CSW --
This is a dissertation!
College sports is a 100% unique American phenomenon. You could probably make an argument that college sports are more popular than their pro counterparts. The NFL and NBA get better TV ratings but pro teams are only based in our biggest metropolitan areas. The most well regarded college programs with gigantic followings in different sports are places without big cities for the most part-- like the University of Kentucky or Alabama.
Our NCAA tournament is the equivalent of the FA Cup. It's a knock-out tournament where it's one game and you're done. There's something like 350 colleges that can qualify for this tournament (it's called Division 1 -- there's smaller divisions for schools that don't put a huge amount on athletics). The regular season whittles the teams down to 68 candidates for the national tournament which we call March Madness.
There's about 30 conferences which breaks teams apart based by size and prestige. The most well-known conferences are the Big 10 (gigantic Midwestern colleges like Michigan and Ohio State), the PAC-12 (big state West coast schools -- UCLA in Los Angeles is the most successful college basketball team of all-time), the SEC (Southeastern Conference),the Big East (traditionally a combination of private colleges in the northeast with a handful of state schools -- teams like Syracuse, Georgetown and Connecticut are traditional powers) and the ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference which has Duke and North Carolina, but of whom annually compete for the national championship and have campuses about 10 miles from each other).
However, like I said, there's something like 30 conferences. There are a lot of smaller conferences based on regionalism and the like. For instance, my school La Salle is a tiny Catholic university in Philadelphia. We play in the Atlantic 10 conference which is comprised of a lot of similar colleges (small, Catholic schools and state schools without gigantic athletic budgets) in the northeastern US. Our conference is a step down from the large conferences.
The most well-known conference is the Ivy League which has Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the like. These schools, of course, are known for their academics but they still compete against the big boys.
Then there's even smaller ones like the America East which have really small, lesser known colleges.
How do you become one of the 68 teams?
It's simple. If you win your conferences tournament at the end of the year, you qualify. That leaves roughly 38 "bids" open for the rest. You get those bids courtesy of a panel of college athletic directors who determine who the 38 best candidates are. Most of these are no-brainers: Duke might not be have won the conference tournament but lost three games all year, so they qualify. However, it becomes a big contest when you get to the final handful of teams.
The big debate is always between who deserves it more: Schools from the big conferences who are mid-tier teams or schools from the smaller conferences who fared well but didn't play as tough schedules?
There are also always a handful of teams outside of the big conferences that are really good. For instance, the most well-known of these teams is Gonzaga, a Catholic school in Washington state. They've become a nationally regarded powerhouse over the past decade and are the number one team in the country right now.
La Salle this year was selected as the last team to qualify. This was the first time they qualified for the national tournament in 21 years, so that explains my ridiculous excitement. We're playing in a play-in game (it's a technicality -- just ignore it) tonight.
March Madness is only surpassed by the Super Bowl in terms of capturing American sports hysteria. All of the games in the tournament are held within a three week period. The first two days of the tournament are on Thursday and Friday. Games start at noon. People literally take vacation days off to watch these games. There's been studies done which talk about how significant workplace production drops during days of the tournament.
The magic of the tournament is exactly like the FA or League Cup. It creates "Cinderella" stories annually. Basketball's a lot like like soccer in that coaching strategies and different styles of play can mitigate the talent advantages a giant has. There are upsets every single year in the tournament. There are also a bunch of miracle finishes every year.
There's also been a recent trend of schools that aren't in the major conferences who advance very far into the tournament -- it's like if Wigan or Crystal Palace made it to Wembley. Virginia Commonwealth (a state school in Richmond, Virginia best known for its arts program -- the members of GWAR all met there) was a controversial pick to enter the tournament and was the last team selected. They ended up making it all the way to the Final Four. Butler made it to the national championship in back-to-back years recently. They also nearly beat Duke one year on a miracle shot at the buzzer (imagine if Crystal Palace hit the crossbar from 45 yards out in extra time).
