March Madness: Team That Cuts Down The Nets Isn't Necessarily The Best

There's a serious, blatant error to the March Madness America holds dear.

March Madness is the best at providing drama (sorry, TNT). It gives us the 2010 Butlers, the 2003 Syracuses, the 1997 Arizonas, and other such Cinderellas that manly men embrace and weep over.

It's the best at providing excitement, at getting bosses angry over a month's work of 25-50 percent efficiency, at getting a nation to focus on the most rudimentary and basic of visual drawings.

March Madness is the best at showing that the most seemingly invincible team in the universe can, for one night, become glaringly, horrifically, and thrillingly mortal.

And that's the problem.

I know. Shame on me for calling exactly what America embraces about March Madness "a problem." All shame accepted, that doesn't change the fact that it is, indeed, a problem.

Because it is...if the winner of the NCAA Tournament is supposed to show who the best team in college basketball is.

It doesn't do that at all. All it shows is that the best teams can have an off-night. And for one off-night, they lose forever the notion that they were the best team in college basketball that year.

Think about it, everyone who's not a Duke fan. Can you honestly say, without nary a quibble in your heart, "The Duke Blue Devils were the best team in college basketball in 2009-2010?

You can't. Heck, most people didn't even pick them to make the Final Four.

You can say they won every game in the Tourney. You can say they drew the easiest bracket of any No. 1 seed despite being the weakest of the four. You can say they're Tournament champions.

But that's not what the crowning tournament, playoff, match, whatever, of any sport is supposed to convey. It's supposed to show, unequivocally, which team is the best that year.

And no, I'm not a Duke hater. I can say that, because I honestly don't care enough about one college team to hate another.

I do care about the best in the business, though. Kansas was the best team this year, and Kentucky was close enough that I could've convinced myself the Wildcats were the best if it was them over the Jayhawks instead of the Devils over the Bulldogs.

The Devils over the Bulldogs? Are we really supposed to believe those were the teams fighting for the right to call themselves "the best team in college basketball"?

As lethargic and lengthy as they are, the NBA playoffs have it right. The best team will win a seven-game series. It's almost impossible for them not to.

At the end of a series, you can see why the winner is the better team, even if you weren't expecting it. In the '04 NBA Finals, Detroit shocked the world by winning the title from the All-Star-laden Lakers.

Even as it was happening though, people were able to see why Detroit wasn't just beating the Lakers. They could see the Pistons were a better team, period.

The Tourney, though? It punishes and tarnishes a phenomenal team for merely an off-night, which every team (except the Connecticut women's team, apparently. Crap, I just jinxed them for tonight) has.

Sure, the upset is sexy, but it doesn't mean the newest object/team of our affection is better than the heavyweight just ousted. It just means the favorite's best player had a bad shooting night (see: Shelvin Mack), or the team as a whole had a bad shooting night (see: Kentucky vs. WVU), or the coach was an idiot (see: Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim's offensive ineptitude in crunch time).

If you like fairy tales, glass slippers, messed up brackets and the threats to your own team out of the way, then March Madness is for you.

But if you want to know who the best team in college basketball is that year, you'd better stop watching in February.