Football men can’t stop tweeting the worst college basketball takes

March Madness is supposed to be a time of wonder.

A time of joy.

A time when plucky mid-major darlings get to hone their swords against the Big Boys of the sport. It is pure magic that we, in the year of 2023, get to watch Florida Atlantic AND San Diego State make their first-ever Final Four appearances — against one another no less!

In all this, however, there are some among us in the Twitterverse who are being Scrooges and aren’t in the March Madness Spirit.

Tweets with buzzwords like “ratings,” “executives,” “CBS hates this,” and “doesn’t belong” flood my timeline. Discourse saying this Final Four sucks is being perpetuated by hordes of men who, on a close inspection of their Twitter bios and handles, may suffer from a specific type of brain rot.

Football.

Yes, of course, football. Some college football personalities, some NFL, but all football, sharing similar trash takes about the wonder of college basketball and sticking their pigskinned fingers into our joyous sport.

Let’s run through some of the Tweets that made me want to blog about it

Noted great journalist Ivan Maisel (seriously, his work is great!) tweeted a story that this Final Four has TOO MANY underdogs — leaving out the fact that San Diego State (won the Mountain West) and Florida Atlantic (won the Conference USA) are far from traditional underdogs. In fact, the argument that FAU was woefully underseeded has only gotten more steam during the Owls’ run.

He also egregiously compared the SDSU-FAU pairing to the New Mexico Bowl — which most recently featured 8-5 BYU and 7-6 SMU, mediocre teams who are a far cry from what Aztecs and Owls are to the sport of college basketball.

Stewart Mandel, the EIC for The Athletic’s college football vertical, had a TWO doozies. First, which he deleted after being promptly dumped on leading to a swift backpeddal, in which he called the NCAA Tournament “watered down.”

And, second from Stew, this gem in which he left out important context that Tobin Anderson was a finalist for the job before Rick Pitino was hired in the first place at Iona.

Ben Volin, senior NFL writer at the Boston Globe, fired off a take that simply surmised that the college basketball regular season was meaningless, and had the AUDACITY to use the PGA Tour (GOLF OF ALL SPORTS) as inspiration for change.

Greg Waddell, who is also a college basketball guy to give him some credit, had the idea that this Final Four is more like the Myrtle Beach Invite, which honestly is kinda funny, but is OBJECTIVELY WRONG.

I shouldn’t include this one, if only because this account must know what it is doing with this rage bait but I am falling for it. The Twitter account for the nerds over at RedditCFB just wanted us to think of the poor TV executives in their ivory towers looking at us poor folk.

Kevin Negandhi, regular college football personality for ESPN, did the tired “Gonzaga bad” tweet and was promptly subtweeted by friend of the program Kyle Kensing (we love Kyle here).

ChrisKBills came into the replies of friend of MMM @morrisoncrying by stating a league that features four teams in postseason final fours (Charlotte won the CBI, one of North Texas/UAB will win the NIT, FAU in the NCAAT), had nobody for the Owls to play.

Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.

And, lastly, this misogynist tweet by David Hookstead, who writes for Outkick (barf), and likely failed media literacy, asking “why women?”

Anyways, I end this rant with this: Be more like Magic Johnson. Don’t be a Scrooge McPigskin. Enjoy the hoops, everyone.