The New Republic asked for my thoughts on the Israeli-Arab conflict and the appropriate U.S. policy response how to improve the NCAA tournament. Results here.
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Modest Proposals
29 Mar 2008 02:05 pm
Comments (40)
Fun fact: Amir Johnson would be sophmore at Louisville this year and the best player in the NCAA. Instead he's one of the last players in the Detroit Pistons rotation and making $2 million dollars more per year than Rick Pitino. Who needs the Boolah-Boolah nonsense of the NCAA when the NBA is offering Moolah-Moolah to ply your trade?
The NCAA is a farce of an educational non-profit organization. By my calculations it costs aproximately $66.5 million dollars a year to give scholarships + room and board to each and every D-I basketball player in the nation. 13 scholarships X 341 teams X 15K per year. CBS pays the NCAA more than $700 million dollars a year, more than 10x the total cost of the every scholarship in the nation, just for the rights to broadcast March Madness. How the hell is that fair?
How about you eat a bowl of dicks, Petey?
seriously.
Best Yglesias joke ever. So awesome.
Matt is right on this one and so is joejoejoe.
I'm not a big basketball fan myself, but if I were, I'd watch the NBA. I certainly have this argument with people about the NFL and college football. If the point isn't to watch THE BEST play the game, why not ramble over to a pop warner football game and watch that? Really, if the NFL or NBA have "too high" a level of play to make it worth watch, why are you bothering with the second tier?
(I have this same argument about men's v. women's tennis. "But women have longer rallies." THAT'S BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT AS GOOD. If I want to watch long rallies I'll watch a fifty-something married couple lob it back and forth at some tennis club for a few hours.)
Whenever I debate the "merits" of college basketball with a fan, it becomes clear that I'm missing the point.
Spot on.
20-odd years ago Dave Barry suggested that in 5 million years humankind would have vanished, and the microbes in the Middle East would still hate each other. I have yet to see an analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict that rises to that level. Stick with the NCAA.
20-odd years ago Dave Barry suggested that in 5 million years humankind would have vanished, and the microbes in the Middle East would still hate each other.
That is so many flavors of intellectually lazy and much more so cowardly it makes me embaressed.
it becomes clear that I'm missing the point.
So you are the perfect TNR writer for this topic. Don't sell yourself short.
The Grizzlies are playing the Clippers tonight. That will be riveting. No one in the country will be watching UNC v. Louisville because there's a much better option. Thank god.
If the point isn't to watch THE BEST play the game, why not ramble over to a pop warner football game and watch that?
If the point is to watch THE BEST play the game, why watch the NBA? Just watch the All-Star game and the Olympics finals, and forget about all these plebian basketball teams in third and fourth place.
With all the free time you'll save, you can go out and only watch the movies that won the Best Picture Oscar and only read the books that won the Pulitzer.
I don't see why everyone gets so worked up over other people's preferences. It's no skin off my back if you don't like the same things I like.
It's okay to write for Marty Perez for money.
Just be sure to wash your hands afterwards.
With Chlorox.
If the point is to watch THE BEST play the game, why watch the NBA? Just watch the All-Star game and the Olympics finals, and forget about all these plebian basketball teams in third and fourth place.
All Star games are low quality basketball games. There's a ton of talent, but the quality of play is awful. The difference between an average NBA team and the best NBA team is less than the difference in quality between a 1 and a 4 seed.
"5 million years humankind would have vanished,"
Dave Barry was off by about 4,999,950 years - give or take a few decades.
Unless of course he meant that mankind would still be gone then, in which case he was right.
OTOH, some other branch of chimpanzees might have evolved to replace us by then - and still hate each other in the ME.
Asking MattY to suggest improvements to the NCAA tournament is like asking a Republican to propose new ethics reform legislation, or asking Grover Norquist to propose a new government social program...
Ladies and gentlemen, you next president - Mr. Straight Talk Express:
Q: "What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?"
Mr. McCain: (Long pause) "Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy."Q: "So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?"
Mr. McCain: (Long pause) "You’ve stumped me."
Q: "I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?"
Mr. McCain: (Laughs) "Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it."
