Matters of Life and Death (Epilogue, The Third)PAWTUCKET, R.I., Mar. 28 -- All animate organisms, from the globbiest amoeba to the most intricate human machine, share one thing in common: life. Life is what keeps you going, it's the light before the beginning of the tunnel. The meaning of life is simply this: it means so much that nobody can survive without it. Every season, the 337 college basketball teams, in many certain ways, constitute living and breathing organisms -- each is a unique collection of blood and muscles and brains all working towards a common goal, each with an expected lifespan of six months (the same period of time that your average worker ant lives for, by the way). Some of these teeming teams just aren't cut out for this world and cut out early, others are snuffed out before their respective times, and still others -- like, say, the third place-cum-NCAA participant 2006-07 Miami (Oh.) RedHawks -- get to live far beyond their expected span. But only one team gets to end its season with a meaningful victory, and live forever. (We're not counting the survivor in Myles Brand's Purgatorio -- er, the NIT.) For every other team, death comes swiftly. I have to apologize for the stark and gloomy terms, but I'm trying to illustrate why I prefer the wide-eyed hopefulness of Midnight Madness or the mundane rhythms of late January's conference games to college basketball's final month, why it takes me at least until June to be able to even look a basketball in the eye after the final mid-major is eliminated from the NCAA Tournament. For all the brief glimpses of overwhelming joy, for every One Shining Moment, there are a hundred final, tearful, bitter press conferences as losers' seasons are killed off in March's annual slaughter of the innocents. When you go to as many games as I do, it can seem like walking through a graveyard. We had this coming, I guess. After a 2006 Tournament where low-seed upsets popped up all over the brackets like glorious spring crocuses, 2007's version was downright newsprint-grey by comparison. Things have a way of evening out, averaging out, finding their own level... and to be honest, we used up a whole lot of mid-major mojo last year. Too far-fetched or vapid of a concept? This isn't the gerrymandered NFL, where financial equality gives most teams a Super Bowl shot roughly every five years -- our game is allowed to move in strange and mysterious ways. And if baseball can have a collective soul that allows it to transcend its klutzy caretakers, we can too. If you prefer a more rational explanation, consider the cold reality that very few of the mid-major champions we produced this year were as balanced or as fearsome as 2006's rich crop. Without naming names, many were too young and ahead of their time, or too defense-challenged, or too stoppable (due to one-man-show issues, offensive imbalance or a lack of the solid team-ball that marked last year's class). Judging from all the returning talent around Hoops Nation on second- and third-place teams, things should be better next year. But still, there were our fair share of notable exceptions. The NCAA Tournament saw Virginia Commonwealth beat Duke (made sweeter by the long, shared border between VA and NC) and Winthrop overcome Notre Dame (putting a merciful end to the "Gregg Marshall can't win the big one" bullshit). And despite having comparable athletic budgets to VCU and WU, Butler and Southern Illinois submitted glorious high-seed seasons that led sportswags to con a nation into believing that the "mid-major" tag was obsolete forever (the next time either school suffers through a 13-game win season, let's hear your thoughts about the matter then, okay?). To me, the Bulldogs' and Salukis' sustained success from November through March, their national rankings and their incredible poise under pressure are only microns less impressive than what Mason did in '06, and I'm just as proud of them. With this essay, I declare the third season of The Mid-Majority closed, but not before a final accounting. (This is a bit of a tradition, see: 1 and 2) Good news first, because I'm just that type of guy... After spending 2005-06 blogging at ESPN.com full time, I resumed here three (sometimes four) times a week. We had cool "product roll-outs," like TMM To-Go for mobile users and the Tournament Wiz. And karma was on my side: within a week of Gonzaga's* Josh Heytvelt hitting me in the face with a basketball, he got his . In other news, traffic was up significantly over last year, and any technical issues were restricted to the ones I myself created (sorry about temporarily and mistakenly locking you out of the site for three days, IE users... I prefer to blame the Google Maps API). But I found that drawing Bally cartoons on the road, then finding a Kinko's to scan them in at, proved really difficult and later impossible. I regret that. (That's right, I said Gonzaga. We've had enough fun with "Unnamed Major Program From The Northwest" and its goofy acronym. Losing mini-mastermind Bill Grier is a huge blow, and you did lose 10 games this season. Welcome back to the fold, Zags. We love you.) But as for games attended -- always a key benchmark of this site -- there was some real ground broken.
