I met Gabe and Randy for the first time leaving the stadium early Sunday morning, maybe around 12:15 AM. I was heading to my car; they were looking for a car, any car. The Indianapolis Uber scene was slammed, as apparently several drivers had cancelled or declined to pick them up due to traffic, and they asked me if I was also waiting for a ride. We talked for a bit, then I offered them a ride to their hotel maybe ten minutes away. This would happen again Monday night, which makes me one of the state of Indiana’s leading taxicab operators.

This is the most boring story imaginable, but the beauty of the Final Four is in the mundane. The walks to the stadium; navigation of Indianapolis’s SkyWalk system; check-ins at various hotel Starbucks locations. The games themselves are the star of the show, but what you end up remembering when attending these (unless something truly amazing happens) is all of the stuff outside of the games. All of the meetups, both clandestine and overt, mean more personally than if a shot does or doesn’t go in.

Gabe and Randy are from Montana, and they’d never attended a Final Four before. Our meet-up is complete happenstance, and had I gone out the southeast Lucas Oil Stadium exit (which turned out to be closer to my car than the one I actually went out) we never meet each other. They never become readers of this site, we never talk about the future of college basketball, and I never learn why a father and son 1,500+ miles away elect to attend this Final Four of all Final Fours together.

That is why I do what I do; this is what will never be taken from me, no matter what changes.

---

Our first year at Basket Under Review started and finished much the same way: joy and uncertainty. The end of the season brought about a very certain outcome (the best team winning the title) but as we sat at St. Joseph Brewery on Friday night, seeing yet another report about Tournament expansion and hearing more and more supposedly-entrenched members of good rosters hitting the transfer portal, it was hard not to wonder what’s next, to wonder if those in power want the same things we want.

Last offseason, in the dead heat of summer, Rob Dauster ran a pretty simple poll. Rob is a friend, a Field of 68 co-owner, and someone who has a pretty deep college basketball following. Rob’s question was very simple: do you, Normal College Basketball Fan, want the NCAA Tournament to be expanded to 72 or 76 teams? The response was nearly as emphatic as asking someone if the sky is blue or if they like drinking water.

There are genuinely very good arguments in existence for tournament expansion, namely those from Names You Know like a Gasaway or a Pomeroy. I do not view it as the death knell for the sport if the supposed expansion to 76 teams, because as I laid out earlier this season I fundamentally believe college basketball will not die. However, the lack of death doesn’t cancel out the looming changes or the feeling that what we’re about to see in 2027 or 2028 will feel fundamentally different than what came before it.

There is joy in every NCAA Tournament, no matter if someone tells you the Tournament is dying or the Round of 64 is dying or that college basketball, even though I just told you it’s not dying, is dying as a whole. There will always be joy in the NCAA Tournament. They could put 128 teams in it, and we would still watch. But on the court after Michigan claimed their first national title in 37 years and the Big Ten’s first in 26, Ky from Three Man Weave and I looked at each other and agreed: whatever comes next will be different. Whether it’s better or worse, we don’t know yet, but it’ll be different. How different, and how that difference alienates or grows fans and fanbases, remains to be seen.

Live from the media game

I got in three good runs around Indianapolis, which was a running joke at the media game on Saturday. (Matt Norlander referred to me as a “sick man,” which I’ll take as a term of endearment.) I am what we’ll call a Retired Hooper, as in I have a backyard basketball goal and last played a true pickup game in 2023. That is, for my health, probably a good change. Yet even a good change brings some bad side effects (being extremely tired, for one), and it would be nice to show to my fellow media members that I am simply Dalton Knecht in waiting. (This is a joke, for the record. I am awful at performing any basketball duty that’s not 3-and-D, with heavy emphasis on the defense.)