Q: "But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?"
Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) "Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before."
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/mccain-stumbles-on-hiv-prevention/
we asked a few friends of the magazine if they had any ideas for improving the NCAAs. Here's what Matthew Yglesias, blogger and associate editor for The Atlantic, thinks
"Friend of the magazine"!!!
But, yes, according to Matthew, the height of basketball is the NBA All-Star game. It's got the most talented players, so therefore it is the best game.
I'd write something about Yglesias' views on the college game are about as well founded as Andrew Sullivan's knee-jerk anti-Clintonism, but considering that I put Stanford in the championship game and Michigan State in the Elite 8 (and considering how my beloved Buckeyes aren't even in the damn tournament), I'm kind of sympathetic to anti-NCAA Tournament sentiment at the moment.
Although I never got the whole "we only watch the best players play" mentality. I won't touch on the implicit sexism of this, but doesn't this attitude call for a far less dynamic game? It's like the ideal team would be five LeBrons.
BTW, this isn't exactly an NBA thread (there hasn't been one of those in a while), but it's close enough so I'll take the liberty and hijack this to say - WTF is up with the Lakers? Back to back home losses to the Grizz and Bobcats? I thought they were fighting for first place?
In addition, that Jason Kidd trade looks more and more disastrous for Mavs, doesn't it?
Without Gasol, the Lakers just aren't that great. The more Kobe needs to shoot, the more selfish he becomes, and the more obvious it becomes that he's not as good as LeBron. When healthy, the Lakers are contenders. If they're missing their 2nd-best player (and their 4th-best, Bynum), then they're not really one of the top 5 teams in the west.
Also, what's "implicitly sexist" about wanting to watch the best players? There's not still a women's pro league, is there? Well, even if there was, it wouldn't make you sexist if you didn't want to watch it. It would just make you smarter than a rock.
Yeah, there is nothing sexist about not wanting to watch WNBA.
Basketball "Quality" = talent level * (player effort + significance of the game)
The Atlanta Hawks are better than North Carolina,and the Knicks are better than UCLA, but most NBA fans would agree that watching UNC play like hell trying to beat UCLA would still be infinitely better than watching a meaningless Hawks v. Knicks game.
This is a fantastic year for the NBA, but there are still a number of horrible, low-effort games that aren't much fun to watch. Every time you watch an NBA game, there is a significant chance that you will end up watching Vince Carter phone in a half-assed performance, or the equivalent. At least when you are watching the tournament, there is almost no chance of that happening. Plus, you get a fairly consistant level of entertainment value without having to actually make decisions which require prior knowledge (Warriors vs Lakers = lots of fun, Knicks vs Spurs = less fun.)
This doesn't mean that college is better than the NBA, but it might mean that a casual fan will get more enjoyment from flipping on a random NCAA tourament game than a NBA regular season game, though I'd have to say that this year has been an outlier in terms of NBA awesomeness.
The biggest problems with the NCAA tournament are
1) single elimination tournaments are inherently boring - there's no real mystery about who you're going to play. The most interesting part of NCAA basketball is actually the conference tournaments culminating in Selection Sunday; the complexity of the national situation - with a finite number of automatic bids, and teams adding to their resumes in the conference tournaments - makes that whole week fascinating to watch and full of possibilities for participants. All that is gone at the start of the 64-team tournament.
2)You're a slave to your bracket - if the two hottest teams in the country wind up in the same region, the best games can be played in round 3 or round 4.
3)it's too easy for undeserving teams to go deep into the tournament by dumb luck.
4)the cinderella metaphor is possibly the most overused please-shoot-me-in-the-head-with-a-flaregun if-I-hear-it-one-more-time-this-weekend metaphors in sports.
5)the biggest thrill of the tournament for the teams just lucky to get there is the day they hear their name called on Selection Sunday. After all, after their surprise and cheering dies down a 15 or 16 seed team faces the prospect that their 'triumphant' season will inevitably end with a complete thrashing at the hands of a powerhouse in the first round of the tournament.
