So March Madness is upon us with the flipping of the calendar page yesterday, and with the change of the month comes the annual rites of Spring:
1) Conference Tournaments
2) The CBS Selection Show
3) The Filling Out Of The Brackets and Entering Of The Pools
4) The Bitchfest Of Snubbing
Actually, the bitching usually starts well before the tournament, as bracketologists find their email boxes, their Facebook walls and their Twitter feeds bombarded by folks wondering how come "my team" isn't in the NCAA tournament.
(Although I would also hazard a guess that some of these folks that feel marginalized also are against tourney expansion, but I digress.)
Only slightly less annoying than these folks are the ones who complain each week about whether or not their basketball team is ranked.
I maintain that you shouldn't care about where your basketball team is ranked.
Unlike in college football, where the rankings play a huge role in which postseason game you may or may not play in (because of the BCS formula), in college basketball the weekly polls really don't matter.
Don't worry about being ranked in the Top 25 in February.
Just make sure your team is considered one of the 65 best come mid-March.
But I want to expand out to a larger point, and this point is about what people perceive to be media bias against your team:
Maybe, just maybe, your team is not as good as you think it is.
From a national perspective, on TV or Radio, not everyone is going to get equal time.
Sorry, that's just a fact of life.
It doesn't mean that your team hasn't done good things.
But the need to have the sports cognoscenti brand you as worthy is something that I find hard to swallow.
Look, ESPN, NBC Sports, Fox Sports and CBS Sports are looking to drive the biggest amount of eyes and ears to the different platforms and products that they produce. That's a fact.
And like in most businesses, if you're a newcomer, it takes some time to make your way in the market and break down those barriers.
It seems that the time line in sports is about a decade (see: Boise State in CFB and Gonzaga in CBB; see the MWC in CFB AND CBB).
I think in CBB, though, it's even harder to get representation.
While we profess to love Cinderella, she's not worth talking about most of the rest of the season.
We are a society that prefers blue bloods, so those teams are naturally going to dominate the airwaves more.
But in this era, it's not like you can't find coverage of your team.
So if you think you're not getting a fair shake from the big boys, guess what?
Hit Google and find some favorable coverage.
It's not rocket science.
And as your team improves, and maintains that improvement, the accolades will fall your team's way.
As usual, patience is a virtue that gets rewarded in the end.