There's certainly a lot of ramshackle charm I miss about that first season three years ago, all the "Go Kyle Go" e-mails and the offers of free beer and places to sleep. But I don't miss scraping for ticket money in the couch, or trying to explain to my then-new wife that I was on a Mission From Gahd and that the journey was sure to end up somewhere worthwhile. I don't get very many well-wisher e-mails anymore (it's mostly "constructive criticism"), or website donations for a largely ad-free site (although Blue Ribbon kicks in some for the hosting in return for the presented-by tag -- nice of them), or free beer (darn). I fully understand that part of it, I'm perceived as being part of The Establishment now. But what cramps my nostalgia the most is that a large number of the site's original readers have turned against me -- I've sold them out, or disappointed them, or failed to provide them with a certain amount of zing. But I'm not stupid enough to fall for it. Without exception, the message boards and blogs and e-mailers that have abandoned the TMM cause are supporters of schools that have cycled over since championship success in 2004-05, and are experiencing changed fortunes, different coaching situations and/or massive rebuilding projects. The only real difference between then and now is that I'm not speaking in glowing terms about their teams every day, and I guess that serves as evidence that there was a disconnect about this site's purpose to begin with. Don't get me wrong, I love to chronicle teams that lose in interesting ways , but there's only so much of that kind of thing that readers are willing to take. Folks are naturally attracted to winning (ask anyone in charge of selling tickets for a 7-20 team), and a large part of my job is to discuss which mid-major teams are leading conferences, winning championships, and which stand the best chance of taking down the big boys when mid-March rolls around. Spending the bulk of my time on victors instead of vanquished is necessary for me to stay in a neighborhood somewhere near "relevant." However, this leaves me with a very strange core audience -- one that confounds, mystifies and repulses me in equal measure. I call it "Cinderella Syndrome" -- a disorder that causes people to slip in and out of underdog costumes as easily as NBA fans trade in their Kobe for D-Wade replica jerseys (and back again), which makes America glom onto any underdog that wins, whether it be Kent State 2002, George Mason 2006 or Butler 2007. All that matters is that it's a mid-major, and that it's winning. I had a good conversation about this phenomenon last month with my friend and colleague Michael Litos (who wrote a book you should buy). We agreed that underdogism was something that resounded in the national psyche, and that there may a little bit of weird guilt involved. "As a country, we're not the underdog anymore," he said. "We overthrew the British a long time ago. Now, America is so large that it reaches everywhere, the world's policeman. Maybe there's a part of us that secretly yearns for that uphill struggle." OK, that I get, but not the part about using temporary, disposable dopplegangers. Honestly, I don't get you people. How satisfying is it, as a sports fan, to bounce from bandwagon to bandwagon, to pull on any clothing that looks like it belongs to a dangerous sheep? If you stuck with Butler after the Sweet 16 season in 2002-03, and steadfastly believed in the Bulldogs when they went 13-15 two years later, I can only imagine how rewarding this Sweet 16 run was on a personal, and perhaps spiritual, level. For the rest of you, I don't know what to say except that we'll find you someone new to root for next March. In 2005-06, as the reach of the site expanded to include statistics and historical data (and hoo boy, there's a lot of that around here), I began to mentally separate "readers" and "users." The website statistics indicate that there are literally tens of thousands of "users" each day, and maybe 1500 "readers." Whichever group you fall into (I'm guessing "readers"), you have likely experienced this gulf in the form of a nightly site slowdown during the late evenings, when the "users" descend on the site to pick apart the tempo-free box scores, performance grids and the updated team stats. The irony -- if you can even call it that -- is that this site was initially born as a repository for mid-major information in an age when such was lacking. I started a companion blog, along with a gimmicky quest, and trust me... I didn't get to the point to where I can make a living off college basketball by providing