Farewell, professional football. With Super Bowl XLI now in the books, we enter a period of mourning and despair for six months, with only inferior sports left to entertain us.
(To be fair, the Pro Bowl is on Saturday, so the NFL season isn't entirely over yet. But does anyone really watch or care about that sloppy, penalty-mired fumble fest? Though, come to think of it, couldn't Sunday's game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears be described that way as well?)
Anyway, the point here is that we sports fans need to find another way to waste away the hours on Sunday afternoons, something else to keep our TVs tuned into and, to a lesser extent, a new activity to place bets on.
So what's left?
There's the PGA. I'm not even going to waste time discussing such a boring, slow-moving sport as golf.
There's NASCAR. Once again, I'm not going to waste time discussing this ridiculously fast-moving, yet incredibly boring sport - huge crashes excluded, since those are pretty thrilling.
Then there's the NHL. As the Boston Bruin fans at Brown know, pro hockey, as exciting as it is, is almost never televised on major networks anymore. Did anyone even notice that last week the league held its first All-Star game in three years? No, because it was broadcast on some obscure channel called Versus. (Side note: Fearing looking like a moron, I honestly had to look up the name of the Boston franchise because I wasn't sure if I remembered it correctly.). The bottom line is that the NHL has lost its status as a major American sport and has yet to regain it. As a result, it is incredibly difficult to follow.
With baseball not really starting up until April - excluding those die-hard fans who await the days until pitchers and catchers report - our final non-football alternate is basketball. We've got two choices in the hoops department: the NBA and the NCAA. And though both are good options, college basketball is far superior in terms of entertainment value. Here's why:
NCAA games are just more exciting than NBA games
It's difficult to pin down why this is true, but I'll try. It's probably a combination of youthful energy and a pure, unadulterated - that is, unaffected by exorbitant salaries - desire to win. That's why, despite a longer shot clock, college games seem to move faster. We see so much more hustle, so much more diving for loose balls and so many more jump balls in college than in the pros.
I wouldn't go so far to say that it's more painful to sit through an entire NBA telecast than to watch a whole Major League Baseball game on TV, but it's not far from the truth. Granted, the players in the NBA are more talented. But if I want to see Dwayne Wade break someone's ankles or LeBron James drive through three defenders in the lane and slam down a reverse dunk, I'd rather watch the Top Plays on SportsCenter than sit through an agonizing two-and-a-half hours just to see a few sweet moves.
The rivalries
The NCAA's Atlantic Coast Conference is home to what is perhaps the greatest rivalry in all of sports: the University of North Carolina and Duke University, which are separated by a mere eight miles. There are also some less illustrious but still intriguing rivalries: Kentucky and Louisville, Texas and Texas A&M and Kansas and Missouri, just to name a few. These match-ups rarely disappoint. The closest thing the NBA has to a rivalry these days isn't between two powerhouse teams. It's between two players, one of whom has barely played at all this season: the Los Angeles Lakers' Kobe Bryant and the Miami Heat's Shaquille O'Neal. Besides, the two ex-teammates seem to have mostly made up anyway.
March Madness
Is there any other long-lasting event in sports that is as exciting as the annual month-long NCAA tournament? (Well, maybe the World Cup, but that, sadly, will not be coming back until 2010.) In the NCAA tourney's single-elimination system, every game is huge, and anything can happen. This is what makes March Madness office pools so much fun. Upsets are always expected, and even the little guys have a shot at a national title. Last year, we were treated to one of the best Cinderella stories of all time: George Mason, a No. 11 seed that barely made the tournament, took down powerhouses Michigan State University, UNC and top seeded University of Connecticut en route to the Final Four.
In the NBA Finals, the big underdogs almost never win. Not since 1999 has a No. 1 or No. 2 seed been upset by a No. 7 or No. 8 seed in the first round of the NBA playoffs, which themselves are a ridiculously drawn-out and dull process. One team can play in as many as 28 post-season games before winning an NBA title - that's more than a third of the regular season. How anyone can be expected to maintain interest for so long is beyond me, especially since games between the same two teams get boring pretty quickly. And I've never heard of anyone entering an NBA Finals betting pool.
So once you've recovered from your NFL withdrawal and are ready to move on, go check out how ridiculous Ohio State's Greg Oden is, and just ignore LeBron.
