March Madness is supposed to be a time of wonder.
A time of joy.
A time when plucky mid-major darlings get to hone their swords against the Big Boys of the sport. It is pure magic that we, in the year of 2023, get to watch Florida Atlantic AND San Diego State make their first-ever Final Four appearances — against one another no less!
In all this, however, there are some among us in the Twitterverse who are being Scrooges and aren’t in the March Madness Spirit.
Tweets with buzzwords like “ratings,” “executives,” “CBS hates this,” and “doesn’t belong” flood my timeline. Discourse saying this Final Four sucks is being perpetuated by hordes of men who, on a close inspection of their Twitter bios and handles, may suffer from a specific type of brain rot.
Football.
Yes, of course, football. Some college football personalities, some NFL, but all football, sharing similar trash takes about the wonder of college basketball and sticking their pigskinned fingers into our joyous sport.
Let’s run through some of the Tweets that made me want to blog about it
Noted great journalist Ivan Maisel (seriously, his work is great!) tweeted a story that this Final Four has TOO MANY underdogs — leaving out the fact that San Diego State (won the Mountain West) and Florida Atlantic (won the Conference USA) are far from traditional underdogs. In fact, the argument that FAU was woefully underseeded has only gotten more steam during the Owls’ run.
He also egregiously compared the SDSU-FAU pairing to the New Mexico Bowl — which most recently featured 8-5 BYU and 7-6 SMU, mediocre teams who are a far cry from what Aztecs and Owls are to the sport of college basketball.
We’ve had two draining, entertaining, give-us-more weeks of March Madness. But there’s one problem with an AutoFill Final Four: you can’t have a David without a Goliath. My column: https://t.co/KBBvkHkQVS
— Ivan Maisel (@Ivan_Maisel) March 27, 2023
Stewart Mandel, the EIC for The Athletic’s college football vertical, had a TWO doozies. First, which he deleted after being promptly dumped on leading to a swift backpeddal, in which he called the NCAA Tournament “watered down.”
And, second from Stew, this gem in which he left out important context that Tobin Anderson was a finalist for the job before Rick Pitino was hired in the first place at Iona.
This happens every year, someone gets hired off one big tourney win. Hope he does well, but what a bizarre hiring…
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