Kentucky Versus March

The undefeated Kentucky Wildcats are the best team in college basketball. They are arguably the best team in college basketball history. And that's exactly why this tournament isn't for them. In a warped, paradoxical sort of way, which is to say by the standards in which college basketball makes the most sense, Kentucky is almost an underdog in this year's NCAA Tournament. Or, anyway, as much of an underdog as an unstintingly dominant and nearly flawless team can be.

If this were a pro sport, a team with such a distinct edge in talent would enjoy a much larger advantage heading into the postseason. If this were the NFL they would have a bye week and extra time to rest their players. If this were the NBA, they would play a seven-game series to avoid the whims of sports-flukery. But it isn't. The Wildcats, like every other team in the tournament, will have to win six consecutive games in order to be crowned the champions.

Cinderella is a code word, and it means "keep watching." The college basketball postseason is about entertainment, not justice. Kentucky's utter dominance on their way to a 33-0 record gives them a minimal edge going forward beyond a monumentally one-sided first game. From that point on they will quite possibly play a team like Purdue, which features two talented seven-footers. After that they could face Maryland, a team that has already defeated no. 1 seed Wisconsin.

This is not necessarily fair, but by March's rules it is good. It's good because rooting against Kentucky is congruent with why we are watching this tournament in the first place.

Variety and predictability may not necessarily be opposing forces, but they are far from perfectly compatible. The variety that March Madness has to offer goes well beyond the fact that it fields a tournament with more teams than are in the NFL and NBA combined.

The game's diversity is highlighted by the fact that Kentucky and Hampton University are facing off in the first round. The Kentucky Wildcats and the Hampton Pirates exist in a universe with different resources, circumstances, and motivations.

Kentucky will likely see seven of the players on their current roster selected in this year's NBA draft. Rick Mahorn is the only Hampton Pirate to ever play a full season in the NBA. Theoretically, all of the players on Hampton's roster are operating under the principles for which college athletics were originally conceived. Some of them are on scholarship and some are not, but supposedly they are all on campus with the ultimate goal of attaining a degree. Whereas in Kentucky, degrees are not even a pretense. And yet here they are, in the same tournament.

The result is the result: crazy and random and flawed and great. Hampton's odds are as good as Kentucky's. Janet from HR is just as likely to win the office Bracket Pool as Todd from sales even though Todd from sales has watched hundreds of hours more of college basketball than Janet from HR. The entire tournament is a mechanism for unpredictability. If you have ever watched a NCAA Tournament, you already know this.

The goal of March Madness is not to determine a consensus on the best college basketball team in the land. The goal is to create chaos: showcase an absurd amount of basketball and overwhelm the senses, and then to make a saccharine video about whichever team is standing when the dust settles. In the big picture, it has yet to disappoint.

People tune into March Madness because of what might happen, not because of what probably will happen. They are not wrong to do this, if only because 'what probably will happen' probably won't happen six times in a row. Those last two sentences made about as much sense as March Madness.

And so if you are watching the tournament without direct ties to Kentucky, then you are rooting against the Wildcats. You have to. To do anything else would be against the spirit of why we are watching in the first place.

Don't root against Kentucky because of John Calipari, or because he has crafted his program into a conveyer belt for NBA players. Don't root against them because the "one-and-done" era of college basketball is "ruining the game" or some other dusty piety. Don't root against them because the three seniors on their roster have combined for 12 points in their ten years at Lexington.

To root against them for these reasons would be missing the point. The Kentucky Wildcats are not the bad guys. They are simply the fall guys, and their opponent is the whole weird constellation of randomness that remains the only undefeated participant in every NCAA Tournament. Kentucky's well-executed version of athletic dominance is the very face of predictability, and predictability is the exact opposite of why we are here in the first place. The predictable, it should be noted, does not have a great record in March.