It is a fact that seven of the eight teams in the men's and women's Final Four were the top seeds in their respective brackets, but what that means is a different and much more debatable thing. (That the sole exception is two-seed UConn in the women's bracket is less debatable, that one is just funny.) Is it bad, or even a letdown, that the good teams are pretty much exactly as good as advertised? Does the ideal state of March Madness depend upon a certain baseline level of chaos, or is it just enough to watch a bunch of college basketball played with the appropriate balance of mastery and freaked-out teenage overage over a couple of manic weeks? Also, what did Drew's dad get into it with a waiter in Ypsilanti, Michigan years ago? Surprisingly or not, only the last question is not given a decently comprehensive answer in this week's episode.
Joining us for all this is Michigan Bureau Chief Maitreyi Anantharaman, who has covered the women's bracket and followed the men's one as a not-quite-nonpartisan observer, and who is currently on her way down to Tampa for the Women's Final Four. With the exception of that opening bit about Questionable Dad Moves in restaurant situations and a late leap into the Funbag, we pretty much talked ball in this one. That meant not just a consideration of whether March Madness can still be fun when it is something more like March Normalness, but a sort of viewer's guide to which players and teams are the most fun to watch and why. This meant a visit to the MiLaysia Fulwiley appreciation station, answering questions about how weird people will be about Paige Bueckers as a WNBA player and what is so satisfying it is to watch her as a college player, a discussion about how good UCLA is and the ways in which the Bruins are good, and an attempt to suss out whether South Carolina is worse than they were last year, or just different.
We ran down the men's bracket, too, which is even chalkier than the women's and highlighted by a distressingly likable Duke team. A lot of this bit was highlighted by a back-and-forth attempt to figure out how mad to be about the way things have shaken out on the men's side. Has the optimization of the men's game via NIL and rampant transfer portal transit cost the tournament the element of surprise? Does it matter if the games are better? We talked about Auburn as the avatar of the new college basketball powerhouses being a bunch of 22-year-old guys who've played at three previous programs, Jon Scheyer's Duke as a counterpoint and a throwback, and whether or not The Game We Love Is Gone.
After the break, we discussed the biggest basketball story in the land, which is that the Pistons are good. We talked about how bad Maitreyi's beloved team had been over the last decade and change, the importance of memories of better times, and why her guys are so rowdy? It is at this point that the pace of the podcast picks up rapidly, and the next few minutes found us talking about baseball's weird new bats, Maitreyi finding the Michigan angle on those weird new bats, and the best and worst crossword crutch-words.
A podcast that has achieved that kind of velocity can only be approaching the Funbag, and soon enough we were there. A listener discussed his quest to figure out which guys on pro sports teams know who Eddie Vedder is. This led us, somehow, to the possibility of Kirk Cousins returning to the Vikings and a dark secret I'd been keeping from Drew for weeks now. We agreed to disagree on whether it was possible that J.J. McCarthy does know who Eddie Vedder is but Kirk Cousins doesn't. The question of what it would take to make you quit your team went in some highly personalized directions. Maitreyi posited that she'd check out if her team won a championship or just got too good; I spent a lot of time talking about how mad I got when the New Jersey Nets removed "New Jersey" from the front of their uniforms; Drew considered the possibilities of the Minnesota Vikings winning their first Super Bowl after the NFL had fragmented into something LIV Golf–adjacent and unrecognizable. Given how ready we were with our respective worst-case scenarios, it's no wonder that we were so cheerful about accepting a slightly less-mad March. It could always get worse.
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