So the other night I settled in front of the TV with the halfhearted intention of watching the North Carolina-Virginia Tech game.
Surfed around a little bit and landed on a Pink Floyd documentary -- and stayed there.
And I don't even like Pink Floyd all that much.
It's never been completely easy to make the transition from football to basketball, but here we are in late January and I'm still finding it hard to get interested in ACC basketball. It's kind of startling, because for so many years there was a lot of compelling stuff about the regular-season ACC wars.
Is it a shortage of dynamic players? That would have to rank pretty high on the list, because when you think back a few years you can think of so many guys you just felt like you had to watch.
Let's go back to the 2007-08 season and look at some of the headliners:
Tyler Hansbrough, Wayne Ellington, Sean Singletary, Jack McClinton, Kyle Singler, Gerald Henderson, Ty Lawson, Jeff Teague, James Johnson, Greivis Vasquez, Tyrese Rice, Jon Scheyer...
Remember that star-studded Wake Forest bunch that came into Littlejohn a few years ago?
Teague, Johnson, Al-Farouq Aminu, Ish Smith -- seemed like a dang NBA team.
Question: How many ACC players truly excite you this season? Harrison Barnes? Yeah. Mike Scott? Sure.
Scott is good and all, but the fact that he's one of the two or three headliners in the conference is a pretty good illustration of the apparent reduction in big-splash players.
Other factors: The elimination of the double-round-robin schedule took away a lot of the meaning of ACC regular-season basketball. Adding three mediocre teams to the mix didn't help.
Something else to consider: Duke and North Carolina are the only teams that have experienced much success in the NCAA Tournament for quite a few years. Has that created a negative recruiting effect for everyone else in the ACC? It's a question worth pondering.
The problem isn't limited to the ACC. College basketball as a whole is suffering because of the minimal importance of the regular season. Keep expanding the NCAA Tournament field, and it's only going to get worse.
It doesn't help that people are supposed to start paying attention to college basketball immediately after the high-drama, big-event extravaganza that is the BCS. It also doesn't help that college basketball is competing with the high-drama, big-event extravaganza that is the NFL Playoffs.
The high drama and big-event feel of college basketball is in the NCAA Tournament, and that's a long way off.
If some of us are choosing to watch documentaries of old, washed-up bands, then maybe college basketball's current setup is a bit too old and washed-up as well.
LW
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