I make no comment on the content of this report, but watching it I did come to the terrible but certain realization that the moment of our permanent decline as a nation — as a people, really — will be signaled by the preceding transformation of our local newscasts into programs composed entirely of altercations at fast food restaurants and government offices that have been captured on cell phones by bystanders. They won’t even bother with the weather. What’s even more horrifying is that this is the kind of show I will quite happily watch. We’re all going down together, folks.

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 can claim. Butler is part of an unofficial Axis of Mid-Majors that reaches from Gonzaga in Spokane, Wash., to Butler in Indianapolis, to Cincinnati, where, for more than a decade, Xavier University has been a cradle of coaching and NBA talent. Each of these schools has similar enrollment numbers; each plays in a non-BCS conference; and each has a modern history of basketball excellence that puts it on par with all but a select few programs around the country.

But where Gonzaga and Xavier have yet to break through and take that final step to the Final Four (and beyond?), Butler is carving out a whole new profile for the mid-major team. If George Mason’s stunning run to the Final Four in 2006 was the first real mid-major breakthrough in the modern era, Butler’s two-season run represents a new world in which a small school with big dreams can claim a legitimate chance to win it all and in the process build a potential dynasty off the traditional power grid.

Butler’s being celebrated by many as a Cinderella story, but it’s worth remembering that this team came within a few inches of winning the national title last season. THE national title. As in, the only one. This time around, after taking down the Big East champion Pittsburgh, the Big Ten’s third-best team in Wisconsin and the SEC regular season champ in Florida, why should the Bulldogs be considered anything but a threat to win the national title? Think of it this way: the only schools in the last decade to reach consecutive Final Fours? Michigan State, North Carolina, Florida, Kansas and Maryland. Oh, and now Butler. Which one doesn’t belong? I’d argue they all do, and that’s the point.

Much has been written about the rapid rise and feel-good story of Butler coach Brad Stevens. But the real story here is the way that Stevens is coolly rewriting the script for coaches of small conference programs. Stevens is on the precipice of doing something far more impressive than just guiding his team to the national title game. Others have managed that same feat to little or no lasting success. In fact, Paul Hewitt (Georgia Tech, 2004) and Mike Davis (Indiana, 2002) aren’t even coaching at the schools they brought to the championship game anymore. Such is the difficulty of sustaining such a high level of success. But both of those guys piloted surprising big conference schools. Those IU and Georgia Tech teams had prep All-Americans and sure-fire pros. Butler has guys who were either lightly regarded or late bloomers and a couple of “maybe” pros. Yet with fewer resources and — because of Butler’s run last season — raised expectations, Stevens is effectively building a Duke-style program in the middle of Indiana.

Why the comparison to Duke? Size. One of the things I like best about NCAA basketball is that, unlike football, all you really need are a few good players and some jerseys and high tops. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, but not by much. When you only need 13 players, not 75, the chances that a non-power team will develop into a consistent winner are greatly improved. Why can’t you build a powerhouse basketball program in the Horizon League? That’s what Xavier (Atlantic 10) and Gonzaga (West Coast Conference) have done. Each has found the blueprint for success: the right coach(es), creative and diligent recruiting, and, most ambiguously yet importantly, a culture of winning.

You see that phrase “Culture of Winning” often in sports talk. It’s vague and, at this point, a bit trite, but there’s still something to it. It’s the idea that kids arrive on campus with the expectation that they will be winners. It permeates the program — from the ball boys to the athletic offices to the assistant coaches and everything in between. To maintain a certain standard of excellence, programs must re-stock with players who can both handle a culture of winning and build on it. This is true of big or small programs, in major conferences and not. It often relies on consistency of effort and, frankly, on some luck as well. Thanks to a run of great coaches doing big things and continuing to build on a solid foundation, Butler has it. In droves.

