Coming to terms with The New College Basketball
Compared to realignment, a slightly bigger NCAA tourney doesn't seem so bad
I saw a Big Ten standings prediction the other day. It was like so many other pieces of ephemeral Twitter sports content: A graphic filled with logos and rankings and team names and numbers, accompanied in the text of the tweet by like five words and a question mark and maybe some fire emojis or some eyes and/or that little guy holding his chin. You know the drill. Usually, this stuff flies past the frontal lobe without registering; there is not even the time to actively dismiss it before the brain moves on. This one, though, stopped me in my tracks. It made me sad. It affected me deeply and emotionally, in a way these things simply aren’t supposed to do.
Why? It was the first time I had seen a preview of the standings of the 2024-25 Big Ten, which became official this week — the first time, I realized, I had seen all of those teams laid out in a row, as if they belonged together, as if they made sense.
Here is the simple, empty ESPN standings version, which went live on Tuesday:
Sorry, but: Can we talk about how much this sucks? Can we all pause for a second and process this? Before it’s time to suss out squads and figure out favorites. Before we get sucked into the here-before-you-know-it fun of preseason previews and features.
Before the eternal appeal of college sports — that same pure feeling of seeing your first game in Carver-Hawkeye with your dad as a little kid watching Chris Street, the feeling of walking tipsy to the tailgate lot with your freshman friends at IU, that undimmable love people exploit to get away with what you see above — reels us all back in, before we figure out how we move forward, can we all take a moment to agree how much this sucks?
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