Bracketology by Thomas Piketty

We are currently head for an NCAA Tournament field that may not include Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, or Michigan State—teams that have combined to win 13 of the last 30 championships. Even if North Carolina hangs onto their spot and Duke or MSU makes a late push, it has been a rough year for the sport’s blue bloods. In January, Duke, UNC, and Kentucky were all unranked for the first time since 1961. Meanwhile, the season has been dominated by teams like Gonzaga, which made the Final Four for its first and only time in 2017; Baylor, which hasn’t made it since 1950; and Michigan, who has had more recent success but have a second-year coach who’s never had a team in the Tournament before.

Of course, it’s been a weird season for other reasons, too. The pandemic has forced teams to cancel or reschedule games at the last minute. Practices have been limited. The games either have no fans at all, or a greatly reduced capacity—at some schools, the athletes are the only students even on campus. Some players opted out before or even during the season.

All of this is reminiscent of one of the central claims Thomas Piketty made in Capital in the 21st Century: that major social crises are often levelers of inequality. We tend to think of things like war, famine, and disease as especially bad for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Think about how many of COVID-19’s worst outbreaks have been in prisons, or among immigrant workers at meatpacking plants. Crises will always affect society’s most vulnerable—they are, after all, the most vulnerable.

But social crises can also upend traditional hierarchies and create unexpected opportunities for social change. In his book, Piketty wrote about how the world wars and their aftermath erased much of the hoarded wealth in Europe, paving the way for the prosperous and egalitarian postwar period. Just last year, we saw how the emergency measures enacted by Congress brought poverty in the US to historic lows and actually increased incomes for the poorest Americans—albeit temporarily.

Of course, nobody likes crises. The pandemic has still been incredibly harmful to everyone, especially the poor in the United States. But it has also exposed the pillars that typically hold up the powerful, and in some cases, like college basketball, shown how to tear them down.

After all, Covid-19 seems to have disproportionately affected teams like Duke, North Carolina, and Kentucky because it has interrupted the thing that has separated them for the last decade or more: the flow of highly talented freshmen to the top programs. Teams at the top of the college basketball food chain stay there by constantly recruiting the top high school players, who then quickly depart for the NBA. Even in a comparatively weak draft class like 2020’s, these three teams lost Cole Anthony, Immanuel Quickley, Vernon Carey, Jr., Tre Jones, and Tyrese Maxey to the NBA. In a normal year, they would replace these guys with a new batch of future top draft picks, and use the months of November and December—when they play a low-stakes non-conference schedule with few true road games—to acclimate and develop new stars.

This year, though, the uncertainty around the college basketball season led players like Isaiah Todd and Jalen Green to forgo college for the G League. Jalen Johnson controversially opted out midseason. But even more than opt outs, these teams just had trouble finding their rhythm in the November/December period that had fewer practices and more canceled/postponed games, thanks to the pandemic.

On the other hand, teams like Gonzaga, Baylor, and Michigan, who have returned most of their key players from last season, have thrived. Their players were already used to playing together, and so the loss of practice time and a weirder nonconference schedule was less disruptive. The problems still hit them—Baylor still seems to be rediscovering its footing after a three-week shut down caused by a coronavirus outbreak—but they were better equipped to handle them.

It’s not clear if this trend will continue or snap back once the pandemic ends. Perhaps top high school players will start opting for the G League more, or perhaps they will still end up at schools like Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina, and Michigan State. Honestly, it’s not even clear what would be best for college basketball as a whole. But the source of inequality in the sport is clear.