College basketball regular season has been irrelevant, boring

It is with considerable delight that I remind you that Division-I, no-playoffs college football is far superior to one-month-of-relevance college basketball.

The latest and most powerful proof of this fact is the current college basketball season, which has been virtually ignored for three consecutive months now.

Let me tell you how insignificant the college basketball season has been thus far: Texas A&M and Baylor staged the signature game, a five-overtime contest that was so big that no one thought to televise it.

Obviously, we’ve been lucky. Kansas has one of the deepest, most talented and experienced teams in the country. And Kansas State is being visited by the nation’s No. 1 player. Locally, we have a couple of interesting story lines and The Fighting Missouri Tigers.

Nationally, in terms of impact, drama and interest, the college game rates below even the 82-game NBA exhibition season, which has featured blockbuster trades and a Western Conference loaded with title contenders.

But while everyone annually disses the end of the college football season and cries about a lack of a playoff, almost no one rips college hoops for its watered-down, four-month, regular-season snoozefest.

There are far more problems in college basketball than college football. You’d never know it by picking up a newspaper, reading sports blogs or listening to talk radio. If you listen to us, you’d get the impression that Darren McFadden and Arkansas upset LSU in three overtimes in hoops or that Appalachian State knocked off Michigan with Dick Vitale and Billy Packer calling the game or that John Calipari masterminded Stanford’s shocking, come-from-behind victory over USC.

Damn near every weekend and on several Thursdays, the college football national-title picture got turned upside down. And college hoops has given us Baylor-A&M, a tree falling in the woods when everybody was at the ocean.

Look, I still love college basketball. I just get tired of hearing how perfect it is because of March Madness. I get tired of hearing how much football stinks because of a lack of a playoff. It’s just not true.

So I’ll write one of these columns at least once a year to remind you that Kevin Durant left the college game two years too early, long before he learned to really play the game and much too soon to leave a lasting college legacy.

By bouncing after one year, Durant didn’t help himself as a player, the NBA or Texas. So far in the pro game, he looks exactly as I predicted: the second coming of Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson, a shoot-first, pass-later, lose-now gunner. Durant is averaging 19 points, shooting 40 percent from the field, and his SuperSonics have lost 37 of 50 games.

Is this a plea for Michael Beasley to stick around for another year at K-State? Not really. He’s a better player than Durant. He has more to offer the game than a streaky jump shot. (And by the way, I hope someone informs Bill Walker he’s not going to three-point-shoot his way into the NBA lottery. Walker will get drafted high if he demonstrates he’s a great athlete willing to defend and able to score, not shoot. Channel Ron Artest with a brain, Bill.)

But the NCAA needs to work with the NBA on devising a system that keeps players in the college game for three years. You know, the same rule that allowed McFadden to finish as Heisman runner-up two years in a row, the rule that will have Tim Tebow back to make another run at the Heisman Trophy, the rule that creates continuity and star power in college football.

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To reach Jason Whitlock, call 816-234-4869 or send e-mail to jwhitlock@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.