For the Love of the Game

**WARNING**

Unfavorable opinions about the NBA and the Chicago Cubs expressed below.

If you don't like it, don't read it...

To be honest, I don't follow basketball. I can't stand the NBA and think that is a complete snoozefest. In my opinion, it hasn't been worth watching since Michael Jordan played. I think that the NBA is nothing but a bunch of show-boating. I believe, and this is just my own opinion, that the NBA players care less about their sport than other professional athletes. Maybe it's how much the sport has been rocked by scandal over the last few years... guns in locker rooms, brawls between the crowd and the players (the Pistons/Pacers fight is still one of the best youTube videos ever), gambling referees... it gets a little old. And as much as I love the NFL and MLB, they too have been rocked by scandal and stupidity.

I used to watch college basketball, but fell out of it in recent years. As a matter of fact, I have fallen out of watching college sports period over the last few years, I am rarely home on Saturdays to watch the football games and basketball isn't really my thing. But that doesn't mean that I have any less respect for them. On the contrary. I think college sports (more specifically football and basketball) have a tendency to be more exciting to watch than their professional counterparts.

There are more historic programs in college. Think Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma... These programs have been around for decades, some even more than a century. In pro sports, you can move a team anywhere you want and call them anything you want if your franchise has enough money to do it. With this history comes major rivalries. Rivalries only matched in intensity by some MLB teams (because they have been around longer than either the NBA or NFL). And rivalries make it more fun to be a fan. Let's be honest, would it be as much fun to be a Cardinals fan if you didn't have the Cubs fans and players to wail on? No. That is something that I feel, for the most part, the NFL and NBA is lacking.

In college sports there is always room for a major upset. NCAA basketball is a prime example. Every year there is always some sleeper team just waiting quietly in the wings to screw up 99% of the countries brackets (NIU vs. Kansas anyone?). The same goes for college football. Sure a handful of teams make it to the BCS year after year, but it will stay that way until they eliminate the BCS all together and implement a playoff system.... But even with the statistical nonsense that is the BCS, their is always some smaller school coming out of nowhere that makes the Bowl series more interesting. This makes it more exciting to watch because you never know what is going to happen.

I think the element of surprise that college sports has over professional sports has a lot to do with the almost constant change of talent. Players graduate or enter the draft every year, leaving room for fresh faces. If you have a great coaching and recruiting staff then you usually fare pretty well, but everyone has their slumps. For instance, Florida has had a pretty stellar few years with Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow at the helm, but with Tebow graduated and Meyer stepping down for health reasons then it should be interesting to see how they fair next year.
It's true that the pro teams get new players every year, but they usually don't get start time right out of the gate. Let me emphasize the "usually", there are guys who have great rookie seasons (Rookie of the Year awards. Duh.) But not everyone is a Mark Sanchez, some guys are Brady Quinns. So you tend to see the same players year after year, which is easier to predict the outcomes.

In my mind there is almost a sense of purity to college sports. They aren't paid, no salary caps, no contract negotiations, no free agents. They have their fair share of stupidity too (I am looking at you Tennessee). But when you watch an NFL game, and they are announcing the starting line-ups for the teams, they also announce the school they went to. Not what team they were traded from for a couple of draft picks and some cash.