March Couldn’t Be Me-dness

Hello friends. It’s been a minute. We don’t have to talk about the last time I wrote about college basketball on here. We can ignore that for now, it’s fine. I’m back, baby! And not a moment too soon because there are major universities in crisis today.

Although the Couldn’t Be Me Weekly Recap was designed to shine a light on the plight of unfortunate college football fanbases that walk among us every day, there are a stunning number of college basketball fanbases that live a similarly miserable existence. If you live in Texas the odds are high that at least one is in your family, several are your coworkers, and many many more cut you off in traffic every single day. These are their stories.

DUN DUN.

Texas

Oh buddy. Ohhhhhhhh buddy. As the wise philosopher Drake once said, “you thought you had one, but it’s not one.”

Travel back with me in your mind to basically any year between 1998 and 2015. It’s March. Rick Barnes is the head coach of the Longhorns men’s basketball team. They did pretty well in the Big 12 regular season, maybe they even won a share of it. They DEFINITELY made the NCAA tournament (unless you happened to pick the 1 season out of 17 that they didn’t make the tournament, #TheNorthRemembers). Surely that level of success is fine. I mean you can’t really get rid of a guy who has made the tournament 16 out of 17 times, right?

Apparently you can because Rick Barnes got shoved through the moon door after not making it past the Round of 32 for 8 seasons.

Now travel back with me in your mind to basically any year between 2011 and 2015. It’s March. Shaka Smart is the head coach of the VCU Rams men’s basketball team. They did pretty well in the Colonial Athletic or Atlantic 10 conference regular season. They DEFINITELY made the tournament. Surely that level of success is fine. I mean you can’t really just leave the place where you made the Final Four a few years ago and are now untouchable to go follow behind the guy that made the tournament 16 out of 17 times, right?

Apparently you can because Shaka Smart threw VCU (and their offer of a million extra dollars) the deuces and took his talents to Austin. How’d that go for him?

NOT GREAT, BOB.

At least one of the writers at our little brother site Burnt Orange Nation has seen ENOUGH and so has ya boy (me). I can no longer stay silent while the “ideal hire for Texas hoops” flops into irrelevance again and again. A school like the University of Texas having to hype themselves up to play a school like South Dakota State in the NIT is something we cannot continue to ignore.

I have a duty to bring awareness to this situation. I have a duty to let the people know...

Couldn’t Be Me.

Texas A&M

What has Texas A&M ever done in men’s basketball? Something, probably. But I don’t know and neither do you because no one cares and it doesn’t matter.

Basketball at Texas A&M is like the tv show Portlandia. Sure, it’s a thing. There’s like 8 people who are very passionate about it, the rest of us are just vaguely aware that it exists, and it ended last year but no one really paid attention to that and now our lives go on as though nothing has changed.

Texas A&M made the Sweet 16 last year and in 2016 (but they’ve never made it further than that in program history, I can’t imagine what that’s like) but this year they finished 14-18 after going 6-12 in conference. Finishing 11th out of 14 teams.

That’s a big yikes.

So big a yikes that it got head basketball coach (do you know his name? I sure didn’t before I googled it while writing this) Billy Kennedy fired.

You know it’s a tough scene when even your own fans are calling your program irrelevant just 1 year removed from a Sweet 16 and 2 years removed from a conference championship...and they’re 100% correct.

Couldn’t Be Me.

Not quite, bud.

TCU

Ahhhhh yes. We’ve arrived. Baylor’s younger, smaller, less reputable, less interesting, less relevant, and much worse at basketball brother.

They got some work done in an attempt to be prettier than us. $80 million worth of renovations to their arena in hopes of...I guess one day having a good basketball season in a year that starts with a 2? I don’t know what the plan was. But hey, they hired Jamie Dixon. Wow. Big get from Pitt. What a hire. And then they won the NIT after finishing 7th in the conference, wooooooo! Then the next year made the tournament for the first time in 20 years after finishing 5th in the conference (they were 1 and done but still), hooraaaaaaay!

But then

This year.

They thought it was all coming together. They thought they had done enough. They thought they were about to put their dancing shoes on.

SIKE.

They’ll tell you they got snubbed and they don’t know why.

I’ll tell you, this is their lot in life and they shouldn’t have done things like getting BLOWED UP in the Ferrell Center or losing to Lipscomb in their $80 million dollar home and then they’d be in the tournament with the big boys. But nah. They outside the club and ooooh buddy are they hating.

Couldn’t

Be

Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Bonus: I’d like to take a moment to focus on the following tweet in the replies to that Frogs O War nonsense:

Focus

FOOOOOOOOOOOOCUSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

HEH HEH HEH