As a basketball fanatic, I’ve never been crazy about March Madness as some of my fellow basketball loving friends do.
I’ll always follow my alma mater, but I rarely ever set out to watch a college game during the season. With March Madness, my interest in college ball increases five-fold. Still, that’s going from one game a week MAYBE to 3-4.
With the NCAA tournament, I am not one to secretly watch tournament games all day long on my work computer as co-workers have been known to do. And I haven’t filled out printable March Madness bracket in 5 years and don’t plan on it anytime soon.
As far as the basketball I prefer to watch, college basketball has always been secondary to the NBA. I love watching the NBA because of the style of play allows for a player’s individual talent to shine through. This is in stark contrast to the more structured and somewhat predictable NCAA.
That said, though I marvel at the skills and ability of players like Kyrie Irving, Russell Westbrook, and Chris Paul, I don’t enjoy the selfishness and pampering of spoiled players that happens (more publicly) in the NBA.
During their college careers, I never looked at Irving, Westbrook and Paul as the dynamic and supremely skilled players that they clearly are in the NBA. In fact, despite Paul and Irving being big name guards from the ACC, I didn’t pay much attention to them at all and it certainly had something to do with the more restrictive atmosphere of the NCAA.
I do think their time in college helped to shape them into the players that they are today, so it’s not taking anything away from their respective experiences at Duke, Wake Forest, and UCLA.
Both leagues serve their purpose, I just prefer the NBA by a large margin. To me, the NBA allows the best players from around the world to play with one another, and that raises the already high skill level — yes, even when the terrible Knicks play the horrible Lakers. In the NCAA, you rarely see the artistry and mastery of a skill on full display as you see with the NBA on a nightly basis.
