One Year To The Day
On an incredible day of hoops, and the light at the end of the tunnel
I.
Fucking.
Love this sport.
I cannot tell you how good it feels to once again be able to spend 14 hours sitting in front of every screen I can get my hands on, watching all of the college basketball. Literally all of it. It’s not child neglect when it’s March. Pretty sure that’s a law.
A few weeks back, Stanford Steve joined Jeff Goodman and me on our daily college basketball show, and one thing that he mentioned during his appearance was that he was a bigger fan of the championship week than the first week of the NCAA tournament. I, personally, do not agree, but I get it. What makes this week so great is that we not only get tournament basketball before lunch is served, but we get seven or eight games tipping off in the same time slot, and every single one of them comes with some level of petty, conference in-fighting that you can only get from rivals that see each other three times a year.
It’s perfection.
On Thursday, we kicked things off with an early window that included:
The rubber match between West Virginia and Oklahoma State, a pair of top 15 teams that just played four days ago. In this one, Avery Anderson — who put 31 on the Mountaineers in Morgantown — scored the go-ahead bucket with a minute left.
No. 8-seed Georgetown erasing a 12-point deficit in the Garden to knock off Big East champs Villanova, and Patrick Ewing following that up with a rant for the ages about not being recognized in the building he made his own.
Virginia forcing Syracuse to sweat out Selection Sunday thanks to a Reece Beekman buzzer-beater.
Maryland mollywhopping Michigan State for the second time this month in the biggest bubble battle of the day.
Kentucky coming all the way back from 15 points down only to see Mississippi State hit two free throws, and Dontaie Allen miss a wide-open three at the buzzer, to end their season.
Duke having their season come to a close due to a positive test for someone on the roster.
All of that happened before 11 a.m. on the west coast!!!
And it doesn’t include near-melts by Wisconsin and Ohio State; or Seton Hall beating St. John’s in overtime; or North Carolina’s huge second half against Virginia Tech; or Utah somehow getting USC to double-OT; or Texas’ remarkable comeback to beat Texas Tech; or Oregon State beating UCLA in overtime; or any of the action that occurred between Happy Hour and dinner.
It was just a perfectly insane day of March basketball, and I am so damn glad that it’s back.
March 12th marks the one-year anniversary of everything changing, at least for me.
March 10th, 2020, is the day that the Ivy League cancelled their conference tournament.
March 11th, 2020, is when every league around the country announced that there would be no fans in attendance for their conference tournament games. That is also the day that Rudy Gobert touched everyone’s microphone before testing positive for COVID-19 and promptly getting the NBA shut down. Then Tom Hanks tested positive. Then Fred Hoiberg spent the second half of a Big Ten tournament game against Indiana looking like he was going to fall out on the bench.
That was a Wednesday.
The next morning was one of the most important of my professional career. I was heading up to NBC Sports’ Stamford compound to do studio analysis for the Atlantic 10 tournament on the Thursday of Championship Week. This came on the heels of a weekly show that I was recording for Stadium, one that was simulcast nationally on so many different VOD platforms and local RSNs that I can’t even begin to tell you who watched and where they were.
Maybe it wasn’t going to be my “big break”, but it was a chance to prove to people that I was worth investing in. You don’t get chances like this often, not in this business.
That morning was surreal. I left my house at 7 a.m. to make the three-hour drive up to Stamford. The entire drive I spent on the phone, trying to figure out if college basketball was actually going to be played when the NBA season had been postponed. We were supposed to go live at Noon ET.
At 11:41 a.m. — I’ll never forget the time; it’s seared into my memory like grate marks on a ribeye — I got the text:
“Cancelled. Sending release.”
That was from someone at the AAC. It was the first shoe to drop. Every league in the country followed suit, with the majority coming in the 19 minutes between getting that text and going live on the air, and what was supposed to be a studio show for the Atlantic 10 tournament turned into a … news show? An x’s-and-o’s breakdown of how to beat the ‘Rona? The beginning of the end?
We were on the air for 90 minutes. Then I was sent home. I never even checked into my hotel room. The best piece of advice I got when I started in this business was to shake hands with every one in the room. Learn names. Learn faces. Let them learn your’s, regardless of who it is. I gave awkward fist bumps to the producer, the host, the rest of the talent, all the people who I was going to try and win over.
So much for networking.
The writing was on the wall from that point on.
I had it easier than many over the course of the last year, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. I have two kids under five. They were home all day, every day, for more than eight months. My wife’s job wasn’t put on pause. So I spent eight hours a day running Daddy Daycare, working in the hours before and after my wife’s zoom calls started and ended.
Five months into that grind, I was laid off by NBC Sports.
You don’t know what stress is until you don’t know where your next check is going to come from in the middle of an unprecedented shutdown of the economy.
No one in media was hiring. They might be now, I haven’t had a chance to look, because seven days after I lost my job I started the paperwork on my own company, Field of 68 Media. I’m not sure anything has been more rewarding than finding success doing something I love on my own. We are going to crack 10 million total views and downloads across the entire network this season, and while it has been incredibly fulfilling to be able to invest my time and energy into something that is mine — instead of something that can be taken from me by a corporation that announces a half-billion dollar deal with a sports book two weeks after laying off hundreds of people in the middle of a pandemic — the workload has been suffocating.
I’m not exaggerating when I say if I get five hours of sleep it’s a good night. Many of you have my number. Try texting me at 3 a.m. See if you get a response.
That’s not meant as a complaint, by the way. I love creating, producing and selling content. This is the most invigorated and motivated I’ve felt about work since I started Ballin’ is a Habit back in the day. (The OGs know what I’m talking about.) That said, there are times that I’ve found myself asking what the fuck I’m doing all of this for, and if it’s actually worth it.
Thursday was the reminder.
And, to be perfectly honest, it hit me hard.
This is what we didn’t get to experience last year. This is what was taken away. This is what I look forward to every year. If you’ve never covered college basketball, it’s hard to explain the crescendo of a season. You got from totally irrelevant to the biggest story in sports to “you watch college, you must be a draft expert” with a quickness. The swings are enormous.
On the one year anniversary of losing all of that, on the first real day of March, in 2021 we get one of the wildest, most entertaining days of college basketball that I can remember.
It came on the same day that President Biden signed the COVID-19 relief package and announced a mandate that all adults be eligible for the vaccine as of May 1st.
Maybe I’m overly optimistic.
Or maybe I’m just not scientifically literate.
But today is the first day where it finally feels like we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
To quote my friend Jon Rothstein, this too shall pass.
You know what the best part about the Thursday of Championship Week is?
We get to do it all over again on Friday.
LFG.