HITTING THE PANDEMIC WALL
We've all gotten there at some point. Is college basketball hitting it now?
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As we’ve gotten further into this college basketball season, as the stress and the grind and the isolation has continued to pile up, the level of play in the sport has remained consistently pretty ugly.
It’s a conversation that I’ve had with a few people around the sport in recent weeks, but one that came to the forefront a bit this week when Friend Of The Program and NBA Draft Guru over at the Athletic, Sam Vecenie, penned a column on the G League Ignite team that took a pretty significant shot at college hoops and the NCAA:
The college basketball season has disappointed scouts. The play in the NCAA has looked terrible at times outside of Gonzaga’s and Baylor’s dominance. One college coach put it pretty succinctly to me:
“It’s almost as if you take a sport that thrives on fans and atmosphere and play it in empty buildings, then have a 4-5 month slog where teams aren’t able to go home for the holidays and are restricting 18-22-year-old college kids with what they can and can’t do, this is what you get.”
I love college basketball. I built a business around covering this sport. I have spent more time watching and thinking about this sport in the last 12 years than any human reasonably should. I defend the sport to people that think it sucks. But the truth is that college basketball has been hard to watch this season, and it goes far beyond the cognitive dissonance required to celebrate amateur athletes risking their health — and the health of the people they may spread this virus to — in order to ensure that the NCAA gets their $900 million from CBS and Turner.
I’ll come back to that.
The truth is that what makes college basketball special is what happens around the game as much as the game itself. It’s the connection that alumni feel to the program that they played for or the school that they attended. It’s the atmosphere that is created when a sea of drunk college kids are sitting just feet away from a rival, close enough that the players can hear every insult directed at them, every mention of their girlfriend, or mom, or sister. It’s the silence that follows a road team drilling a dagger. It’s the familial bond that is created when a group of strangers join a team and spend three or four years doing everything together.
It’s that yellow wall of fans covered by the state flag at Maryland. It’s the blue paint flaking off a Crazie that you get on your button down covering a game at Cameron. It’s the haunting tones of Rock Chalk Jayhawk, or the loose Maui rims, or the overpacked WCC gyms that No. 1 Gonzaga goes into that are half the size of most Indiana high schools.
We don’t get any of that during a pandemic.
The charm is gone.
College basketball is supposed to be anything-but sterile, but it feels like games this season are being played in an OR.
Which leaves … the basketball.
And the basketball has always had the potential to be ugly at this level. That was before the rising salaries in the professional ranks — not just the NBA itself, but the G League, two-way contracts, etc. — created a talent drain on the sport that the NCAA has yet to try and plug with money from access to Name, Image and Likeness rights. We always start with some rock fights. That’s an annual tradition, but typically once we hit February, everyone is rolling.
But this year, outside of Baylor and Gonzaga, it feels like every team in the country is constantly fighting an uphill battle to get into any kind of a rhythm, and there are almost too many reasons why to bother trying to list them all.
These athletes are not robots. They’re not machines. They’re not immune to the stress that life in a COVID world has put on every one. The team I think about the most here is Stanford. The Cardinal have spent less than a week total sleeping in their own beds this season, because Palo Alto has certain restrictions that prevent the basketball team from being able to practice or play. They spent some time in North Carolina after playing in the Maui Invitational. They spent some time in Southern California. They’ve spent a lot of time living in a hotel and playing in the Warriors’ G League facility in Santa Cruz.
That’s a nightmare.
New Mexico and New Mexico State may have had it worse, as they had to leave their state just to practice. Everyone else has dealt with it in some form or another, and it’s not easy. I played college basketball. The basketball was a special experience, but the best memories I have came off the floor in the moments that surrounded the games and practices. How many of those moments are these kids getting right now? They’ve essentially been asked to isolate for five months now. That would wear on anyone.
And that’s before you factor in what a pause does to chemistry and rhythm and game shape, or the impact that a limited preseason had on all of these teams that were trying to define themselves this year. Think about it like this: The biggest programs in the country usually get their new players coming to campus in early June. They spend more than two months on campus during summer sessions, getting to know each other as people and players, playing pick-up, working out, partying. No one got that this season, and the impact should not and can not be overlooked.
These kids aren’t stupid, either.
They know why they’re doing this.
They know that this season is being played for one reason and one reason only: THE MONEY!
There are billions of dollars in TV revenue on the line here.
I was asked the other day why the pandemic brought out some of the best and most competitive basketball that we’ve seen in the NBA while dragging down the collegiate product, and, again, there are a couple of things at play here.
For starters, the NBA players knew that this was how they would get their paychecks. Both sports had TV revenue on the line. Half of that revenue from the NBA deal goes to the players. The college kids are getting scholarship checks. For online classes. Great!
But the other difference is that the NBA bubble provided at least some level of normalcy for the players. It was the first time in years that most of the recognizable NBA players were able to be in public without being mobbed. Since it was a true bubble, they were able to have something of a normal existence as well. They didn’t have their families, they were staying in a Disney resort hotel room, they were fishing in a stocked bass pond, but it created an environment of competition.
It was new. It was different. It was a unique experience that they’ll never get again.
And they’re professionals, the best in the world at what they do and grown enough to be able to deal with the pressures and stresses that come with it better than a college kid.
Even then, there were multiple players that talked about how much the bubble impacted them mentally. Paul George is probably the most well-known of that group.
This shit isn’t easy on anyone.
We all hit our pandemic wall at some point.
I did about a month ago.
Are you really surprised these college kids are as well?
Good read Rob, but I'm no totally sure what point you're driving at other than this deal is hard on people. Do you think we should shut down the season? Of course college hoops is playing for the same reason college football played-the tv money. And hopefully when this season is over approximately 50 of the kids playing will be able to take their talents to the league and make an NBA salary. Others can go to Europe/G-League and carve out a living. Same as every other year.
Hit the nail on the head here.