The biggest obstacle to creating a mid-major dynasty is overcoming a system that’s rigged toward big conferences. Each conference gets only one automatic bid, and since at-large bids are handed out with heavy weight on who you’ve played, who you’ve beaten and where those games were played, schools like Butler or Gonzaga are, by NCAA design, forced to play anyone and everyone in the pre-conference season just to establish their bona fides for a potential at-large berth in the tournament. That’s fine so long as you win all those games. But playing a murderer’s row of a schedule can backfire if you don’t beat a few of those big names early and if you don’t then win your conference tournament. One or two years of whiffing on the tournament and that cathedral of winning you were building is back to being an outhouse.

The list of once up-and-coming basketball situations that have flat-lined over time is significant: George Washington, Tulsa, Southern Illinois… and the list goes on. Often this is because the coach left for green (literally, as in cash) pastures. But what we’re seeing at Butler isn’t a coach making something from nothing, but rather one super-coach creating a legacy out of a tradition of winning (again, similar to Xavier and Gonzaga). Stevens got the Butler job when his boss, Todd Lickliter, left for Iowa. Now Lickliter is no longer the coach at Iowa, because he got fired for not winning. But Lickliter had taken over from Thad Matta who had only coached one season at Butler before leaving for… Xavier.

Xavier has its own long legacy of winning, which can be dated to the hiring of Pete Gillen back in 1985. Gillen went a ridiculous 202–75 in his ten years in Cincinnati and took the school to its first Sweet 16 in 1990. Gillen beget Skip Prosser (148–65 at Xavier), who kept on winning. Prosser handed off to Matta (78–23, 1 Elite Eight), who handed off to Sean Miller (120–47, 1 Sweet 16, 1 Elite Eight), now at Arizona, who bequeathed to Chris Mack (50–17 in two seasons, 1 Sweet 16). The Musketeers’ lasting success has long been undervalued, as has its pre-eminence as a starting place for future coaching stars. Butler is now on a similar trajectory — only with a higher arc.

The flip side for the super-successful mid-majors is the expectations that come with long-term success. Gonzaga is now expected to post a conference title winner and compete for a spot in the Final Four. Never mind that the Bulldogs have never been to a Final Four — and haven’t reached the Elite Eight since 1999. Based on their profile and their history, the Zags have come to be thought of as the basketball power on the West Coast. Xavier plays in a more prominent conference so their chances for an at-large berth are usually somewhat better. Butler now stands as the standard bearer for small schools playing big-time basketball. That weight can be crushing if the right players are not in place. Stevens has been able to count on junior guard Shelvin Mack — a tough kid from the University of Kentucky’s back porch that the Wildcats ignored — and senior Matt Howard — a local Indiana kid with grit and non-stop energy — for two years. It’s time for Howard to leave, and Mack has played his way into the NBA Draft conversation. How Stevens replaces them will go far in determining the future of the burgeoning Bulldogs dynasty.

And then, of course, there’s the question of keeping Stevens himself around. After Butler’s remarkable run last season, Stevens signed a mammoth contract extension that would (in theory at least) keep him as coach until 2021–22. Nonetheless, his name crops up whenever there’s a prominent coaching vacancy in the power six conferences. Stevens insists he’s happy where he is, but his record to date is 10–3 in the last four years in the NCAA tournament. That’s not just good. That’s all-time good;that’s Rick Pitino good; that’s Roy Williams good. But what is there to gain from jumping to a bigger program? More games on television? Sure. An easier time recruiting blue-chip recruits? Probably. And yet, would he win more or be a bigger name or reach higher heights?

There are many cautionary tales here. Take Dan Monson, who put Gonzaga on the map, then catapulted from Spokane to Minneapolis to revive a Minnesota Gophers program reeling from NCAA penalties. Ended up that Monson had none of the fun and all of the pain that comes along with coaching a hobbled Big Ten also-ran and now he’s back in the little time, at Long Beach State. Ask Monson if he made the right move leaving the friendly confines of Spokane. If he says yes, he’s lying to you.

