Remember, not tweeting is always the best option
March Madness is meant to be a time of miracles.
A time of joy.
A time for brave mid-major darlings to sharpen their swords against the sport’s big boys. It’s pure magic that in 2023 we can see Florida Atlantic AND San Diego State make their first-ever Final Four appearances – even against each other!
However, in all of this, there are some of us in the Twitterverse who are Scrooges and are not in the March Madness spirit.
Tweets with keywords like “reviews,” “executives,” “CBS hates this,” and “doesn’t belong” flood my timeline. The discourse that says these Final Four sucks is being perpetuated by hordes of men who, upon scrutinizing their Twitter bios and handles, might be suffering from a certain type of brain rot.
Football.
Yes, of course, football. Some college football personalities, some NFL, but all football players share similar trash-takes about the wonder of college basketball and stick their pig-skinned fingers in our merry sport.
Let’s go through some of the tweets that got me blogging about it
Noted great journalist Ivan Maisel (seriously, his work is great!) tweeted a story that this Final Four has TOO MANY underdogs – ignoring the fact that the states of San Diego (won Mountain West) and Florida Atlantic (won the USA Conference) are a far cry from traditional underdogs. In fact, the argument that FAU was woefully undervalued only gathered steam during the Owls’ run.
He also egregiously compared the SDSU-FAU pairing to the New Mexico Bowl – which most recently featured 8-5 BYU and 7-6 SMU, mediocre teams that are a far cry from what Aztecs and Owls made for the sport of collegiate basketballs are.
Stewart Mandel, the EIC for The Athletic’s college football vertical, had TWO fools. First, which he deleted after being dumped immediately for leading to a fast backpeddal in which he called the NCAA tournament “watered down.”
And second from Stew this gem, in which he left out the important context that Tobin Anderson was a finalist for the job before Rick Pitino was even hired at Iona.
Ben Volin, senior NFL writer at the Boston Globe, fired off an attitude that simply assumed college basketball’s regular season was meaningless and had the audacity to use the PGA Tour (ALL SPORTS GOLF) as an inspiration for change .
Greg Waddell, who is also a collegiate basketball player to give him some credit, had the idea that this Final Four is more like the Myrtle Beach Invite, which is kind of funny to be honest, but is OBJECTIVELY WRONG.
I shouldn’t include this one, if only because this account needs to know what they’re doing with this rage bait, but I fall for it. The Twitter account for the nerds over at RedditCFB just wanted us to think about the poor TV executives in their ivory towers looking at us poor folks.
Kevin Negandhi, a regular college football personality for ESPN, tweeted the tired “Gonzaga bad” and was promptly subtweeted by program friend Kyle Kensing (we love Kyle here).
ChrisKBills came into a friend’s response from MMM @morrisoncrying by explaining that a league with four teams in the postseason Final Fours (Charlotte won the CBI, one of North Texas/UAB will win the NIT, FAU in the NCAAT) nobody for had owls to play with.
Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.
And finally, this misogynist tweet from David Hookstead, who writes for Outkick (Barf) and probably has a media literacy failure, asking, “Why women?”
Anyway, I’ll end this rant with this: be more like Magic Johnson. Don’t be Scrooge McPigskin. Happy tires, everyone.
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