5 Reasons to Hate the College Basketball Regular Season

Or

Why this blog is gonna do some random stuff over the next few weeks

1. LSU sucks. Fire Brady! Fire Bertman! Fire anyone with B last name!

2. Tech sucks. 0-8 in the WAC – a mid-major football conference? Seriously? Fire Karl Malone!

3. The announcers. Listening to Dick Vitale is worse that getting a prostate exam from Andre the Giant. But what other sport can also boast this Hall of Fame of pure splinter-under-the-fingernail torturers: Billy Packer, Jay Bilas, and Digger Phelps? It’s a virtual Muderer’s Row of tv announcers. Well, except for Packer, who actually is a murderer. Of course, we kid.

4. The schools. In football, many of your premier programs are big, sometimes public universities, everybody knows where they are, and they can be easily identified with a region or state. For instance, LSU, Florida, USC, Nebraska, Texas, Viriginia Tech, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, even Miami and Notre Dame fit the criteria to some degree. But in Basketball, any private Catholic school with a decent donor base and located near a major inner-city can recruit enough players to make themselves a contender. For every North Carolina, Kansas, or UCLA is a Butler, Xavier, or Georgetown. A quick perusal of the current AP Top 25 shows me that these schools are ranked: Drake, Marquette, and Saint Mary’s. Huh? If I expand the search to check the ‘also receiving votes’ category, I notice Rider, North Carolina Asheville, and St. Joseph’s (PA) listed. At least with St. Joseph’s they realize that nobody knows where the hell they are and so put their location in parentheses. Are you listening Saint Mary’s? Here’s a new rule – no team with apostrophes in the name can be ranked. I don’t know where these schools are, I never knew anybody who went there or even considered going there, and so I just don’t care.

5. The regular season doesn’t matter. Get to 20 wins in a major conference with 2-3 good ones and you are in the tournament. So who cares about that Texas A&M-Nebraska game on cold January night? I’ve got an new episode of Grey’s Anatomy to watch.* You know what would make the regular season so much better? A BCS like formula and ranking system. Let’s make it happen!

And so I refuse to care about College Basketball until the tournament – and then I follow it religiously. Oh yes, I will watch #16 Southwest Missouri Tech take on #1 Duke and pull hard for that 16 over a 1 upset, baby. C’mon Roosters!**

So, you will see this blog do some random stuff over the next few weeks – though for the stout-hearted roundball enthusiasts among you, I will try to say something about College Basketball about once a week.

*I would rather give myself a home-vasectomy than watch this show.
** Or whatever the hell they are. Does it really matter?