In this world, there are very few, if any, unambiguous changes. College basketball feels like a pretty good microcosm of that, this year of all years. The quality of the best teams are arguably as great as they’ve been in 20+ years, but with that comes the concern of the supposed ‘missing middle.’ The Round of 32 and Sweet Sixteen had several fantastic games, but it came at the expense of a weak Round of 64, and the Sweet Sixteen had zero mid-major involvement for the second year in a row. Conference realignment means more high-level matchups in the regular season and fewer dead Tuesdays in January, but the loss of regional identity is a real thing, and sue me, I’m gonna miss Gonzaga playing Saint Mary’s twice a year.

A lot of what’s happening in college basketball is good, but it comes with a twist that it’s different in good and bad ways. I really do appreciate that this year, I got to watch Houston play Arizona, Iowa State, Kansas, Texas Tech, and BYU, all games that wouldn’t have existed three years ago. It was nice that Illinois and Nebraska played, that UCLA kinda makes sense in the Big Ten style-wise, and that Belmont and Murray State play each other in meaningful games again. If you give these things time, it seems they eventually work out.

But, well, it’s hard to be optimistic 24/7. A lot of good things will go away. Every year a new year gets added onto my least favorite Wikipedia page:

The upcoming season will bring back the Pac-12, which is a nice thing. I missed the logo, and I missed its general weirdness. Yet the return of the Pac-12 is going to lead to a minor destruction and a major disruption of the Mountain West, which has probably been my favorite overall conference across the major sports over the last 20 years. It was one thing to see Utah and TCU graduate to larger leagues, but to see Boise State, Colorado State, San Diego State, and Utah State all depart…that’s gonna be tough, my friends. It’s going to be very, very strange looking at the Mountain West standings ten months from now and realizing a game between UTEP and Grand Canyon has genuine stakes.

Sometimes these moves work out, and sometimes they do not. (Ask Maryland how they feel about blowing up all of their ACC rivalries to constantly finish 11th or lower in an 18-team league.) What every move has in common is money, which is why the NCAA Tournament will almost certainly expand. It’s money. It’s always been money. This is America, and such.

Every year I do one of these essays a song wedges its way into my brain while writing, but usually it waits until the Final Four to do so. This year a song wedged its way in on a November trip to Chicago with my dad and never left. The most obvious, simplest rock radio hit of the last 25 years, and probably the most evergreen Simple Song of my entire life.

"In spaceships, they won't understand." What the hell does that even mean? The beauty of that line, to me, is that it could be about anything. The rest of the song is pretty straightforward - your grandsons, your girlfriends, people, none of them are gonna understand. I get all that. What does the spaceship have to do with it?

I see it two ways:

  1. Those in literal spaceships, aka those way off in the hypothetical future, will not understand;
  2. Those in buildings that look like spaceships, the uber-rich who can never get enough, will not understand.

Either is a fine interpretation, but the latter has felt very real to me over the last few months across all walks of life. The constant push for things nobody wants, with no listed reason other than "money" and perhaps "TV ratings," has moved past nauseating and exhausting into merely being part of the background noise of everyday life. The newest constant push is for a thing not even 10% of people want.

Right, people, they don't understand. In spaceships, they're never gonna understand, because they're not in it the way the proverbial We are in it. These people don't understand, and it doesn't matter. Expansion is coming, more realignment is coming, more monetary interests are coming. None of these things will kill the sport. None of these people control the parts of the sport that matter most. We have the choice to keep going. We all do. I know I will.

Gabe and Randy did not come to Indianapolis because of the potential end of the 68-team Tournament. They did not come because of even having a team still playing in the Tournament. The lone team they supported that did get in was NC State, who got bounced on First Four Tuesday. (I found out on the first car ride that Randy used to teach at NC State, which explains how two Montanans had Thoughts on the ethics of Will Wade.) These guys came because this, the Final Four, the NCAA Tournament, every little thing you and I and everyone see, matters.

You cannot quantify this with dollars or polls. You can try, but the people who come here come for something harder to quantify. These people are more resilient than the people monetizing their interest. The infrastructure of this Tournament and of college basketball can and will change. The rituals we hold dear, even if it costs me $25 per day to park for them every single year, will not.

