On the Collapse of the Mighty (NCAA Edition)

In 1990, the Oregon State Beavers Men’s Basketball team had the fourth most wins of any program in Division I. The Beavs success was only occasionally flashy, but it was steady; they had gone 359-186 under the legendary Ralph Miller, including a 77-11 stretch between 1979 and 1982. In 1990, the Beavs rode Gary Payton’s senior year to a the regular season Pac-10 conference championship.

The Beavs haven’t had a winning season since Payton left for the NBA. This year, they became the first team in Pac-10 conference history to go 0-18 in conference play. Absent sanctions, are there any other falls from grace in the NCAA as impressive as that of OSU?

While I’m on the subject, in brief answer to Yglesias, the narrative arc of Oregon State Beavers basketball is one of the reasons that I prefer the NCAA to the NBA. It’s true enough that there are similar arcs in the NBA, but they don’t play out in such operatic fashion. Moreover, the single-game playoff system enhances, rather than detracts from, the narrative; I remember with crystal clarity how Gary Payton picked up his fifth foul on a charge late in the 1990 NCAA tournament first round game against Ball State, and how the Beavs shortly thereafter lost on an inbound right under the hoop, and then how Ball State went on to beat Louisville and then lose at the buzzer to UNLV.

This is another way of saying that playoffs, in any sport, have never been about “finding the best team”. Rather, they’re about building tension in the most effective way for the sport in question. In this, the NCAA Tournament is indisputably superior to the Bataan Death March that constitutes the NBA playoffs. Major League Baseball uses a playoff system similar to that of the NBA, but the seven game series is much more suitable to the rhythm of baseball than of basketball, and moreover it’s built into the structure of baseball that many of the best and most important players simply cannot play every day. In short, the capacity of a George Mason to reach the Final Four now and again is a feature, not a bug. On the point of the greater athleticism of NBA players, I’ll say only that if I wanted pure athleticism I’d watch a decathalon; athleticism is only meaningful in the context of a certain set of rules, and I visually prefer the playing of the game under NCAA rather than NBA rules.

A final question that pops up in comments occasionally is “How can you enjoy NCAA sports when they’re based on exploitation and have a negative effect on academic life?” These are fair questions; the treatment of players by the NCAA is remarkably exploitative, and I think that big time college athletics has, on balance, a negative effect on academic life. My first answer is that there are the wretched of the earth and the Wretched of the Earth, and that NCAA players are more the former than the latter, and moreover that doing just about anything in the context of an advanced capitalist economy is going to involve the exploitation of someone. My second answer is that I would like college athletics severed from professional sports, and in particularly would like the NBA and the NFL to develop robust farm systems like MLB has, such that talented eighteen year olds who don’t want to go to college can receive fairer treatment. This preference doesn’t, however, mean that I don’t enjoy watching UO or UK play within the system that now exists.