I can’t really say why I watched less college basketball this year than I have in years past. It’s something I could try to retcon into an ethical stance, or I guess an aesthetic one, but I feel like all of this has been litigated at this point, on this site and everywhere else. College basketball is, in every conceivable way and every bit as much as it has ever been, a mess. This is what is bad about it and what is good about it, and I have believed this for a long time. It generally has not kept me from watching Rutgers get blown out by Purdue on Saturday afternoon in the past. I am sorry if this sounds like bragging.
But this year was different. Last year, I could attribute my general absence and ambivalence to individual and circumstancial trauma. This year I just…kind of didn’t. I still watched a lot of college basketball, of course—I have not stopped being an idiot and you have my word that I will never stop being an idiot—but I watched less and less intensely than I had in years past. I was worried about other things, but I didn’t really have anything else going on. I wondered, as conference tournament season came along, if this would change things once it came to this time of year. And I have some good news on that front.
As it turns out, I am still an idiot. I still love this dumb shit somehow, and I love being wrong about it. And while this site is only intermittently putting new posts up—as long as I have a login and as long as that login works, it will continue doing that—our broader work of Being Wrong About College Basketball must go on. We must fail. Fail again. Fail better. I believe Bob Huggins originally said this.
So: this is where you click to join the seventh (I know!) iteration of Classical Bracket Buddies. The prize, as ever, is pride and I guess if you want me to mail you a basketball jersey I can do that. The longstanding and never-once-accepted offer of a photo of me wearing my Corliss Williamson Arkansas jersey remains open. You don’t have to accept that photo, of course. It is enough that you’ve come this far with us, and read this far this time. Do it. Get in there. Be wrong with us. What else is there to do?
