There's Pros, Then There's Poetry

The college basketball season is well under way, as, apparently, is the NBA head coach-firing season. But we swear we're not piling on a certain struggling local pro team. We're just noting that many fans in this region seem a lot more geeked over hoops played by student-athletes when we ask: What makes college basketball better than the NBA?

Cinderella Stories

Currently, the worst team in the NBA is the Oklahoma City Thunder. This is a squad so bad, Oklahoma City announced plans to build a new arena for it -- in Seattle. So what would the reaction be if, on a given night, the Thunder beat the champion Celtics? Meh. Because the worst NBA team still has NBA players on it, and it's just not all that shocking when one group of NBA players beats another in any given game. The league has a salary cap to prevent rich teams from hoarding all the talent, but, with 347 schools playing Division I basketball, colleges make no such effort to have a level playing field. So when a school that can pour an enormous amount of resources into its program, like, say, Kentucky, loses to a school that can't -- take a bow, VMI! -- it's a stunner. (Too bad Kentucky fans haven't appropriated the Saints fans' favorite chant, because there's no better response to "Who Dat?" than "Keydet!") From Gardner-Webb last season (note to Kentucky: Stop scheduling teams from the Big South) to Chaminade 26 years ago, the college basketball landscape is dotted with wins that made people sit up and go, "Really?!" And we haven't even started talking about the tourney yet. The NCAA tournament is a veritable assembly line for Cinderella stories, and American automobile manufacturers only wish they churned out a product so appealing. (On the other hand, George Mason wasn't traveling to its appointments with destiny via private jet, so there's that.) Conversely, the NBA playoffs' best-of-seven format eschews stunning upsets in favor of a postseason longer than Yao Ming's inseam. Sure there's the very occasional Warriors over Mavericks or Nuggets over Thun . . . er, Sonics, but even those early-round surprises don't resonate nearly as much as Princeton over UCLA or Hampton over Iowa State. And not only has there never been an NBA champion as unlikely as Villanova, the league doesn't even want one, vastly preferring a brand-name Finals matchup like June's Celtics-Lakers showdown. Well, the NBA can have its "been there, done that" teams -- college hoops fans will take squads that make them yelp, "I can't believe they just did that!"

The NCAA Tournament

The tourney, of course, is a big part of item No. 1, but we had to give it its own place in the sun, because it's clearly the king of all postseason extravaganzas even when it's down to games between top-seeded teams. One game played for all the marbles is reason enough for onlookers to lose theirs.

Playing Hard

A member of our crack staff answered the question with three simple words: "No guaranteed contracts." In contrast to their paid-regardless brethren, there are only two kinds of college basketball players: those who play hard because they want a shot at the pros, and those who play hard because they know they have no shot at the pros and therefore must make the most of their ever-dwindling time to shine. Either way, you won't hear too many student-athletes uttering the immortal phrase, "Whoop-de-damn-do."

Fan Experience

This is a no-brainer. At a lot of NBA games, the most excited the crowd gets is when it leaps to its feet in the hopes of snagging a T-shirt. And a student band's live music over the piped-in variety is a bigger mismatch than -- well, something other than Kentucky-VMI.

Real Rivalries

The days of Knicks-Heat are long over, and Lakers-Celtics has a ways to go to recapture the ill will of the '80s. But at the college level, even the Ivy League has at least one major blood feud. Penn-Princeton is like the Hatfields and McCoys, except with much better SAT scores.