It Could Be Worse

Don’t ever tell me it could be worse. There is no single piece of ostensibly helpful advice that I detest as much as “It could be worse.” I can’t say I’ve never offered it myself to some poor friend or family member in the midst of a crisis and I had nothing more useful to say. I get why people fall back on it. Sometimes it seems like the only thing you can say is something like that, something intentionally devoid of deeper meaning. Better that than to enflame or further deepen some afflicted’s funk. But that doesn’t mean it’s good advice, or really advice at all. Of course things could be worse. They could be anything. They could be better, too. They could be breakfast meat. They could be God’s divine will. Could be.

And it’s exactly the kind of thing some non-sports fan friend of yours — or worse, your spouse — will tell you when you’re disconsolate after your favorite team’s loss. What it confirms most is that the person (a) doesn’t actually care about the game you’ve just suffered through even though (s)he claimed to and (b) feels you are being ridiculous for caring as much as you do. I don’t like being condescended to about my irrational love for my team. No one is more aware of the irrationality than I am. I’m the one who has to deal with myself when I feel this way. Folks around me get some of it, but I get all of it.

“It could be worse.” Of course it could be worse. You could be stuck in an elevator with someone who says: “It could be worse.” You could be Bobby Knight’s least favorite son. You could be one of the guys turned down by the fraternity that is full of the hapless geeks the other fraternities won’t have. You could be a Louisville fan. That would be much, much worse.

Or you could be one of the people who get stuck living in the shadow of the Northeast Corridor Amtrak route. You’ve seen these places before and probably thought the same thing. You’re dreaming lazily and staring out the window at a passing vista of what have to be some of the bleakest tracts of real estate anywhere in America and you think, “Man, there’s no way that can’t suck.” Whether it’s dilapidated row houses near Baltimore or the apparently entire abandoned neighborhoods on the outskirts of Philly or the industrial wreckage of north-central Jersey, that right there is a panoply of “It could be worse.” You find yourself thinking “Who lives there?,” or, more likely, “Who gets stuck having to live there?” It’s condescending, but it’s true. Does anyone say to those folks it could be worse? Probably not. I hope not, at least.

Then again, sometimes people in the worst spots seem to be much better at keeping things in perspective than idiot over-thinkers like me. There are clearly good things to focus on, better things. Lots of them. In fact, most times it definitely could be a lot worse. And for people for whom things really do suck, and who are stuck in the suck, focusing on the good is probably much easier than for those who only think things suck. Jerks like me.

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about things. I most often seem to get hung up on what is it, exactly, that I am supposed to be doing all the time? Got to be productive. But at what? In the back of my mind is always that Hollywood-standard Zen advice that goes something like: “Find what you love and do that.” That may be great if what you love actually provides something of an income. For those of us without marketable skills or the ability to apply ourselves, we have to either suck it up and pick something less loved or marry up. Lacking anything more realistic, I chose to write a lot about college basketball. And marry up. In my case, there’s zero doubt that it could be worse. Much worse.

Luckily, nobody told me on Saturday, as Kentucky lost another crushingly close SEC road game, that it could be worse. Obviously, this is true. The Cats are still considered tournament material, and they’ve been competitive in each of these games. But we in the Big Blue Nation do not do well with losing. Ever losing. We were spoiled last season with all those NBA players we rented. The talent of John Wall and Demarcus Cousins and Eric Bledsoe was the reason UK went 35–3 last year and not 30–8 or 28–10 or what have you. This season, we are learning the lessons of relying on freshmen all the time, even massively talented ones like Brandon Knight and Terrence Jones and Doron Lamb.

Try to tell North Carolina fans it could be worse. After apparently finally ridding themselves of the Larry Drew recruiting mistake, things are looking up — to the tune of 16 assists from his replacement, Kendall Marshall. Sure, the ACC is down, but for all that grief folks gave Roy Williams and his supremely talented underachievers early in the season, the fact is that the Tar Heels are sitting pretty at 17 wins, seven in the conference. Whether UNC will be a dominant force in the NCAA tournament is certainly up for debate, but at least being in the field is not, and after last season, that is reason enough for UNC fans to to keep “It could be worse” in the back of their minds.