On Monday night, which was Tuesday morning, after I'd said bye to all of my friends and coworkers, after we'd celebrated our first year of Basket Under Review together, I met up with Gabe and Randy at the same exit from 48 hours prior. We'd made the arrangements beforehand because, frankly, they paid pretty well for a pair of passengers needing a 15-minute ride. It was late, we were all very tired, and I learned while walking to the parking garage that the two of them were headed to the Indianapolis airport not even three hours later. We debriefed the game, and I learned Gabe had played high school basketball with Randy supporting him the whole way. They even went to Montana State basketball practices together, just for fun.

We parted ways at a Holiday Inn. The drive home, I hit "Last Nite" one final time. There are so, so many good people in this world, and some of them happen to love basketball the way I love basketball. In years to come, whether it's 68 teams or 76 or (Christ almighty) 96, whether conferences make any sense at all, whether rosters have no continuity at all, there will still be a Gabe and Randy. There will still be me. And damn it, there will still be our community, all heading to our car or train or bus together, real or imagined.

That's the part they can't take away. They never will.

This has ended the season on a more didactic note than I'd hoped, but...I don't know, felt a little necessary. Not been the greatest time for human history and such! But what it has been an awesome time for is friendship. Through year one of Basket Under Review, I have met so many great people, many of whom showed up in Indianapolis whether they had a team involved or not. Genuine thanks to everyone who came up and told me this week/end that they loved the site and loved my work. I am genuinely so pleased by the reach we've achieved in just a few months, and it's nice to know your work has real impact.

I always end these essays with thank yous of various sorts. These are in no order because I always forget someone important.

  • My wife, Carly, my greatest supporter. Thank you for allowing me to completely ruin our collective lives for one full month out of twelve. I will repeat my statement from 2025: she is a wonderful spirit whose gifts of love and grace know no bounds.
  • Our entire staff at BUR, who absolutely killed it. I think I only failed to meet one or two people who work for us. I got to sit with Matt Winick and Brian Rauf all weekend and it was like sitting next to a pair of basketball dictionaries. Thank you to Trilly Donovan, the masked man himself, for setting this all up. Life-changing. Look at this crew, the lot of them.
Trotter is in here as an honorary staffer.
  • My podcast co-host, Jim Root. I've noted before that I hate the sound of my own voice and generally hated doing podcasts at all, but in a pinch I said yes when we needed a second host for a show that met a sudden end. I never would've guessed we would have such great chemistry or that people would enjoy what we do. Clearly, we've struck a nerve in a good way, and much is owed to him for carrying.
  • So many media members who've gone from coworkers (in some sense) to friends. Isaac Trotter, David Cobb, Matt Norlander, Eamonn Brennan, Evan Miyakawa, Joey Dwyer, Sam Federman...and I know I'm forgetting several. I would and will ride or die for any of these guys.
  • Kyle Boone, who came BACK to the bar on Friday to meet me and forced Trotter to take him because he didn't know what I looked like.
  • The rest of the Three Man Weave crew, who let me steal their third seat in the press box on Saturday. (Matt did come for Monday, so I've finally met and hung with all three.)
  • Anyone and everyone who came to our event on Friday. I got to meet a person I've known for 20 YEARS through various message boards, and I got to meet a bright young journalist who almost certainly knows more about the USMNT than anyone else at the Final Four.
  • Whoever at Barstool Sports that applied for a credential and didn't use it. Thanks for the third seat for the BUR team in the end zone, fellas.
  • One final thank you to those in my personal life who helped beyond basketball. The names of known friends and trusted agents must not be listed; they know who they are.

That's a bow on 2025-26, one of my favorite seasons ever. What will 2026-27 hold yet? I don't know, but I know I'll be there. I hope you'll be there, too.

See you soon.