Dominance vs. Inspiration

And the death of (what I liked about) college basketball

I make somewhat frequent references to Ryen Russillo’s podcast here because I generally enjoy it. I also tend to like ESPN’s Jay Bilas as a college basketball analyst, and college hoops used to be far and away my favorite major American sport. So on paper a Bilas appearance on Russillo’s podcast to preview the Final Four ought to be an extremely Me Thing. In practice, though, it just kind of annoyed me:

This is largely because in the last several years I’ve basically stopped watching college basketball. Mostly for logistical reasons (between my work and the kids’ schoolwork, it’s not feasible for me to watch games on tv every night), but also because I don’t really like the way the game has changed in the last decade or two. And then a big chunk of the podcast is devoted to saying that I’m either lying about not watching or an idiot for not liking the current state of play.

This is, of course, a standard strategy of modern #discourse: boldly asserting that everybody loves Thing X and then dismissing and disparaging anyone who says they don’t like Thing X. And then the next time the subject comes up, repeating the assertion that everybody loves Thing X despite the fact that you just had an extended argument about this. It’s deeply infuriating when you’re not a Thing X lover, particularly when the argument is presented in a supercilious and dickish manner (which is the principal failure mode for Bilas in particular).

In the specific case of college basketball, it’s maybe worth trying to unpack a bit of what’s going on, though, because I think it traces to a fundamental difference in mindset. That is, I can sort of see how to get to the Bilas and Russillo view that everything is great, provided you start out valuing something completely different about college hoops, and sports in general.

The argument that the college game is in a great place basically boils down to saying that the combination of “power conference” consolidation and the “transfer portal” system allowing players to jump between schools increase the odds of the Final Four featuring highly-ranked teams stocked with great individual players. That gives you the best chance of spectacular plays in the final games.

And that’s absolutely borne out, to a certain extent— this year’s semifinal games (Florida over Auburn, Houston over Duke) went down to the wire, as did Florida beating Houston for the title. The star players for all those teams did star-player things, so in that sense, the system is working. The problem is, that’s not the primary thing I’m looking for in sports in general, and it’s very much not what I found charming about college basketball specifically. And, as a result, I watched maybe half an hour worth of the semis, and not a minute of the title game¹.

And this is where I think there’s a fundamental difference between what most of the sports commentariat want and what I (and a non-trivial number of other people) want. It’s the difference between wanting dominance and wanting inspiration.

People in the sports business generally want everything to be as big as possible— the biggest ratings, the biggest stars, the biggest numbers. The goal is to see the best individual players putting up the most spectacular performances on the biggest possible stage. At some level, it’s all about power rankings— how does this year’s star performance stack up to the greatest performances of the past, where does this year’s team stand compared to the all-time greats.

This drives a lot of the structure of professional sports (with one important exception): playoffs in the NBA, the NHL, and MLB are built around multi-game series, increasing the odds that the “best” teams will win, leading to the biggest possible match-up in the finals. This mostly works out, though not perfectly, and sets up endless conversations about dynasties and championship windows and all that kind of thing. They want to see dominance, and compare the dominant performances of today to the dominant performances of the past.

But that’s not the only way to approach sports, and specifically it’s not the way I tend to approach the sports I follow. I’m not opposed to seeing spectacular individual feats, but the thing is, every single one of these guys is so far beyond what I can do that the returns start to diminish². The thing I value most, at least as a non-aligned fan, is the “any given weekday” aspect: the inherent randomness of sports that allows a merely-okay team to knock off a great one, when things break just right.

The championships I remember most fondly are, of course, the ones won by my teams— Maryland in 2002, Syracuse in 2003, etc.— but after that, the title games I cherish are the ones where heavy underdogs got a shot to take down the very best: NC State over Houston in 1983, Villanova over Georgetown in 1985, that kind of thing. I even think more about ones where underdogs came up short but at least got a chance (Butler’s two title-game losses), or where the “underdog” was also a power school (UConn knocking off a very hate-able Duke team in 1999, say) than about the years when “the best” teams squared off in the final.

