Florida still has a Sugar Bowl to play, but the mood around Gainesville is college football season is pretty much over.
It was fun while it lasted, but now we can immerse ourselves in my favorite sport: college basketball.
With UF off to a surprisingly good start and a top-10 ranking, it’s time we turned our attention to roundball, especially with a matchup with Syracuse just around the corner.
I know football is the king of college athletics, but here’s the top-10 reasons why I love college basketball:
10. Early Season Tournaments: Most of them are over by now, but the only reason we get to watch Florida and Syracuse go head-to-head is because of the SEC-Big East Invitational. The tournaments give us tons of great nonconference matchups, and a win in the Maui Invitational (Gonzaga), Coaches vs. Cancer Classic (Syracuse) or NIT Season Tip-Off (Duke) can propel your team into conference play with confidence and provide the marquee victories needed to get into the NCAA Tournament in March.
9. The Big East: Conferences get the word “Big” in their name for no good reason these days, but the Big East is exactly that. It’s the SEC of college basketball — if the SEC had 16 teams instead of 12. Sure, there are a few bottom feeders (Rutgers, USF, DePaul, Seton Hall), but what conference doesn’t have a few bad teams? ESPN shows plenty of the action each year on Big Monday, and the Big East Tournament always provides classics like last season’s Syracuse-UConn six-OT title game.
8. “One Shining Moment”: Don’t worry, March Madness gets its own paragraph, but “One Shining Moment” is cool enough to be a separate thought of its own. Watching the montage at the end of every NCAA Tournament while the new champion celebrates on the court in its corny locker room victory gear is a must for anyone who loves college sports. It shows the ups and downs of the six-round tournament and puts all the memorable moments to an even more memorable tune. One of my guy friends cries every time he watches that year’s edition for the first time, and none of us make fun of him. That’s how cool “One Shining Moment” is.
7. Coaching Actually Matters: For the most part, coaching matters more in college sports than pro sports, but that dichotomy is most obvious when comparing the NBA to college basketball. NBA coaches do pretty much nothing. They stand on the sideline, yell at the refs, draw up plays during timeouts and try not to mess things up. With the NCAA’s 35-second clock, compared to the NBA’s 24-second clock, it allows for more strategy on both ends of the floor and therefore more coaching. Zone defenses are more prevalent, and college kids are still exactly that — kids. Most of them want to be coached.
6. Mid-Majors: Small conference football schools exist only to get pounded on by big college football schools. In basketball, the small schools occasionally do the pounding, and it’s fun to watch. The Cinderella potential for a team like George Mason is something you can’t get anywhere else.
5. Mid-Majors that aren’t Mid-Majors: Gonzaga, Butler and Xavier all play in mid-major conferences, but none of them are really mid-major schools. Somehow, they have been able to establish themselves as annual powers in a system where big schools have every advantage when it comes to recruiting. It could be compared to Boise State and TCU in football if Boise State and TCU were actually allowed to, you know, COMPETE AGAINST THE BIG SCHOOLS at the end of the year.
4. Dickie V: Dick Vitale is a legend, and anyone who says otherwise is a Satan-worshipping bastard. His voice is as identifiable as his many catchphrases, and his enthusiasm for the game is a breath of fresh air considering the increasingly corporate nature of college sports. Quite simply put, Dickie V is awesome, baby! (All right, maybe he’s a little corny, too.)
3. White Guys: Basketball has become “the black man’s game,” and that’s perfectly fine with me. The best athletes in the world play in the NBA, which is more than 80 percent black, and that’s my favorite league of all, college or professional. But as a white kid whose game is reliant on deft passing and outside shooting, I like to watch some guys who look and play like me every once in a while, and college basketball provides that. I like watching guys like J.J. Redick, Lee Humphrey and Stephen Curry — wait, he was black?! — even if those same guys go on to sit at the end of an NBA bench and get dunked on by LeBron, Kobe and D-Wade at the next level.
2. Duke vs. UNC: I hate North Carolina. I hate Duke more. But man, I really love the Duke-UNC basketball rivalry. For my money, it’s the best rivalry in all of sports, and it’s No. 1 on the list of nonchampionship sporting events I want to attend in my lifetime.
1. March Madness: The NCAA Tournament is the exact opposite of the BCS system. It is quite possibly the most perfect and entertaining postseason of any sport out there. Nothing is better than skipping class for a couple days while you glue yourself to the couch and watch the first weekend, which somehow always lives up to the hype. And most importantly, the last team standing earned its championship — something we’re not always able to say about college football.