But the lure of the bright lights of an Indiana or Kentucky or, heck, maybe even Duke might be too much for Stevens to pass up one day. But until then fans of college basketball can enjoy watching a dynasty in the making, one built at a school in a small conference that plays in a gym called Hinkle Fieldhouse.

In the Final Four, Stevens and his upstart Bulldogs will face the other surprise team of the tournament: Virginia Commonwealth. VCU has a strong recent history, albeit nothing on the scale of Butler’s last two seasons. VCU coach Shaka Smart has taken his Colonial Athletic Association member school to new heights after barely making it into the tournament at all. Proving all those pundits and doubters wrong will be a major motivation for the Rams. Were it to win, and were Kentucky to get past UCONN in the other semifinal match-up, VCU will have beaten teams from each of the six major conferences on the way to a national title.

UCONN has made its own remarkable run, winning five games in five days to win the Big East tournament, then four more to get to the Final Four. Huskies star Kemba Walker stands on the verge of cementing his NCAA legacy, à la Danny Manning or Carmelo Anthony. Or standing there at the tip could be the Kentucky Wildcats, whose defense and determination overcame probably any team’s toughest two-game stretch in the draw so far in Ohio State and North Carolina. Kentucky’s ardent fans and oft-maligned head coach may be despised by those outside the Bluegrass, but a closer look finds much to like about John Calipari’s actual team: guts, guile, rock-solid defense and an unbelievable will.

With no top seeds left, this Final Four might look a little like someone shook up the brackets and this crazy mess is what spit out, but that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay. Because one team’s fans are going to experience the joy of a thoroughly unexpected national championship. And maybe the rest of us will get to see some college kids no one expected to be there grab that big win. The win that can turn a team of afterthoughts into household names, or a scrappy undersized scoring guard into a legend, or a small school in Richmond into the center of the basketball universe. Or maybe, if things work out that way, we’ll see the next, and biggest, steps in the building of a new basketball dynasty, straight out of the Horizon league. Wouldn’t that be something?

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

Photo by bradjward.

I know you were busily reading the newspaper cover to cover this weekend, so you won’t have missed the exceedingly important piece by Nicolai Ouroussoff on the Barnes Foundation, the Getty and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: three museums built in America by wackos that have since (after their founders’ deaths, of course) been taken astray of their intentions by their current managers. The Barnes (which has on exhibit more Cezannes than you can see in all of France, should that be a thing you would ever want) is currently in the last gasps of a long legal fight, which seems to be ending badly for the people who would like it not to be uprooted and moved to downtown Philadelphia. Everything interesting becomes made dull for profit! Attend the Barnes before June 30th, if you can! And then, join me in never visiting it again.

by Matthew Wollin

1.
Offices are awkward. Suddenly, for no compelling reason, you begin spending most of your waking hours in intimate contact with the same strangers every day. You are obligated into friendship, necessitated into a camaraderie whose boundaries are anything but clear. Is it weird if you want to be friends, or worse if you do not? What if (God forbid) there is someone in the office that you like — like, like-like? There’s no avoiding it, no deluding yourself into thinking it’s fine; you are forced to see that person every single day, horribly and thrillingly. The situation is repetitive but lacks security: we all know we are just circumstantial friends. This is awkwardness at its most quotidian, inane and purest form.

What is it exactly? An emotion? A fabrication? A blinding moment of unforgiving clarity? It’s like porn: you know awkward when you see it. There are awkward people, awkward situations, awkward thoughts to have at awkward times. There is the word itself, which is wonderfully onomatopoetic in its own peculiar way. It is something that always matters more or less than you think, and never just as much.

