Jake Russell
@oreojakesters
Everything has seemingly been doom and gloom surrounding college basketball in regards to the makeup of the state of the game as of late. Full grown European men and NBA players are able to join teams, legends of the game like Coach K, Tony Bennett, and Jay Wright have jumped ship due to the new era, and the NIL and transfer portal has seemingly made the gap between the midmajors that make the Cinderella stories and the blue bloods larger than ever.
There are some positives that have come with the new era that we’re living in- players are more likely to stay in college for several years after the era of the one-and-done, creating more household names (they just happen to be wearing different colored laundry each year), and the NBA draft is now filled with names of guys that likely got to play in college and make a name for themselves in March Madness rather than go through alternative programs as unknown commodities since they can get paid here.
What really could save the sport is what’s happening in college football with Indiana and Curt Cignetti.
Cignetti took over from James Madison University and took his entire team with him to the losingest-program in FBS history to a major conference and turned the team around within one year with the anger and fire of a thousand suns and merely expects to win each game. They’re in a major conference, they’re always going to be known as a basketball school, and that gives him a permanent chip on his shoulder for a team that’s #1 in the country and now competing for a National Championship. It may be the largest turnaround ever.
Some of the closest equivalents we’ve gotten to that in basketball was Jim Calhoun at UConn, taking the Huskies of rural Storrs, Connecticut and suddenly they’re a blue blood in both men’s and women’s college hoops, or even Mark Few at Gonzaga, who, while not having cut down the nets just yet, turned the private school in Spokane into a force to be reckoned with year after year with early success recruiting internationally to make it a powerhouse.
But nothing has been done like Cignetti has done at IU, where a team tinkering on irrelevance is suddenly a powerhouse by taking advantage of this new time period.
What would be the equivalent of that? Will Wade was a gangster at LSU, the football school, but got caught on a wiretap about his offer.
Imagine the team of Ivy League powerhouse Yale taking their coaching staff and team of geniuses to the University of Washington- a basketball program that has been around since 1896 and has a win % of just .602 and seemingly irrelevant despite being a major state school, and turning it around. But then afterwards, James Jones does nothing but gloat and come at the throats of Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Tim Izzo and the others claiming they deserve to be amongst those greats in the conversations.
“Yeah, not only are we better than you on the court, but they’re smarter than you off the court, too, so we’re pretty much better at life than you.”
“I’m sure the players at Kentucky are super happy about their paychecks right now before they go to the NBA. In Seattle, we are about the win column.”
“In 49 other states, it’s just basketball? I guess after our win at Assembly Hall we were the 50th state where it meant more tonight.”
That’s how we save college basketball for the culture: a Cignetti Cinderella story.