Right, Michigan State faithful? Anyone feeling it could be much more terrible in East Lansing these days? Hard to believe what’s happened to the Spartans this season. Doesn’t seem like Tom Izzo can believe it. But after being humiliated on Sunday at Wisconsin, Sparty is on the other side of worse. Five losses in six games means at this point, there is nothing save a Big Ten tournament run that will save the preseason Final Four lock’s NCAA hide. For a guy like Izzo, or his senior point guard Kalin Lucas, who had to sit out last season’s surprise Final Four run due to injury, it can’t feel much worse than it does right now.

But these are all temporal states of being. Next year will bring new blood and new games and new chances to right some wrongs for these perennial challengers. Other programs have to be wondering, how can it actually get much worse? To paraphrase Rod Stewart, if some Division 1 basketball programs have all the luck, others have all the pain. A pain that just keeps returning over and over again. It’s not always a matter of just bad coaching hires or a lack of tradition, though those do play real factors. Winning programs have been built in unlikely places on next to nothing, while a slew of would-be big-time BCS schools still flounder year-in, year-out, or just can’t seem to turn the corner. As illustration, we look at the situations at N.C. State, Oregon, Seton Hall or Auburn.

The ingredients all exist or have existed at these places to create a consistent winner, but whether through poor leadership, bad player evaluation a run of rotten luck or some combination of each, it just hasn’t happened in recent years.

I’ve covered the N.C. State situation previously, so I won’t go on too terribly long. But one wonders how much mediocrity can there be? And who is out there that can change things without taking a Tom Crean-esque amount of time to do so. There are no scholarship limitations here, save those currently going to inferior players, or sanctions to overcome, just a culture of unimpressive performance. It will take a winner winning in attractive fashion to do it. And no gimmicky hires.

Oregon hired Dana Altman, formerly of Creighton (and very, very briefly, Arkansas) in the hopes of turning around its needlessly sinking ship. Altman fits the bill as a program-builder, even if he wasn’t the first choice. He can build a good program, though the PAC-10 is in theory a much tougher conference to win consistently in than the Missouri Valley. But the funds will be there, and the fans, too. Just have to bring up the talent level and stop losing all of Oregon’s A+ recruits to outsiders.

Seton Hall has been losing to outsiders plenty in recent years. The Pirates suffer from Gonzo creep this season. First-year coach Kevin Willard has to play with the guys he’s been left. He could probably do without the near-death experiences his team has had to endure on top of a generally bad vibe affixed the program by former coach Bobby Gonzalez. Like Altman, key to getting Seton Hall back to the heights it once knew likely means owning the north Jersey recruiting territory that has been mined in recent years by interlopers like Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino. That won’t be easy.

Turning the Auburn disaster around definitely won’t, either. New coach Tony Barbee is finding that out. The Tigers opened their brand new multi-million dollar Auburn Arena with home losses to UNC-Asheville, Samford and Campbell, and have limped to an 8-win season to date. Along the way, they’ve been described in a number of less-than-flattering ways, including as the worst high-major team in the country. Auburn hasn’t played in an NCAA game since 2003. Here is a genuine case of “it couldn’t be much worse.”

But I guess all this is still just basketball, right? Guys like me take it way too seriously, at least in the eyes of most people. It’s just a game. It could be worse. But I guess that’s sort of what bothers me most about being told it could be worse by someone who just doesn’t understand. It implies that the thing I find most enjoyable and exhausting and invigorating and depressing in the world is somehow just a nothing. It’s not really that important. Not for those folks out there getting paid to pay attention to the real problems of the world, the ones they obsess on and take home to their families at night, to live them and to breathe them.

You know, I guess after all that I have to admit it could be worse. I could have a real job.

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.

Photo by FlyinAce2000, from Flickr.