The Pursuit of Imperfection
College basketball is an imperfect game. In fact, it’s gloriously imperfect.
Its players — even the best ones — miss open shots. Top prospects turn into pumpkins, while barely recruited kids become household names. Guys with no pro future play alongside blue chip, one-year rent-a-players. And win.
Its coaches make dumb mistakes, lose and get a free pass with “get ’em next time” platitudes. They improve mildly on lousy seasons and are then rewarded for making progress. (My personal favorite is the hot-seat-to-contract-extension-in-a-season maneuver.) Most of them keep their jobs, often for years, based on some unsolvable logarithm of personal charm, fading past success and nebulous “father figure” role-playing. If a coach is genuinely, truly horrible at his job, he’ll probably still get two years at a six-figure salary.
The whole system seems backwards: prominent schools are put in situations where they can lose to nobodies, sending the biggest draws and fan bases home early. But in a weird twist, it actually works out better that way.
Fans expecting accountability and some guarantee of a positive outcome avoid the college game, either for the NBA and its professional-grade robo-athletes and boardroom-interesting production quality, or other sports whose players always respond in the clutch and whose “best of” playoff series usually ensure that Cinderella heads back home dejected, crystal slippers in shards at her feet.
But I’m fine with that. Those of us who love college basketball love it almost entirely because of these foibles. Players suit up for scholarships, not Bentleys (even, despite the rumors, at Kentucky). Kids learn humility and the extent of their own limitations from their failures. Even at the elite programs, where gaming the system has become something of a black art, there is always that equalizer, the one-game chance of failure, no matter the talent on your roster.
And what’s most enthralling, what keeps us coming back for more: how often teams still lose that one game. For us diehards, college basketball represents a (mostly) egalitarian system where the real treat lies in Colossus U falling prey to some shitty walk-on’s chucked up three pointer.
We think of ourselves as purists of an impure game, lovers of the not-so-neat.
So it is in some ways curious that we enter a new season with Duke, one of the college game’s elitist of the elite — hell, one of academia’s elitist of the elite — looking about as perfect as it gets in college basketball. Meanwhile, everyone else must do what they always have to do and transcend imperfection to cut down the nets in April.
Perhaps the most respected and most despised program in the game, Duke won its fourth national championship last spring, much to the surprise and chagrin of most everyone outside the castle walls back in Durham and the wealthiest enclaves of New Jersey. Duke’s iconic coach, Mike Krzyzewski, then headed overseas to save America’s ass by achieving global basketball supremacy with a patchwork national team, two years after winning Olympic Gold with this generation’s edition of the Dream Team. Hooray for Coach K and America!
Of course, before he redeemed America’s soul in Turkey (“Thanks again, Coach! Seriously, you can stop now.”), Duke’s boss led his jarringly pasty Blue Devils to championship glory at the expense of one of the best underdog stories in the game’s history. While the game was close, Duke’s assemblage of scholar-warriors rather bloodlessly ended hometown Butler University’s magical run to the title game, maybe enjoying it a bit too much, like big brother stealing his lesser sibling’s new, hot girlfriend. But while it was deflating in a way, it managed to only further illustrate college basketball’s funhouse mirror version of the ideal.
In most other sports the concept that the best team is the one that wins it all is a given. Sure, there are classic examples of underdog achievement in other sports — think the Miracle Mets, Joe Namath’s Jets. But in college basketball, the story behind the game is as much a part of the sport’s legacy as the outcome. For college basketball geeks, the names of the unlikeliest of winners are signposts to its greatest moments, not pauses of parity between dynastic franchise runs. The list of unlikely NCAA champions and overachieving ruffians comes more quickly to mind — Villanova, N.C. State, George Mason, Butler — than that of those annointed juggernauts — UCLA, Kentucky, Kansas and, most definitely, Duke.
For college basketball’s most avid followers and pundits, imperfection is actually the x-factor makes the struggle all the mightier. Perhaps no team this season will represent this better than Purdue University.
Purdue, coached by a former gritty point guard, was expected to be among the country’s five best squads this year. By the open of fall practice the Boilermakers appeared to have everything they needed to cross the threshold to the Final Four, a place they haven’t been since 1980. Then their best player, Robbie Hummel — already returning from a crushing knee injury late last year — proceeded to blow out his rehabbed knee in the second practice of the season and was lost for the year. When that happens in the pros, another millionaire steps in to take his place. In college ball, it’s just time to forge on, to overcome. Purdue try to weather the loss of their leading scorer and on-court leader, lacking at their core.
Other schools around the country may not have it that rough, but they’ll have their own challenges.
