SIMSANITY: Collegiate Athletics As We Know It

SIMEON LAM
Sports Editor

In our world today, professional leagues reign over sports because of their popularity and entertainment value. Yet, while many enjoy the highest level of professional sports, I find that college athletics bring a unique aspect that professional athletics rarely have. In professional sports, upsets rarely occur because the level of competition has a much larger scale; often, the best team has a major advantage over the other teams in professional sports. However, in college sports, the range of skill is so small that even the best team has a reasonable chance to lose against other teams. This basically means that there is never a guaranteed win or championship to any university at the college level. That is what makes college sports different and much more interesting. As a sports fan, I’d much rather watch a good contest with unsung heroes that have no fame rather than the famous athletes playing the professionals everyday. Also, watching these college athletics allow fans to see which athletes could go to the pros in the near future.

One of the biggest events every year is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Basketball Tournament in which 68 selected teams compete for a championship. With 16 seeds in four regions, the tournament offers a chance for fans to create a bracket for prizes, allowing great feedback from fans. Because of the monumental difficulty of predicting every single game, the tournament becomes a crazy event every year because of all the unlikely teams that battle it out with top-notch teams in the tournament. What makes it even more interesting is the one-game format in which anything can happen, which makes the game even more unpredictable. In fact, only once in tournament history have all No. 1 seeds made the “Final Four” in the tourney. This shows just how much college athletics are much different than the pros. For instance, in the NBA, it is fairly predictable as to who will make the conference championships every year with rarely any surprises.

Overall, as entertaining as the pros are, I’d rather be interested in college athletics because of the uncertainty that it brings. The fact that everyone has an almost equal chance of winning a championship brings a bigger thrill than the pros could ever offer.