March Madness

The March Madness tournament is 1 day away and as I purely guess on my bracket and watch episodes of Coach to try to get interested in college sports (it was either that or episodes of Hang Time but that's high school), I am realizing that, out of the 64 teams in this tournament, there is not one jersey that I want to own.

College jerseys, basketball or football are all the same, most of the team names are the same too for that matter (at least 4 in this tournament are Wildcats).

With a cool name like wildcats, you could design a pretty decent logo for the jersey.  So why don't colleges market their jerseys more and make them a bigger selling feature?  I can only guess, so here's a list of my guesses.

#1. Unless you're a player, sports is not the purpose of school.

When you walk in to your campus store, and you have to pick between a jersey and a regular piece of everyday clothing, you are going to take those clothes every time.  Jerseys at the Kansas State store go for $75, this very smart button down retails for $30.  In the US college economy that translates into roughly 70 watered down beers.  Enough to get you through your teams opening round upset followed by a crushing round 2 loss.   Then later in life you will still have a nice button that you can put into your regular rotation which will remind you of the 4 great years you had meeting new people and shaping your life to be a successful, contributing member of society (the purpose of school) as opposed to a jersey that just reminds you of how embarrassingly drunk you got and that you didn't really have any connection to that team other then you had to cheer for them since you shared facilities.

#2.  College success is not jersey worthy.

Out of your entire team, you might have one or two players go on to be decent NBA regulars.  But until that happens, there is no way of knowing.  Do you want to run that risk of buying a jersey of a guy that was drafted and never panned out?  Wearing that around would be as embarrassing as wearing an Alexander Daigle Senators jersey.  You would end up lying about how you like the jersey and that the #29 represents the address of your student house, or some lame joke about how you dated 29 girls while in school.  Either way, you are not going to take that chance.  You wait until well after a storied pro career, then you buy the college jersey once it's cool (like a North Carolina #23)

#3.  Do you want to honour players you really don't like.

Unlike your favorite pro players who you grew up watching, you don't really want to support the players on the team.  Are you really going to wear a jersey of the guy that you have anthropology with but you never see?  Or the guys that get to skip the line at the campus bar while you wait in the cold?  And they get to do this while on full scholarships.  Your hard earned summer painting job money goes straight to tuition and a trip to Europe when schools over, you're not going to spend that on a jersey.

So with the vast majority of students not a part of the team and all of them with now at least 3 good reasons to not buy a jersey of their school, there is not enough of a market for Colleges and Universities to start improving the design of their jerseys.  And even if they did, the only NCAA jersey I would buy is that of the Minnesota State Screaming Eagles!!!

Now let's all enjoy some average quality basketball, where the last 2 minutes actually takes 2 minutes and we can cheer on our randomly selected upsets.  Go Penn State!!