Why NBA is better than College Basketball (but College Football is better than NFL)

Passion and effort makes college sports compelling. The drama created by the players’ love of the sport draws us to watch and cheer. But it can’t carry college basketball past the NBA.
College basketball is vastly inferior game compared to the NBA game. Players are smaller, slower, and far less skilled. This makes college basketball a bag of Skittles. The individual effort and passion are there, but there’s not enough skill and the talent for it to be more than the sum of it’s parts like Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.
For example, the Lakers play one of the most beautiful offenses ever, and no college team can match the ball and player movement of their triangle offense. The Hornets run the Princeton offence with precision and control no college team can match. Even the rag-tag Warriors (who’s offensive strategy is to just chuck it) can out-run, out-gun, and out-create the best college teams. The lowly Warriors, or even the Clippers would easily rack up 140 points on best college teams.
And the Warriors and the Clippers would actually be able to stop college teams from scoring. College players play defense with a lot more passion and effort than the pros do, but they are not as effective. As John Wooden said “don’t mistake activity for progress.” And it shows in rookie mistakes, like when they miss a rotation or fail to help. Many of them are not even decent pick and roll defenders, and they should have been taught to say not over-commit when putting pressure on the ball but many rookie big men do.
NBA basketball is simply more effective on both offense and defense. Now I would argue that this is true in football too, but the effectiveness of the NFL game works against it. In football, the proportion of (observable) unplanned event is much smaller than basketball. Effectiveness of the NFL lowers that proportion to the point where it becomes too predictable and not as much fun. That’s why college football is better than the NFL. But the proportion of unplanned event is much greater in basketball in general. The effectiveness of the NBA game limits it enough to highlight those moments of creativity.
Players like LeBron, Steve Nash, D-Wade, and Chris Paul would be far less entertaining to watch in college game. They won’t be able to play at the highest level because the players around them are not as good. They won’t be able to showcase their talents because the offenses and defenses are simpler. They won’t even be allowed to create as much because college coaches tend to over coach. And we would have to watch fewer possessions because the shot clock is 10 seconds too long. Passion and effort is good, but not good enough to overcome inferior product, especially that idle 10 seconds at the beginning of every possession.

i'll meet the ones between us and be thinking about you. thoughts inspired by a cocktail of xanax, wine and weed. i know this joke through a woody allen film: sex is always between 6. the couplers (2), their parents (4)= 6. but the joke comments intelligibly on what I like to call "the everyday coitus." what's between you and a conjugal I........ is a series of Others. Others? For example: your father, the lessons he may have ingrained in your psyche. These lessons (superegoic commands) fill you with turmoil. Your mother, the ego ideal you keep for every partner you'll ever have had.

Fuck, I'm almost out of my wine. Thankfully we keep a cupboard of sedatives. Sometines I don't hear.

Isolated rat cells can fly planes, so you have no free will

In the last few years, someone decided to see if isolated rat brain cells placed in a dish could control a flight simulator. Not to keep you in suspense, they can.

At first, the cells did not what the hell they were doing, but over time, they learned. (That's what brain cells do.)

Basically, the cells are grown are grown on dish of electrodes and form sort of a bio-circuit board. Whenever the virtual plane is flying strait, the neurons receive a positive electrical signal, which strengthens which ever neural connections are active at that time. Pretty soon, the neural pathways that fly the plane correctly are the strongest, and the isolated neurons are blazing around like Goose and Maverick giving "the bird" to a MIG. This is the same that we learn to walk or hit a golf ball.

Now if isolated neurons can fly planes, can they form some kind of natural, artificial, semi-conscious, conscious, human-like, bio-bot? I'm glad you asked.



This robot learns the same way that the flight simulator neurons learned. In other words, it gets better at being a robot over time without any future programming. Neural cells are built to do just that. It's a large part of how we learn - neurons that do the job correctly become stronger.

So why don't you have any free will anymore? Well, you are basically one of the these robots, except your brain cells last a lot longer and you occasionally have to go to the bathroom. That's it. Maybe. Perhaps all you do is respond to stimuli and strengthen neural connections over time.

Not enough proof that you have no free will? Well, how about this: Recent studies have shown that, when making a decision, electrical signals for that decision can be observed in your brain...wait for it...10 seconds before you make your decision. In other words, contrary to our assumed relationship with our brain, which is that we tell it what to do, it now appears that it tells us what to do.

Let's think about how this works. You are at the store pondering whether to add crunch berries™ to this week's stockpile of your favorite breakfast treat, Cap't Crunch (which are supposed to look like a bunch of treasure chests, by the way). Your impatient wife asks you what you're going to get. You reply "I have no idea", because you don't. Ten seconds later, Bam! you triumphantly throw the crunch berry™-less cereal into your cart. Beaming, you walk off to ready to take on the ever present "idodized vs non-iodized salt" Goliath.

Had you been able to see your brain's activity more clearly, you would have known that you were about to choose that the plain cereal when your wife asked. In fact, your brain has probably already decided on idodized salt. In essence, the decision was already made before you knew about it. All you did was eventually carry it out by grabbing the cereal box, like some kind of monkey butler.

On the other hand, maybe your brain is just good at reading minds. Like your own. Wait, that doesn't make any more sense at all.