March is the best sports month of the American calendar year, primarily because it has the best two sporting events — you know, the ones with 68 teams and brackets — and benefits from the buzz of baseball spring training, upticks in NHL and NBA urgency (for some) and NFL news produced by free agents signing with teams.
March follows up one of the worst months, though Olympic years help. Still, even taking the Super Bowl into account, February tries to make a “sporting event” out of NFL prospects exercising and answering 8,000 questions about which teams they’ve talked to, and everything else is a grind. February is cold, gray and full of potholes, in the real world and the sporting world.
In the college basketball world, it’s the hardest time. Let’s not forget this as we continue to marvel at the public tantrums of its coaches. November brings the excitement of discovery, along with tremendous cross-conference matchups. December offers more big games and a taste of conference play. January renews rivalries. March is nirvana.
February intensifies league races, but conference expansion has diluted them with drastic differences in schedule difficulty among teams in the same league. Most teams are out of the races by mid-February. Banners and trophies still matter, but the teams that win them typically are so good that they’ve got bigger things on the brain — as the month ended, No. 1 overall seed hopefuls Duke, Michigan and Arizona had already earned their championship ballcaps.
It’s mostly just a bunch of teams that know each other too well and wish they could play someone else. I suppose there’s something positive to be said about expansion in this regard, because teams see many of their conference foes just once in a league schedule. Still, it’s a slog.
Even coaches with teams that have much at stake search for ways to maintain their players’ focus. Even teams with some of the best bodies of work in the sport can misplace it.
“It’s a grind once you get into late January and February,” Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg said Tuesday. “You’ve got different teams fighting for different things, too. Some are competing as spoilers, and we’ve had that role in (the Big Ten) before. Teams on the bubble, teams fighting for top seeds, it’s a really interesting time of year. Our message to our guys is that you just can’t look ahead.”
That wasn’t necessarily the issue when Hoiberg’s historically great Nebraska team fell 57-52 at Iowa on Feb. 17. However, it was so February — unsightly offense, a team playing below its standard, a mild-mannered coach getting ticked off (justifiably, by the way, with a student sticking a phone in his face in the handshake line).
Offensive efficiency for Power 5 teams this season, per CBB Analytics, went as follows, every month: 120.3 in November, 119.0 in December, 113.8 in January, 114.4 in February. Yes, there are more lopsided games (for most teams) in the nonleague schedule to inflate those numbers. Yet, at the end of two months of that, you’re ready for a change.
CBB Analytics found the same pattern with those numbers in the past two seasons, with only slight upticks in March. However, everything’s more intense and better in March. Focus isn’t a viable excuse. Handling pressure becomes the challenge. Successes and failures are immortalized. College basketball is Dorothy, stepping into the Technicolor Land of Oz.
Stunning results are the celebrated rewards of March. They are the unintended consequences of February. In the final week alone, we saw NCAA Tournament locks and hopefuls produce a bunch of duds.
Iowa State no-showed at home against shorthanded Texas Tech. Tennessee blew a 13-point lead in the second half at home against Alabama. BYU fell to UCF at home. UCF fell to Baylor at home. Wisconsin lost to Oregon, Iowa to Penn State, UCLA to Minnesota and NC State to Notre Dame. Indiana harmed its at-large hopes with a home loss to Northwestern. Cal did the same against Pittsburgh. Auburn? Same. Ole Miss.
We’ve talked plenty about petulant coach behavior this season, and how it perhaps relates at times to the sport’s transient nature. And at times, a lack of respect for people covering the sport. Some of it is inexcusable. ESPN analyst Jay Bilas put it well on SiriusXM last week when he said, “Look, I’m OK with the feeling that the media doesn’t understand basketball the same way coaches do. Congratulations. When I go into a restaurant, I’m not a chef, but I get to opine on the meal. I’m paying for it, I get to opine on it. I don’t see why this is so difficult.”
As February ended, some of the things coming out of the coaches’ mouths felt more like despair than disparagement. UCLA coach and famed reporter roaster Mick Cronin could only throw his hands up about his team’s defensive struggles after the loss to a Minnesota team with a six-player rotation, saying: “It’s been a grind, something I haven’t experienced in 30 years in college, 23 as a head coach, seven as an assistant. I have never experienced anything like this.”
Tennessee coach Rick Barnes, after Alabama: “Not everybody was totally locked in.”
Indiana coach Darian DeVries after Northwestern: “We’re gonna have to really look in the mirror a little bit and get some things figured out.”
Auburn coach Steven Pearl after Ole Miss: “I want to apologize to our fans, who have been so phenomenal all year. They deserve better from us.”
That DJ’s speaker in Kalamazoo, Mich., deserved better from Miami (Ohio) coach Travis Steele, too. Still, that’s all in the past.
We’ve made it to March, the last week of the regular season for major conference teams and the doorstep of bracketed bliss. Congratulations, coaches. It gets better from here. Except for those of you who will suffer unthinkable losses and/or be fired this month.