March is Mostly Over and I'm Still Not Mad

Somehow the NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament never seems to capture my attention.  I've never followed American college sports.  But still, somehow I manage to care about football's bowl season.  That's strange: arguably the teams in the lesser bowls are more pathetic than the worst basketball seeds.  But for some reason I can bring myself to care about Wheatman State University and their 6 and 6 record for three hours, and to actually feel like it matters whether or not they win the Speed Stick Canola Bowl.  And yet, I can't summon any enthusiasm for Soapstone College for two hours while they try to win the Midwestern 5 vs. 12 game.

In the past week, I have made an effort to watch some of the wall-to-wall basketball coverage.  Some upsets and close games made for entertaining viewing, but I still don't feel like putting in the effort to keep up with it.  This year, I couldn't even be bothered to look up Gonzaga on Wikipedia to remind myself where it is.

I guess one reason is the play-down, knock-out, everyone-loses-but-the-champs format.  Wheatman State may only have clinched a winning record, and the adulation of a half-full stadium of fans, but their reward is to feel like camps for a night.  Even if it was for beating-up on a mediocre team that merely had one more weakness than them.  But in the early March Madness rounds, teams are just playing for the honour of going one more round before being pummelled by a top seed, and their only reward is polite applause from fans who are only there because they couldn't get tickets for the Duke game tomorrow.

It doesn't help that the TV coverage bounces from one game to another every few minutes.  You start a relationship with a couple of teams, find a flimsy reason to favour one over the other, and then you're whisked off to another game.  But if these game fragments are going to dominate sports programming for the rest of the month, then maybe I'll make another effort to... Oooh, Women's curling!