Actually, the Final Four Sucks

Because let’s be honest: As the cylons used to say, All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.

STEP RIGHT UP AND COME SEE KENTUCKY PLAY DAVIDSON. Yeah, I’m pretty sure those two teams have played before.

WILL THIS BE THE YEAR THAT A SMALL SCHOOL WILL MAKE THE FINAL FOUR? Buddy, I was there when George Mason happened.

WILL WE SEE A BUZZER BEATER? Yes, that will happen, duh.

WILL A 15-SEED BEAT A TWO SEED? Yep, I saw it before. Remember Florida Gulf Coast?

WILL [INSERT LONG-OVERACHIEVING SCHOOL] FINALLY MAKE IT TO THE FINAL FOUR? Gonzaga, Florida, Connecticut, and John Calipari’s Kentucky have all made it over the hump now. What else ya got?

UMMM, WELL, WHAT IF YOUR TEAM MAKES IT BIG. I went to James Madison University. They’re never going to make it that far and if they do, it would only be after nearly every school in the country had already done it and at that point, making the Final Four will be like making the playoffs in the NBA.

March Madness first existed to me as a math exercise in 7th grade. Back then schools like Marquette and Monmouth were just strange names. We all laughed at Colgate’s entry into the tournament and I had trouble taking a school named after toothpaste seriously a couple years later when a sibling of mine went there for a college visit. My math class did NCAA pools as an exercise in calculating percentages and probabilities and I didn’t know one school from another.

In 9th grade, I started watching the actual tournament games for the first time and saw buzzer beaters and the quad-screen simultaneous game craziness. I fell for the Madness pretty hard. By the following year I was watching college basketball all season long and eagerly checking the AP poll with my low-speed internet every Monday morning.

The team to beat that season was Duke. They were once-defeated and so insipid that there was no possible reason anyone in America who hadn’t given the school tuition money could possibly root for them. (Plus ça change.)

Everything about the Dukies was un-American, starting with the school’s name. (What’s next Earl University? Duchess of York University?) They had an enormous monstrosity of a center named Elton Brand, a sharpshooter from Alaska named Trajan Langdon, and a guy with a weird haircut who was annoyingly vocal about students having a voice and who commentators kept insisting was going to be president someday.

Yet despite—or maybe because of—Duke’s dominance, I was sucked into the tournament like never before. In the final they faced Connecticut (my pick to win the pool) and it was was one of my favorite sports experiences, ever. I watched it with my dad and my maternal (non-English speaking) grandfather and miraculously Connecticut won. Which put me over the top to win my pool, too. It was my one shining moment.

In 11th grade, I got sucked into the NBA because the players from my perfect season—Richard Hamilton and Wally Szczerbiak and Scott Padgett (the last man from the Kentucky dynasty)—had left college and moved up a level. I was satisfied to see that Elton Brand looked a little more ordinary when matched up against the NBA. The rest of his Duke teammates (with the exception of Corey Maggette) got swallowed up by the NBA, too. Remember William Avery? I’m not sure his teammates remember him either. And the fact that these college legends seemed so ordinary in the big leagues only got me into basketball in a bigger sense.

The 1999 March Madness tournament saw five double-digit seeds in the sweet 16. The following year there were just three upsets in the first round (Seton Hall, Gonzaga, and Pepperdine) which looked like the makings of a boring tournament, but in the second round there was a hurricane of upsets that left only 4 of the top 12 seeds standing. We’ve seen just about every possible permutation by now, including the one thing most of us never saw coming: A year where everything went according to plan. In 2008 all four #1 seeds reached the Final Four, something most of us thought the laws of probability would never permit.

The following weekend, we’re driving through West Virginia and we turn on the radio to hear the Mountaineers playing Villanova in the Sweet 16. And for a moment, the magic was back because I thought about the folks living the hills nearby and how excited they would be if WVU somehow managed to beat the #1-seed Wildcats. The next night, I watched the game with someone who really knew basketball and pointed out things I’d never known about how power forwards and small forwards affect the game differently. It reminded me how exciting March Madness can be under the right circumstances.

In truth, what makes March Madness so much less exciting for me isn’t the repetition. They play the World Series every year, and most of the time it’s not boring. No, the problem is that like any sport, the technical details of basketball only really reach a certain level of excitement when you’re buying into the spectacle behind the tournament: The rivalries, the perception of school spirit, and the bracket format that that can dependably create drama.

And a lot of that has been bulldozed by the modern NCAA.

