As my variously diseased sports-watching habits go, my fondness for college basketball feels like the most disreputable. The Mets are a family thing. West Coast MLB and NBA games, between teams I don't care about, are mostly about proving that I am allowed to stay up as late as I want. Choosing to watch the Horizon League semifinals, on the other hand, is just very difficult to excuse. I'm not gambling on it, and I'm not even expecting it to impact my bracket in any meaningful way. I could claim that I am just doing enough so I don't embarrass myself for our annual visit from the college basketball data maven and all-around titan Ken Pomeroy for a March Madness episode. But I know that's not it. I am just failing the marshmallow test, over and over, for the entire month of March, every year.
I am fine with this, by the way. I greatly enjoyed Ken's visit on this week's episode. I still didn't know what I was talking about, but it was fun to ask general questions of a real expert and get detailed and informed answers in return. While we talked about this year's men's tournament bracket and the unusually top-heavy crop of title contenders, we also talked about the stuff that will actually make the tournament fun to watch: the surprisingly varied styles of the teams that have been out ahead of the field all year, what a good college basketball roster looks like in this weird moment in the sport, how the transfer market actually works and why, and what has happened to the 5-12 upset.
There's plenty of goofy stuff in there as well, and some moments when I found myself explaining some objectively depraved game-watching and fandom behaviors. It is a strange thing to find oneself suddenly explaining High Point University's whole deal—it has branded itself as a school for rich kids to learn how to do rich-kid stuff—with great confidence to people you respect, but I suppose I earned it. There is some Speedy Claxton chat, a digression about recruiting ace Slice Rohrssen, a frank consideration of Rick Pitino's health, and other things of that nature. It's debatable how much anyone needs to know any of this, but I learned more about it all during the course of our conversation, and that feels like enough.
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