The Southern Strategy

I spent the spring before I moved to Brooklyn diligently flattening out what was already a pretty mild Southern accent. The way I looked at it, I was moving up Nawth with no particular intention of returning to Kentucky.

What I didn’t know, being naïve and geographically provincial, was that in diluting my accent I was inadvertently losing something of myself. Sure, now I didn’t sound different than my colleagues from Connecticut, Boston, Pennsylvania or even Des Moines. But that turned out to be a shame. Nearly everyone I met those first few years would, upon learning where I was from, immediately ask me, “What happened to your accent?” Pride in my My Fair Lady fix turned to remorse at my Gone With the Wind loss.

It was only years later, after I’d collected a few fellow Southern friends in New York, that I began to appreciate my Southern roots. A taste for bourbon became a badge of honor; finding a good cornbread was a genuine victory. In fact, a background I’d once considered provincial actually made me much more conscious of just how unworldly many Northeasterners are. Here I was living among and teaching the Russians and Yeshiva kids while all these Long Islanders thought going to Philadelphia was akin to a trip to Outer Mongolia. What I came to know was that I wasn’t better for losing my Southern-ness, I was better for ever having had it at all.

Similarly, a fondness for Kentucky basketball — an affection I had taken for granted, even avoided, living in Lexington all those years — blossomed into true fanaticism. As with the bourbon and the cornbread, the longer I lived away, the more latching onto home took on new importance. Learning to let go and love something I’d once dismissed as a redneck obsession brought me closer to who I really was down there under all that pretension, manufactured worldliness and uninflected Brokaw diction.

Now I will readily acknowledge my own Big Blue bias when it comes to evaluating college basketball, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about. Understanding sports on a deeper level mostly involves watching a shit-ton of it and paying attention to more than the score when you do. And as I fell back in love with the Wildcats, that’s what I did: watch game after game after game. While there were some fantastic games over the decade-plus I was in New York — Tayshaun Prince’s five threes vs. UNC, the stomping of Florida at Rupp in February of 2003, many battles with Duke and UNC and Kansas and the like — there were also plenty of Ole Miss games, Dennis Felton-coached Georgia slugfests and November out of conference tilts with directional schools.

Still, as I grew from fan to aficionado to self-proclaimed expert, I learned to be judicious, observant and to appreciate the full spectrum of players, coaches, styles and traditions. Anyone who loves college basketball can’t help but marvel at “Rock Chalk, Jayhawk” or at the brilliance of a Jay Williams at Duke, Kevin Durant at Texas or Mike Beasley at Kansas State. Hell, I even came to appreciate Joakim Noah. Who wouldn’t want that guy on your team? Dude just killed Kentucky over and over again.

But as I’ve learned to appreciate my Southern roots in absentia, I’ve also come to appreciate how regionalism affects college basketball, too. By this I mean not only the ways in which the media can group-think on a particular team or group of teams, but also the real and organic ways in which — despite the globalization of the game and the freer distribution of high school players across the country — player skills, programs, conferences, rivalries and styles have developed and matured over the years in well-defined pockets.

Historically, college basketball was fairly localized. There were a few national programs that could recruit from all over and teams did compete outside their area a few times a year, but generally the western teams stayed out West and the southern teams in the South and so on. And out of these localized zones of competition came the conferences that we know today: the Southeastern, the Atlantic Coast, the Big East, the Pacific-10 et al. Expansion and attrition have changed the dynamics somewhat, so that Louisville, and next year TCU (!), can be considered “East.” But the basic framework of the conference structure harkens back to when teams traveled by bus and not charter jet, to when a program’s players mostly reflected the particular stylistic tastes of its fan base and when its recruits almost entirely came from a hundred-or-so-mile radius around the school.

It wasn’t that long ago that the NCAA tournament’s directionally named regions were actually reflective of the areas of the country in which those teams played. This is still true, though to an ever-lessening degree. Usually the top four seeds are slotted roughly by region, but not always. And now there is of course the so-called ‘pod system’ to dictate where the games are played in the earlier rounds, which means the region a team is from factors in mostly since proximity issues are in play, too.

But more than the naming of a bracket or the placement of teams in the tournament, what I’m talking about is regionalism as it plays out on the floor and among fans. While recruiting at the highest levels of NCAA hoops is now a national endeavor, most schools outside the twenty or so truly national programs still populate their roster primarily with regionally grown prospects. This is especially true the further down the food chain you go. Northern Iowa, out of the Missouri Valley Conference, for example, has eight kids from Iowa on the roster and each of the others is from a Midwest state. It’s not that the national programs don’t want local kids — you’ll still find Kentucky kids on the Kentucky roster, or Carolina kids on the Tar Heels roster — but by and large those are either kids who would have been recruited by those schools anyway or they’re there as token payback to a program’s loyal local fans.

