Today is the last day of February. That means, if my math is correct, that March starts tomorrow. March is about college basketball, which has generally faded in the popular consciousness but will always have March—the NCAA Tournament is just about the last perfect thing America has.
Still, I have to confess that, between the NFL pushing the Super Bowl into mid-February, the big NBA trade deadline, and the news about the baseball lockout, I have fallen behind on college basketball this year. Indeed, I have not really written about it all season. But that will be changing, and we are working on some big things this month here at Undrafted and with the Lefty Specialists podcast, so keep your eyes out for some good stuff.
Anyway, here’s a rundown of the month that was February:
-The Brian Flores trilogy: Part I, Part II, and Part III
This story really combines so many issues of particular interest to me: hiring processes, the intersection of race and class, the legal system’s potential as a vehicle for change, etc. Hopefully there is more to come from the lawsuit, but for now I’m honestly just happy Flores got a job. Obviously it’s not the head coach position that he deserves, but I was worried he would be run out of the league completely, and I’m glad that did not happen.
The podcast is back! Obviously we predicted the Super Bowl with perfect accuracy, and also found reasons for socialists to be excited for the Rams.
This was a quick reaction to the Super Bowl, focusing on Odell Beckham, Jr., Sean McVay, and the silly “controversy” around the halftime show.
Part of this podcast was a pretty despondent reflection on the MLB labor negotiations—and things have really only gotten worse since! So listen to recall the simpler times of mid-February, when it seemed like we might at least get 162 games this year…
This was a reaction to the Juwan Howard suspension—I guess this piece was kind of about college basketball. But really it was just an excuse to talk about how the word “violence” is deployed for political ends.
The beauty of the MLB lockout—if you can call it “beauty”—is that it’s a great illustration of how labor fights are really fights about structural power and change. This might seem like just a question of splitting money, but it’s really about how baseball has changed in recent years, with increases in tanking and defensive shifts and strikeouts and time between pitches. All of these changes have allowed owners to keep payroll down, and made the game worse for fans and players. So if you want to fix baseball, you need to address worker power. Even if that means siding with “millionaires against billionaires.”