Kansas should be Champions
I know I’m not breaking news to you when I say this, but March Madness got cancelled. Not postponed, not put on hiatus; cancelled. Today was supposed to be the first day of the tournament. College students are supposed to be day drinking on their Spring Breaks as they follow their schools. People are supposed to be at work right now with a secret tab open, following all the games and dreaming about what they’d do with the money from the office bracket pool.
I should be getting my hopes up for yet another KU run.
It feels weird complaining about the lack of sports at a time like this. Yeah, sports got cancelled, but not on the whimsical executive decision by the sports powers that be. It’s not like there’s some special sports czar out there who just decided to be a dick and cancel all sports. There’s a global pandemic that is wreaking havoc on infrastructure systems and daily life the world over. Sports is perhaps one of the least salient issues that we have when it comes to the safety and wellbeing of literally everyone on Earth.
But I don’t exactly have any spicy takes when it comes to the coronavirus. Nor should I, because – you know- I’m not a doctor. So rather than tell you anything about the coronavirus; what it can do, or what you should do (listen to professionals, not random people on the internet dummy), I figure sports can serve its purpose of unifying us even in its absence if we all talk about the absence together. And then go back to trying to protect ourselves and others from this disease because, like I said, we’re experiencing a global health crises.
So if you’d please indulge me, I’d like to talk about sports during a global health crises.
I guess in my own life, I feel like an especially big fool for spending the last two weeks writing about the reasons why I shouldn’t buy into this KU team and then talking myself into rooting for them because they had a legit shot and I’d be a bad fan if I didn’t believe. By the end of my second article, I was ready to start planning a Final Four party.
And oh, how my friends must hate me right now. All I’ve talked about for the past five days is how Kansas is technically and rightfully the NCAA Champion. When the Ivy League cancelled their conference tournament almost a week ago, they named the Yale and Princeton teams as the automatic bids for the men’s and women’s tournaments, respectively; in essence crowning them as conference champions. In the Associated Press’s last top-25 ranking, Kansas was the #1 team in the country. There will be no championship game to determine a new winner. No One Shining Moment to get the juices flowing. The only logical thing to do is award the title of champion to the consensus best team in the country.
And if the NCAA won’t do that formally, I hope beyond hope that Kanas claims the 2020 NCAA Championship and hangs a banner anyway, like UCF football did after going undefeated in 2017. Just hang the banner, claim the title, and tell everyone to shove it up their asses. Sure, it’s an asterisk title and sure nobody other than KU fans will really celebrate it, but I don’t care. The seniors get to go out with a championship, and I don’t have to watch a tournament game through my fingers, sweating through my shirt. Everyone wins.
My friends have been pretty quick on the draw, though. They’ve hit me some pretty harsh putdowns that follow the general track of “It would be such a Kansas thing to claim a championship in a year without a tournament, because we all know they would’ve blown it had the tournament actually happened”. And then they usually start laughing. Because it’s at that point that I usually start crying :’(
I have a very good friend in my life who is and has always been a fan of Virginia basketball. As we were talking the other day about the lack of college basketball, he introduced me to perhaps the most haunting thing about all of this. I almost can’t type it out. He explained that the defending NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Champion is STILL Virginia. And they will remain the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Champion for AT LEAST ANOTHER ENTIRE YEA-wait…I think… I think I’m going to throw up…nope…no…I’m good…Yeah, I’m good.
We can’t let that happen. Please, NCAA, for the love of all that is good and holy, do not let Virginia keep the crown for another whole year.
Do the right thing.
Name Kansas champions.
Wash your hands and stay safe.