Up until Saturday night, the athletic legacy of the University of California San Diego centered on its national championship-level surfing team. Yeah, surfing—it’s a sport, and you SEC-centric troglodytes will have to deal with it. You don't like it? Go take it up with your fussy Airbnb host/god, Nick Saban.
And surfing is very much the sort of sport that a school like UCSD would be good at. UCSD is mostly known as a Public Ivy—long on brain, mostly indifferent to brawn. It tried football for one year a long time ago, went 0-7, and determined that high-speed human collisions weren't for them, as smart folks might. The athletic department has done good work in other areas, but surfing is the calling card. If only there were raftloads of NIL money that came with it.
But on Saturday night, UCSD and all its knowledge and thinking and theoreticals and curiosities became just another jock factory. For all the arts projects and scholarly pursuits and research grants and that well-stocked library, UCSD gave in to the new national emphasis on sporty stuff and tracked its sandy Crocs onto college basketball's most hallowed halls. Twice!
UCSD, which just got cleared to play Division I basketball this year after being told to cool its heels during some probationary years by the administrative mall cops at the NCAA as penance for the temerity of wanting to be a Division I school, put both its men's and women's teams into their respective national tournament fields for the first time ever, and in their first year of eligibility. That achievement will get both teams onto national television at least once, and deliver to UCSD fans their first real exposure to the central truth about The Big Dances, which is this:
People don't care about your stories. They don't care that you're a land grant institution full of brainiacs, or why smart folks go there and come out smarter for everyone's benefit. They want to know if you can win as a live 12-seed. Also most of them mostly want to know if you'll cover. Tritons, you're adults now. Welcome to big kids' sports.
The two NCAA basketball brackets were announced Sunday, and both the Tritons and Tritons were there as full-fledged bracketeers after winning their respective Big West conference tournaments. UCSD's men's team arrived as a very live three-point dog against Big Ten Tournament champion Michigan, and the Tritons certainly have the profile of a March assassin. They shoot lots of threes and prevent same, and take care of the basketball when they have to and take it away whenever they can. They are a classically ominous 12-seed, in short, which is high praise given that the 12 seed beats the five more than a third of the time; we should probably flag this bit as Not Gambling Advice.
We’d be late to the party, anyway—ESPN's phalanx of semi-learned gasbags acknowledged as much Sunday evening. The Tritons are 30-4 and have a 15-game winning streak, which will get people's attention, especially as an 11- or 12-seed. As a 13, well, feh. That's another lesson: the tournament is about making mathematical judgments based on seedings—arbitrary and entirely non-negotiable judgments issued by athletic directors who know remarkably little beyond squeezing a sponsor's shoes. And by those standards, 12's have a throw-weight that 13's don't. Take it up with the NCAA if you don’t like it. They'll appreciate that you still think they have something to say about anything.
And then there is UCSD’s women's team, a powerhouse in Division II but fresh off four consecutive losing seasons at the higher level under Heidi VanDerveer, the sister of recently retired Stanford coaching legend Tara VanDerveer. The Tritons—mercifully, they do not feminize their team nickname, as remains the custom with a number of other women's teams—won their first game of the season and then lost the next eight, and had to win the Big West Tournament to get to 20-15 and claim the automatic berth that placed them in a play-in matchup on Wednesday night against SWAC champion Southern. The winner will receive the honor of serving as the nail against reigning sledgehammer UCLA on Friday. Unlike the men, the UCSD women would not be anyone’s trendy upset pick if they make it that far; to this day only one 16-seed, the 1988 Harvards, have ever won even one game in the women’s bracket—over Stanford and the elder VanDerveer, as it happens. The average score of a 1-16 game in the 30 years of this matchup is 87-48. You come to take pictures and buy the merch, but you do not stay for the weekend.
But that is a problem for later. For now, it's the getting there that matters. At UCSD, it was about winning, stepping up in class, and then losing until they found a way to win again, and this is where they are now. The last game will mean less than the 20 before it, and for the Tritons, that winding past only serves to make the future more alluring. The good old days start Wednesday.
Let others fret needlessly about North Carolina making the tournament while a more deserving Indiana did not. If it makes you happy, go ahead and believe that the fix was in all along because the chairman of the selection committee is the AD at Chapel Hill. We don't know that any more than you do; we're just trying to help boost your corruption-tolerance in a way that will better prepare you for our new world order. This isn’t gambling advice, either, but we're all in on UCSD basketball, twice, if only because it is time that they end the crushing hegemony of the think-tank surfers who used to own the joint.
