C'mon Now

As TigerBlog saw the end of games like Abilene Christian-Texas or Oral Roberts-Ohio State or Ohio-Virginia in the NCAA men's basketball tournament, he had one thought:

He's looking forward to seeing the videos the winning schools put together for their own 25th anniversary celebrations will look like.

Okay, maybe it wasn't his only thought. Still, he did think about it, after the way his colleague Cody Chrusciel recently put together the three-part series "10 Days In March" about Princeton's own NCAA tournament win over UCLA 25 years ago.

Sometimes spending three decades in college athletic communications impacts your world view, right?

Even more than just making a video in 25 years, how will it be shared with the public? Back when Princeton beat UCLA, there was no social media and very little internet. Most people didn't like the internet because of how long it took to load pages or even connect through dial-up, and nobody but nobody thought it was even remotely safe or smart to buy something online (what, put your credit card number out there?).

Cody cut his video in three parts, none more than 10 minutes long, to fit on Twitter. What will all this be like in 2046, when the 2021 versions of "10 Days In March" get produced?

There is nobody who has any idea at all. It would be cool to know, just like it would be cool to go back 25 years and explain the future to the people then and have them give you quizzical looks.

There might not be flying cars yet, like TB was promised there would be in the 21st century back when he was a kid, but hey, the world certainly does not look like remotely like it did back then.

Even on the most simplistic level, TigerBlog's job as the men's basketball contact back in 1996 during that UCLA game would have been completely different had there been anything resembling the technologies that exist these days. If nothing else, TB would not have been sitting there just watching the game and feeding notes to the CBS announcers.

As TB has been saying, it's a completely different world in 2021.

Or is it?

If you watched the NCAA men's tournament this weekend, you probably enjoyed the games, especially the double digit seeds and small schools that scored major upsets. Hey, that's what the tournament is all about.

And as you know, as TB always says, the tournament is unique in that it gets less exciting with each successive round, largely because of the absence of games like that and because there are just fewer and fewer games at all. 

So TB hopes you enjoyed the first round, which is the best part and as good a two-days as there are in the American sporting calendar.

Having said that, it was hard not to do a little (actually a lot) of head-shaking at this year's men's basketball tournament. Why? Because of the stories that came out about the differences in treatment that the men's tournament was supposed to get versus the women's tournament.

What the heck?

The men's players received much nicer tournament gifts. Okay. Were that it, then it might not be as big a deal.

There were also major discrepancies in the strength and conditioning equipment that were provided for the men and the women, something that was exposed by Oregon women's player Sedona Prince, in a social media video that had more than five million views.

Prince's video sparked an outrage and a backlash, and the NCAA tried to make amends over the weekend. By then, the statement had been made, whether intentionally or not: The women's tournament was not as big a deal as the men's tournament.

Of course, Prince's video and the subsequent social media postings of others were followed by hundreds of comments that said something along the lines of "hey, when the girls bring in the same money, they can get the same stuff." That's such insulting thinking, but worse, it also misses the main point.

Should Alabama men's basketball get less than Alabama football because Alabama football brings in more money? Is money generated the only critieria? 

How about the law? How about Title IX, which says it's not legal to discriminate based on sex for educational institutions that receive federal aid (which is all of them). 

Or how about just common sense? Was there nobody at the NCAA who saw this and thought "what are we doing here?" 

TigerBlog won't pretend to know all of the meetings that went into planning these two bubble tournaments (not easy in the first place to do). He won't pretend to know how it works at the NCAA.

He will hope that nobody at the NCAA saw both weightrooms and said "yeah, that's fine." He would really hope that isn't the case, and he knows for a 100 percent certainty that would never happen at Princeton.

The NCAA was rightly called out for what happened, by prominent women's coaches and the media, not to mention on social media. TB didn't see any Power 5 men's coaches who called out the NCAA, so he apologizes if they did and he just didn't see it.

It's 2021 people. It shouldn't have come to this in the first place. 

It doesn't matter how much money either tournament generates. 

What matters is providing equitable opportunities.