2.
Something of awkwardness pervades urban life in general, underwriting the briefest of glances and interactions with worlds of potential mishaps and misunderstandings. Subways in particular: Hi, I don’t know you, but that pole you’re holding for stability? Well, I need it too, and if I move at all I’m going to jump to second base with three strangers simultaneously, so can I just reach around you like we’re cuddling on the couch instead? And no, I’m not checking you out, I promise, I’m actually trying to check out the person next to me by looking at the reflection in the window, which is why I’m going to super-casually look in the other direction at that mom with her kid — oh God, eye contact — and then look back quickly, and now we just made eye contact again because of course you’ve been watching me this whole time because you’re not an IDIOT like me, and now there’s no way you don’t think I’m checking you out, and now the person next to me also thinks that I’m checking you out so there’s no chance there, and that mom with the stroller that I stared at also thinks I’m a creepster, and oh, all of you just got off the train and I’m never going to see any of you in my life again and here I am alone.

The quality of the awkwardness can determine into which category a relationship falls. Strangers, passers-by on the street, exist only through its lens, each of you jumbled, incoherent fragments of action and perception to the other. Foreigners are people with whom you don’t even share the same notion of what constitutes awkwardness. Friends are made through awkwardness shared, inventing ways of laughing and living together that only we can understand. A romance progresses as you pass through all the other stages — the figments and preconceptions and expectations of physical intimacy — to the awkwardness of reality, and the heart-pounding thrill of being exposed in every way at the same time.

3.
For something so small and irritating, so embarrassing, awkwardness has a habit of inspiring near-religious reverence, particularly among young people making its and each other’s first acquaintance, initiated into the painful, measured ways of adult self-consciousness. This is largely because of that first awkwardness, the thing itself, the one that needs no explanation and from which all other awkwardnesses stem: puberty. An awkward word whose component parts are scarcely less awkward than the whole, whose mere mention makes me want to go crawl under a rock until the world has moved to a different backyard. Locker rooms, bathrooms, classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, bedrooms, basements, kitchens, the outdoors. Just thinking about it is enough to make me blush burningly and send me flashing back to gangly teenage years and the discovery that things are all so much grosser and more complicated and above all more awkward than you thought they were yesterday.

With age comes the supposed remedy: pretending that you understand the reasons why you’re awkward and believing in other peoples’ constructions of same. Now, instead of ignoring the issue, you confront it head on, openly and publicly analyzing everything that hints at awkwardness so that it becomes a bridge instead of a divide. Suddenly it’s cool to be as awkward as you can. It’s possible to take this even farther as well, using awkwardness as a weapon to cut through the social fabric. Some people hold their awkwardness out for all to see, brandishing it so obviously and so awkwardly that awkwardness passes from social phenomenon to metaphysical condition. This is awkwardness that physically, tangibly hurts. So acute that neither you nor those around you can ignore it and must confront it head on.

4.
Which is where romance comes in, subsuming awkwardness and rendering it not only charged but erotic. Because there’s always sex, whether implicit or explicit, consummated or unfulfilled. Sex fulfills and transcends the awkward promise of puberty, offering justification for the pain and embarrassment and sheer amount of effort it took to get through those years. But it brings with it a new form of awkwardness, too; the awkwardness of exposing yourself, bit by bit, to another person as he or she does the same, until both of you are confronted by the existence of an individual who is somehow both a part of you and not at all what you thought.

On one end, there’s the No Strings Attached/Friends With Benefits/Strings Attached to Friends genre of contemporary romance (or non-romance, rather), which is so conspicuous in its trumpeting a brave, new non-awkward paradigm that something about it becomes deeply unsettling in its manic cheer. On the other, there’s Kitty and Levin, or Jane and Mr. Rochester — stories in which tens of thousands of words are spent consummating awkwardness. There are a whole range of approaches in between and beyond these: awkwardness as a bluntly erotic turn-on during revolution (The Unbearable Lightness of Being); awkwardness as what unites two youthful outcasts (anything with Michael Cera); awkwardness made epic, intoxicatingly surmounted and then banished forever (Romeo and the other one). Flirtation makes a game of it; hookups plunge into and past it; dates codify it and make it livable.

Awkwardness lives outside your mind. Instead, it makes itself known somewhere between your cheeks and your heart and your stomach. It breathes out of every uncomfortable pore of the body. It is so insistent in its demand to be acknowledged that it becomes, by necessity, a delectable, guilty pleasure, until it seems the only possibly solution is to introduce your full awkwardness to the other person and either descend to earth or ascend together to heaven.

