College Basketball Has Gone Mad, And It's Not Even March Yet

As I write this, I am watching the final minutes of a college basketball game between Vanderbilt and Texas A&M. The Aggies are ranked No. 8 in the country, and Vanderbilt is unranked, and the Commodores are up by double digits in a game they will go on to win 77-60. I would like to tell you that this—the Vandy win, not me watching basketball on television—is an accomplishment of some note, but I am also extremely pleased to say that it's really not. That's because this may be the most chaotic college basketball season in a generation, and this kind of shit is happening all the time on your preferred sporting-conglomerate television network. And all that chaos may be the best thing to happen to the sport since the first of the uber-upsets was sprung some 50 years earlier.

I am speaking, of course, of Texas Western's victory over Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA championship game, a contest freighted with such historic and social significance that they made a movie out of it, starring a guy who isn't quite Matthew McConaughey. In the years that followed, the tournament got weirder and crazier; by the 1980s, when CBS and ESPN piled on to the lunacy, college basketball had developed a reputation as the one major American sport that could lay claim to at least some semblance of true democratization. It was built for the masses, an aspirational game that any college in America could aspire to join, provided they had the proper athletic budget (and maybe a few bagmen on the side). And just about any team could beat any other if things went right.

We all know what happened over the next few decades: The NCAA tournament became a multi-million dollar bonanza and an upset-studded American treasure, but even as this was happening, the season itself had begun to grow far less interesting. Over time, the one-and-done rule rendered things too top-heavy, and the games themselves became ugly slogs that were hardly worth watching. Except for that first fortnight of the tournament, the sport felt staid, and even Brad Stevens and Butler only managed to alter that feeling temporarily over the course of a pair of NCAA championship games.

But something is happening this season, and if I may utilize my columnist's privilege to overstate my metaphors for a moment, it has a vibe vaguely like democratic socialism. Five No. 1-ranked teams lost games this season before February even began, the first time that had happened since 1949; in one eight-night stretch in late January, according to Yahoo's Jeff Eisenberg, 15 ranked teams lost at least once. Around the same time, Duke fell out of the top 25 for the first time in nine years, the kind of weird occurrence that threatens to produce a mushroom-cloud of schadenfreude.

And this is what college basketball needed more than anything. In addition to the rules changes that have made the game itself more fluid, it required a shakeup; we needed a reminder that this is the one major sport in America where the best teams often lose games they're supposed to win.

This is the beauty of college sports—it is a deliberately flawed product. Every team has a weakness because every team should have a weakness, given that adolescents and young adults are contesting these games. But it goes beyond that because, unlike with college football, the NCAA tournament has democratized college basketball to the point that teams from otherwise unknown universities increasingly vault themselves into the spotlight. This is what happened with Gonzaga, and with Wichita State, and with Dayton, and with Butler, and with several other "mid-major" teams that can no longer be considered mid-major, because they seemingly have as good as a shot of making the Final Four as any team out of the SEC or the Pac-12. It's pretty clear that this is no longer a Butler-inspired trend; a team like Xavier really does have the potential to make a Final Four run this year, if not win the national championship.

What does all this mean? It means that, if this form holds, we could be on the cusp of a historic NCAA tournament. Maybe this is the year a No. 16 seed finally defeats a No. 1 seed. Maybe this is the year Duke doesn't make the tournament at all. Maybe Iowa—Iowa?—glides through to the Final Four, and maybe A&M rebounds from that Vanderbilt loss to win the SEC. Maybe Kentucky begins to quietly oil its machine heading into the postseason, and maybe it does not; maybe South Carolina—seriously, South Carolina?—is as good as its 19-3 record indicates. Up until recently, the final remaining undefeated team was SMU, which isn't even eligible for the NCAA tournament; now the highest-rated teams in Ken Pomeroy's rankings with the fewest losses beyond Oklahoma, Xavier, and SMU are St. Mary's and Arkansas Little-Rock.

"Every team in college basketball is beatable," Wake Forest coach Danny Manning said recently, and maybe that's true every year. But it seems especially true this year, in a season that's increasingly beginning to feel like a renaissance for a sport that's been lost in the wilderness. Pomeroy's rankings are statistical wonders, but this may be the year that even he has no real idea what's going to happen in March.

This is a sport that is once again embodying its best trait; this is a sport that feels like an exercise in the wildest form of democracy, which is not something that can be said for the NBA, particularly right now. As spectacular as the Golden State Warriors, San Antonio Spurs, and Cleveland Cavaliers (at least within the Eastern Conference) are to watch, pro basketball is currently an exercise in hegemony, the Bush and Clinton dynasties exchanging the White House. It's impressive to witness all that brilliance, but over the next two months you'll find me down here far more often, watching a college game among the masses, none of us having any clue what will happen next.