Why now?

I’m sure if you just showed up here you’re asking, “Why now?” It sure does seem like an odd time to start a college basketball blog. I mean, almost every school this site intends to cover has already finished playing basketball this season. Some have been done for almost a month. So yeah, why now?

Well, for one, the college basketball offseason is full of its own stories. There is the coaching carousel, recruiting and just the normal going ons of college students on or off campus for the summer.

Also, starting now gives me a chance to take a deeper look at each of these schools and conferences. As you’ll learn in the months ahead there are going to be a lot of analytics thrown around on the site, but I promise it won’t be a blog for math geeks, and it takes some time to digest them all. By starting now there’s a window to get some data collected and some analysis done while there aren’t any live fire games demanding attention.

And then there’s history. Each one of these schools has a unique and complex history that defines what they are as an institution. There’s NJIT’s creation of a Division I basketball program from scratch. There’s Columbia, which hasn’t been to the NCAA Tournament in over 40 years. There are rising powers at Long Island and St. Peter’s and a collapse at Fordham. Now I’ve got the chance to dive deeply into each of them, to read about them, to understand what makes them tick.

For me, that’s the key here. I don’t want to just know what happened, I want to know why it happened. Thus, while it’s going to take some time to digest everything, one of the starting points is finding the information. If you’ve got something you think I should check out email me at john@nycbuckets.com. I’d be happy to hear from you.