The monolithic entity we call ‘Sports’ has had a rotten run of late. First, there was a month of non-stop coverage of what is consistently the most depressing and least enjoyable aspect of sports—owner-athlete financial bickering—when the NFL locked out. Then we had weeks of breaking coverage of the huge money grab and rivalry-busting of the major college football powerhouses and conferences. Then the NBA managed its own lockout (with attendant financial bickering). Then Tony La Russa and the Cardinals won the World Series, subjecting the rest of us to an entire post-and off-season of the oft-repeated fallacy that St. Louis is somehow a better America. And then we [...]

After four bustling days of NCAA tournament action, a few truths have become clear: the Big East Conference was every bit as overrated as it looked before the tournament began; the era wherein referees’ decisions were considered sacrosanct is over; and Virginia is for basketball lovers.

Of the preposterous ten Big East teams that we were told deserved at large bids to the tournament (University of Connecticut earned the automatic bid), only one remains in the field. And the two Big East teams left, UCONN and Marquette, each played and defeated Big East teams in the Round of 32, meaning that, in theory, had [...]

I spent the spring before I moved to Brooklyn diligently flattening out what was already a pretty mild Southern accent. The way I looked at it, I was moving up Nawth with no particular intention of returning to Kentucky.

What I didn’t know, being naïve and geographically provincial, was that in diluting my accent I was inadvertently losing something of myself. Sure, now I didn’t sound different than my colleagues from Connecticut, Boston, Pennsylvania or even Des Moines. But that turned out to be a shame. Nearly everyone I met those first few years would, upon learning where I was from, immediately ask me, “What happened to your [...]

Don’t ever tell me it could be worse. There is no single piece of ostensibly helpful advice that I detest as much as “It could be worse.” I can’t say I’ve never offered it myself to some poor friend or family member in the midst of a crisis and I had nothing more useful to say. I get why people fall back on it. Sometimes it seems like the only thing you can say is something like that, something intentionally devoid of deeper meaning. Better that than to enflame or further deepen some afflicted’s funk. But that doesn’t mean it’s good advice, or really advice at all. Of course [...]

The mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard is a favorite of my father’s. I recall vividly books by or on Bachelard strewn about our split-level ranch for a few of the mid-80s years Dad was index-finger-only typing out his dissertation on our silver Texas Instruments machine—the result a big, fat, impenetrable (to me, at least) treatise on the Frenchman’s philosophy and its relationship to higher education.

While the content of the Bachelard books—hell, even the descriptions on the outside covers—was lost on me (due to a typical American kid’s short attention span and/or disinterest in phenomenology at the age of 14), I was always picking them up [...]

We are a nation of takers. Unapologetic receivers, we understand only the politics of evasion and of punishment. Flaunting, prancing and dodging until brought to judgment, once penned we seek forgiveness, plead ignorance and claim irresponsibility. And, more often than not, it works.

Ours is an addiction to innocence corrupted. We are so surprised—shocked—at our tainted heroes. But why? We worship and forgive Tiger Woods and LeBron James and Brett Favre. Because they are winners, and because we wish we could take as much as they do. Too much is never enough for us. We need more. We’ve earned more. We deserve more. There is no end of more.

It was in the summer of 1985 that I saw two-time All-American forward Kenny Walker standing in line at our local K-Mart, towering above the other patrons, a blue light mere inches from his head. I still recall the profound feeling I had at the time even though it’s been 25 years, because the moment was formative. It was more than just the awe of a star-struck 10 year old seeing a celebrity in the flesh for the first time. It was the beginning of a personal awakening of something fundamental about class and achievement and a first revelation, however indefinable at the time, about the game I would [...]

Another long college basketball season came to an end last night in perhaps the most unsatisfactory way imaginable. Connecticut head coach Jim Calhoun—one of the game’s least likeable and hardest to root for figures—walked off the floor in glory as Butler, everybody’s Cinderella, thoroughly humiliated itself in its biggest game. It’s impossible to sugarcoat just how bad the final was; it was without a doubt the poorest championship game in memory.

An odd end to what was an odd and, ultimately, probably pretty forgettable season. Here, at the end, let's look back at some of the major moments and storylines and how they may appear to us in the [...]

Details of the Second Official Awl NCAA Bracket Tournament Challenge—remember last year?—are coming later today! [UPDATE: It's here!] In preparation, our college-ball expert, JL Weill, offers some guidance on filling out your bracket.

[INTRO FOR COLLEGE HOOPS FANS] Oh joyest of joys, the NCAA brackets are out and that can only mean one thing: the actual tournament games are only days away! I wait the entire year for this, my unofficial national holiday. A few years back, I decided that if I was going to have to work every Memorial Day and Fourth of July (I was working for a major sports league), then by golly [...]

Early last week, I spent a pleasant evening flipping back and forth between two fantastic college basketball games involving top 10 teams. On ESPN was Kansas State’s stunning obliteration of newly minted No. 1 Kansas. Jacob Pullen, the enigmatic K-State point guard was chucking silly three-pointers from way outside and just burying them. The crowd was freaking out. Great basketball atmosphere, great game (unless you're a Kansas fan, of course).

