Written by Matt Zemek at The Comeback.com
The arrival of Monday marks the arrival of February. This brings us in touch with an annual in-season lamentation from college basketball diehards: The regular season doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves.
It’s an argument that is hard to measure in terms of media focus, even more so when one realizes:
A) how many games are on television;
B) how much publicity Ben Simmons is receiving;
and C) that the Golden State Warriors have gobbled up more of the news cycle this winter than NBA teams normally do.
Yes, the NFL season and the Super Bowl always diminish the weekend spotlight on college hoops in January — that will always be a part of the landscape unless the NCAA makes the (hard-to-implement) decision to adjust its calendar. In the present day, we’re stuck with the culture we have in America. For all too many casual consumers of televised sports, college basketball just doesn’t matter until March. It is what it is.
All one can do — instead of railing against groupthink or engaging in a stemwinder against cultural attitudes — is to calmly point out how much the regular season has meant… before a single game has been played in the month of (no, not March, but) February.
It’s true: While many college basketball teams will certainly have a chance to play their way into the NCAA tournament over the next month, it’s just as true that many teams have already played their way to the margins of the debate. Some teams are genuinely done as at-large candidates, and a great many others — while technically still alive — have already run out of any meaningful margin for error.
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