Regionalism also reveals itself in ways that are less obvious and harder to quantify than in recruiting. Even among the big-time programs, there is a maturation over time to the ways the teams play and the skills and styles of the players. Watch SEC games regularly enough and you’ll see how recruiting athletic but fundamentally untamed kids from hamlets in Alabama, Florida and Georgia has affected the style of play, creating an above-the-rim game that can often devolve when a team needs a bucket off a set play. Watch the Brooklyn-bred point guards that populate Big East rosters drive and drive because when you play on bent metal rims in Bed Stuy, you better not be more than a foot from the goal. In the Midwest, where basketball is played mostly indoors in leagues or on park courts with nets and decent backboards, learning to shoot is just how you develop as a player. Thus you get Big Ten and Big XII teams like Wisconsin or Nebraska whose offense often involves set plays for jump shots, not just lobs at the rim. Likewise, West Coast players tend to grow up learning to play up-tempo, less physical basketball at the lower levels, and it translates to a freewheeling but hands-off PAC-10 style at your Washingtons and Arizonas.

These are, of course, oversimplifications. There are plenty of dunks in the Big Ten and plenty of deep threes in the SEC; Ben Howland brought muscle ball to UCLA and don’t try to tell anyone that Pitt’s Travon Woodall can’t shoot. But there are some truths here, too. Regional trends do exist, and how those trends match up when the different regions meet in the NCAA tournament is a big reason the event is such a fascinating one. After a season of watching Pitt and Syracuse punch each other in the nuts, it’s great to see whether those teams can still dominate a more fluid offensive team like Florida or Missouri. Or will those Big East brawlers get smoked by finesse teams from other conferences that feature deadeye shooters you can’t shove into the stanchion? While at Kentucky or Duke or Kansas they may have flattened their regional accents with their national recruiting, most of the programs in the postseason will display elements of these regionally infused dynamics.

That said, the difference between winning and losing in the postseason is still remarkably simple: The team that has better players usually wins in the end. This holds most true in the later rounds. Upsets are what make the NCAAs so popular, but what’s rarely acknowledged is the generally unremarkable makeup of each season’s Final Four. Viewing Butler (2010) and George Mason (2006) as exceptions to the rule, you can bank on the fact that the likelihood is that a team that finished among the top three from the five or six “major” conferences will emerge from each region. This means you can expect the last four teams to be primarily from the ACC, SEC, Big East, Big Ten, Big XII and PAC-10. This isn’t to say there won’t be a surprise (see also: Butler and Mason, George). But looking back at the participants from the last decade of Final Fours isn’t much different than looking at the teams playing on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday nights during the regular season on ESPN.

In the late ’60s, Richard Nixon figured that his only chance to wrest the presidency from the dominant but fractured Democratic party was to capitalize on what he saw as the only pilferable voters: disenfranchised white Southerners. By cleaving traditionally conservative and “farm” voters from the Democratic Party, and by colluding with Southern Dixiecrats, Nixon solidified his chances of capturing first the GOP nomination and then the presidency over Hubert H. Humphrey, albeit by the slimmest of margins. This tactic became forever known as the Southern Strategy. Much reviled today as the exploitation of voters’ racial fears and of Southerners’ perception of themselves as victims, it’s also undeniable that the Southern Strategy worked. It worked again for Reagan in 1980, when he successfully appealed to “states’ rights” voters in the South, dog-whistle political code for white working class voters feeling left out by what they saw as the minority politics of the prevailing Democratic Party.

What do college basketball and Nixonian politics have in common? In addition to the sad fact of cheating, the Southern Strategy in hoops isn’t a bad one to utilize, either. Like me, you probably didn’t realize that teams from below the Mason-Dixon line have won thirteen of the last twenty titles, and seven of the last ten. In addition, only one time in the last twenty years has a national title game not included a program from the traditional South, when Syracuse stopped Kansas in 2003. Remarkable.

This isn’t to say that a team from another region won’t win this year’s title. The two major southern conferences — the ACC and the SEC — are both considered to be having down years this season. But despite the top-heavy nature of each conference, strong teams capable of deep runs will come out of both leagues. From the ACC, Duke and UNC are both talented and well coached, if flawed, and each could get on a roll in March and April. There is a strong chance that the SEC will still get five or even six teams into the NCAA tournament. Kentucky and Florida are both loaded with talent, and Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Georgia are all capable of beating some of the nation’s best teams. Though any of those five is also capable of losing to a lower seed, too, that could almost always be said to be the case. Rarely are there prohibitive favorites anymore, and even more rarely do those favorites actually win the whole thing. This year, Duke is the only “southern school” being tabbed a top contender for the championship at this point. But there is no real favorite this time around. And with the NCAAs, there is always the potential for a surprise, albeit probably only one from a major conference.

I was surprised that I came to embrace my own regionalism. In my case, it took a long time to appreciate the many good things the South has to offer. When it comes to college basketball, maybe it’s been right there under our noses the whole time.

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 from Flickr by Sonnett.