The other game featured arguably the best team out West, sixth-ranked San Diego State, scrambling to hold off a game UNLV in Las Vegas. Every time UNLV made a run at the Aztecs, San Diego State guard D.J. [...]

Oh, what a joy it was for me to watch BYU beat San Diego State in Provo, Utah on CBS College Sports last Wednesday. It had next to nothing to do with the game itself—a mighty performance from white basketball pundit boner-inducer Jimmer Fredette. No, my whole week was made when, at the halftime break, I was treated—all of us were, really—to the sight of Alaa Abdelnaby in the CBSCS studio.

Former Final Four participant and awkwardly oblong center with Duke, Abdelnaby arrived straight from the “Holy shit! It’s that guy!” file. Smiling, wearing a sharp suit, Abdelnaby looked relaxed and polished as he kidded around with his studio [...]

There is a form of historiography, only fairly recently becoming more accepted, called Counterfactual history, or sometimes Virtual history. Counterfactual history is the study not of what actually happened, but rather of how things might have been different had facts or actions along the way been different. The purpose of this brand of study, as I grasp it, is not so much to re-imagine outcomes—that is the stuff of fiction—but is instead to try and game out how changes to recorded history might have altered an alternative future, and then to gauge the real impact of a person, action or incident and what, if any, impact the absence [...]

With a blowout win over Bradley on Wednesday night, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski won his 877th basketball game in Division I, passing Adolph Rupp for third best in NCAA history. He’s now right behind Dean Smith and a few dozen back of his former coach and mentor, Bob Knight. It is a remarkable milestone, made all the more so by the fact that most of those wins have come in an era that has evolved from four-year recruits to an NBA-like rotating roster of young talent. In fact, Krzyzewski has won all four of his national championships in just the last 20 years.

Such staggering achievement on the [...]

However crappy your year has been up to now, there is a very good chance that Rick Pitino’s was worse.

Granted, unlike you, he still lived in some moated castle on a hill somewhere, wearing custom Armani suits while doing his yard work (or, more likely, paying someone poorer than himself to wear Armani suits while doing his yard work for him). But also, unlike you, he had to admit to a courtroom full of media and his family that he jizzed down his leg at the end of a 15-second sexual tryst with a grasping, desperate muppet. If you, also, endured such a thing, then I [...]

It doesn’t take much to build a winning basketball program. Just wins and consistency and star players and loyalty and, oh right, lots and lots of wins. Big wins. Tournament wins. And yet, there are programs across the country that have done the winning part but still been thwarted on the way to lasting prominence by some unlucky combination of coaching attrition, failures in recruiting and/or the wrong bounce of the ball happening a few too many times.

This is what makes Butler University so fascinating. With this year's return to the Final Four, Butler is emerging as a legitimate basketball power—a title very few so-called “mid-major” programs [...]

With the NCAA tournament starting next week, it seems like a good time to talk about why sports even matter. I've argued about this with more than a few people, most often un-athletic friends with unpleasant memories of high-school gym class. And it's true: This basketball tournament won't make any major illnesses disappear or stop people from killing one another (all told, sports probably hurts that effort). But it does grant us a distraction from the killing and suffering in the world—and at its best, contests like this offer us a way to judge what's important to us about competition, fairness, heart, skill and all those other major life [...]

It’s probably true that in this space over the past few months I’ve spent much more time pontificating about obscure French philosophers, junior high science fairs and my own internal angst than I have about actual college basketball this season. OK, it’s definitely true. While I’m confident that some of it has worked, I’ll let you be the judge. And then, like any patriotic American, I will dismiss your judgment until a ruling from a higher court comes through in my favor. Like anyone who’s ever been on stage, when you have an audience that will indulge your love for smashing watermelons with a sledgehammer, you don’t go off [...]

Usually, the only times you hear the word “marriage” intertwined with sports are when some meathead’s boorish behavior becomes front page news or in reference to the special relationship between a player/coach and his school/city. For example, “Ben Roethlisberger and the working class enclave of Pittsburgh are a perfect marriage.” Or, alternately, “The marriage of Latrell Sprewell’s fiery personality and hard-driving head coach PJ Carlesimo was doomed from the start.” Etcetera.

Speaking of choking, most of us of a certain age have experienced the throat-clearing discomfort of attending the wedding of two people everyone is confident should not be getting married, at least not to each other. That [...]

When I was 13, I was a supreme nerd. Having bought in fully to the vision of my college prof parents, I had in my sights nothing less than utter and complete academic domination of Beaumont Junior High School. For a while, I was well on my way. I had taken four of the six end-of-the-year academic awards and I was one of only two students in the school who got a library pass for the half-hour to 45 minutes before the first class bell rang. This is why the septuagenarian librarian was the first person to sign my 7th grade yearbook. This fact is as true as it [...]

It was a Sunday morning not long ago and I was about two-thirds of the way through the full college basketball scoreboard, over 100 games of it, scanning the box score of a 12-point Miami (Fla.) win over Florida Gulf Coast, which I have to assume is an actual school, when it hit me like an uppercut: there is absolutely no reason I should be looking at this.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon to the Internet. Whether it’s porn-related or not, there are countless times each week you are struck by this realization, especially if you are online as often as I (and most [...]