A big part of the fun of watching March Madness comes from being wrong. This may not be true for the loyalists and degenerates who have an emotional or financial stake in the outcomes, but I treat the college basketball season and its giddy final act more or less the same way that I treated my classes in college: I do enough research to feel OK with myself and pass for informed, otherwise consume whatever feels right whenever it occurs to me, and try to bear in mind that it doesn't really matter that much. I am roughly as good at filling out a bracket as I was at being a history major, and while I'm not a historian, I do have a diploma.
This week, we were visited by Ken Pomeroy, the college basketball stats icon (and ace blogger) whose eponymous ratings are both the absolute state of the art in terms of understanding the broader state of play in college basketball and, from my experience, no help when it comes to picking a bracket. Ken would be the first to admit the latter, which is part of what makes him such a delightful guest.
Another big part of that is his patience. Drew drops in and out of watching college basketball as the spirit moves him; I watch a decent amount, but not nearly enough to have a comprehensive understanding, and eventually tend to remember someone like Levance Fields by the end of every college basketball-centric episode. While I did the same here—well, it was Chevy Troutman, if you want to be specific about it—I feel like I also learned a lot along the way.
We talked to Ken about how it felt to have his rankings cited by West Virginia's furious and startlingly pink governor in his complaint about the Mountaineers getting aced out of the tournament field. We also discussed which teams are good, which teams are fun, and how college basketball teams are constructed these days. The last bit, especially, was interesting to me as an examination of how NIL money and the wide-open transfer portal have led college basketball into something like a golden age. We talked about the wandering ronin who are now the sport's most important players, the challenge of building a program through churn and scouting, and the different ways to succeed or fail in that space. We considered Duke as a sort of throwback to the last decade's mode of roster construction, and Florida as the prime exemplar of the current style. A consideration of the retro wrecking-ball aesthetics that Rick Pitino has brought to St. John's was my excuse to remember some rectangular Pitt Guys. We made our picks, too, but no one should really be putting too much weight on that.
All that college basketball talk left us time for just one Funbag question, which led us to consider the greatest and strangest crowd pops in sports. We added to our listener's comprehensive list, but mostly talked about how crowds respond when weird things happen. It was a good fit for this moment, because while there will be all the usual roaring, no consideration of The March Experience would be complete without an appreciation for the thrill of everyone in an arena making Tim Allen Confusion Noises at the same time. If you're going to be wrong, you might as well be wrong together.
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