The other day, I was shooting the shit with a buddy of mine about the Arizona Wildcats men’s basketball team.
That rag-tag collective of Dolph Lundgren lookalikes from the former Soviet bloc and assorted American blue-chip recruits has surged of late, going from the doldrums of a 6-5 non-conference record to an absolute heater of a six-game winning streak.
The chat alluded to above did not have anything to do with that hot streak, though, as it centered more so on the continuing trend in amateur basketball that used to make fans of the Pacific-12 Conference livid.
That trend was the dreaded “Pac-12 After Dark” basketball game, which usually pitted an overworked Tad Boyle and the Colorado University Buffaloes against Washington State or some shit.
The only silver lining to those bleary nights was the one-man, “Naming Some Grateful Dead Dudes” generator known as William Theodore Walton III (god rest his eccentric soul).
Now, Walton’s shuffled off this mortal coil (as has the Pacific-12, pretty much), though the fans’ No. 1 gripe remains.
Yes, my friends, the vagabonds from the West’s island of misfit toys are still playing games that tip off well after the sun goes down on God’s country — though Larry Scott no longer absorbs the blame.
As an example, those lovable Wildcats are slated to five games down the stretch that tip off at 8 p.m. local time or later (out of 15 on the schedule). Tommy Lloyd’s heater of a run has also included tip times at 9 p.m. (against Baylor on Tuesday), 8:30 p.m. (against Duke on Nov. 22) and 8 p.m. (against UCF last Saturday and Canisius on Nov. 4).
All of this is to say that the West’s legion of amateur athletics fans’ biggest reason for leaving the Pacific-12 in the first place (those damned TV tip times) has not budged at all.
Thanks to traveling carney/Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark’s ballyhooed $2.2B TV deal with the Four-Letter Network, teams like Arizona will continue to be fodder in the name of driving a few hundred thousand degenerates and amateur hoop heads to whatever the company’s streaming service du jour is called these days.
Sadly, it seems like the nation’s hottest amateur men’s basketball teams (like those steely Wildcats from Baja Arizona) will continue to be the pawns of the little masters of their own universes like Yormark, delivering impeccable returns on the bottom line while driving fans further from the teams they have supported since the days when the Big 12 still had a dozen teams in the first place.