2023-24 College Basketball: Parallax

thinking about the immortality of the crab

Hello. This is the NATIONAL ESSAY for the 2023-24 college basketball season. Enjoy. Starting tomorrow, all subscribers will be getting my writing on all 32 conferences and 362 Division I men’s basketball teams. Sign up below so you don’t miss anything. -W

1. GARDEN OF DELETE

I have spent a lot of time on every student and especially every teacher’s favorite website, Wikipedia, in my lifetime. I remember becoming familiar with it around 2005 or so, back when it was a big deal for the site when it hit 500,000 English-language articles.

There are over a million articles in Vietnamese alone these days, but back then, visiting the site daily was less of an obligation for what I do and more of a joy. Something new would pop up every day. As the site became bigger it got more moderated, so there was less of a chance of seeing something truly ridiculous in an article. The first time I discovered the Wikipedia page for ‘List of hip-hop feuds’, a page that no longer exists, it was like a whole new repose had unveiled itself.

Annie Rauwerda, though several years younger than I, appears to have had the same youth experience. Rauwerda runs Depths of Wikipedia, one of the last truly entertaining accounts on social media. I first encountered it on Twitter circa early 2021, coming out of the world of COVID, and being entranced. The average reader of this newsletter is likely aware of Depths and is similarly entranced by just how absurdist and funny the world’s largest free encyclopedia is.

Since that time I’ve been aware of a lot of what Rauwerda does, including an Instagram page where she makes memes that feel frighteningly like someone is peering into my brain.

But the real impetus for this essay, as it sits, is not Wikipedia or pizza or the various citation styles I am regrettably very familiar with. It is another thing Rauwerda did over summer 2023 that I became fascinated by: the Perpetual Stew. If you’re unfamiliar it is almost exactly what it sounds like. This is a stew that cooks over and over, every single day, with new ingredients being added or removed at various given times.

Rauwerda served hers in NYC, but perpetual stew is a tale far older than Wikipedia itself. There are examples dating back to the 15th century if not further. Modern examples aside from Rauwerda’s exist, though mostly outside of the United States. Here is one in Bangkok that has been cooking non-stop since 1974. There’s one in Japan that’s been served since the 1940s. Rauwerda herself notes to “think about all the fabled longrunning stews — simmering goulashes in Hungarian farmland, medieval broths slurped up by starving Saxons, soups nurtured by Japanese grandmas — that have been lost to time.”

Of course, because we had one in America for 60 days, that is the one you have maybe heard of. Of course, it is the only one I had ever heard of. I clicked around on the site for it, went to the FAQ, and:

Well there’s your offseason essay prompt.

If that isn’t basketball - and really if it isn’t life - I am uncertain what is. Every day represents a completely different pot of ingredients, of things that can marinate together. Some days are a delight and some are pretty nasty. No, this is not exclusively about Tennessee, though I did ponder that the second I read the FAQ. It’s more about how you view this sport for me. Does a Final Four with zero 1-3 seeds work? Is it okay that a 9 seed was a buzzer-beater away from a title game appearance? Do we want 16 seeds to win?

Perhaps your view of it completely depends on the day, just like mine seems to. Which led to another prompt in my brain.

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2. ECCOJAMS

The other major thing from this offseason is that I got on a plane and saw some stuff. How exciting! I think of the parallax view, or parallax effect, any time I am on an airplane. This is not a brag, because I fly maybe once every year or two and rarely for vacation. (It is usually for work, a wedding, or a funeral.)

The parallax view is when there’s a difference in how something can be viewed based on the angle or sightline you’re seeing it from. This is mostly used as the concept of “objects in distance moving more slowly than objects in front of you” thing, but extends to “if I view this art piece from this angle it’s going to look different.” You may also have read the term “parallax view” if you are of a certain age and watch hockey.

This September I flew up to Canada as part of what I do for my day job. Flying high allows you to see Earth from a much different angle. On a clear day it’s all geometric farms and occasional flyovers of interesting-looking cities. On another, you’re above the clouds for an hour-plus, which also serves some interest. The point is not that you are speeding above the world but rather that you’re seeing something from a totally different angle, and meaning, than you would on the ground.

