There Is No Resting State Of March Madness

You can tell a lot about a college basketball fan by what they miss. Cut me open and the concentric rings of idle sentiment that have accrued over a lifetime spent caring about this stuff will date me to my precise moment of conversion, on a well-timed sick day back in middle school; it remains the first and only legit sick day among the many I've called in during the first days of the NCAA Tournament in the years since. It will date me in general, too, not just in terms of the players and teams I remember best but for how different the shape and context of those moments were. When the NCAA Tournament starts in earnest, the basketball will be more efficient and polished and beautiful than the stuff that hooked me decades ago, as befits the fact that players are now getting paid for their labor in ways that can finally be acknowledged officially. If there is something unsettled and unsettling about the contemporary college game, it comes down to watching it become optimized in the same degrading contempo-style free-market ways that you'll recognize from every other corner of public life. Again, you have to know what you're actually missing, and that all this novel fuckery is leveling and bleaching something that was once scuzzier, jankier, and less finished is regrettable in some ways without actually being bad and only tenuously qualifying as "new." College basketball is driven by a vigorous gray market in teenage wing players; that market is overseen to no great effect by an irredeemable, corrupt, and badly diminished regulatory authority, and dictated from one moment to the next by the whims of sour monied alumni and local car dealership types and sneaker companies. That has been true for more or less my whole life, and what feels new amounts to an increasing refinement and liberation of that old pursuit. What's uncanny about it comes from watching as college basketball crafts itself into a tiered independent minor-league enterprise more or less from first principles. Liberalized transfer rules allow players to seek out the best pay and developmental situations they can find, and they do; a market proliferates around this as reliably as mushrooms after rain, with brokers and technologies making it possible for schools at every level to participate in this marketplace. How much you spend, here as everywhere else, dictates how much you will get. Every year, now, college basketball is made over by those forces.