After These NCAAs, You Can’t Go Home

I come from a pro basketball town, but I can't go home again.

Not to those days when I was young and the NBA had allure, when the hometown Boston Celtics perennially contended for its championship. Not to those passionate rivalries with the 76ers and Lakers and Pistons, with Doctor J and Magic and Bill Laimbeer.

Not after this March.

NCAA basketball has ruined the NBA for me.

Actually, it's more a euthanasia. The NBA has been on life support since Michael Jordan hit that 20-foot jumper in Utah's Delta Center to close out the Chicago Bulls' dynasty of the 1990s. JJ Redick and Adam Morrison simply unplugged the equipment and turned off the lights.

Today's NBA has become a Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on hardwood, a place where front offices can strut their prized pedigree scorers around to drum up cable television subscriptions. It's about your guy getting his 50 points and raising the arena Noise-o-Meter needle to the Fan-a-rific level and vying for that tightly-wrapped undershirt shot into your section by a bazooka-toting floor attendant.

I caught one myself a few years ago on my son's birthday. Even though it was aimed right at me, I had to fight off a dozen lunging fans and two dozen clutching hands. It was a Work Sucks cotton tee and I gave it to my son. The next morning, we didn't remember who had won the game, only that Dad caught a flying shirt. Mom wouldn't let him keep it though because she didn't like the word sucks. I used it as a paint rag for a bit, but it was too sheer to absorb drips.

That's the NBA. Nothing But Air. Nothing of substance.

Back in my youth, March Madness was just something to watch before the NBA playoffs. The Celtics and Lakers had usually sewn up the Atlantic and Pacific Divisions, respectively, by then. It was postseason tune-up time in Boston where we fans deluded ourselves into thinking KC Jones could groom a bench by playing Greg Kite and Sam Vincent and Darren Daye for eight or 10 minutes a game. College was the minor leagues and we put its stars on ice until the day they were ready to turn pro.

Gradually, the passion of college play began compensating for any perceived lack of precision. It didn't hurt that its gain in notoriety was coincidental with the decline of the Celtics. The intensity that drained from New England springs after the retirements of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parrish was being replenished through the feats of Rick Pitino and Jim Calhoun.

Over the last decade, that passion has waned at times as more underclassmen and high school athletes opted for an early paycheck in the NBA and depleted the collegiate ranks of some vitality. Now, however, equilibrium is returning.

The flood of underclassmen into recent NBA drafts has finally attained critical mass. The average age of an NBA team at the start of this season dipped to 26.7 years compared to 27.8 five years ago. Rosters are filled with college-age players exhibiting college-level maturity each night. The product now taking the NBA court delivers inconsistent play and an abandonment of defense. Two years ago, NBA teams averaged 93.4 points per game. This season, it's up 97.0 points.

All the while, college basketball seems to have weathered the erosion of its ranks. Now, the NBA's 2005 collective bargaining agreement has raised minimum playing age by one year, to 19, and the NCAA has been granted a right of first refusal on every high school stand-out. They'll have one year in which to wine and dine freshman athletes in their world of passion and drama, a world the NBA once knew, but has long forgotten.

And what better way to culminate that year than in March Madness? This year's Division I men's tournament was like no other in recent memory.

Of the 60 games leading to the Final Four, 20 resulted in upsets, including 15 by teams at least three seeds below their victims. Everyone by now is acquainted with George Mason University, an 11th seed who defeated the Washington, DC bracket's sixth, third, seventh, and top seeds in consecutive games.

Certainly, the three games played in the RCA Dome were anticlimactic, all being decided by 14 or more points. However, 12 contests leading up to Indianapolis were decided by a three-pointer or in overtime. During one amazing third round evening alone, fans watched Kevin Pittsnogle bury a trey to tie Pitt's game against Texas, only to have the Longhorns push the ball upcourt and win it on Kenton Paulino's own trey at the buzzer. Moments later, the national audience was taken west as UCLA climbed back from a 17-point deficit against Gonzaga to steal a two-point victory in the final 10 seconds.

Like Adam Morrison's emotional display even as that game was in balance, the NCAA men's tournament is one sporting event in which viewers can be certain of the unexpected. Witness the Big 10, Division I's strongest conference as measured by the RPI. They went 6-4 overall with no team reaching the Elite Eight. And the Big East, with its record eight-team field, couldn't manage one entrant into the Final Four. No regional top seed ever reached Indy.

With UCLA the consensus favorite to win its first national championship since 1995, it was a fitting cap to the 2006 season that Florida should handle the Bruins so easily, etching the Gator name on the Siemens trophy for the first time ever.

Perhaps no player better embodies the renewed vitality of NCAA basketball than the Gators' Joakim Noah.

The Troy Polamalu of NCAA basketball — and sporting hairdo to match — the 6'11" sophomore was an omnipresence, scoring 16 points, collecting 9 rebounds, blocking 6 shots, and rushing several Bruins big men into missing lay-ups when he was in the vicinity. Whether pumping fists on the court, simulating gator chomps on the bench with his long arms, or ceremoniously snipping the cotton net, Noah radiated a youthful enthusiasm and true appreciation of his accomplishment. An enthusiasm made for college basketball.

Starting four sophomores and a junior during their national championship run and with only one senior on the roster, the Florida Gators must now brace for the carnage of another NBA draft. As they do, Head Coach Billy Donovan and Athletics Director Jeremy Foley can only hope that the team returning from Indianapolis to a throng of screaming Gator fans still has more homecomings in store for them.

Who knows? Maybe you really can go home again after all.