Sun Belt game times. And on top of that, I'm too stuck in my Kerouac/Kuralt pigeonhole to be taken seriously by the stathead community, or even to get compilation credit from the general populace at large (hello, morons on certain message boards: five minutes each on this site and Pomeroy's site will conclusively prove that our databases are unique and different... nobody's "stealing" anything). So I'm not getting much out of this by making it public -- starting next season, the stats will be spun off, sold or otherwise excised, and if that means I lose 85% of my audience, bully for me. The "users" weren't helping pay the bills anyway. Considering that I witnessed games in all four time zones in 27 different states (and one district), attended seven conference tournaments, drove 15,481 miles, and slept in 32 different truck stops, this year went extremely smoothly -- nothing untoward, life-threatening or irreversible (I'm talking to you, 10 extra pounds). But I keep going back to the conversation I had with the Richmond cop who took me downtown after the CAA first round in March 2006, to file a police report after my rental car had been smashed in by multiple crowbars. To pass the time, he asked me what I do. "I travel around and go to college basketball games," I said. "A lot of college basketball games. Then I write about them." "So, you're a traveling journalist-storyteller type," he replied. "Yeah, I guess so." "Wow," he said, pausing briefly. "I didn't know there were any of you left." Unfortunately, with all the celebrity sports opinion-makers around, the traveling journalist-storyteller type is a dead species at worst and some sort of weird anachronism at best... and should probably be wearing a fedora with "Press" in the hatband in either event. These days, "sportswriting" is filled with first-person garbage filed by people who are more interested in injecting themselves into the story instead of covering it. But I mean, seriously -- in a world of blogs and message boards, do we really need our sportswriters to sidle up to us, speak directly to us, be our know-it-all I-was-there pals? Do we need their open letters of advice to sports stars, when we can easily get the same exact thing from a 17-year old with a TypePad account and a Fathead in their bedroom? Opinions are well, you know, they're certainly not retentive. The people who are paid to attend sporting events (and given free courtside seats) should be conduits between the experience and those who weren't there, and if it's as boring as rote AP wire copy, you're fired. In any case, get out of the way and let me pretend I was there. I take an enormous amount of pride in the fact that I made it through an entire year of regular ESPN.com contributions, and did not slip into first-person once. Not once (check the archives). But my continued status as a national voice -- should it continue at all -- should be taken as a one-man referendum on whether that matters anymore. I'm not claiming saviorship of the restrained school of sportswriting, but it certainly is lonely in here with all the I/me/my. I save that stuff for the blog (or the chats). And there's the larger questions of whether people want stories at all, or just a validation of what they already hold to be true. Politicos gravitate towards the "news" that doesn't challenge their beliefs (liberals to Air America as conservatives to Fox News), and so it is with sports fans. Most would rather experience big, sloppy, wet blowjobs on their favorite programs, players and coaches, and that's what gets the bulk of the page views, message board mentions and Nobel Prize for Being Smart nominations -- in that respect, fans get the columnists they deserve. Few want to hear actual analysis, unless it's an analysis of how good their team is ("genius!") -- certainly not a list of its shortcomings ("idiot!"). Speaking as the first product of the sports blogosphere to make a living at this (sorry, Leitch), I am never going to be a big media star, and I don't aspire to be one. As I say every year in this season-closer, I want to go to basketball games and write about them, and will do so as long as it's financially feasible. So where does that leave this site? At this point, I don't know. But I will say this: it will come back on November 1, 2007 different, smaller, leaner... and possibly supported by advertisements that will cover the gap between TMM's $178 PayPal income for 2006-07 and the actual costs of running this site. The fourth season of The Mid-Majority won't be about front-running, "users," self-aggrandizement, or substituting storymaking for storytelling. Stripped of thousands of pages of unsustainable noise, it will speak simply and clearly about what it was supposed to be about from the beginning: the uphill struggle this country secretly yearns for. The good news is now you're smaller, What you'll find there are all flaws in progress, | |||