The solution? Make the NCAA tournament more like the World Cup, where the first round is a round-robin of some kind with 8 balanced Groups of 6 teams, leading into a 16 seed single elimination tournament. The winner of each Group, plus a certain number of wildcards would advance. You'd have to extend the tournament one weekend, and you'd have to implement some kind of tie break formula when wildcard teams end up with equal records in their groups.
That guarantees every team -even the lucky-to-be-there Appalachian States of the world- gets a real reward by going to the post season - specifically 4 or 5 games at the big dance, and gives them a chance at pulling down a win for their fans....and if not that, then a chance to make a difference in the tournament by knocking out one of the mid-seeds in their Group.
I've pitched this to about 20 people over the last 5-6 years and so far I'm 0-for-20 in convincing people....but I feel confident they'll come around.
Sports? OK, if that rocks your boat. Anyway, that means you don't have to understand subprimes and how the government is bailing out Wall Street.
The Romans already knew that games were good for distracting the people from how their leaders were screwing them.
NCAA? What is professional basketball doing in colleges in the first place? I naively thought that one went to college to get an education, and I don't mean about throwing a ball around.
But the big, and maybe not so big, college coaches are paid much more than even the top professor. I guess that is all right because a basketball game attracts thousands whereas even a Noble Prize winning scientist will attract tens.
Yay! It's Matt's annual post in which he trolls for comments by proudly displaying his ignorance about basketball. It's my favorite post of the year, to which I will give my annual response: everyone is an idiot about something, and for Matt it's basketball.
Bonus funny: Matt's alma mater (Harvard) hired a former Dookie as a head coach in order to make them competitive in the Ivy League and have ended up with their first recruiting scandal. http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaab/news;_ylt=AiPu8x22.jWgwwZMYB2SHko5nYcB?slug=dw-harvardscandal030208&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
Bernarda-
I think you underestimate the important role that sports can play, particularly in the lives of young boys. It can instill certain ethics like teamwork and hard work in ways that book-learning or more vocational avenues could only hope to. And I would say that sports has provided thousands of young men and women a chance to attend college that may not have existed otherwise. Of course it is up to them what they do when they get there, but I think sports does play an important role in the formation of a well rounded individual.
Complaining about the extent of professionalism in college sports and the hypocrisy of the NCAA is always fair game and welcome, however. It still baffles me that they can be considered a non-profit organization.
UCLA
why shouldn't they be a non-profit? do they distribute excess earnings to shareholders?
sure, the "madness" thing is overhyped. but this is a strawman. the vast majority of the time the highest seed teams make the final eight and beyond. the tournament is the best basketball to watch (except for a closely contested late playoff NBA series) because it is when you get to see the highest combination of coaching and playing, both integral parts of great basketball.
Bored on a Saturday, let's dig for fire...
No one in the country will be watching UNC v. Louisville because there's a much better option.
Ah, yes...the thrilling UNC-Louisville matchup, which is now a twelve-point game at halftime.
Will Louisville come back and cut the lead down to single-digits? Will UNC push the margin to 20? Stay tuned, basketball fans!
Seriously, all you NCAA partisans...have you watched any of the games this weekend? Quality counts. So does parity. The NBA is undergoing a renaissance this year...watch any of the 20 teams in playoff contention face off and you'll see what's up.
I naively thought that one went to college to get an education
One goes to college to get a degree. Education is an ancillary benefit, and often unnecessary i/r/t the success of the larger end--i.e., employment.
How is life on the high horse? Does the saddle make you sore?
Will Louisville come back and cut the lead down to single-digits? Will UNC push the margin to 20? Stay tuned, basketball fans!
You know that's likely to bite you -- 55-56, 11:30 on the clock.
The boring fart at TNR -- Crock1701 -- who pooh-poohs the FA Cup's random draw needs to be kicked repeatedly up the arse, especially after this year. (It's you, Al, isn't it?)
So, given that bracketology isn't going to go away, I don't see why you can't transplant the equivalent of the non-leaguers' road to the FA Cup. More play-in games -- heck, have the 15 and 16 seeds in each region decided by eight-team play-ins.