There are also a lot of people who like college basketball more than the NBA. The NBA is a much better type of basketball. The NBA has the best athletes in the world playing in their athletic primes. But there's a lot of NBA games where there will be something like 12,000 people in a 20,000 seat arena. College arenas are smaller and most of the fans are between the ages of 18-22, which is to say they're drunk as hell. I would say college basketball has the atmosphere most like European football in American sports.
As far as why I love my college basketball team despite being in my mid-30s -- My school had something like 4,000 students. I had classes and lived in dorms with basketball players. I actually was friendly with a few of the players on the team. It's really easy to keep track of the current players since they'll talk to fans before and after games. They're also literally kids -- they still have fun playing basketball and have a lot of energy, whereas it's a job for NBA players. I also live 10 minutes from the campus and tickets are $10. So I get to see a decent level of basketball for $10, with my friends who I went to college with, and sit about 25 feet away from the court with a lot of fun chants and songs. Or I could go to see Philly's NBA team, pay $35, sit in the upper tier of some soulless arena, be subjected to non-stop dance music and see the team not care. (Which is a 76ers trademark.)
There are so many indelible moments the NCAA tournament has left on the American sporting psyche.
These include: The Duke/Kentucky game from 1992, widely considered as the greatest college basketball of all-time. Christian Laetner's shot at the buzzer is probably only right behind "The Miracle on Ice" (our upset of the Soviets in hockey in the 1980 Olympics) in memorable sports moments.
Loyola-Marymount's run. Loyola's a small Catholic school in Los Angeles. They became this ridiculously good team in the early 90s. They did this by playing the craziest style of basketball we've ever seen -- imagine if a soccer team won every game by a score of 11-8. That was how they played. They were really popular. However, one week before the national tournament began, their best player (Hank Gathers) had a heart attack in a conference game and died minutes later. His teammates decided to carry on. Hank's one weakness as a player was free throw shooting and he decided to try shooting left-handed in order to get better. His best friend on the team, Bo Kimble, decided to shoot his FTs left-handed in honor of Hank and made every single one. Loyola came within one game of making the Final Four, losing to eventual national champion UNLV.
Those are just a few. There are literally dozens more.
As far as the development system goes --
That's a huge debate basketball nerds are currently having. A few years ago, there was a rash of NBA teams drafting players right out of high school -- LeBron James being the most famous of the lot. However, there were always a few guys who came out of high school who were nowhere near ready to play at that level and flamed out. The NBA then instituted a rule saying you couldn't get drafted until you played either one year of college basketball or one year of ball in Europe or elsewhere.
(This also helps the NBA's marketing -- you watch kids in college and know who they are when they become pros.)
The NBA does have a minor league called the NBDL which is about 10 years old. It's only been in the past few years where NBA teams actually started using these to develop players, and even only a handful of teams do that. The league isn't that great -- most players who are just below the NBA level go to Europe or China where they can make a lot of money whereas the NBDL pays really low wages.
A handful of players have left high school and gone right to Europe. The most well-known is Brandon Jennings on Milwaukee, who played in Italy for a year before joining the NBA. He's a decent enough player but not a star. Everyone else who has done this hasn't made it to the league.
The other thing that college has that the NBA doesn't is coaching. The coach of the NBA's dream team is actually the Duke head coach -- he's that well regarded a tactician and developer of talent. There are a lot of other college coaches held in that same level esteem. There's an argument to be made that players are better off going to college to get coached by great coaches. How great the coaches are is a viable question but that's sort of the point.
The recent trend, though, is that if you're a top-level high school player, you'll go to one of the national powerhouse teams. And then after your freshman year, you'll move on to the NBA. This, though, has created a ton of parity in college basketball -- smaller colleges like La Salle now have experienced players of a somewhat lesser talent level going up against big colleges that have star freshmen who don't have experience.
Sorry for the lengthy thesis! But I hope that explains some of it.
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