Today is the first day of the college basketball season, which means that for the next five months, bar televisions will air this most foul sport, one people love with the passion of a rhinoceros mother protecting her just born baby, despite the fact that it FUCKING SUCKS.
Seriously. Fuck college basketball. You are terrible for liking it. You are terrible for recycling the same standard tropes everyone uses to defend it. You are terrible for pretending to enjoy a game that routinely ends in scores of 58-46. You are terrible for allowing the culture of 229 timeouts at the end of a game to exist.
Because when something good is going on, there’s nothing better than stopping it as frequently as possible.
Oh, but those kids, those gosh-darn kids try so hard. Cool, you know who else tries hard? Billions of people on this planet every day. Kudos for existing College Basketball Player X. Hell, I give my best on a daily basis and the last thing you hear from me is how the general populace should publicly masturbate to my effort.
But here’s the bigger problem: college basketball players are not good at their job. They suck. They are awful and atrocious and the only talented ones are only there because they are REQUIRED TO BE BY LAW.
What gets you turned on about this game? Point guards who move with the efficiency, speed and grace of The Titanic sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean? Swingmen who stand 6’2”? NO FUCKING CENTERS ON ANY TEAM ANYWHERE?
That’s what you like? And the back-and-forth of college basketball is so goddamn mind-numbingly boring that I would much rather cut off my foot and watch myself slowly bleed to death than sit in front of a television for a whole game.
You get to score a point.
Now you get to score a point.
Now you get to score a point.
Now you get to score a point.
Oops, you missed there. That’s okay. You can have another chance in 15 seconds.
College basketball players are given more opportunities to fail in a single game than the average middle-class child gets from their parents over the entire course of their natural life.
And can someone explain to me why college basketball breaks the basic structure of the sport? Two twenty-minute halves? Where did that dick-fucking idea arise from? We played four quarters when I was a seven-year-old in a rec league. But a college basketball game has to be 40 minutes because if it were eight minutes longer, the number of unathletic players required to fill the rosters of the approximately 4,552 Division I college basketball teams who’d die would be astronomical. College baseball players play nine innings.
But March Madness is the best, you say. No it’s not. It’s just a nationally-sanctioned excuse for you to be a little less productive for four afternoons once a year. It’s no different than taking a sick day. And you’re telling me if there were no office pools you’d be just as vested in every game? How many of you would just love the fucking sport as is and still watch all 9,000 games that tournament is comprised of? None of you. None of you at all. The only societal value college basketball has is it allows closet degenerate gamblers to feel less bad about their problem for three weeks a year.
Fuck that.
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[Basketball image via Shutterstock]
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