On ssdagg's points:
1. Single elimation / straight knockout is not inherently boring, especially if you abandon seeding and have random draws after each round.
2. The World Cup group stage model has a small but always non-zero number of dead games. That's partly because draws earn you a point, but in your model, it means that dominant teams can win four of their six, bench the starters for the remaining two, and potentially skew the results against teams that had to play the top dogs early in the round robin.
3. From my relatively limited experience of watching the NCAA tournament, the best games do seem to come in the early rounds, not just because of giant-killing, but because of the sheer number and frequency of games. That's not something you can really do much about, though.
If you aren't a fan of a team, if you don't hate a team, you are stupid for watching. "Oh my, this was exciting athletic competition." What a sucker! Do you care who wins or loses? Yes or no? If it doesn't matter to you who wins, go fly a kite. The level of athletic competition is the worst reason possible to watch a sporting event.
I am happy that UNC won. I would have been happy to watch Rick Pitino and L-ville lose to near about anyone. That was a fun game. It had *nothing* to do with watching the most competitive athletic game on TV.
Some people care who wins and loses. Generally, we love March Madness. The NBA Playoffs? Small percentage of games that actually matter, and small number of teams I care whether they win or lose. Doesn't do much for me. For folks who like to watch a lot of games and don't care who wins or loses, its great. Different strokes for different folks.
"In fact, you ought to convince your daddy to buy you a magazine." -- Petey
Petey,
You're filled with class rage yet when we click on your name it links to John Edwards campaign stuff. Too amusing.
Don't you know Edwards dropped out of the race?
But don't worry - the hedge fund he worked for lives on!
You can link to it here: http://www.fortressinv.com/
Why not then make John's beloved Fortress Investment Group, L.L.C. your link now? You'll seem like less of gullible, wrath-filled rube?
When you're done with that you can contemplate the irony of a trail lawyer not just working for big money finance, but working for big money finance in the form of an L.L.C. (LIMITED LIABILITY corporation.) Too droll.
Off now to swoon for Obama . . . you know, unlike Chelsea Clinton or John Edwards he wasn't working for a hedge fund prior to the Presidential race.
(Good luck dealing with those anger and gullibility issues, Petey! Nice, too, to see Hack, Williams and the rest of the sadly obsessed come out from under their rock at a Mideast mention! None of this ever gets old or seem pathetic!)
You would need to add only 63 teams, not 64, to expand the field to 128 since the field currently starts with 65 teams, not 64.
The point in any type of entertainment is rarely ever only the 'best' ply their trade. The point is to watch things that make you happy.
So, if someone likes Norbit more than the Godfather, then so be it. If they like Guns n Roses more than Mozart, then so be it. If they like to watch the Indiana Hoosiers instead of the Indiana Pacers, then so be it. Who the hell are you and I to tell Jon Doe what he should enjoy or spend his money on?
Sports may be about competition, but being a fan is not. Being a fan should be about having fun, and nothing more.
My modest proposal is to return the tournament to 64 teams instead of the currently bogus 65.
The 64-team, 3 weekend NCAA tournament is so perfect it needs no other improvement
(other than perhaps not letting any team play virtual home games -- i.e. UNC playing in Charlotte. How is that fair, exactly?)
Yes, so ridiculous that the current format failed to result in the four best teams playing in the final four.
Yes, he certainly did pick the wrong year to write this. (Also, I was naive enough before clicking to think that they would be serious proposals.)
Besides, every sport has its own intrinsic culture. In baseball I'm a purist, and I'm glad the Red Sox won a World Series in a first-place year to add to their one won in a wild card year, but in college basketball these kinds of things are expected (except this year).
Clearly, the only thing that will save the NCAA tournament is replacing it with a Basketball Bowl System.
Playoffs represent logic rather than "madness" so why not have a game a day for the month of March?
[Insert every idiotic argument against a college football playoff here.]
Comments closed April 12, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
You ought to write more for them. You've got far more in common with Marty than you pretend.
In fact, you ought to convince your daddy to buy you a magazine.
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Your NCAA piece is spot on, FWIW.
Posted by Petey | March 29, 2008 2:40 PM