College Basketball Ranking System: A Useless Indicator For Athletic Prestige

This is absolutely pathetic.

Forgive my bluntness, but how can we continue to use a rankings system which is not only inaccurate, but irrelevant in terms of determining who can dominate who in any game.

In the last week alone, we have witnessed 4 of the top 5 college basketball programs succumb to losses at the hands of teams that were unranked.

Duke was the only who prevailed and lived up to their given rank…barely.

Between Florida losing to a weak conference opponent in Arkansas, to a supposedly adept and super star studded Indiana powerhouse blowing a definitive lead to Illinois with three and half minutes left in the game.  That’s not even the worst part.

The biggest unforgiveable mistake that Indiana made in that game wasn’t blowing their hefty lead, it was allowing an Illini player to seamlessly move unguarded right underneath the rim of the basket for and easy pass and lay-up with less than one second left on the game clock.

Don’t even get me started on how atrociously Louisville handled the game clock in one of the many overtimes they were allotted or how Michigan failed to implement a simple fouling strategy which would have prevented unranked Wisconsin from making a astronomically uncontested three point play.

Simply put, watching college basketball has become a complete joke combined with unabashed conceded mistakes which would be considered lackluster at best on the high school basketball court.

While I understand that there will be upsets from time to time, and that even the best have their down days, the frequency at which these upsets are occurring and how they are coming about isn’t entertaining…it’s athletically abysmal.

Kansas is the epitome of this sentiment.

Kansas has not only lost three in a row to unranked conference opponents, the second of these three losses came at the hands of TCU.  Not only had TCU failed to beat a conference opponent up to this point but they were also by and large the worst team in the Big 12.  Somehow, some way they were able to humiliate and handedly beat this overrated Kansas team without much trouble.

Bill Self, the head coach of Kansas, was naturally not pleased with this lose.

He was overcome with what appeared to be anger and inconsolable disappointment when he said “"it was the worst team that Kansas ever put on the floor, since Dr. Naismith was there.”  ..For the first half there hasn’t been a team that has played worse than that offensively.”

While some might say that these allegations are unfair and unjustly demoralizing, I couldn’t agree more.  This is the type of wake up call these teams need if they ever hope to avoid these inexcusable inconsistencies.

Either that or the ranking system needs to be done away with completely because without prestigious teams that are supposed to hoist these rankings up high to make these intangibles worth something, then why would our nation continue reward them with something that they frankly don’t deserve to be associated with in any way, shape or form.