So for the second straight revenue-sport-season, we are left with Florida and Ohio State to determine the national championship. This time, it's in men's basketball. Mike Jensen and I got into this a little bit on the College HoopsCast last week, but now that I have a bit more time and space here's what I really think about tonight's national championship game.
Even though I've said it already, I might as well say it again: I don't like it. I don't find it healthy that two schools are dominating the college sports landscape the way these two are. Of course, they raise and spend enough money each year to qualify as minor countries, and they have good coaches (there, I said it) who can recruit the top players in the country and win games because of it.
Still... it just feels weird. Yes, it has something to do with the fact that these are football-first schools who've put money into basketball and overtaken schools that embrace college basketball first and sometimes way above everything else. But any school can spend a lot of money. Syracuse, Kentucky and Connecticut surely do, and it's not like they're football powerhouses even though they're in BCS conferences.
For me, the real problem is the way in which the football powerhouses have risen to prominence seemingly without batting an eye. Florida, Ohio State and Texas come to mind, and you bet it's no coincidence that those three schools clean the rest of the country's collective clock in football every year.
Nor is it a coincidence that their stadiums are larger than a significant proportion of the towns and cities in their respective states. And it's not coincidental either that the next team to make it big with rented NBA players is Southern California.
(If you haven't read it yet, read this piece by the Inquirer's Frank Fitzpatrick, in which he compares the profits of the four No. 1 seeds in this year's tournament to the rest of the Sweet 16 combined.)
I'm sure some of you readers out there have longer memories than I do and are more cognizant of how things were in the 1970s and 1980s, when there was a clearer separation between basketball and football schools. But now we have a situation where even though Big East and ACC schools have more than enough money to play with each year, they get trumped by the Big 12, SEC and Big Ten on a pretty regular basis.
Yes, Georgetown made the Final Four, and yes, Villanova almost did last year. But I fear that even though those two schools are among the heavyweights of Big East basketball, at some point, the presence of any non-BCS heavyweight school not called Duke, Kansas or North Carolina will be surprising to us no matter the conference.
Before you ask, no, I'm not advocating any kind of change in the way money should be distributed among teams and conferences. It's a free market. The only way you do anything about it is by getting players and coaches who can come and knock the other guy off when he's feeling just cocky and self-absorbed enough to not play good defense and hustle for loose balls.
(Except when you get stars not being whistled for flagrant fouls, or converting a few seconds' worth of grit into a game-tying three that forces an overtime in which the little guy runs out of gas.)
It is of some help if you have Big East or ACC basketball money. That's just enough to get the Villanovas and Georgetowns of the world a few players each year who keep the lesser football lights, especially the Big East's I-AA football schools, in the national conversation. It certainly gives them them a better shot at knocking off the BCS football schools than teams from the CAA or A-10 have.
But don't forget for a moment that a big reason why those two schools are in it is their coaches and the assistants who surely work ten times as hard at recruiting as the assistants at Ohio State, Florida and Texas.
That's enough of a rant for the night. I hope I'm way off about all this, but I fear I'm not. Better to get ourselves ready for it now, so that we won't be all that surprised by it in the years to come.
