There's a Basketball Game On

I've been doing a marathon amount of labwork lately, which invloves a lot of late nights waiting for machines to finish their things, with naught but an internet connection to keep me awake. And now that the conference season is in full swing, I fully intended to spend a lot of that time reading about the game. The only thing seemingly stopping me was, well, the people writing about basketball.

It seems the infinite amount of webspace needing to be filled leads people to write about easier things than actual basketball. (And eventually to the madness that spawns ideas like ESPN's Page 3, I presume.) So here are two subjects that don't need to be touched on during basketball season:

Recruiting. I first meant to mention this with the spate of articles saying how wonderful next year's group of Tar Heels were going to be. And then again when N.C. State fans turned away from bowl season and the Wolfpack's best OOC match-up to discuss a high school junior. But what tipped it was the Gregg Doyel column on how Rutger's basketball fortunes for the next decade depended on a high school kid choosing between a school in New Jersey and one that just thinks it is.

Ladies and gentlemen, please back away from the high school kids.

Basketball coaches have to focus on recruiting. They're paid anywhere from obscene amount of money to a criminal lack of it to worry about this. No one's paying you a cent. And meanwhile, over there? On the shiny wooden courts? There are basketball games on. Real ones. With your team playing.

High school basketball is fun, if you're in high school. Or know a player or two. (Know as in family member or friend of family, not as potential impact player for your alma mater.) Hell, it can even be a fun distraction if you just want to see what a game is like twenty years or so removed from worrying about acne. But if you're going to these things to evaluate the futures of sixteen year-olds? If you're wearing warm-up gear in a venue where you will be doing nothing athletic? Stop it. You're creepy, you're ruining it for people there to actually have fun, and you're hurting the game of basketball.

Reduce everything back to basketball at it's most basic form - the pickup game. What are the memorable things you take away from a game? That no-look pass on the drive down the court. Shutting down your man on the other team. The horrible shooting motion of that one guy who's just killing you from the outside. It's not the fact that some guy on the sideline called "Next." There's a basketball game on.

No fan should be able to opine anything about the recruiting process beyond "I hear we've got a couple of good kids coming in." That's it. You know more than that, you're feeding an ugly system. You do it for a living? Find a more respectable line of work, like Republican staffer or something.

Bracketology. Joe Lunardi, you need to stop. Bloggers who want to be Joe Lunardi, please turn away from the dark side before it's too late. It's January. No one cares who you think the fifth seed out of the East is going to be. And no, that game between two mid-level Pac-10 teams is not going to have an effect on the seedings in the Midwest. Please invest in something that can explain just how much basketball there is between now and mid-March. I've heard tell of this things called "calendars." Some included cute pictures of kittens. Please. Get one.

Look, I enjoy the NCAA tournament. Selection Sunday is a High Holy Day, that must be celebrated by following the ACC championship game with the Recording of the Brackets, immortalized on notebook paper with hand-drawn brackets. But that's in March.

Remember how no one seemed to really care about the bowl season the last couple of years? That it's just two weeks of games you keep walking by during the holidays interspersed with the same 15 stories about USC or Texas? That's because all ESPN talks about during the year is the BCS, and who's where on the list, and what University A knocking off the Fighting B's will due to C State's and D A&M's positioning until everything that's not that list doesn't seem to matter. And they're doing the same thing to basketball.

Those columns that spring up like mushrooms the second week in March? The ones that begin "Now is when college basketball really begins?" Each and everyone of those writers need to be beaten with a folding chair until they realize kids have been playing college basketball for four months at that point. Bracketologists, the name you've chosen for yourself rhymes with proctologist for reason. You're spending you're time making lists, pushing virtual slips of paper around a board, imagining fantasy games going on in your head when there are basketball games on. Those two mid-level Pac-10 teams? They've got stories to tell. One team is on a three-game slide trying a new offensive scheme to right the ship. The other has a junior back from injury starting against the team emblazened on the pajamas he wore when he was five but wouldn't recruit him out of high school. These are the reasons to watch the games, not to pull names on or off the mythical bubble in your head.

Reduce it back to the pickup game. At any point when you're running up and down the court are you thinking about the free throw ability of who you're running with? Are you making mental lists of who's likely to end up on which squad for the next run? No, because it's a stupid thing to do. And you're playing basketball.

Let the tournament wait until March. Let the freshmen come in September. It's January, and there's a basketball game on.