With Cinderella leaving a large footprint this year, March Madness might be more chaotic than ever, with powerhouses bounced after just one round. Big-time powers and big-time favorites, including Michigan State, Arizona and top-seeded Virginia, took early vacations, leaving us with mangled brackets and a thirst for the old days, when we could count on ancestral giants taking their places in the Sweet 16.
But even before this year, the March Madness paradigm had been shifting a bit, with the spotlight slowly moving from the players to the programs and coaches.
Aside from a few stars such as Oklahoma's Trae Young and Arizona's DeAndre Ayton -- both of whom have been bounced from the NCAA tournament and already declared for the NBA draft -- we are hardly left with a roll call of college icons. Gone are the days of Christian Laettner, Grant Hill, Tim Duncan and Patrick Ewing, and teams with senior-laden stars whom we followed since their freshman years.
Nowadays, the freshman year is the career year, if not the entire career. No sense in crying about it, as any of us would gladly leap to the NBA if we were guaranteed millions of dollars and the chance to send our kids and their kids to any college they wanted.
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So we're left with the school spirit, the draw of the alma mater or the provincial pride of the local school. Here in the Big Apple, we used to be able to recite the St. John's starting lineup with ease. We knew local kids such as Mark Jackson, Chris Mullin, Shelton Jones, Willie Glass or Walter Berry. We memorized the monsters across the map, from UNLV to the Fab Five to Duke. Try naming four players today on Syracuse or Gonzaga or Michigan. (Forget some of the lower seeds. We can't name two players on Nevada, Texas Tech, or Texas A&M.)
When it comes to coaches, however, we know quite well who runs Syracuse, Michigan State and Gonzaga, all of whom are Sweet 16 regulars. Jim Boeheim has been squatting on the Syracuse bench since the '70s, and Tom Izzo is equally etched into our NCAA consciousness. Mark Few just coached in the Final Four. Kansas? We can't name their lineup, but we know Bill Self. Kentucky is festooned with freshmen we don't know, but John Calipari is quite familiar. Perhaps that's why this FBI deal has so much public traction: It hits big-name coaches, including Rick Pitino and Sean Miller. Whenever scandal envelopes a program, we don't think of the players affected, only the coaches.
Few colleges have kids of some national note. We have Duke, a team with a star senior (Grayson Allen) and a lottery pick freshman (Marvin Bagley III). Villanova has a guard-heavy squad led by Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges, both Wooden Award finalists, and the rare, gifted juniors who haven't fled for the NBA.
But these aren't legends, not in the mold of Alcindor or Bird or Jordan or Duncan, all of whom played at least three years. And as the NBA toys with the idea of erasing the "one-and-done" dictum and allowing young men once again to skip college and jump nose-first into the NBA waters out of high school, you will find it even harder to memorize or be mesmerized by college basketball players.
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College players are not irrelevant, but they are interchangeable. Since the glory days of the '80s and '90s, it seems our fervor for the NCAA tournament, our number of failed brackets, hasn't changed a bit. According to the American Gaming Association (AGA), there are roughly 70 million brackets filled out each year, with approximately $2 billion wagered on every March Madness. Indeed, we now have even more ways to watch than ever. Between smartphones and tablets, we can swath ourselves in college pride without calling in sick to work.
Our allegiance has just shifted from the kid to the coach. We can still take comfort in Coach K, in Roy Williams and in Jay Wright. Even with the lack of superpower squads, March Madness is as fun and chaotic as ever. Iconic coaches will still get the best recruits and win the most games. We just won't really get to know those recruits until they reach the NBA.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
