Ray Kowalczyk called me from a sports bar in Akron at 11:30 Tuesday night, audibly chewing something fried, to ask if I’d seen what the man on TV had just said. Some little school out of Ohio had won its conference tournament — Ray didn’t catch the name, but he said the kids were hugging each other on the floor and one of them was crying into a piece of net. The man on TV called it bid theft. Ray, who is 71 years old and worked 38 years for the gas company, wanted to know what that meant. I told him I’d look into it.
I looked into it. Turns out that when a school you have never heard of wins the basketball tournament they are guaranteed by rule to play in, and earns the spot in the NCAA tournament that is the entire point of having a conference at all, a separate group of men in glasses regards this as a kind of larceny. They call those teams bid thieves. Bid thieves. As if a 26-win team from the Horizon League snuck into the Sheraton at midnight and lifted a bracket spot off the nightstand of an 18-13 team from Texas A&M.
The men in glasses do something called bracketology, which I gather is a full-time paying job that involves predicting on Tuesday what a committee will announce on Sunday. They have appearances. They have followers. They have spreadsheets with team names color-coded by something called “quad wins,” which sounds like a brand of off-brand allergy medication. There is, somewhere, a person whose entire professional identity is being slightly more correct on a Wednesday than they were on a Monday about something that will be revealed in 96 hours regardless.
And these are the men who have decided that when a small school wins, it has stolen something.
I want to be clear about what is happening here. A team of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds at, let’s say, Robert Morris, has just played its absolute heart out for four nights in a row in an arena that smells like a Knights of Columbus hall, and won the trophy they were told from the day they got there was the only door to the dance. They cut down a net. They called their mothers. And a man on a podcast in a half-zip pullover refers to them, with a straight face, as bid thieves, because somewhere a 9-9 SEC team with a guard who has his own cologne now has to play in the NIT.
My old coach, Vince DiMaggio, used to say that the only people who complained about the rules were the people who weren’t good enough to win under them. He said it about a kid named Petey Corrigan who got cut from our varsity in 1971 and spent the next two months telling anyone who’d listen that the tryout had been rigged. Petey is now, I assume, doing bracketology somewhere. He always did love a spreadsheet.
You want to know how far this thing has gone? There is a tracker. Somebody is tabulating, in real time, how many bids have been “stolen” by mid-majors as the conference tournaments unfold this week. There is a graphic. The graphic has a little cartoon burglar on it. I am not making this up. I cannot make this up. My imagination is not robust enough.
The whole thing tells you exactly who college basketball is for now and who it is not. It is for the four conferences with television contracts and the bubble teams that pretend the bubble is a moral category. It is not for the schools whose entire season is built around the four-game miracle that the rules say is supposed to be the whole point. We invented the auto-bid because we said every conference deserved a champion. Now we are mad that the conferences keep producing them.
Ray called me back Wednesday and said his sports bar had switched over to women’s tournament games and he liked them better anyway. The girls, he said, looked happier to be there. I told him that’s because nobody on television has gotten around yet to telling them they’re stealing anything.
Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s a recipe she got from a podcast. I’m going to eat it anyway.