Special Weekend Rant…

No, I did not set my calendar ahead a day instead of setting my clock ahead an hour last night. This is a weekend rant simply because I know that I will not have any time to write one if I wait until tomorrow. So, on with the show…

Sports fans ought to be gearing themselves up for the single best sporting event of the year. As of tonight, we will know the teams and the seedings for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament; frankly, as much as I believe that the NCAA is a feckless and useless organization, I do believe that they put on the best sporting event of the year and perhaps for that reason alone should be allowed to continue to pollute the sporting world. What makes March Madness great is its finality. There will be 67 games; one team in each game will end its season with a loss; one team will win the tournament.

It is that finality which – unfortunately – seems to help to diminish the college basketball regular season. There are more than 300 teams that play Division 1 college basketball; they play multiple thousands of games and only a minuscule fraction of them have anything remotely similar to “finality”. Far too many of the regular season college basketball games are:

Occurrences rather than events

Games in which the outcome has only marginal meaning – and –

On television.

On a typical weekend in the DC area, it would not be unusual to find 2 or 3 dozen college basketball games available on the various cable channels – and that does not even begin to count the reruns of those games multiple times on some of the channels. Now hear this:

From around Thanksgiving time until the start of the conference tournaments (I am being generous here.) there is not a single week – let alone a weekend – where there are 2-3 dozen college basketball games that are significant.

The humongous over-exposure of college basketball on TV is hurting the game as much – if not more – than anything else.

Believe me; I understand the economic driving forces that put so many games on TV. I also recognize that interest in the regular season games as a whole is significantly diminished from the days when there were only two or three “national games” on TV over a weekend. I doubt that network execs, athletic directors and broadcasters would want to acknowledge it but there is an application of the Economic Law of Supply and Demand at work here:

The current demand for college basketball on TV is pretty much saturated.

The current supply of TV games is more than the demand can consume.

Ergo, the only thing that can happen is that the value of each regular season game diminishes.

Fortunately, we can put aside senses of apathy, torpor and indifference about now. From here on out, the games are for real.

Bob Molinaro of the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot feels the same way about regular season college basketball as I do but perhaps for different reasons:

“In the shadows: I almost feel sorry for college basketball, which even as we approach the tail end of the regular season, takes a back seat – picture the third row of a mini-van – to talk radio’s and the Internet’s fascination with the NFL combine, mock drafts, landing spots for Robert Griffin III and Johnny Manziel and spring training. Until March, when a lot of people think it’s cool to pretend to care, college hoops is becoming more of a niche sport … I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a poor reflection on the sport when Pablo Sandoval’s stomach gets more attention in February than the college top 25.”

Since Professor Molinaro brought up the name Johnny Manziel in his commentary, that leads me to pose this pair of questions.

Given the off-field situations that have accreted themselves to “Johnny Football” and the seemingly unending number of similar situations that continue to fall into his orbit:
Will he ever start another NFL football game at QB?

What will he do with his life once he no longer has a future in football – be it next year or whenever?

With regard to the first question, I believe there is reason to doubt he will ever get another starting shot based on the fact that it is only a 50/50 proposition that any NFL team will sign him now that he is a free agent. First you have to be on a team; then you get to be a starting player. Moreover, I cannot imagine that any NFL team would bring him in and anoint him as the starter; at best, he would be signed with the understanding he would be given a chance to compete for the starting job and to win it he will have to be clearly the best option on the roster.

With regard to the second question, I am not qualified to make any sort of definitive statement. His actions seem to me to be a combination of self-destruction, entitlement and a gross lack of maturity. I would defer to those trained in psychology to confirm or deny those labels and to predict what might be the future for someone with such presentations. I will simply say that from my perspective, his future does not look all that great.

Finally, since I mentioned Bob Molinaro above, let me close this weekend edition with another of his observations – this time about televised college basketball games. He is spot-on with this comment:

“Shouting back: When courtside analysts raise their voices asking why a college player committed a bad turnover or foul or took a wild shot, I sometimes find myself saying to the flat screen, ‘Because he’s 19. He’s a half-formed player who came out of AAU ball with minimal real coaching and probably less discipline. So shut up, already.’”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………