Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports believes college basketball is ugly to watch these days. Forde cites a few reasons why he believes games are (as Jay Bilas says) “unwatchable”.
Here is an excerpt:
Here is the biggest problem as it relates to the game as a whole: it is ugly and slow and unskilled.
Here is an ancillary problem specific to this season: the two teams currently atop the rankings aren’t helping.
The disappointing aspect of the overall pace and aesthetics of college hoops is that the sport’s decision makers were in the process of fixing it last year. And then they lost their nerve.
After a lot of early whistles and the beginning of a nationwide adjustment for the better, officials abdicated on calling it tight (1). At the start of conference play last January, we started backsliding to wrestling matches in the paint, hand-to-hand combat on drives, cutters bracing for collisions and secondary defenders collecting bogus charge calls. That has continued this season, with awful results.
Forde also believes that the nation’s top two teams, Kentucky and Virginia, aren’t helping matters. He says Kentucky’s best attribute is sheer size and brute force and that watching the Wildcats play isn’t “exactly a thrill ride”.
Check out his comments on Kentucky:
But the twice-weekly grind of watching the Wildcats play is not exactly a thrill ride – and not just because they’re miles better than most of their competition.
Their primary attribute is sheer size – they may be the biggest college team ever. And sheer size is not terribly entertaining in and of itself. Sometimes huge can be fun – like when Willie Cauley-Stein (3) soars in to flush an alley-oop or block a shot into outer space. But even with all that size, this is not a great lob team – not like the Anthony Davis days at UK, that’s for sure. The offense is often more brute force than scintillating skill.
There are games where Kentucky’s best offense is throwing the ball at the rim, retrieving it and laying it in – per Ken Pomeroy’s numbers, the Cats are third nationally in offensive rebounding rate and 90th in effective field-goal percentage.
Brilliant shooting and creative ball-handling can be fun, and Kentucky has players who can do that – but the two best both come off the bench and are fifth and sixth in minutes played. Freshman Devin Booker (4) is the knock-down shooter and fellow freshman Tyler Ulis (5) is the deft handler – and they play behind the Harrison twins, sophomores Andrew and Aaron, who are having inferior offensive seasons to their backups, and inferior offensive seasons to their freshman selves. (In his last 10 games, Andrew Harrison is 7-for-39 from two-point range – a cringe-worthy 18 percent. Aaron Harrison’s shooting percentages also are down from last season across the board, as is his free-throw rate.)
Do you agree with Forde that college basketball is somewhat ugly these days or is this just Forde being Forde?