5.
I’ve traveled a fair bit, and as far as I have encountered, English is the only language that codifies this particular concept. There are approximations elsewhere, but none are so unforgiving or profoundly undignified. French has maladroit, which in typical French fashion is both more beautiful and less useful. Spanish speakers have incomodo, or dificil, or maybe peculiar, but their plurality dilutes their impact. I don’t know what German has, but it probably sounds like it hurts.

Consequently, much of my traveling has been spent in thrall to awkwardness that only I had the word to define. Being in other cultures lends the most minute of interactions an electrifying valence in which every step and every syllable results in either triumph or public failure. I would have explained why I stammered and stuttered and blushed when I meant to ask where the train station was and instead asked how to find the Eastern War, but the word I would have used would have meant nothing to these gorgeously sympathetic foreigners looking on in pity.

English has awkward. English awkwards alone. Does this mean that English speakers are actually and quantifiably the most awkward people on earth? I find this plausible, if a bit disheartening. There is no doubt a linguo-historical explanation. Maybe once upon a time awkwardness performed some roundabout evolutionary function, such as prompting removal from social situations that could damage one’s reputation and hinder one’s chances to find a mate and reproduce. Maybe it gave English speakers a way to stand out at evolutionarily significant parties. Maybe evolution just got bored with efficiency and decided to have some fun.

I suppose it may be our burden to bear. But I wish everyone else could know how delicious it is to awkward. It’s the great leveler of contemporary society: no one is so exalted that they are exempt. There is something beautiful and admirable in its impartiality — neither for you or against you, but simply a great blank, a uniquely synthetic and human creation. By Jove, it’s what separates us from the beasts!

6.
We (or maybe just I) have fetishized it — but more to our strength than our detriment, I’d argue. We do not fit like pieces of a puzzle; we do not want to. Awkwardness is a warning against complacency. A connection with the incomprehensible achieved only through immersion in contemporary life, a moment of awareness of the gap between your perception and understanding. It is the urbane corollary to the antique sublime: the social vista that slaps you in the face with the breadth of what you still don’t understand. It is watching James Franco and Anne Hathaway co-host the Oscars.

That’s part of why I like traveling so much, almost in spite of myself. Right after I return is when I feel it most acutely. I am in Dulles airport catching a connection to JFK, coming back from my gamble at being French, five months of melancholy and three weeks of pride at the close. I can finally understand what everyone around me is saying, and it is all so stupid. Eight hours earlier, every person was brilliantly, incomprehensibly articulate and unfathomably self-aware, a petrifying challenge I loved more than I realized.

There’s a strange pleasure in allowing awkwardness to become the defining feature of my actions. There’s a security in the foreignness, when nobody knows me or the guilty, deep-seated secret that I’m nothing more than who I seem to be. Perhaps that is the appeal: the constant presence of The Awkward makes the difference between my various reasons for foreignness difficult to discern. I am always, reliably apart. Whereas here, in the same language as everyone else, awkwardness exposes truths I cannot explain away so easily.

Which is why I say, perhaps against my own better judgment, Up With Awkward! Here’s to reveling in uncomfortableness until it becomes a tool to expose inanity. Here’s to forcing visceral meaning into the monotony of the everyday. Here’s to the painful disruption of complacency. Here’s to awkward endings.

Matthew Wollin lives in New York. He has no other pertinent personality traits.

Remember how freaked out everyone was a couple months ago about all the birds that were dying? No one cares anymore, right? That’s probably because now we know that even if all the birds die, it doesn’t matter. We can just make new ones that look and fly pretty much exactly the same.

