Today, college student and sentient double-double robot Armando Bacot announced his plans to return for his senior season at North Carolina, forgoing the possibility of being picked in this year’s NBA Draft. For UNC basketball fans like myself, this is good news. For a number of reasons.
I don’t usually use this blog to write about college basketball, but I’m writing about it now because college basketball, neat and tidy in its various rules, policies, procedures and predictable cadences, is about all my brain can handle at this moment.
I saw something yesterday that people can no longer recognize the difference between actual human faces and human faces created by artificial intelligence. That concerned me. I worried about it for a moment, but got distracted thinking about the news of a missile attack on a train station full of women and children in Ukraine, and a shooting on a subway platform in New York City. The International Panel on Climate Change said we only have three years left to prevent irreversible climate disaster. I saw a screenshot of a newspaper that put a story about the IPCC report on page 3. “World hurtling towards irreversible collapse, page 3.” Over the course of Covid-19 my brain has atrophied into a bowl of shrimp and grits, so I could be wrong, but I believe that’s called “irony.”
The drawers and cupboards of my mind are flung open, overflowing with TikTok dances, aggrieved Elon Musk and Kanye West diatribes, news of yet another Black Mirror plot line becoming real, and Joe Namath telling me to call the Medicare Coverage Helpline and check my zip code to see if I qualify. (It’s free.)
I need to get my mind right.
I need to ease into the cushy, reclined embrace of a mental La•Z•Boy, where the rules are simple, the remote is always within reach, and the world is still right-side up. I need the grounded, consistent world of college basketball.
For example, do I ever have to wonder how long a player can play college basketball? Nope: four years, same as always. Well, unless they get the option of a fifth year due to a global pandemic, but that’s like a once-every-thousand-years kind of thing.
Forget the antagonistic, divisive personalities of modern life — in college basketball, the coaches are cordial with their teams and with each other, and only occasionally do things like punch opposing coaches in the face. The father-and-son-like relationships between coaches and players are so rewarding to watch, and only on the rarest of occasions devolve into players being choked at midcourt or having basketballs thrown at them in practice while being called a “f***ing f****t.”
And there’s no need to worry about big-money contracts, holdouts, or off-the-court distractions — the players are, as always, students first. When they aren’t carrying the hopes and dreams of hundreds of thousands on their shoulders, they’re studying anthropology, as they should be. The only slight caveat is that many of the coaches and athletic directors do have big-money contracts, but these people are, on the whole, a lot older and a lot whiter, so that’s appropriate.
In a world so callous and impure, what providence that we have college basketball, where the players play for the purest of reasons: for the love of the game. In living rooms around the country, players are cheered on by millions of adoring fans, whose hopes for a particular game outcome are, like that of the players, motivated by nothing more than a clean, pure devotion to the game of basketball. And, in some cases, by the bets they’ve placed on that outcome through the betting site Draft Kings. (Check your state’s gambling laws to see if you qualify.)
Win or lose, there’s always next year; and usually, there’s very little drama about who will return to a team. If a player still has college eligibility, you always know they’ll be back. Unless they enter the draft. Or the transfer portal, which is a new thing that sort of simulates how non-college-basketball labor is allowed to move freely in a market-based economy. But this isn’t a market-based economy, this is college basketball.
It’s all so simple.
So cheers to Armando Bacot. Thank you for the good news, and for returning to UNC. Thank you for making this last thing that my brain can process — the simple, no-nonsense, morally untainted treasure that is college basketball — just a little bit sweeter.