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   March Badness

Remember when college basketball was actually good?

After watching a couple games in this year's NCAA Tournament, I remember why I don't watch the sport anymore.

I'm 31-years-old, in my short lifetime I've seen menacing Georgetown teams with seniors Patrick Ewing and then Alonzo Mourning at center, UNLV in the early 90s win a championship then lose just one game the following year with a nucleus of three upperclassmen who would all go on to play 10 years in the NBA, the Fab Five at Michigan become a cultural phenomenon, great Duke teams and a Kentucky team in 1996 that had nine future NBA players – and good ones.

Today, college basketball is ranked teams struggling to score 20 points in a half and seniors who are still on the team only because they aren't good enough to play professionally. It's the sport's two most talented, interesting and exciting players both being freshmen, Greg Oden at Ohio State and Kevin Durant at Texas.

Remember when Tim Duncan stayed four years at Wake Forest when he could have been a Lottery pick in the NBA Draft after his freshman season? It seems like ages ago, but it was just 10 years.

I know I tend to be nostalgic, but when I say college basketball is a shell of the game it was a decade ago, that's a fact.

The ACC player of the year this season was someone named Jared Dudley. I had to "Wikipedia" the guy to find out who he was. This is the ACC, the best, most powerful and tradition rich conference in America, the conference of Sampson, Jordan, Laettner, Hill… and now Dudley?

I'm not alone in thinking this by the way. You believe it to and you show it through television ratings. The total audience for the NCAA Tournament peaked in 1998 at 153.7 million viewers; last year's tournament was watched by 25 million fewer people. College basketball ratings on all networks continue slip and where the sport was once a major source of conversation at water coolers and on sports talk radio around the country, people outside its hotbeds are now only interested in it for the 17 days of "March Madness."

It's no secret how or why this happened. As NBA dollars got bigger and bigger, more of the best college players, and then more of the mediocre players, gave up eligibility – or skipped it all together – creating a talent vacuum on campus.

One of the great myths about college basketball is that it's about the name on the front of the jersey, not the name on the back, meaning the team is more important than the individual. While that may be true to a degree, and it certainly is to the die-hard fans, the casual sports fan wants to see individual brilliance and college basketball hasn't had much of that in the last 10 years. As fans we like to get to know our athletes and build relationships with them, follow their story arches like characters on TV shows. There are no relationships or story arches in college basketball because no one sticks around long enough for you to care about.

College basketball's popularity has sunk because it lost out on an entire generation of the best talent in the world which simply bypassed it for the pros. Where would the sport be today if Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Tracey McGrady, Tyson Chandler, LeBron James and Dwight Howard had played for just a year or two like Allen Iverson, Chris Webber and Shaquille O'Neal did?

And it wasn't just the superstars skipping that destroyed the quality of play. Think of all the high school players who passed on college ball and never made it to the NBA who could have been stars for three or four years on campus. Forgotten names like Lenny Cooke, Ousmane Cisse, Korleone Young and Taj McDavid were all highly talented and hotly recruited high school seniors who snubbed college basketball only to flip hamburgers. The one thing to suffer as much as their futures from not playing college basketball was the sport itself.

Hopefully this all changes now that the NBA has instituted an age limit on players entering its draft, but are a bunch of "one-and-done" college players really drawing you back to the sport?

America used to love college basketball because of its great teams and players and rivalries and traditions, then all the great players went away and now we love it for three weeks in March - or as long as our bracket holds up to see if we can pick more games right than Gladys in accounting.

With advances in training and coaching and nutrition, almost all sports get better over time, college basketball is the rare exception. Take the Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon, Greg Anthony 1991 UNLV team that didn't even win a national title, put it in a time warp and transport it to 2007 and it walks through this tournament unchallenged. Three future NBA players, all upperclassmen with heavy tournament experience – you don't see that anymore. Conversely, take the college football national champions from 15 to 20 years ago and they'd be given a serious run for their money by any team ranked in the Top 5 at the end of this last season.

Strangely enough, as college basketball has gotten worse and worse and less and less popular over the past decade, college football has gotten better and better and more and more popular.

College football is bigger, faster, stronger, more complex, better coached and more closely and widely followed than at any time in its history. Just this decade we've had Miami and USC teams that can be considered among the greatest ever. Players like Reggie Bush and Vince Young and Calvin Johnson and Sean Taylor that could be considered among the best ever at their positions.

Watch a college football game from the mid-80s and it looks laughable with the midriff-bearing mesh uniforms, the giant elbow pads and high school offenses.

Watch a college basketball game from the same era and… wow, there are actually centers, seniors, teams that stayed together for a couple years.

To know me now, you'd think I'd always been a huge college football guy who never really cared much for any other sport, but you'd be wrong. There was a time when I was a huge college basketball fan, just as big a fan of that sport as college football. I was always more passionate about college football, but when it came to how closely I followed it and how much I watched on TV, in the mid 1990s, when I was in college, it was about the same. I loved to watch Jason Kidd and Ray Allen and Glenn Robinson and Corliss Williamson and Jerry Stackhouse play ball, but when those players stopped going to college, I left too.

My moment of clarity with college basketball came in the disastrous 2002 national title game, a slog it out 64-52 Maryland win over Indiana that was so aesthetically unappealing as to almost turn itself off the TV. At that point, I said, "enough is enough."

Since that day, April 1st, 2002, I haven't watched an uninterrupted half of any college basketball game, the product isn't good enough; it's not worth my time. I haven't watched as much as 10 minutes of a regular season game since then and this year didn't watch a single minute of college basketball until VCU's first round upset of Duke, of which I saw the final 10 minutes.

From what I saw in that game, it may be another five years before I tune in again: missed free throws, turnovers, freshmen everywhere.

"March Madness" is still watchable as a TV show because it's so exciting, so dramatic, but if you're looking for good basketball, you've come to the wrong place - I know because I've been fortunate enough to see what it does look like and this isn't it.