A Rant.
Please indulge me this brief screed.
Those of you who have read my tweets over the years or have had the misfortune of meeting me in person know that I am easily triggered by irrational behavior and general stupidity. Despite being acutely aware of this character flaw, I inexplicably still choose to follow college basketball — a sport chronically plagued by a near-complete absence of brain cells amongst its commentariat.
Unlike, for example, baseball, which has its own share of bobblehead media types yammering nonsensically on TV but also boasts a very active analytics “community” producing data-driven and smart analysis to a broad audience, college basketball analysis is exclusively lists, rankings, ESPN-style hot takes, and more rankings. Outside of guys like Jordan Majewski, Will Warren, Jordan Sperber, and the 3MW crew, you will be hard-pressed to find anyone attempting to inject even the slightest degree of intellect to offset the malign influence of the TV networks, the journos, and the Field of 68’s collection of recently-fired coaches spewing tired clichés from their couches while they bide their time playing golf and waiting for a new coaching vacancy to open.
Where is “our” version of FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, or PitchersList, with their well-researched and insightful deep dives into the widely-available data? Where is “our” version of Statcast, which is now fully-integrated into every baseball broadcast in the league? Where are the widespread discussions on major platforms of “our” version of expected run differential, xFIP, SIERA, BABIP, etc? All of these terms are regularly incorporated into ESPN and Fox’s baseball broadcasts and discussed on nearly all of MLB Network’s myriad daytime and nighttime programming. No one ever suggests that the MLB viewership is incapable of understanding these concepts.
But it’s different in college basketball, where we are fed a single-menu diet of rankings, rankings, rankings. Eat your bowl of rankings and shut the fuck up, peasant. You will get nothing else, and you will like it.
And why should I care? After all, this is primarily a betting-oriented blog. An ill-informed “gambling population” is a net positive for me. True. Very true. But I’m also a fan of this sport, and I will go to my grave believing that there could be broad appeal for higher-level coverage of college basketball.
The impetus for this long-form rant tirade was Duke/Arkansas on Wednesday night. Lest you’ve already forgotten, the journos (whose Poll should be abolished, no matter how much they scream and stomp their feet when their precious toy finally gets pried away from their undeserving hands) deemed Arkansas the 14th-best team as recently as two weeks ago; KenPom ranked them 15th at the time. Again, this was 12 days ago. The Hogs then hit a brief rough patch with a poor effort against a hot-shooting UNCG team, followed by a below-average showing in Atlantis. Somehow, one bad week caused the entire CBB commentariat to immediately forget its previous position on Arkansas. The mood turned so dour that the Hogs closed as 4.5-point underdogs against Duke — only the second time in 72 home games that Musselman closed as an underdog at Bud Walton. Despite Muss’s sustained track record of home dominance and national success, the ESPN broadcast laughably force-fed the viewers a canned “David vs. Goliath” narrative, with Dan Shulman and the execrable Jay Bilas rigidly adhering to the producers’ marching orders by dutifully reinforcing the purported shock of the game script unfolding in front of their eyes. An unknowing viewer would be unable to glean a single clue from the broadcast that the scrappy little engine-that-could wearing white and red is 64-10 at home in the last four seasons and was a *top 15* team as recently as…last week.
Is there really a “solution” to this incredibly petty, first-world “problem?” Realistically, no, there is not. We’re constantly told that this is what the masses want. They want banal power rankings lists. They want, “this team won because they just wanted it more!” analysis. They want the announcers to ascribe all happenings within a game to “momentum.” They do not care about game-to-game three-point variance or expected regression. They want to be told that this is a MASSIVE UPSET because one team has a little number to its next name and the other team doesn’t have a little number next to its name. They want Rob and Jeff to create YouTube clickbait aimed at middle schoolers declaring any loss a Hindenburg-ian catastrophe and any win a reliable indicator of a guaranteed Final Four appearance.
Thus, if this theory is correct, the masses are getting precisely the type of content they crave, and they will continue to get it in perpetuity because no one in a position of power and influence in CBB media is interested in producing anything worth a damn.
Oh well.
Carry on.
Agree with a lot of this. As someone who has worked at places where rankings et al. were simply required (and where that kind of stuff gradually takes hold over everything), I've always thought you can do really smart stuff within any format so long as you actually try. You *can* default to the lowest common denominator and just list a bunch of teams, and people often do, or you can make a list of teams your excuse to say smart stuff about each one of them.
To me, this works two ways: It gives the audience what they consistently indicate they want while also sneaking in depth and information they wouldn't have otherwise sought out. But serving audience demand vs. creating it is a hard problem to solve.
I think you've done a great job of summing up my own frustrations with the sport's coverage. I like some of the guys in the media space just fine but the vast majority are simply regressing to the standard ranking/listicle stuff...and that's just legacy media, not even the obnoxious ChatGPT generated "CBKReport" accounts.