Earlier this season I compared evaluating teams to win the NCAA Tournament with the episodes of “American Ninja Warrior” my daughter was watching on her iPad. It’s a pretty straightforward analogy: in the TV show, the contestants have to be really well-rounded athletically, able to get past a variety of obstacles using speed and strength and skill. If they had an area of weakness, there would be a part of the course they’d be unable to complete, and they would fail to achieve their goal. In college basketball, it was the same, I argued. If you were deficient in one area of your team, or particularly bad in one part of the season, looking back historically, you did not win. Instead, the well-rounded, always-good team won and got the trophy. And that happened every single year, even the years where it seemed like something crazy happened.
Well, we are about to enter a really interesting part of the season, and it basically starts today, February 15th. I actually even have filters set up on my lists for teams, and the filters end this morning and start this afternoon. “Pre-Feb-15” and “Post-Feb-15.” Basically, it’s about 1 month left until the NCAA Tournament starts. Not exact, but it’s good enough. Most teams have about 5-6 regular-season games remaining, and then have however many games they play in their conference tournament.
This is also an interesting time because it’s when everyone starts watching a lot of college basketball, or at least starts watching more than they were watching before. Football season is officially over. The NBA is about to take their All-Star break. The NHL just did that, and some teams have still only played once or twice since it ended a couple weeks ago. College basketball starts to get at least a piece of the spotlight, when maybe previously it had very little of the spotlight. Sports fans want to start doing their “homework,” getting a feel for all the teams before they fill out their bracket.
And the ironic thing about this time on the calendar is that just as everyone is about to start paying attention to the sport, we are entering the part of the season that matters the least. By far. It actually will confuse people more than help them when they sit down to fill out their brackets or place a bet on a team to win the tournament.