At North Carolina, even an abundance of elite talent wasn’t enough to overcome a lack of guts and cohesiveness last season. One of college hoops’ “brand” programs, North Carolina was an embarrassment last year. It only added injury to insult that Duke’s archrival was left to watch, helplessly, from NIT oblivion as its nemesis hoisted the NCAA trophy. Now a still-supremely talented but deeply flawed squad welcomes the nation’s best freshman, Harrison Barnes, into the fold. But many of the same personnel who brought about last year’s debacle remain, inviting the question: can you make a poodle into a pit bull just by adding a kick-ass spiky collar? We’ll see.
Nowhere does the battle between delusion and reality manifest itself more glaringly than at Kentucky, the nation’s all-time winningest program. No program’s fans love or hate their own team more. I should know. I’ve been part of that deeply sick fanbase since birth. We’ve lost all sense of perspective in pursuit of another national title, which would be the school’s eighth (but who’s counting?). Our coach is the most loathed in the game, John Calipari, but also one of the best. Outside the Bluegrass State, Calipari is near-universally regarded as a cheat and a huckster, a rule-bending car salesman of the highest order. Back home, he’s a perfect salve for the acid belly of the Big Blue beast. Kentucky will have to find replacements for a record five first-round NBA draft picks. Nice problem to have, of course.
As if he needed more fuel for his haters. ‘Coach Cal’ now awaits word about whether his prize recruit — a professionally trained Turkish man-child named Enes Kanter whose presence could make an undersized but talented Kentucky side into a title-contender — will be allowed to play by the NCAA. And Big Blue Nation, Kentucky’s rabid, insatiable and generally obnoxious fans (of which I am unabashedly one), wait with him. No one demands more from their team than we do, and no one hurts more when that demand is (very rarely) met.
Fellow blueblood Kansas faces a similar situation. Their hotshot guard recruit, Josh Selby, awaits his own NCAA fate. But no Turkish professional issues here, just your everyday “family advisor might be a player agent” situation. With a team strong at most every other position, like Kanter, Selby could be the piece Kansas is missing, the perfect fit to a championship puzzle. Never mind the ethical issues involved, of course. To win big, you play by the rules the way they are written. Or wait for them to be re-written. Just ask Kentucky fans.
There are, of course, exceptions. Michigan State’s trek to the Final Four has become an almost annual affair. Coach Tom Izzo, widely regarded as one of the good guys, brings in “character guys,” preaches a brand of smash-mouth, 54–50 final score basketball, and the Spartans take it to gyms across the northern Midwest all winter long. Ready again to run with a roster of talented but oddball overachievers, Michigan State will probably be the nation’s best team not named Duke, but will still somehow find creative ways to lose 10 games along the way. That’s just the way it works in East Lansing.
But it’s not all about the pedigreed in college basketball. A slew of other programs seek their first glory in generations, if ever.
Pittsburgh will be the class of the Big East; a low-scoring, defense-focused team of scrappy streetballers who are coached to play games as grudge matches. Featuring players from all sorts of hamlets of the industrial northeast — Lancaster, Harrisburg … OK, and Brooklyn — the Panthers will try to out-will and out-tough better-heeled opponents like they always do, grace on the court be damned. And damned their brand of grace-less basketball most assuredly is.
With a roster chock full of transfers, junior college talent and vagabond prep All-Americans out in the heartland, Kansas State and maniacal coach Frank Martin look to build a hoops legacy from scratch the hard way. Kansas State is the serious college hoops fan’s dream: a hard-nosed team put together by a throwback coach at a middle-of-nowhere locale. It’s ur-Hoosiers shtick. Corn and basketball and shredded coaching vocal cords. Of course, we should probably ignore the small fact that none of the team’s good players are actually from Kansas, or anywhere near Kansas. And we will.
Of course, there are too many more stories like these to get into. And this is why Duke’s villainous narrative will dominate college basketball this season. Because while the rest of the game’s programs work to overcome their issues, Duke and Krzyzewski merely add the country’s best freshman point guard in Kyrie Irving to a team already loaded with NBA-caliber talent. And instead of trying to iron out wrinkles, the Blue Devils’ challenge will be avoiding overconfidence as they steamroll conference and non-conference foes alike. The story of Duke’s pursuit of basketball perfection will make writers breathless and opposing fans (even more) bitter.
Anguish, sloth, goofiness, disgust, unsightly basketball, unseemly rule evasion, delusional fanaticism, maddening inconsistency, frightening sideline behavior, unbridled bitterness. Yep. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.