Dumping Them Out: This Is March
Welcome back to another episode of Dumping Them Out. This series might be on it's last legs. Dumping Them Out under attack. On Saturday, out of nowhere, anonymous blogger who's actually Dante The Don, Malcolm Smutler launched a nuclear warhead directly at DTH HQ in the form of Smutler's Digest, a revolutionary new blog concept that features upwards of 50 combined Boob GIFs AND Boob Instagrams. And even more diabolically... no words (other than an intro paragraph explaining how there will be no words).
Not sure how I'm ever supposed to compete with that. A weekly 1000 word blog that features Boob GIFs ironically stands no chance against the most non-ironically horny man on the internet. It was bound to happen eventually. It's a dog eat dog world out here. No one person can lay claim to Boob GIFs. It's every man for himself.
Since yesterday was March 1st, I spent all day watching college basketball so I can become an expert by the time the brackets drop exactly 2 weeks from now. My main takeaway every time I get back into college basketball, is that the ends of games suck so much. I mean, they're also fantastic. It's actually impressive how much they can suck and be awesome all at once. For example, the end of Missouri vs Vanderbilt was incredible. Vanderbilt made a late game comeback and hit a last second shot to send the game to overtime on their bizarre oversized home court.
What a moment. Great stuff. Everything leading up to that though… I know this isn't a fresh hot take or anything. People have been bitching about this for years. But holy shit… the last 2 minutes of a close basketball game is roughly 5% action, 15% free throws, and 80% nothing at all. Just players standing around waiting for play to start. Somehow each team has 12 timeouts remaining. There's reviews. Commercial breaks. It becomes painful to watch. If you're not careful (this has happened to me multiple times) it will lull you to sleep. You'll look down at your phone for a second, forget about the game entirely, and suddenly realize you just missed the most important possession. There's so much dumb shit about basketball that basketball fans have just accepted as part of the game. Flopping. Fouling up 3. Flailing your legs to draw a foul. The final minutes of the game being a long dragged out free throw competition. But I guess there's just no way to fix it without drastically changing the game. In some ways it builds the suspense and adds to the drama. It's just so so so slow. But I still love it. At least for a month out of the year. Can't wait for the tournaments to start.
Speaking of college basketball tournaments, and Rico already blogged this the other day, but of all the conference tournaments across the country, nobody has it figured out better than the Sun Belt.
As ridiculous as it looks, this should be the standard for brackets. If you're going to host an end of the season tournament that allows every team, or at least a majority of the teams in, this is so clearly the most fair way to do it to not diminish the regular season. It makes the regular season matter. Especially for the small conferences where the only way teams can make the NCAA Tournament is by winning their conference tournament. Part of me thinks this could be the answer to fixing the NBA. If they're going to insist on letting over half the league into the playoffs, at least make the seeding matter more than it does. It would kinda suck from the standpoint that we'd get less playoff games, but if you want NBA players to actually give a shit during the regular season, and not just shut it down once they've locked in a playoff birth… this would do it. What you'd lose in playoff games, you'd make up for in meaningful end of the year regular season matchups. Late season games between the 2nd and 3rd place teams in the Western Conference would have huge implications. The difference between a 4 seed and a 7 seed is 8 more games you'd have to win. That's enormous. The NBA would never do it. And there's probably more drawbacks to it that I haven't considered. But I think it's an interesting concept.
That being said, what I want to see professional sports do is once every 10 years, they have a "try new shit year", where leagues test out all the trendy new ideas people have to fix their sports. Say in 2030, the NBA does their playoffs Sun Belt style. Maybe they shrink the hoop as well. Maybe one year they do the thing where home teams get to design their own court dimensions. They could choose to move the 3-point line back, take out the 3-point line entirely, make the key gargantuan, or just make the court twice the size in general. Not every year. Just once a decade. Then if there's a rule that people actually love, they can consider keeping it. Just a thought. I'm pretty sure Adam Silver could be convinced of anything at this point.
In other basketball news, this high school kid in Columbus punched a guy in the dick last night.
If that's not the best basketball dick punch you've ever seen, I'd love to see what your #1 is. Even Draymond Green feigns 10% effort to make it look like he wasn't directly setting out for a dick punch. But that kid really just squatted down, got eye level with his opponent's cock and balls, and gave a solid 80% power punch square to his nuts. Zero shame. And based on AJ Mirgon's tweet, who appears to be a relative of the dick punchee, this was merely called an intentional foul. The dick puncher pretty much got away with it. Which makes it a pretty effective defensive play. You gotta think that point guard is gonna be at least a little flinchy bringing the ball up the court once he's iced his balls and checked back into the game. Not to mention, you get their starting point guard out of the game for a few minutes. I feel like high school basketball should be at the point where they can go to video review by now. Every school should at least be able to set up a phone camera or something to record the game. You gotta be able to review dick punches.