The Beautiful Season

Ever since the Bracket Project blog added me to their Bracket Matrix, I've occasionally gone through the links to see what other college basketball bloggers have to say. To be honest, it's a bit depressing. Most of the links go to people who have absolutely nothing original to say. Some websites end up having one post a week, consisting entirely of their bracket projection. Others merely have short posts, with poor grammar, poor spelling and poor overall structure.

I understand that many people just can't get too excited about college basketball early in the season. I know that I used to start tuning into college basketball after the NFL season hit the playoffs, and I would always get wrapped up in bracket projections and any "Bubble Watch" discussion on places like Sportscenter. But there is a clear direct relationship between how much you truly understand and care about a sport, and how early in the season you start paying attention, and I eventually understood that while success is realized in March, its seeds are sown in October and November. College basketball is a complicated sport, with a hundreds of teams and thousands of players. To truly understand it requires a lot more than looking at Joe Lunardi's brackets and moving a few teams around.

When I started to seriously contemplate putting in the time to build a blog like this, I knew that I wanted to be more than some guy putting out a bracket once a week. For two reasons:

First of all, why should anybody care what I have to say? When I move teams around, I want you to know why. You can then take my argument and accept it or reject it. You the reader can judge my argument not on my name or my flashy graphics, but on my argument's actual merit.

Secondly, I take my writing seriously. A blogger is just another type of a writer. And if I'm going to make money as a writer (what little I make through my advertisements), I'm going to take myself seriously as a writer. You wouldn't expect to see incorrect grammar or brutal structure in a major magazine, so you shouldn't tolerate it from the blogs you read on a regular basis.


With that in mind, I do think I have a long way to go. I'm not a great writer, nor am I a great college basketball analyst. But I'm working as hard as I can, and I want you the reader to remind me when I'm wrong. But I want to maintain the emphasis on quality college basketball writing, and will try to link to good writing when I see it. The title of this post, for example, is the title of an excellent piece written by The Mid-Majority's Kyle Whelliston before the 2004-05 season.

And in that spirit, I will continue trying to spotlight quality college basketball writing. And I will start linking to these blogs on the right side of the front page, under "Good Reads." I don't pretend that I've got the best website that there is for you to read. But hopefully my writing and the writing that I link to can be a positive part of your college basketball experience.