ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Really, college basketball’s madness is in the other 11 months.

Only in March is there sanity with priorities. This month (and the few days that leak into next month) is all about tournament play and the good stuff that comes with it, be it bids and bubbles and brackets and bracket-busting from upsets and underdogs and universities you’ve never heard of before, but thanks to an epic 2-15 win, you’ll never forget.

And such, we have the Big Dance and the Big Dichotomy — a sport based on the ideals of team and school and growth, but really a sport that makes a mockery of its values because of money, money and money. The madness swirls — player salaries and player transfers and player-coach disconnect (let alone player-academic institution disconnect).

Now, of course, there has always been money in college basketball (I can imagine an early days booster telling a player: “I’ll leave the cash for you in the peach basket.�) And yes, coaches make an exorbitant amount of money and still hop from school to school with little loyalty. But something must be done to tailor the current culture. Hire a czar. ESPN’s Jay Bilas? Retired coach Leonard Hamilton? Sports Illustrated scribe Pat Forde? Fix this thing.

College basketball was always a somewhat smiley sport, but goodness, it’s gotten gross. Again, there was always some money involved. But many players used to truly choose a head coach because they connected with him, or a program because they believed in the culture, or a team because of the bond with teammates they could grow with and bond with over the course of years. Now, with NIL (name, image and likeness) deals, players often just choose the team offering the most money.

And then, the transfer portal allows players to bolt from team to team (and to dollar amount to dollar amount).

It’s gotten to the point where college basketball seems somewhat, frankly, like a farce. For, say, six months, some players pretend to buy into a culture and a mindset about being a team. And they wear the T-shirts with the slogans and they listen to the coaches and their mantras and they’re sort of sold on it all until — what, I’m not going to start? I’m out.�

UConn coach Dan Hurley has contributed a lot of good to the game, notably with his back-to-back championships. He has also contributed a lot of, um, personality to the game with his blustery behavior on the bench. That said, he was recently featured on “60 Minutes� and made a powerful, yet to him seemingly innocuous statement: “Fifty percent of my roster or more is at least considering going in the (transfer) portal, if not already knows what school that they’re going to.�

That’s madness. Yet that’s reality.

There must be a middle ground — a way to still pay the players but keep the players from transferring all the time, all over the country.

“Five years ago, I wasn’t in conversations saying, ‘How much do you want to be paid?’ Never thought that would happen in college basketball,� former Indiana star Steve Alford, the Nevada coach and a Division I head coach since 1995, said this past week at a news conference. “I’ve always been a big proponent of — as the game and money has evolved and changed, I’ve never been one that said I don’t believe student-athletes shouldn’t be paid. But the way it is now is ridiculous. It’s utterly ridiculous. It’s changed our game. And so you have got to adapt. We have got to adapt, but every coach (I talk with brings up) portal issues.

“You’re going to replace eight, nine guys to a roster every year. The travel time that is across the country in these leagues. It makes no sense for that to be our model, but that is our model. Do we have to evolve as coaches? Yeah, we have got to evolve how we recruit.

“It used to be, ‘Hey, what’s my degree going to look like? What’s your facilities look like? What’s your relationship with the team look like? Are you there for all practices? Are you a coach that dives into relationships? Are you going to care for my child?’ You might as well throw all that stuff out, because the only question they’re concerned about is what they’re getting paid in the portal. To me, that’s a terrible model for an 18-year-old.�

Such is the state of the game. But hey, it’s March now. So (at least after reading this column) we can get back to the joy of the NCAA Tournament — this Sunday is Selection Sunday! — and all the fun that only this sport and this setup can provide. And in a few weeks, a championship team will be crowned … and a few days after, half of that team will transfer to a different team.