March drabness

A decade-and-a-half ago, a friend of mine’s sister went to the University of Kentucky with Demarcus “Boogie” Cousins, for the one year that Boogie was a student at that particular institution of higher learning, before he matriculated to the NBA. She had a class with him. It’s not a particularly classic anecdote, in that they didn’t go on any dates and didn’t forge a special friendship that has lasted a lifetime. But it’s the kind of happenstance occurrence that’s central to my friend’s (and his sister’s) fantasy construction vis-à-vis Kentucky Basketball (conceptually) mattering to them.

The fact of the matter is that Boogie Cousins was probably no more a “student” at the University of Kentucky than I was (I wasn’t) in 2010 (or ever). But it allowed them to convince themselves that the games mattered because they had some tangential connection to Boogie Cousins beyond just the baseline of paying taxes in the state of Kentucky.

In 2025, Boogie Cousins may have taken all of his “classes” online and never darkened the door of an academic building, thereby never meeting my friend’s sister, and thereby weakening their particular construction-of-fantasy. Cousins in 2025 is de jure, a college basketball player, but de facto, a professional basketball player.

This seems like it doesn’t matter, but it does.

We’re in a particular season of March Madness that isn’t all that “Mad” and as such, isn’t all that interesting, because the plucky, hardscrabble mid-majors for whom we used to cheer and which we previously used to mastermind our brackets, have all lost. Rest in peace High Point and SIU Edwardsville.

The reason for this is fairly simple and economic in nature: If you’re the best player on High Point’s roster in 2025, making (let’s say) $20,000 per year in NIL money, you can probably transfer to Vanderbilt next season, where you’ll be the eighth-best player on the roster and make $75,000 a year. Almost every school in the SEC is in the NCAA tournament this year because they can afford to buy the best players. If it feels like there’s nothing especially romantic, or academic, about this paragraph, it’s because there’s absolutely nothing romantic or academic about it.

This is happening at almost every level of college basketball. At the small, Baptist, and actually Christian (I’m proud of this!) university where I’m a professor, we play Division II basketball. As I type this, I am one day removed from having joined hundreds of students in an auxiliary gymnasium on our campus to watch our women’s team play in the Elite Eight of the D2 basketball tournament. The starting point guard is also one of my best students. (I’m proud of this, too!) Watching her play (and win!) in an impressive-looking arena on an ESPN+ feed with hundreds of my friends and students brought me an inordinate amount of joy on an otherwise drab Monday afternoon in March.

Around the room there were occasional shouts of “that’s my student!” or “that’s my friend!” as something interesting would happen on the court. The shouts were, of course, the fruit of these women attending real classes at a real school where they are seen, known, and loved. It was honestly pretty magical.

But our men’s basketball team faces the same challenges faced by the High Points and SIU-Edwardsvilles of the world: The best player on our roster will probably leave in the transfer portal to go make $20,000 as the sixth-best player at one of those schools. This is a.) understandable at some level, but b.) completely at odds with what we’re endeavoring to “sell” at our school—a transformational four-year experience full of rich community, academic rigor, Christ-centeredness, and discipleship.

In reality I would have had that hypothetical best player in one class and probably would barely get to know him, due to travel schedules and excused absences because of games. For these students, the discipleship probably doesn’t happen. The rich community definitely doesn’t happen because he’s gone after a year.

And it doesn’t take too many years of adulthood to realize how relatively insignificant $20,000 is in the grand scheme of things. It is a symbolic and I guess somewhat tangible way to quantify how good you are at basketball (“I’m worth exactly $20,000”) and it’s something for dad to puff his chest out about and excitedly tell his friends. But it’s the start of something entirely unromantic: adulthood. For many people, that means you pack your car every few years and move away, in search of a few thousand more dollars that will be gone before you know it, and before you realize what you’ve lost.

So America’s basketball problem is really a romance problem, which is really a fantasy-construction problem. Which means that CBS really has its work cut out for it in the soft-focus feature-package department … but no amount of “Everybody in this player’s family and friend group died in the offseason so you should care about him” packages can solve it.

The most interesting thing that’s happened in this tournament was Dan Hurley getting caught complaining in the tunnel about officiating. That was just a normal Tuesday for Bobby Knight in the 1980s, except he did it in his press conferences. The second-most interesting thing was McNeese State’s student-manager getting his own NIL deal for rapping with his players before a game—a circumstance that will no doubt be replicated (stupidly) and will for sure be forgotten in the span of one week.

In the name of player-empowerment and money, we took the “college” out of college basketball. And we may have lost it forever.