March Madness

Today, six days into the month, I finally realized that it’s March, which of course signifies the arrival of everyone’s favorite season—no, not Lent—March Madness!

I think this is the surest proof that JVC, or at least the lack of money for cable, has had a significant impact on me. And while maybe I’m not “ruined,” there’s a good chance my bracket will be. Actually that’s probably not true, since the tournament no longer seems to have any rhyme or reason and picking winners based on mascots or uniform colors seems to be about as equally effective. Never the less, I normally pride myself on making informed selections, having usually watched at least one game from nearly every school in the dance, even the play-in game. I’m a junkie--my drug of choice is college basketball, that and the occasional highball.

Aside from the lack of cable, I’ve tuned out of this year’s college basketball season in part because my Hoosiers, with first-year coach Tom Crean, are in the midst of a historically bad year, currently sitting at 6-23. Though, we have a good recruiting class coming in, so I think we should be respectable next year and start to seriously compete in another year or two after that. And to all the haters, unless you’re Kentucky or UCLA we still have more championship banners hanging from the rafters (’40, 53, ’76, ’81, ’87). You might point out that it’s been over twenty years since we last won, and if you do the math you’ll realize that the vast majority of guys in this year’s tournament weren’t even born in 1987, but those are minor details…

I assume most of you (the four people who read this blog and aren’t related to me) are unaware of the events that led to this year’s disastrous season. Well, back in the year 2006 IU decided to hire a man by the name of Kelvin Sampson, who was already in trouble at his old school, Oklahoma, for making too many phone calls to recruits, but we hired him anyway. He promised that he’d follow the NCAA rules and do things the right way. To make a long story short, he brought in one NBA lottery-pick, a bunch of junior college thugs and a few other questionable recruits and also continued to make phone calls with reckless abandon.

Sampson knew how to coach, and his teams were relatively enjoyable to watch. Before he was forced to resign during last year’s season, the team cracked the top ten in rankings and was poised to capture a Big Ten championship, though there was always a nagging sense that we were doing things the wrong way. But despite it all, I continued to support Sampson and the team, because when it comes to sporting endeavors it’s always more fun to win than lose.

It’s not as if I supported Hitler and the Nazi party, but the two or three year ordeal has been a reminder and lesson in how easy it is to justify behavior that deep down you know is wrong.

I think there are many issues, especially related to social justice, where it’s easy to fall into similar thought patterns. It’s easier to say, “I’d never do drugs,” “they deserve to be homeless,” or “I’d never let my tickets spiral out of control,” than it is to address the root causes of the problems and the legal and social barriers that exist. That work is difficult, arduous, met with resistance and often painful. But at the end of the day, it’s the right thing to do and there is a certain reward in that alone.

Likewise, this season has been dreadful for the Hoosiers when judged by wins and losses, but not everything can be measured using results. Our team has been battered and bruised nearly beyond recognition, but they hustle and play with pride and our basketball program finally has its heart back, and in my opinion that counts for an awful lot.