[/URL]
Christine Brennan has been around a long time and accomplished quite a lot. She's written some good columns. Her latest offering, which features her whining about the shadow that men's basketball casts over women's basketball, is not one of them.
Hey, if you want to start the women's season earlier and play the women's tournament at a different time so as not to coincide with the men's tournament, cool by me.
But please don't insult the intelligence of your readers by trotting out the predictable --- and intellectually dishonest -- suggestion that everyone would be filling out brackets for the women's tournament if it weren't for that dang men's tournament.
Nothing against women's basketball. There are some fine people who play it and coach it. But there is a reason men's basketball is infinitely more popular than women's basketball. And it has nothing to do with product placement on television.
It's because ... and this is probably not something Brennan has considered .. men's basketball is a vastly superior product. And gaping disparity in ratings is vastly proportional to the gaping disparity in the quality of product.
Not saying women's basketball can't be entertaining and fundamentally sound -- heck, more fundamentally sound than men's basketball in some cases.
But come on. Let's not pretend that the complete lack of interest in filling out WBB brackets is related to the coinciding of the two tournaments.
This is borderline nauseating:
Could it be more ingrained in our culture that there is only one basketball tournament going on at the moment - even when there are two? If you were to go into your workplace and say you'd like to start a pool for the women's bracket, people likely would look at you as if you'd just said you were moving to Mars. You name the workplace: companies run by women, offices with moms and dads who dash out every evening to their daughters' games. Almost all of them have never even considered the possibility of hosting a women's basketball tournament pool.
This tells us something. It tells us it's time for the NCAA to acknowledge what it's doing is not working and move the women's tournament. Move it, lock, stock and barrel. Move it so it starts and ends before the men's tournament begins. Move it so that it can have a chance to escape the enormous shadow cast by the men's tournament.
Start the women's season a week or so early, perhaps cut out a game or two during the regular season, and then schedule the tournament so the Final Four is on the Friday night before the Sunday men's selection show, with the championship game being played right after the show on Sunday. Or go with Saturday-Monday if that makes it easier to avoid competing on TV with the men's conference tournaments. Just get it all done before the men get going.
A few Thursday links:
-- Former Clemson assistant (and current North Florida head coach) Matt Driscoll channels his inner Addazio.
-- At SI, Pete Thamel takes Syracuse and Jim Boeheim to the woodshed.
The first thing the school did was seemingly force athletic director Daryl Gross to resign. Then it put a clock on the end of Boeheim's four-decade tenure. It allows the university suits to look themselves in the mirror without wincing and say that they stood up to big-time sports. That they really do take academic integrity seriously. That maybe the academic issues were caused by systemic indifference more than a rogue operations guy. What's most notable here is that things have gotten so foul at Syracuse that even an institution with such high tolerance for athletic department shenanigans felt it needed to do something-anything-to show that the person in charge of the university resided in the chancellor's office and not the athletic department.
And this:
I attended Syracuse and covered the program for the local paper, The Post-Standard, for three years after graduating in 1999. From dealing with Boeheim on multiple arrests and suspensions of his players over the years, his only way of handling them is fighting and arguing over every detail like it's a block/charge call. Boeheim's competitiveness-the same trait that's driven him to the Hall of Fame and made him a seminal figure in the university's history-can also be his weakness. This showed up most famously when he called the molestation allegations of former ball boys against assistant coach Bernie Fine as "a bunch of a thousand lies" and said they were out for money.
And on Thursday, it will be stunning if Boeheim does anything but argue his case right down to the last detail. It's all he's ever done. It's the only way he knows. But at this point, the appetite to listen and believe, beyond the hardcore fan, is limited.
-- Chris Dufresne of the LA Times says college basketball is broken and presents a repair manual.
It's easy to criticize the state of college basketball. The sport has been so thoroughly damaged it's a wonder it hasn't spawned conspiracy theories.
The best players don't stay with their teams for more than a year, the action has been slowed to a crawl by television breaks and a deluge of free throws, scoring is being squelched by suffocating defenses, and the regular season has been minimized nearly to the point of irrelevancy.
In other words, the college game no longer operates as intended and, like an injured limb, it needs to be lovingly rehabilitated to be whole again.
So, after careful thought and heartfelt discussions with people who care, here is a five-point plan to help save the game:
-- And 21 years after his epic shot lifted Arkansas to the national title, Scotty Thurman helps the Hogs again.
There will not be an ESPN documentary titled "I Hate Scotty Thurman" like there was last week for Christian Laettner. But if the tables were turned on Duke fans, Thurman would have been a logical candidate.
Though Laettner hit a famous shot to propel Duke to a national title, Thurman hit a famous shot that prevented one 21 years ago: A high-arcing three-pointer that beat the shot clock with 51 seconds left and broke a tie against the Grant Hill-led Blue Devils, giving Arkansas its only national title.
"I wouldn't say it was life-defining, but it's something I'm very proud of," Thurman said Wednesday. "When you're 19, I don't think you really embrace it and enjoy it as much and now that I have a son in college, I think I enjoy it a lot more. And of course, living and working in Arkansas it's kind of hard to run away from it."
LW
