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.
If you remember college basketball teams that were built how college basketball teams once were—by the tectonic process of recruiting, raising up rotation players over time and elevating sure-thing prospects into the pros at a more rapid pace—most contemporary college basketball rosters will look strange. Players change teams in the way that people change jobs, and for the same reasons—these are jobs, after all. A team that does good and thorough work identifying talent on the transfer market can overhaul its roster without recruiting or developing much talent on its own. Florida won a national championship in large part by doing that last year, and Michigan might do it this year. This is not just a matter of having money to spend, although doing it at the highest level is expensive.
Further down the market, a smaller-bore program can do something similar by offering players an opportunity that they are unlikely to receive at elite programs; Penn’s best frontcourt player saw limited minutes at Duke and then Virginia before breaking out in the Ivy League; a player who can’t get off the bench at Arizona State can be one of the best players on a 16 seed. A smaller program that lucks into or unlocks a player who is too good for that level will invariably lose that player to a bigger program offering a bigger payday. You can trace the outlines of this system by how players move up or down through it. Kansas guard Melvin Council Jr. has played at Wagner, in the low-major NEC, and then at St. Bonaventure in the Atlantic 10, and now in the Big 12; he is finding his level just as those new levels keep finding him. The college career of the Serbian forward Lazar Djokovic, who played a low-leverage role in the Big East as a freshman at Xavier, flashed in more minutes after stepping down to College of Charleston in the Colonial Athletic Association as a sophomore, and then was one of the better all-around players in the A-10 after leveling up to VCU this year, would be unimaginable by the old standards of college basketball but is otherwise easily legible as a minor league career in a professional sport. It’s a marketplace all the way through, now, and there is very little to mourn about the effectively feudal thing that it replaced.
That said, it will not entirely upset the old order. Penn and LIU are surely better for having those transfers from power-conference programs, but they’re not going to beat the much bigger and better teams from those programs that they’ll face in the tournament because of them. And not every program works this way. Purdue is led by stars who have played together there for years, and it shows; Duke thrives on having such a high volume of elite recruits coursing through the program that some invariably wind up staying multiple years in search of a bigger role, and that shows, too. Both teams are really good.
To look at a well-constructed, high-end contemporary college basketball roster is to see something that is familiar in the broad strokes and strange in the particulars. Arizona exceeded expectations this year because its two most vaunted recruits—forward Koa Peat and guard Brayden Burries—have both played like sure-shot first-round NBA draft picks, but also because the team’s pre-existing core of longer-tenured transfers and international signings already knew how to play together. Only two players on the team are even from Arizona: Peat, who is just passing through, and Evan Nelson, a reserve guard who is spending his final season of college eligibility in his hometown after four years at Harvard. The team makes perfect sense on the floor, but the roster is both familiar and strange as a text; it’s the sort of hybrid that a system and a market like this would naturally create, and reasonable and unreasonable in the ways that college basketball can’t help but be. These Wildcats are identifiably a very good basketball team, but not quite identifiable as the same sort of team I grew up watching.
What I liked about the players and teams I miss, mostly, was who and where I was when I was watching them—in bed during a school day, or in a bar when everyone else was at work, or just at jobs that didn’t just allow me to watch the games but required it. It’s the nature of college basketball, and every other thing, to change, and I am not and cannot be mad about that. I’m not mourning the old March Madness games played, slowly and mostly poorly, by players in enormous shorts or meticulous box fade hairstyles, not even as a sort of double-bank way of mourning my lost youth by proxy and not just because new games are about to be played. At the most elemental level, the tournament is still made of and through the same wonderfully unstable stuff: the strange and superheated basketball produced when young people encounter the type of pressure that only exists in very close proximity to dreams fulfilled. The market is what it is, and does what it does, but if this is the sort of thing you’re into, there’s still plenty of it to go around.
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