Why College Basketball Sucks

College basketball kicks off today and surprisingly there will even be a couple of good match-ups (three games involving Top 25 teams and one of them played on the deck of a ship).  Having gotten that out of the way, here comes a rant as to why I think college basketball sucks.

One-and-Done Players are ruining the sport.  If you don't know what a "One-and-Done Player" is, it is a college basketball player that enrolls to a college, plays for a year, and then leaves for the NBA.  And because of them, college basketball stupid.  You may be saying - how is watching the best talent in the sport playing at the college level a bad thing?  Easy, it makes rooting for a team hard to do.  How can you have any sort of attachment to your favorite team when they have a new roster every year?  If you look at college football, they have a rule in place that requires that a player can't enter the NFL Draft until they have been out of high school for three years.  Therefore, you can root for your team's best players for at least three years which results in a true attachment to that player.  But in college basketball, the rule is that a player only has to play for one season before going pro and that means that the elite teams have such high turnover that it is impossible to ever feel like you got to know the best players that come through there.  For example, Kentucky has been able to bring in the best talent in the country year-in-and-year-out, but that talent only comes in for a season and then immediately abandons that school for a paycheck.  So, how exactly can you consider that guy a part of the team if he was there for such a short amount of time?  You can't.  Then again, Kentucky competes for a National Championship every year, so their fans forgive those players for never really being apart of their school.  And sure, some of the smaller schools are able to hold onto their best player for more than one year, but those schools have to have the stars align in order to actually compete for anything meaningful.

However, there is one exception to this rule.  Duke.  The Blue Devils are able to bring in elite talent (albeit white talent) and keep them there for a couple of years.  And because they are able to bring in great players that stay for multiple seasons, you would think that I would applaud their team and pull for them.  However, Duke is evil and I will never be able to pull for them even if I were to have a son who was to go on to be a star player for the Blue Devils (it's possible, he would be white after all).  In the end, I think college basketball is a waste of time and I find it harder to watch every year because I couldn't tell you who the best players in the sport are because none of the best players stay more than a year.

"Makes me laugh every time."