I’m not as big a fan of basketball as I am of football or baseball, but I still do like the game, and I watch almost all of South Carolina’s games. Even when things were going very badly, I still watched most all of the games. Obviously a losing team isn’t as much fun to watch, and the end of the Horn era wasn’t fun at all. In fact, it was so bad, it sapped my enthusiasm for watching other games.
Here and there I would watch games, but many of them had lost their meaning. South Carolina had fallen so far from relevance that the outcomes of the games didn’t matter. If it had just been a bad season or two, perhaps my interest wouldn’t have waned so completely. And, I should mention that a general depression in the quality of the SEC didn’t help either. But several bad seasons made the outcomes of so many games meaningless. Carolina wasn’t more or less likely to make the post season. Their RPI wasn’t moving up or down. There really weren’t any sort of bragging rights or schadenfreude to indulge.
That’s changed now. I can’t pinpoint exactly when, perhaps it was the Oklahoma State game, but the resurgence of this year’s Carolina team makes all of the games more interesting. I can care again whether the SEC is a three bid league (looks like it), and then I can extrapolate what Carolina needs to do make the NCAA or NIT. That’s fun. I’d forgotten how much more enjoyable the whole season is when your team is relevant.
