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Less is more The NCAA tournament is tops for everything it isn'tPosted: Monday March 18, 2002 11:26 AM
Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor touches on a Hot Button issue each week on CNNSI.com. After you read Phil's take, give us yours. I watch the NCAA tournament and I think, somebody got it right. Somebody found a way to put on a major sporting event that's thrilling and fair and pure. (OK, maybe not pure, but now that Jerry Tarkanian has retired, at least it's cleaner than it used to be.) We tend to find ways to cheapen and ruin most of the championship competitions in major sports, but the tournament is one contest that we've managed not to screw up. Maybe that's what makes it the best event in sports. It's not so much what the tournament is, but what it's not. For instance: It's not sponsored to death. So far, it's still just the "NCAA tournament," not the "Nokia Tostitos Outback Steakhouse NCAA Tournament." Unlike most bowl games, you don't get the feeling that the whole thing is just an excuse to advertise somebody's new Chalupa. It's not bloated by extraneous "entertainment." Tournament games don't have *NSYNC or Elton John doing a halftime show, or F-16s flying overhead while some pop star lip syncs The Star Spangled Banner. The tourney just gives you Valparaiso vs. Kentucky, straight up. It's not a marathon. The tournament lasts three weekends. Round of 64, Sweet 16, Final Four, and then people can get on with their lives. This is unlike the NBA playoffs, which last longer than some marriages. After three weekends, it seems as if Portland and Utah are just getting ready for Game 4 of the first round. The NCAA tournament is not dependent on some wacky system to determine its champion. To put it another way, suppose someone suggested that instead of the tournament, we forget about Maryland, Arizona, Oklahoma and the other contenders and just have Duke and Kansas play for the championship because some arcane formula determined that they were the two best teams. After you stopped laughing, you would tell them that this isn't college football. It's not played when half the country is asleep. In the tournament's opening round, weekday games are actually played in the afternoon and kids don't have to go to school bleary-eyed from staying up so late to watch them. Are you listening, baseball? It's not exclusive to one region or set of fans. The tournament touches every corner of the country, from Massachusetts to Florida to California to Washington. Nearly everyone has some personal connection to at least one of the schools, whether it's their alma mater or their sister-in-law went to law school there or their co-worker's dad grew up in the same town as the campus. It's not subjective. Sure, it looked like Kansas outplayed Stanford, but the French judge gave the Cardinal high marks for artistic merit, so Stanford wins. No sport would allow something like that to happen, would it? It's not played in front of a lot of celebrities who are hogging the good seats. You don't see Jack Nicholson or Spike Lee sitting courtside at the St. John's-Wisconsin game. The only Hollywood face that pops up with regularity belongs to Kentucky fan Ashley Judd, and that's OK. We'll make an exception for Ashley Judd. It's not preceded by a long layoff. There's usually a dead week between the conference playoffs and the Super Bowl, which is bad enough, but not nearly as illogical as having teams sit around for a month between the end of the regular season and their bowl games, as sometimes happens in college football. Teams that get to the tournament are still sharp once they get there, which is one of the reasons the games are usually so well-played. All that, and we haven't even mentioned office pools, which, considering the sorry state of my bracket, brings me to one other thing the tournament is not. It's not good for my bank account. Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button issue every week on CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer. |
