"Screw you guys!"

Let's just get this out there right now: Maryland losing to Ohio University (not even THE Ohio State University!) and BC losing to UMass do not signal the weakening of the ACC, the freezing over of hell, and the coming of the apocalypse.

I mean, it's not a good sign for the Maryland basketball team this year, frankly, but it doesn't mean that the ACC is crumbling, crumbling all around us.

Really.

I swear.

It doesn't.

Come down off the ledge now, John Swofford. Please.

The first thing you need to remember is that, in the case of BC, UMass specifically and the Atlantic-10 in general were once actually national powers. Temple at the height of John Chaney's brilliance; Xavier off and on for years and years; UMass in the days of (it kills me to give him props, but) John Calipari and Marcus Camby. (Sure, UMass's trip to the Final Four was invalidated because it turned out that Camby took money from agents, but that's really neither here nor there nor relevant to talent.) UMass beat a very solid Syracuse team in the Carrier Dome. I wasn't surprised that BC -- a team that lost its heart, soul, and leading scorer when Jared Dudley left -- collapsed in the face of a fierce, underrated UMass team. You mean you were? It's an upset, I suppose, major conference losing to mid-major conference, but BC isn't supposed to be great this year anyway. UMass may be up-swinging again, finally recovering from the mess that Calipari left there. And I say good for them if that's the case.

The second thing you need to remember is this: welcome to the brave new world of Parity & The Internets. (That's be a pretty good band name. If I ever start a girl punk band, I shall call it Parity & The Internets. I cannot play an instrument, but should I learn, that is.)

Here's where I out myself: I spent three years, between my BA and my MS, working for a private company that profiled student-athletes and marketed them to college coaches, in pretty much any sport you can imagine. (We worked with fencers. And equestrians. Only two or three of each, though, before we realized we couldn't made it work, which is really not relevant to this story.) As odd as that sounds, we didn't actually violate any NCAA rules in what we did; coaches have thousands of rules about contacting athletes, but there aren't actually any rules about athletes contacting coaches. So what my company did was put good athletes -- not blue chippers, not All-Americans (well, not often; although I have met and drunk with some current NBA players), but solid All-State athletes who couldn't play for the big schools because of size or talent or whatever -- in touch with coaches at smaller schools, where the students might get a free education and the coaches might get a good addition to their team. We worked with coaches from D1 down to NAIA and JCs, and what we did was, essentially, level the playing field for coaches with very small recruiting budgets.

Revenue sports (ie, sports that make the university active profit; football, men's basketball and women's basketball at BCS schools are always rev sports, and almost nothing else ever is, though sometimes you'll have an outlier at a school where the program's exceptional; women's soccer is a rev sport at Carolina, because of all the titles) at Big D1 schools have recruiting budgets that mean they can afford to travel, to see every kid they want to. Rev sports at smaller D1 schools and definitely at D2, D3, NAIA schools can't afford that. (Yes, I know D3 schools can't offer athletic scholarships; they can say, we want you and we will find money for you if you come here and play on our team. It's not an athletic scholarship, it sucks for non-athletes, it's what happens whether or not you think it sucks.) Non-rev sports at any school can hardly afford to travel, quite frankly.

The Internets changed that, because we could send unknown gems of kids from Arizona (kids who weren't being recruited by anyone) to coaches in Michigan (who couldn't afford to recruit outside of Michigan before the Internet) and improve their basketball (soccer, softball, swimming) teams 150% immediately. We could get kids who weren't being recruited, but should have been, in front of coaches who had $6000 for a whole year and that includes travel, and we could get coaches players they wouldn't have heard of, otherwise. We could send All-State swimmers to Wisconsin (one of my favorite kids I ever worked with; I worked primarily in Sales and Marketing by the end, not with the athletes, but this swimmer from California, a girl we'll call H., who's got to be a senior at UW now, was one of the few kids I hung onto from the period of time at the beginning when we all did everything) and there are still a few D1 basketball players I see on TV on a regular basis, who I can look at and grin and think, I remember when you were 6'9" and weighed 150 pounds soaking wet and were so shy you wouldn't say more than four words to me at a time, and all you wanted to do was get Bruce Weber or Bill Self or Roy Williams to pay attention to you, because we got the coach who didn't take a second look at this kid, who's going to be an All-Conference center in a major conference this year, to take a third look.

We did that with the internet and a massive database and a lot of phone calls. We did it without violating any NCAA regulations or by-laws. I was unhappy with a lot of things at my company when I left, but what I was doing, what the company was doing, was never one. I believed in the work and I believed in the kids and I believed in the success stories we got to see.

There's ways and ways of recruiting these days, and the small schools are starting to compete with the big schools. Look at this year's football season: parity. Anybody can beat anybody on any given day.

Parity's coming for college basketball, too. That's all this means. I may think there are problems with the coaching system that's in place right now, and I do, especially when it comes to patience with coaches, but that's not the same as thinking the whole product and program is flawed. I don't think the whole thing is flawed; I think it's changing, but not necessarily for the worse (except in the case of the ACC logo, gosh-darned friggin' BC). There's nothing wrong with the ACC, per se, that isn't already a root problem with the Maryland basketball team specifically. They might not be very good this year, but that's not the ACC's problem -- that's Gary Williams' problem. He's not using the internet, metaphorically speaking, and parity's coming for him because he's gotten hammered on recruiting the last couple of years. There will always be majors, mid-majors, and minors -- there will always be a play-in game and a team that doesn't even really go to the Dance. The NIT will continue to be the Not Invited Tournament. But there's a corner that's being turned in recruiting, and it's about the Internet, and it's about parity.

Ohio University just stuck that lesson to Maryland early, is all.

(All opinions in this post reflect my opinions only; I will back up with facts as best I can without violating my non-compete and my non-disclosure agreements, because for all my problems at the end, I still respect my company; shep. cannot be blamed for my outrageous opinions at all.)