“A soap gun in the wrong hands, especially when dried, painted and of sophisticated design, is capable of deceiving and instilling fear.”
 — A report from Her Majesty’s Prison Service applauds the detective work of one of its guards, who, made curious by the large amounts of cleanser an inmate was making use of, discovered among his possessions a replica of a handgun constructed from soap. There is also, of course, this: “The plot emerged as jails across the UK were also warned to beware of boots with” — wait for it — “concealed knives that flick out…”

The Awl Bracket Contest Update: The One Where Readers Find Out That The Tournament Is Still Going On!

Believe it or not, the NCAA college basketball tournament is still going on! In fact, it’s a very exciting tournament that is currently taking place! Upsets (teams that are seeded lower and less favored to win, are defeating teams that are higher seeded and more favored to win!) are happening left and right! Here’s how crazy it is: Of the almost 6 million brackets filled out on ESPN, only TWO of them correctly predicted the Final Four (the four teams that make it to the semifinals) correctly. That is a very low percentage! I’m not sure if you’ll believe this, but none of the intrepid Awl sports fans were also unable to correctly predict the Final Four. Sad face! But we still have updates to be done!

VCU is in Richmond! People are really into talking about this for some reason. The “TWO TEAMS FROM RICHMOND” fact was one that was mentioned repeatedly and emphatically when Richmond and VCU both made the Sweet Sixteen. Not sure why people are so into Richmond, Virginia.

College players aren’t getting paid but their coaches are! The narrative of college athletes not getting paid is always hovers over the conversation, but it seems especially noteworthy this weekend when you consider that Kentucky coach John Calipari made $175,000 with yesterday’s win to send Kentucky to the Final Four. That makes his haul for this school year more than $4 million dollars. In comparison, the college players will make $0, maybe some free clothes depending on the school’s athletic sponsorships, and will be very seriously penalized if any other earnings from outside sources are reported. That seems a little unfair right?

But enough about real sports issues, what about The Awl’s bracket contest(?)! Curiously enough, someone who’s username is “Bryan H” has a bracket named “Shannon” and this person is in first. Isn’t that weird? What is this person’s real name? Is it Shannon? Is it actually a woman using someone else’s (Bryan H’s) account to fill out her bracket? What’s their relationship like? Dating? Newly exclusive? Are things going well? Too much too soon? Did he fill out her bracket for her? Is he still paying for everything? That’s nice of him. I hope he doesn’t expect anything in return though. That would be unfair to Shannon. Realistically they will be winning this whole contest (hopefully we’ll be invited to their wedding) because they have the highest point potential left, with Kentucky winning the national championship.

Otherwise it seems like everyone else is doing pretty miserably, not only do we all not have the relationship and companionship that Bryan and Shannon have, but we are also incredibly miserable at picking sports team winners. Adam and Edith, because of their UConn picks and with many thanks to Kemba Walker, are still in the mix to finish in the top 5 (which is good because we’re not giving anyone anything for finishing 2nd place and below). No other Awl pals are faring particularly well: “Deep Omega”, “KarenUhOh”, Lindsay Robertson, and “Boy of Destiny” are also in the mix, but, in case I haven’t made it entirely clear yet, this is all really Bryan and Shannon’s contest to lose. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we’re all rooting for them though.

Of course one must remember that there are “lots” of lady reporters and thinkers and pundits in Washington D.C., in addition to all the men. Because without this sprinkling of ladies, how would all the important men there who furiously write their blogs be regularly reminded of all those long years until their mid-20s, at which time they first (and possibly last) got to second base with a human?

If you feel confused or uninformed whenever we mention “bunga-bunga,” you will find this handy guide to be very helpful.

“He played with a real bright, animated sound with lots of picking, but he could take off into blues licks at the same time. Nobody every played quite like he did, and after that it became known as ‘the Mooney sound.’”
 — Ralph Mooney, who played pedal steel guitar behind Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings died of cancer last week. His style was an important component of the Californian “Bakersfield sound,” as well as the “outlaw” country music that thrived in the ’70s. In 1956, he co-wrote the song “Crazy Arms,” a no. 1 hit for Ray Price, that would become a standard of the genre. Mooney was 82.