Is men's college basketball facing a villain problem?
It's an ironic question to ask, on the same day in which Duke — top-seeded, No. 1-ranked, national title hopefuls once again — gets set to play a high-profile Sweet 16 game against Rick Pitino and St. John's. But, as Chris Vannini of The Athletic noted earlier this week, Duke doesn't seem to rile the nation up nearly the way it used to. (It's hard to disagree with that assessment; for those of you too young to have grown up watching everyone from Shane Battier to Greg Paulus come through Cameron Indoor, you'll just have to take my word for it when I say that rooting against those Blue Devils teams was a cathartic, communal ritual.)
And Duke's shift in the national consciousness is about much more than just one program. For all the reasons Vannini identifies in his column — the fact that the Blue Devils haven't won a national title in over a decade, the fact that Coach K is no longer roaming the sidelines, greater access to player personalities in the social media era — one stands out most of all. In the age of NIL and the transfer portal, "one and done" isn't just for the blue bloods; it's a fact of life, and engaging with the sport has become less fun because of it.
This men's NCAA Tournament is missing a big bad
Strictly in basketball terms, this year's men's tournament has delivered the goods. The level of play is as high as it's ever been, and while the first round didn't devolve into chaos, we've still gotten plenty of Cinderella goodness to sink our teeth into. A second weekend that features a No. 9 seed in Iowa, a No. 11 seed in Texas and several blue bloods overflowing with talent? What's not to like?
And yet, the whole thing has felt strangely ... weightless, as though the center has failed to hold. The reality is that college basketball, and college sports more broadly, has always been at its best when it gives us something to unite against — a Goliath against which everyone can feel like a David. But that's missing this season; sure, you can be annoyed by Dan Hurley's sideline antics, but does UConn's success really make your blood boil? Is it making you rearrange weekend plans just to watch them (hopefully) lose?
It's hard to talk yourself into any team left in this year's field as a worthy villain — not even Duke, which on paper should check every box. Coach K's embrace of elite recruiting, targeting players who were only in Durham for a year before bouncing to the NBA, didn't just alter the racial and socioeconomic profile of his program. It also made the whole thing feel transitory, as though the Blue Devils were merely a brief waystation feeding into the pro game.
Now that describes just about every program in the country, and certainly every power-conference program in an era in which roster turnover has reached historic highs. All of which has made the sport harder to sink your teeth into; we don't really know these players, much less associate them with each other and with the name on the front of their jersey, and it's hard to connect with what you don't understand.
“It’s having these characters and where these games are something that you feel, not just something that you bet on,” Bomani Jones told Vannini, and it's almost impossible to tell a story, to establish a character, in a few weeks or months.
NIL and the transfer portal have made it harder to connect
To be clear, I'm not sure what the solution is. There is no moral or legal case to be made against players' freedom of movement and their right to see the fruits of their own labor. (And it is, in fact, labor, no matter how determined the NCAA is to cling to the phrase "student athlete.") No appeals to gauzy feeling or nostalgia can be so compelling as to override those rights.
But it's also OK to acknowledge that college basketball has changed radically over the past few years, and in many ways not for the better. It's not the most important item on that list, but the lack of any program to get truly invested in — both for and against — has resulted in a tournament that feels more like fodder for NBA Draft Twitter than something for casuals to immediately plug into.
Sure, I hate Duke as much as the next elder millennial, and would love to see them fall short of winning it all for yet another year. But I also know that the reality of this Blue Devils roster is pretty far removed from what I grew up with, and that next year's roster will look almost completely different. No matter how this year's tournament ends, the landscape of the sport will be unrecognizable the time next season rolls around, as though someone shook up an Etch-a-Sketch. That's a long-term problem, one that will result in everyone slowly but surely losing touch with the passion that made March Madness an institution in the first place.