March Madness 2007

When people think of the purity of amateur sports, they think of college basketball, and they think of the NCAA Men's Tournament, dubbed "March Madness". The media loves a story like George Mason, a team many felt was undeserving of a tournament bid last year. This team that could knocked off three former champions in UNC, Michigan State, and UConn.

Of course, college basketball, much like college football, is big business. For the next few weeks, office pools will spring up throughout the country making people care about the Winthrop, Davidson, VCU, or more likely, a big school alma mater. Outside the periphery are people who don't care. That's perfectly legitimate.

There's a sense that college athletes should be students first, and athletes second. If there were a viable way for the NBA to create leagues comparable to the minor leagues for post high-school students, many kids would likely opt out of college. Of course, many colleges, with administrators who often feel a passion for sports that they don't feel for education, would lament losing college sports, which they feel encourages alumni to give money and feel a kinship with all other alumni.

Indeed, many of these kids would never see the inside of a college were it not for basketball. John Thompson, Jr., who is the elder Thompson (his son is the current coach of Georgetown), argued that any kind of awareness of higher education was good for these kids, even if they never got a degree. If they found success in pro sports, they would surely educate their children, much as John Thompson the 3rd headed off to Princeton, much like James Brown (the football announcer, not the "I feel good" guy) went to Harvard when he had his choice of universities who wanted a college player with Brown's skill.

But somehow television is able to create this mythos around college basketball. If there's any certainty to the tournament, it's that there will be upsets. Teams that you wouldn't expect to win come from nowhere and defeat better known teams, and suddenly the thoughts of how these teams got to this place, with millions of dollars paid to coaches, but none to the players, is hidden.

And more than likely, I'll be going along with the frenzy, wondering how my skills of prediction will fare this year and not thinking about why there isn't the same passion devoted to education.

I would occasionally tell my students, back in the day, about how it would be nice if there were this pressure on them to succeed, to hear other students boo when they don't give it their all, to call them bums and worse, all because they so desperately wanted them to succeed. Sports, perhaps more than anything else the university does, pushes success and rising to the high expectations. Unlike sports, however, education doesn't have the clarity of vision of sports.

Most athletes probably understand what they can or can not do. Education, on the other hand, is a much more mysterious process, where confusion reigns supreme. Students often lack the tools to make themselves better students. They don't see what the bright students do, unlike, say a star athlete when he makes a dunk, or she makes a no-look pass. When Pete Maravich would practice for hours, he knew what he wanted to achieve. Not always the same for those trying to get a degree.

I've filled out a bracket. I'll catch a few games. And for a few weeks, I'll probably put this thought of education somewhere else.

And maybe I shouldn't.