At some point Sunday night, a final Dorito shall be crushed under your shoe, a shirtless Jason Kelce will pass out beneath a mountain of commemorative beer cups at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas and the NFL will dump a few tons of confetti onto the heads of its new champion. And just like that, football season will be over. Cruel. Unfair. But cold, hard reality.
What then?
Watching the Bulls won’t be the answer. Talk about a team going nowhere and loving it. The Bulls, who change their roster as often as a dead man changes his boxers, are just good enough not to be complete laughingstocks and just bad enough not to be taken seriously by anybody. You don’t need the aggravation.
Watching the Blackhawks is a terrible idea. Without Connor Bedard on the ice, the Hawks are pretty much the 1980s Oilers minus Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Paul Coffey, Grant Fuhr and anyone else who ever scored a goal, stopped a puck or skated in a circle without suffering a catastrophic injury. A live stream of Bedard’s fractured jaw hardening would be more entertaining.
No, what you need right now is college basketball, especially those of you who habitually don’t dive into the college season until the Super Bowl ends and the sweet, sultry stench of March Madness just begins to waft in. You’ll be filling out brackets before you know it. Consider this a bit of a catch-me-up.
1. Super Saturday: It’s a perfect opportunity to work your sitting-dead-still-for-hours-on-end muscles a day before Chiefs-49ers. You have No. 10 Illinois at Michigan State in the early afternoon, and Indiana at No. 2 Purdue — still and always the Big Ten’s greatest rivalry — at night. In between, though, is the main event, No. 13 Baylor at No. 4 Kansas. The Bears are the best three-point-shooting team in the country. The Jayhawks were preseason No. 1. It’s a perfect representation of what every week has been like in the Big 12, the Cadillac of conferences. Bank on at least nine Big 12 teams making the NCAA Tournament, a number that hasn’t been surpassed by any league since 2011.
2. The Year of the Transfer: An all-American team of transfers might beat the daylights out of the best team of non-transfers one could assemble. Kansas’ Hunter Dickinson (from Michigan) is the likely Big 12 player of the year, and Tennessee’s Dalton Knecht (Northern Colorado) and Arizona’s Caleb Love (North Carolina) could win top honors in the SEC and the Pac-12, respectively. Cam Spencer (Rutgers) is leading No. 1 UConn in scoring, as LJ Cryer (Baylor) is doing for No. 5 Houston. And these guys are just the tip of the iceberg.
3. Look, we weren’t kidding: Not only are some transfers playing starring roles, but others have walked in and, impressively, become the backbones of Final Four contenders. North Carolina’s Harrison Ingram (Stanford) might be the toughest Tar Heel since Julius Peppers. Arizona’s Keshad Johnson (San Diego State) is the kind of bad dude many a Wildcats team has lacked in March. Purdue’s Lance Jones (Southern Illinois) has brought all kinds of attitude to a championship-caliber team that needed it.
4. The forgotten Illini: Multiple online lists of the top transfers in college basketball this season have — inexplicably — left off Illinois’ Marcus Domask, who was teammates with Evanston’s Jones at SIU. Domask is averaging 20.1 points in Big Ten games, fourth-most in the conference, and has become the Illini’s closer. Terrence Shannon Jr. and Coleman Hawkins still have bigger profiles nationally, but Domask will be the one with the ball in his hands in a must-score situation in March.
5. Ty Berry update: Northwestern is on the right side of the tournament bubble entering Sunday’s game against Penn State, but its fate will instantly look different if a weekend update on Berry’s injury status brings bad news. Berry, the team’s top three-point shooter and best defender, was soaring of late before appearing to hurt a knee against Nebraska on Wednesday. Depth already was an issue for the Wildcats.
6. Welsh-Ryan demeanor: Last season, Northwestern won six conference road games, as many as champ Purdue and more than any other Big Ten team. This season, the Wildcats are 6-0 at home, where they’ve already upset Purdue and Illinois and smacked around Michigan State. If they do make it back-to-back Big Dances for the first time in school history, they’ll have their wildly improved home-court atmosphere to thank.
7. More score and 30 years ago: This is the highest-scoring Illinois team — 82.5 points per game — since the 1993-94 season. The Illini are ranked seventh in the country in offensive efficiency, their best in this department since Dee Brown, Deron Williams and company nearly won it all in 2005. Also worth mentioning is Northwestern’s offense, which is scoring 78.9 a game in Big Ten play, its most since 1970-71.
8. Don’t overlook Loyola: After a big win at George Mason, the Ramblers are 8-2 in the Atlantic 10 and legitimately threatening first-place Dayton and second-place Richmond. It’s hard not to look back and grimace when remembering an early-January 58-56 loss at home to Richmond in which Jayden Dawson missed a three-point attempt that could’ve put the Ramblers ahead with 10 seconds left.
9. Mountain men: Take a peek when you can at the Mountain West, a league much of the country ignores even though it’s absolutely stacked. Three Top 25 teams — Utah State, San Diego State and New Mexico — were tied for first place along with Boise State entering Friday, and six Mountain West teams had better NET rankings than Northwestern, which, again, is on the right side of the bubble.
10. DePaul’s search continues: What will happen first for the Blue Demons, a Big East victory or a new head coach? At this point, there’s no choice but to bet on the latter.