After a long week in Canada, with a lot of work and apparently 26 miles ran per Strava, I was looking forward to sleeping on the flight home. Neither United (there) nor WestJet (back here) offer in-flight WiFi without incurring an additional charge, which I am religiously opposed to, so I downloaded a couple of albums and podcasts for the ride back.

I’d already fulfilled the stereotype of listening to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell records up north, so naturally I racked my brain thinking of a Southern artist for the U.S. flight. For whatever reason, I picked an album by a band I no longer listen to that often and one that I wouldn’t even consider said band’s best record: Halcyon Digest by Atlanta’s Deerhunter.

I loved Deerhunter when I was a high schooler because listening to them made me feel cool. I was 17 when Halcyon Digest came out in 2010 and listening to Pitchfork music in a small farming town made one, indeed, feel very cool. Perhaps too cool. I can remember riding on a school bus to a football game, as the football team’s statistician (yes), my senior year and listening to Halcyon Digest both ways because it had just leaked on the forgotten, beautiful What.CD.

I was 17, then 18, then 19, listening to that record and a lot of the Bradford Cox (née Atlas Sound) records a lot back then. I was going through a lot of changes: weight loss, college, new friend groups, all of the things you think are so critical and massive at those ages. Like a remora, Deerhunter and Halcyon Digest hung on all those years. Then I was 20, a junior in college, and Monomania came out. I think that was the last time I listened to Halcyon Digest in full.

Then I was 29, nearly 30, and some sort of memory of a verse of a song told me to download that for the flight. The song was “Desire Lines”.

The first time I heard it was on that bus, because I got home from school and saw the album leaked. I had 45 minutes to go from download to iPod transfer to Warren County High School’s campus. I clicked on “Desire Lines” after awhile and against the farms and all it was beautiful, down on Earth. Gravity was holding me in, but “Desire Lines” felt like a new repose. Something of these same farms, but of a different view. One I had not seen before after living in a small town all my life.

13 years later, a month shy of turning 30, I turned it on. And on, and on, and on, and on, and on. For an hour straight, soaring above the Midwest, I listened to that song over and over. The lyrics themselves are probably about this exact thing of aging, of seeing the same things a different way. I heard them over and over on that flight, but I heard the closing instrumental over and over, too. It’s as if it is a reminder that despite how everything changes, there is comfort in the change and joy in the change.

This song was not written by Bradford Cox, who apparently has a similar brain worm because he named his 2011 solo album Parallax. (For a Cox song about aging, 2009’s “Walkabout” is one of the sunniest songs ever written in human history.) It was written by guitarist Lockett Pundt, who wrote all those beautiful guitar lines that sound like desire themselves.

I think about Pundt a lot these days, who had a brief solo turn as Lotus Plaza. It’s no longer because of “Desire Lines” specifically, though this did spur the initial pondering. It is because Pundt quietly moved away from music, from his passion, as a career. He operates as a software engineer in Atlanta, per his own website.

I think about this guy a lot, not least because he wrote a song that has now spanned 13 years of enjoyment and listening for me. His life has meaningfully changed. He’s adapted. He likely has a different view - one that none of us will ever really know - of his past career. As long as the guy is happy, I can support it. At the same time:

The view is multi-fold, but for me this is a story about a successful person who simply wanted something different. That different could be good; it could be bad. The only way to find out is to take the chance itself.

35,000 feet above the Midwest, a song I have loved since I was in high school (!) took on a new meaning, a genuine new repose. Flying above country, new tones and views unveil themselves. Those guitar lines bleed into one another and feel like cirrus clouds look. The song genuinely sounds different to me on the ground than it does in the air. That’s a very specific parallax view of one six-minute composition, but it works for me.

“Desire Lines” is largely about growing up, changing, and accepting everything that means, for good and for bad. If you don’t change ever, you get left behind. Such is life, and well, such is basketball.

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1 + 2 = 3. AGAIN

What Depths of Wikipedia and a 2010 indie rock song have to do with basketball is probably pretty minimal on the surface. Please let me cook a little more, it may make sense. Or it may not, which I apologize for if so. Anyway!

