David Roth's Weak in Review: Re-Learning to Love College Basketball

Bill Raftery is a human just like everyone else, except that he's better at it. Plenty of people have enough knowledge about college basketball to talk about it on television, but no one is better than Raftery at finding the hungry humanity and fumbling grace in failure, which is college basketball's active ingredient. He is either better at finding beauty in college basketball's endless flailing cock-ups, or he's much, much better at acting than anyone else presently working as a television analyst.

Raftery's job is about transmitting information, and given the basketball he's talking about, that amounts to explaining how things might have been done or were supposed to be done after an instance of them being done the exact opposite way by some jangle-nerved college kid. Doing his job well also requires projecting a very unique sort of compassion. It's about watching a bunch of kids make mistakes and back-rim jumpers and watch the ball and forget their assignments, and still finding something redemptive and lovely in it. And then, maybe the harder part, conveying to the people watching, who know what basketball is and how it should be played, that it is OK to enjoy this sludgy, blundering, walleyed version of it. This is not an easy sell.

There is no one on television currently who is better at this than Bill Raftery, and maybe no one has ever been more purely great at it, or has done this strange job—which simultaneously demands the skills of a local politician and a social worker and a therapist and a parent and a high-level basketball coach and a used-car salesman—more lovingly or empathetically. He's a miracle, is what I'm saying. But there are limits. There is Rutgers at St. John's on a Thursday night in November, and there is only so much anyone can do with that.

Rutgers basketball is, as I wrote back in March, a painfully perfect metaphor for just about everything that's elementally fucked and wrong about college basketball. My fascination with and affection for my home state's ultra-dystopian basketball team is, my therapist agrees, probably something to work on, and my decision to give any moment of my life to this game is more or less unforgivable. So yeah, I watched some.

Even by the usual standards, the game was purgatorial. Both teams are awful, and didn't so much go back and forth as handle the game in shifts, with St. John's spending the first half duffing things abjectly and Rutgers thoughtfully taking the last watch. Rutgers boofed a 16-point lead in the second half despite keeping St. John's from making a field goal for the first six minutes of the period. They blew it largely by deploying a play down the stretch that could best be described as "narcoleptic wearing rollerblades"; St. John's did not rally past Rutgers for the win any more than you might "rally" over a discarded hot dog on the sidewalk with a bootprint in it. Rutgers lost when they were unable to get a would-be game-winner off before the final horn.

This was the game that Bill Raftery had been given. While he did his level best with it, even Raftery let loose a few weary sighs and some bemusedly scandalized "Oh my"s in the course of the broadcast. There was nothing else to do, really, even for college basketball's patron saint of forbearance. It was college basketball, but college basketball with a little bit too much college basketball in it. In a week that saw a great deal of very good college basketball—the best teams are presently playing each other in those branded early-season tournaments, and will then take some time off to score 95 points on a bunch of Sun Belt and SWAC teams before conference play begins—this was decidedly not that.

Even in those good games, in which good teams played disciplined and at least moderately crisp basketball, there was that ragged and nascent quality that makes college basketball different, and great. To watch the Golden State Warriors, who are beyond good and evil and effectively unbeatable at the moment, is to see something awe-inspiring and total. It is difficult to imagine how good a team would have to be in order to beat them, which means that the fun of watching them is something like the fun of watching a James Bond movie. They are going to escape from whatever the latest ingenious trap is, because they always do; the Clippers, on Thursday night, were just the latest prestige actor to take on the role of Purring Millionaire Sociopath Who Leaves Bond Alone in the "Get Eaten by Sharks" Room. The fun is in watching the Warriors make a stylish escape without getting any smudges on the tux. It's almost formulaic by now, but you can't beat the stuntwork. College basketball does not deal in this sort of thing.

Even when college basketball gives us its best shot—whether that be transcendent freshmen like Kentucky's Jamal Murray struggling to catch up with their own outlandish talent, or comparatively cagey seniors like Michigan State's Denzel Valentine easing into triple-doubles—it is not giving us a NBA-style spectacle. There is just too much about it that is unfinished and untethered, and it is always apparent that the game is played not by mortals but by kids. Even the most transcendent among them have not yet transcended their adolescent selves. They're not nearly finished growing into their talent, and they stumble around in shoes they can't quite fill yet.

College sports being college sports, there is a creepy authoritarian undercurrent to the way this is perceived and consumed. A lot of the college basketball discourse is devoted to old white men screaming at these kids, and a great many of the participants in that discourse clearly harbor intense urges to spank other peoples' children. These are the curdled men for whom college sports' many exploitative aspects are not a bug but a feature. That is absolutely their problem, and all I can tell you about those people is that you ought not make eye contact with them if you can avoid it. I encourage them, with all my heart, not to vote in any elections.

What college basketball demands of us, if we want to watch it differently, is to be more like Bill Raftery—to try to share his capacity for patience and kindness with other peoples' kids, his willingness to celebrate their successes and soften their sufferings, and his ability to treat humans of college age as the tragic, futile, beautiful, stupid wonders that they are. The NBA gives us a great show, one that is forever stepping farther back beyond the arc of mortality and tossing up heat checks. College basketball gives us a show that is strikingly similar from year to year, albeit with variations along the margins and frequent cast changes. It gives us struggle and failure, always; it demands empathy and patience and good humor. It's not always lovely to look at, and there are many other things to watch. You do not need to watch Rutgers to be reminded of this. But I think it's good practice