Chuck Klosterman: evaluation

Transcript context

…In college basketball, if so many of the good players are one and done, the coach doesn’t get to imprint an identity on the franchise. Players just want to signal they have upside potential to become lottery picks. How is it that college basketball is even still worth watching? Well, the first thing I will say is that when I think about sports experiences in my life — and I’m discounting “Oh, this team I wanted to win lost,” or “This team I hated succeeded,” and I discount terrible injuries to people or the death of Len Bias or whatever — when I think about things in sports that have disappointed me over the course of my life, the decline in college basketball is probably at the top of the list. I would say that and the introduction of instant replay are the two things that disappoint me most about the way sports has changed over time. College basketball now is solely the March Madness tournament. That seems to be the only thing even relatively serious college basketball fans care about. Because the best players play the shortest amount of time, it is real difficult to get a sense of what these guys are like and what the coach is trying to do beyond succeed. I guess that is part of it. When you think of college basketball in the ’70s and the ’80s, and you think of John Wooden and Bobby Knight and Dean Smith and John Thompson and all these guys, you think about these coaches who had consistently strong teams and teams that had a real clear identity. You could look at these teams, and you would almost see when a kid graduates and a new kid is recruited, he’s the replacement for that guy, both as a position on the floor but also as what they would bring to the team. That is gone now. The fact that Duke does this, especially . . . People thought they might be the last holdout of this, but they are not. When Calipari succeeded at Kentucky, it proved that this is the best way to build a great team. You get the best collection of kids coming out of high school, put them together, and accept that college basketball now is more an extension of AAU basketball than high school basketball. If you’re asking me, “Why is it worth watching?” It’s like, “Well, I still watch it.” But I will say this: There was a long stretch of my life where, if there was a pro game on and a college game on, I would always watch the college game. Now that’s never the case. Now I will always watch the pro game. Is there too much gambling money in sports today?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.