Mad At March-Ness, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #218 | @MDWorld

March 26, 2013 Arthur Tebbel 1 Comment

Dear Art,

Welcome to March Madness!  We are one week in to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament and I have to say things are going great.  We’ve had some great Cinderellas including the incredible performance from Florida Gulf Coast University becoming the lowest seed to ever reach the round of 16.  We also have marquee teams like Duke, Indiana and Ohio State through to the fourth round.  How perfect is this sport right now?  You can’t possibly be having more fun right now.

-Mark Emmert, President NCAA

Mark,

It has been an amazing tournament.  I, like I’m guessing 99% of other tournament watchers have seen less than two hours of college basketball going I to the tournament but still get super cocky about their brackets and are convinced they’re going to walk all over any competition.  My bracket was mostly broken by Thursday afternoon and completely destroyed by Saturday morning.  I’m really glad I don’t have money on it.  If you’re ever wondering if I’ve developed a gambling problem it will be the year I take my April rent and run off to Vegas the first weekend of the NCAA tournament.  Call my mom and have her meet me there; I’ll need help.

College basketball is in a really good place right now because it has none of the horrible baggage that college football has right now.  The more information that comes out about the risk of head injuries that come with playing football the idea that all of these children are risking their health for no money makes it so I can’t watch those games without getting a little queasy.  The only thing that bothers me about basketball is that when the NBA said that kids had to be a year removed from high school graduation to play in the league.  This provides you with a captive labor force that you trade a meager stipend and one semester of college for the millions and millions of dollars in TV revenue.  That’s completely fucked up but if you had problems with exploiting children you wouldn’t have gotten involved with the NCAA to begin with let alone become president of the organization.  Clearly you have no problem with this at all.

In the end, I can’t stop watching, whatever it is in the modern American psyche that has allowed us to turn a blind eye to people being casually exploited takes aver and I spend 13 hours a day for four consecutive days yelling at my TV cheering on players I’ll have mostly forgotten in three weeks.  It gives me an excuse to start drinking at ungodly hours.  I said the phrase “It’s gotta be noon somewhere” this week and that’s fucked up.  Anything that can do that to me has got to have something going right.