Beware the Ides of March, and the other 30 days of it as well

If you are a dedicated reader of The Enfranchised, and you aren't, then you'd know we had it out over the topic of NCAA basketball once before (though my post is the only one in the series worth reading). Still, there might be a dribble or two of piss left for the taking.

I'll first note that I am of two minds about college basketball. On the one hand, I am bothered by the entire phenomenon. Part of this is personal--after four of my roommates were evicted from our choice F Street townhouse during my sophomore year at GWU, I was shipped off to an "efficiency" (one could write an entire post about the misnomic properties of this appellation) apartment in the very same dormitory that housed our illustrious Men's basketball team: The GWU Fighting Colonials. I quickly found them to be loud (quiet hours don't apply when nobody on the floor studies), spoilt (they all seemed to drive SUVs and imports when most others walked, and to have Playstation N's in their rooms when few others had even Playstation N-1's), and lecherous (it quickly became a tedium to have to break the news to them that my girlfriend was just that. The poor girl is Latin and voluptuous (not in the euphemistic way) and so attracts more black men than the subject of a hypothetical stereotype that won't get me in trouble with the NAACP).

On the other hand, when those selfsame Colonials fought their way into the top 20, and then the top 10, I became something of a born-again bandwagoner. I was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Colonial Army, and thought it the personal duty of every student and faculty at GW to make sure these boys had all the Powerade, pep, and pussy they needed to assure a good seed in the Tourney. But when starting Center Pops Mensah-Bonsu [sic] and company failed to lead the team into the sweet 16, I was crestfallen. They hadn’t even lost to some distinguished team like Oxford or The University of Chicago, but rather to a regional school in some North Carolina backwater (Earl University, maybe, it was Marquis or Baron U. It bore the name of some viceroy, of that much I’m sure).

So I did what any good sports fan would do if once-disappointed by his hometown heroes – I formed summary judgments about the intrinsic worth of the entire enterprise. So why worry at all about the mechanics of the tournament? Why not forget basketball altogether and have the respective team-members see who can construct a vaguer and more ridiculous major (Rural Sociology, anyone?) to appease those nettlesome academic-types who are always interfering with university athletics? I’m fairly sure GW could still compete at that.

That, or eliminate the automatic Ivy bid, distribute automatic bids by regions instead of conferences, recalibrate the S-Curve accordingly, and publicly clarify the role of Ratings Percentage Index.

Either way.