The real basketball thing I spent this offseason pondering is how much everything changes, always. The Big Ten is becoming an 18-team conference. The SEC has 16 teams and will almost certainly add more in the coming years. The Pac-12 is no more after this season. The Big 12 has turned from football to basketball as its main focus, a thing I never could have imagined saying when I was 17. USC and Maryland will play each other in conference games. So will Stanford and Miami. Texas and Kentucky will too, and that somehow sounds not insane compared to the others.

This, the 2023-24 college sports season, feels like the end of history, or at least the end of something that resembles the thing you and I and everyone reading this grew up watching.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe, like all the other times realignment and monetary interests threatened to ruin the things we love, maybe we’ll stick around. We’ll still be here. We made it through the Big East exploding into little bits, reforming around its core seven Catholic schools, then once again becoming a premier conference in the sport. I have seen the CUSA and WAC and MWC and numerous other conferences forced into long-term rebuilds and come out the other side. The Atlantic Sun and Ohio Valley and several other conferences change teams literally every single year. It happens.

Mostly this is just about accepting change as an inevitable thing of life. I think that this particular change feels worse than most, but all it does is make me want to enjoy this particular season that much more. This is the end of some kind of history. It doesn’t have to be the end of history. This is the perpetual stew of college basketball. It completely depends on the day, and the year, what you’ve got in front of you. I’m choosing to believe that this year, the stew gives us a great sendoff. One final great add of all the flavors you like and were hoping to see.

I can understand feeling defeated by realignment. I can certainly understand feeling defeated if you are a fan of Oregon State or Washington State, two athletics programs fully left behind after this season ends. You could feel defeated if you’re a fan of the Arizona schools, because your trips go from California to instead now involving West Virginia. You can feel defeat creeping in if you’re a fan of any ACC school who actually loves what the ACC stands for. A lot of things are wrong about the changes coming down the pipe.

At the same time, there is this view: the last great college athletics season is staring us down. This college football season has operated as a terrific sendoff thus far, peaking with a beautiful Oregon/Washington game that ended in a field storming and a sixth-year quarterback in happy tears with his family. The college basketball season - notably far more diverse in outcomes year-over-year - could feel like a mega-delivery of that exact thing.

Maybe I’m feeling a little too romantic and/or charitable but I believe it’s gonna deliver big time. You get to see San Diego State try and re-deliver after the greatest season in school history. Florida Atlantic gets to build on a Final Four run. Creighton has a chance at its first-ever Final Four. Tennessee can say the same. Teams like Saint Mary’s, Duquesne, Yale, Eastern Kentucky, and more have legitimate hopes of delivering the best seasons in their respective school histories. You do not have to be hyper-focused on Purdue, Kansas, and Duke to find really interesting stories left and right in this sport.

Over the next six months, I plan on being here five days a week. I laid out what that means in late September but let me hammer it in. This is a fully independent newsletter covering all of college basketball (with a focus on Tennessee, but only ~30-40% of the time) that is supported by you, the reader. If you want to read about the Pac-12, you’ll get words on the Pac-12. If you’re interested in the WAC, the SWAC, the MAAC, we’ll cover that too. I want to expand the women’s college basketball coverage here as well. A lot is going to change next year, but that’s next year. This is this year, and this year is going to be fun.

The goal of this project is to cover the perpetual stew that is this sport with real seriousness. There is no Sicko Game of the Week here. There is not a hyper-focus on blue bloods. I wrote at least some form of a preview for all 362 teams playing this year because I want to cover the entire sport. I want you to read this and feel like the sport is respected. Hopefully, I can achieve it.

There are two ways to view this stew: you can either ponder what it could have been on a different day/year or you can accept it for what it is and enjoy every second of being there. I choose the latter. Whatever comes tomorrow comes tomorrow; this is about today. I do not care about the money or the realignment angles or what a conference commissioner said. I care about the ball. I’m writing about the ball. Everything else is secondary.

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There was originally a section in here about how I had a fall trip through Michigan and saw a bunch of cool stuff (an image of Glen Lake is the social photo for this) and barely used my phone, which was wonderful, but you’ve already read 2,700+ words and you don’t need this to be a travelogue. Basketball is just around the corner, anyway.

No more preamble. Park that car, drop that phone. It’s time.