s just way more money to be had from the NBA than the NCAA.

As someone who has always vastly preferred the college game to the pro game, I find this sad, but there’s really nothing that can be done about it at this point. In a weird way, I think the best thing for the kind of basketball I like might be for the NBA to renegotiate its deals, and remove the one-and-done requirement, letting top prospects be drafted directly. This will greatly reduce the casual audience for college basketball by removing those spectacular talents, but it’s not clear to me any more that their presence has any positive impact on the game. Freed of the need to cater to the mercenary tendencies of the top prospects, we might see a bit more variety creep back into the game, giving it less of an NBA-Lite feel, albeit with smaller crowds and less TV money.

There will always be some audience for it, though, in large because many people will maintain some rooting interest in the teams from their alma maters (should probably give a hat-tip to Mark Titus of Titus and Tate here, as he’s been saying this for years). But there will also be people who tune in because they’re quite deliberately looking for a variety of basketball that isn’t just NBA-style ball played by guys with less talent.

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Not the thing I was originally intending to write today, but plans changed after my morning dog walk podcast. Anyway, here are some buttons:

And if you want to attempt to convince me that it’s actually more interesting to watch James Harden or Russell Westbrook than college hoops, well, it’s not going to work, but you can try in the comments.