When I first watched the tournament as a freshman, it excited me to such a degree that it actually influenced my college search, because I wanted to get closer to the Madness. But now that I’ve been through to the other side of the college diploma mill, I know that the athletes aren’t particularly participatory in the student community, nor do they generally enhance the quality of life for the other students.

The rivalries and conferences that used to drive a lot of excitement have been scrambled, too. Asking us to believe that New Jersey (home of Rutgers University) and Maryland are now part of the Midwest—or that Marquette (located in Wisconsin) is somehow a member of the “Big East” is insulting to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the compass. Geography matters, people! (Full disclosure: I majored in geography. One of the few things I have in common with Michael Jordan.)

Remember Colgate? Despite their funny name, they were apparently one of the few schools in the country that didn’t have an athletic department overrun by money in the Patriot League which didn’t award athletic scholarships at the time.

Back when I was entranced by March Madness, I bought into the myth of the student athlete but it’s since been exposed as an invention of the upper British classes in the late 19th Century to keep the lower classes from getting competitive and co-opted by the NCAA as an insurance scam. Maybe Shane Battier was onto something. It’s hard to enjoy a game knowing that it fuels a bizarre kind of socially-sanctioned exploitation.

And the downstream effect of my disillusionment with the college game has been to blunt my interest in the pros. I haven’t watched an NBA draft since 2009, so when I watch an NBA game now, I recognize maybe half the players.

Even worse, the players from the first year I watched the draft (1999) have been retiring over the last five years. It’s like the extremely depressing idea of a tontine where I’m just waiting to see the last of my favorite players die. Looking at a box score is an exercise in knowing who’s left standing and who time hasn’t been as kind to and it’s mostly an exercise in mourning. As I get into my 30s, watching athletes bow to the inevitable tide of age is a reminder that there’s no upside left for my own modest athletic goals, either. I occasionally hear a success story about how Desmond Mason (draft class of 2000) became a great painter or how Todd McCollough (draft class of 1999) became a pinball wizard. But let’s be honest: Unless you’re going to make it in coaching or you enjoyed the success of Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal where you’re hired in the broadcasting booth, a successful life outside sports is more the exception than the rule.

My last great memory of watching the NCAA tournament was seeing Louisville win in 2013. But the memory is only sunny because of a weird chain of coincidences: The year before, I had gone on a long run, got caught in a rainstorm, and come home drenched. I stopped in a thrift store and bought a t-shirt just to get dry. It was a Louisville shirt and it worked its way into my rotation and I happened to be wearing it at a bar during the first round when Louisville started their title run. Because of the shirt, everyone thought I was a Louisville alum and I became, for a couple hours, incredibly popular. I took the serendipity and ran with it, rooting for the Cardinals the rest of the way. They beat Michigan in the final and it was, in its own smaller way, another shining moment.

The feeling feels funny today, though. Louisville’s coach, Rick Pitino, shortly became synonymous with the rot at the heart of college basketball. He was accused—among other things—of taking bribes from Adidas to influence incoming athletes and fired. (He denies it; but then again, they always do.) And Louisville’s title was later vacated by the NCAA over allegations that Pitino failed to monitor his employees in a prostitute scandal.

I have no idea the degree to which Pitino monitored his employees or took bribes but it seems irrelevant within a system that’s so screwed up in the first place.

That the NCAA’s response to such scandals is to literally try to erase history by stripping the champion of its title is both poetic and terrible. Because that’s not how human beings work. You can’t vacate a high school kid’s cherished memory of watching a game with his dad and grandfather; or a really great night in a bar pretending to be a Louisville alum. These things happened. They’re real. As Ricky O’Donnell wrote on SB Nation, “I’d like a tattoo that says ‘Luke Hancock still hit five threes and the NCAA can never take that away’.”

As for the future of March Madness, I had a good run with the spectator sport but I’ll now leave it to the next generation. I hope they get to enjoy the buzzer beaters and brackets and hold onto those memories for at least a few years before the disillusionment sets in.

Orrin Konheim is a Virginia-based freelance writer, researcher, and journalist who generally covers entertainment and local events. His writing has appeared in Mental Floss Magazine, Toptenz.net, Screenprism, ESPN’s The Undefeated, the Washington Post, and various publications in the Richmond and Washington D.C. markets. He blogs at sophomorecritic.blogspot.com, tweets at @okonh0wp, and failing that, he shouts thoughts from his rooftop when his wifi is down.