The very sweetest, of course, is when those two interests can align— when my team is the heavy underdog that knocks off a truly great team. And I think that’s maybe a pretty good proxy for the difference in approach I’m talking about— most people in sports media would’ve been happier if David Tyree had dropped that ball (and Mario Manningham had done the same a few years later) so the Patriots had remained undefeated, but the Helmet Catch is an iconic moment because it’s a triumph for the “little guy.”

Interestingly, the NFL is the one pro sport best set up to allow that kind of moment, because, like the NCAA tournament, it’s a single-elimination system. You only have to beat any given team one time, which increases the odds of an iconic underdog run (like my Giants on multiple occasions, or the Joe Namath Jets, or the first of the Patriots titles, etc.).

The very best lesson to take away from sports, to my mind, is not anything about individual dominance, but that if you get a chance, anything can happen. That you don’t have to be the best player on every single day, you just have to be the best team on one particular day. Which can be the result of stellar individual play, but can also be a greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts kind of deal, where a bunch of little factors come together leading to a victory. One of my favorite possibly-apocryphal quotes is one of the coaches of an underdog champ being asked at a press conference “Do you really think you have a chance to beat [heavy favorite]?” and replying “We’re the only ones who do, because we’re the only ones playing them.”³ As a guy who has basically never been the best individual player in any sport I’ve ever played, I find that attitude inspiring, and that’s what I’m watching for, particularly when the teams involved aren’t ones I root for.

College basketball used to be exceptionally well set up for that sort of moment. In addition to the single-elimination format, the breadth of the field (hundreds of different teams in different leagues playing different styles) and relative stability of the rosters (most players staying put for multiple years) gave you good chances of getting one of those teams where none of the individual players were all that highly regarded in high school, but they had played together so much that as a unit, they were formidable. And those are exactly the factors that are undermined by the changes of the last 20-odd years— particularly the transfer portal, which encourages players who turn out to be better than recruiters thought to leave small schools after only a year or two, preventing the development of those cohesive veteran teams that produce the best versions of what I’m looking for. It’s also led to a kind of homogenization of play across the sport— the constant churn in rosters makes it harder to implement idiosyncratic approaches to offense or defense, and those were part of the charm. For many years I would get in arguments with NBA fans saying that “It’s just the same game with worse players,” and defend college by pointing to significant differences in the style of play. When I watch these days, alas, it really does feel a lot more like just a lesser version of the NBA. Even more so since the transfer portal brings in the trade-and-contract aspect of the pro game that I find incredibly tedious (but which is great for folks in the business (like Bilas) who need #content on a regular basis).

And, look, I understand and even largely agree with Bilas’s argument that the current system is more equitable and advantageous for individual players. They deserve to be compensated for their skills, and I can’t fault them for moving to places where they’ll get more attention and more money. That doesn’t change the fact that the resulting talent consolidation makes the college game less appealing to me, and as a result, I’m much less likely to watch it.

I don’t know that there’s any solution to this that could bring back the aspects of the college game that I used to love. I certainly wouldn’t favor restoring draconian “amateurism” rules, or banning players from switching teams. You could maybe get somewhere by having schools directly pay players a uniform set rate that’s higher than the paltry “NIL” packages smaller schools can offer, but that’s entirely too sensible for the NCAA. And still wouldn’t address the disparity in outside resources that can be pulled together by the bigger schools. The horse has left the barn and gotten on a ship that’s sailed, and the only thing I can do is lament what was lost.

Bu I genuinely do think the game today is worse than it used to be, and I genuinely do watch less of it than I did in the past, and it irritates me to fire up a podcast and be told that neither of those things is true.

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Yeah, I’m yelling at clouds again. If you like this kind of thing, here’s a button:

And should you feel moved to reply, the comments will be open:

1. The 9pm start time of Monday’s final didn’t help; I go to bed around then on a good day, and my Tuesday teaching schedule is just brutal.

2. We had a nice illustration of this yesterday, when our lunchtime pick-up game was joined by a guy who played for the UNC Tar Heels (not a star, but not just garbage-time minutes, either). He was head-and-shoulders better than anyone else in the gym without visibly trying.

3. I swear I heard this associated with Jim Valvano in ‘83, but a few half-ass attempts to find a clear attribution of it have come up empty, so maybe I imagined the whole thing.