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.

Pissing In The Wind: This Bracket Racket

This Sunday, the NCAA announces its field of 65.

That is, of course, an odd number. And as much as it isn't even, it's even less a power of 2, as tournament rosters are wont to be. This irregularity descends from a historical quirk. In every tournament, there are the 31 automatic bids and the 34 at-large bids.

The automatic bids go to the winners of the separate conferences. There used to be 30 conferences, but the august Mountain West Conference split from the athletic pantheon of the Western Athletic Conference, and in its infinite wisdom the NCAA decided both were, in fact, real conferences and both deserve automatic bids.

And then there are the at-large bids, or, as they're also known, the "Good Teams". You want to see Duke in the tournament? Of course you do, cause Coach K is K-k-k-krazy! And who wouldn't want to see UNC. Or Maryland. Or Boston College. Let's not forget Wake Forest's Demon Deacons, a team name up there with Pennsylvania's Fighting Quakers for absurdity. Of course, because all these teams come from the ACC, most of these great teams are coming from an at-large bid.

So why even bother with the automatic bids that are just warm-up for the teams that have been spending the regular seasons kicking ass and taking names?

And while we're at it, what is the deal with those conference tournaments at all? Let's say there is a team from the Podunk Regional Conference that is good. Not great, certainly not a top 25 team, though maybe it's gotten some votes. They work their ass off to establish a solid record, get to the Charles Willamon (he was the first athletic director at East Bumblefuck University) Tournament, and lo and behold, there are actually cameras there! They're going to be on TV! And they lose! And even though they're obviously the "best" team in the 'Dunk.

This is all done, of course, because those fancy-shmancy TV cameras give the 'Dunk teams hell of money. At the cost of, y'know, screwing over their best child.

So, dear commentatrices, what's the way to deal with basketball championships?

Harvard sucks at basketball; Dinosaurs still dead

Harvard decided not to renew their coach after a 12-16 season. At, say, Duke, that would be a disastrous season. Coach K would be roasted alive and the Cameron Crazies would become the Cameron Cannibals. But Frank Sullivan, the coach, had an overall record of 178-245 in 16 seasons at Cambridge Community College. So, in fact, this year's .428 percentage was .8 percent *better* than his career .420 winning record.

How mercurial, dear Ivy League Bastion. Perhaps the Ivory Tower wants to get in on the game? Recruit noted intellectual players like J, Ph.D.? You get down with your bad self, Stanford of the East.

So how long has it been since they made the big dance? Will next year's seniors be able to gather round the campfire and tell the freshmen stories of NCAA tournament shenanigans? Maybe the red-shirted seniors? Let me get on my reading glasses, and peruse this article... It says that the last time the Crimson made the bracket was.. two thousand and-- Where is that?

"Harvard last made the NCAA Tournament in 1946."

1946?!

That's right. People who saw the Harvard team last ball it up weren't grindin', they were jitterbuggin'. Diplomats from the LEAGUE OF NATIONS watched the game (possibly). India was part of Britain. Bobby Bonds, father of today's elder statesmen of steroid question dodging, Barry Bonds was born. But hey, at least maybe some of the players were scouted for the League? Y'know, go pro?

Oh, wait, no. The NBA wasn't founded for another couple months.

So Harvard, here's my suggestion: Don't form a search committee for a new coach. Why bother? Instead, just let the intramural basketball team currently leading in the standings play for you at the Div I level. That way, you save some money, more kids get to experience the rush of competition, and it's not like you'll do much worse.

Maureen Dowd's Career And Other Cunning Stunts

Sports analogies are illuminating in a piece of writing when they recast complex phenomena--like the Democratic Primary--in the more immediately recognizable terms of positions and objectives, raw talent and charisma, the value of teamwork versus individual achievement, , underdogs and favorites, triumph over adversity, et cetera.

Maureen Dowd's latest op-ed gem, "Where Is His Right Hook?" manages to take a fairly common and straightforward species of sports analogy--'politics is like a prize fight' (or a wrestling match, or a dogfight...)--and make it almost completely incoherent.

A good rule of thumb in journalism (even op-eds) is that the headline, the lede, and the pull-quote should give the reader a fairly good idea what the article is about. In this case, the aforementioned headline set up the following lede:

"If Hillary is in touch with her masculine side, Obama is in touch with his feminine side."

and the pull-quote was....Well, I don't know exactly what the pull-quote was, because I threw away my copy and nytimes.com wants me to pay to read it again.* I'm fairly sure the pull quote said something like "he rolls over while she takes another shot", which is not only ambiguous across about a thousand contexts that the Times would no doubt find "unfit to print", but also brings the pronoun-to-noun ratio in the headline, lede and pull-quote up to 5:2.

Like I said, I can't be sure this was the exact wording of the pull-quote. It might have been a reference to Sex and the City--one can never be sure.

Her writing (and I use that term charitably) invariably seems like it comes straight from her adorable little diary in which she confides her deepest, darkest secrets along with notes about super-hottie Centrists, Third-Wave feminism, and bulk makeup orders.


*though, becoming a member of "Times Select" would allow me to root through their Op-Ed archives and reconstruct just how John Tierney managed to make Libertarianism fit on a postage stamp

March Madness

Stereotypes are idioms, and idioms sure can be useful. For instance, this weekend when I met a women's rugby player, I filed away that fact and all its connotations. And so when she mentioned she was Dutch, I was able to say with nary a pause, "ah, then it makes sense that you want to stick fingers in dikes."

Speaking of, it's March. To some of my friends who are interested in walking a mile in the other guy's shoes (and pants), that means it's March Manness[sic]. But for us here at The Enfranchised, it means it's time for basketball.

(For those of you a bit confused about my introduction and segue, allow me to quote Aristotle. In Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Ch. 7 Eth.1098a23-24, we find, "What is the difference between cunnilingus and dunking? You don't have to dunk to play woman's basketball." A bit awkward phrasing, yes. But remember that comedic timing was discovered at the same time as perspective in 2-D art, only in the Renaissance.)

And so, this month, we're getting into it. Sports sports sports here at the 'Franchised. College, Pro, PAL, men's, women's unisex, hot horse-on-horse action (if we find horses that play polo, y'know, on other horses. Come to think of it, that's Foster's assignment). You name it, we'll consider considering it.