As I’ve reached the stretch drive of my junior year at Emory University, I’ve started to realize a few things. Thing No. 1: I am old!* Thing No. 2: My time at this University — and particularly with the Wheel — are winding down. It made me think: What have I accomplished here? I need something to leave behind, other than the gaping holes in the wall of my freshman year dorm room made from that godforsaken hell-paste that’s supposed to stick your posters and other belongings to your wall, but winds up taking off half the wall in the process. I can’t explain to you how big these holes were — the poor maintenance workers that are tasked with touching up the campus rooms probably still joke about it to this day. “Ryan Smith? Yeah, that kid took a sledgehammer to his wall. CHARGE HIM ONE MILLION BUCKS.”
This is where #blessed comes in. #blessed is planned to be a bimonthly column that will be gracing the Sports pages of the Wheel from now until my graduation, so that one day lists of notable Emory alumni will include my name — “1. Robert W. Woodruff: CEO, Coca-Cola. 2. Newt Gingrich: Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives. 3. Ryan Smith: Author, '#blessed'; Maker, big holes in the wall.”
I digress. I hope you’re reading #blessed now. I hope you read it again at some point. I hope something in here makes you laugh just once so you can forget, if only for a moment, the crushing disappointment of realizing the biggest concert of your academic year is going to be performed by J. Cole.**
Let’s get cooking. The hottest #sports topic of the moment is the NCAA tournament, this year’s edition being particularly remarkable for two big upsets in the opening round: Fourteen-seeded University of Alabama-Birmingham and Georgia State University knocking off third-seeded Iowa State University and Baylor University (Texas), respectively. As a self-proclaimed sports hipster and staunch supporter of literally every underdog everywhere, the NCAA tourney is generally a bastion of happiness for me. “Oh, you didn’t have Southwestern El Paso State beating Kansas? Wow, you really haven’t been following their season, have you?” It’s GREAT. I am a loud, pretentious cat rolling around in the catnip of self-importance during the NCAA tournament.
This year’s tournament, though, presents me with a wrinkle that is at least temporarily stumping my psychological dependency on upsets. The University of Kentucky, of the oodles of talented freshmen and the unblemished 36-0 record, represents the ultimate Not Underdog. Last I checked, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight had their odds to win the tournament at over 40 percent, which is an absolutely ludicrous number seeing as there are still 16 teams left. Kentucky winning the tourney would, by any standard, be incredibly anticlimactic.
Think about this, though: Have the Kentucky Wildcats become so good that they’ve busted the sports space-time continuum and become an actual Underdog in spite of themselves? Going undefeated in a college basketball season is really, really hard — only eight teams have ever done it, and none since 1976. Wouldn’t the Wildcats winning the title be accomplishing a task so ridiculous that it’d be an upset over fate, in a sense? I don’t know the answer to this. These are the type of existential questions you should be struggling with while watching Kentucky’s seven-foot giraffe-men literally swallow opposing teams and not watching J. Cole perform music.
#shoutouts: Russell Westbrook vines, “I Really Like You” by Carly Rae Jepsen, Blue Donkey coffee, people named Karl-Anthony, sleep.
*Seriously, though. I just had a talk with my friends about how many gray hairs I have. I have so many! This made us debate whether premature graying or premature balding was worse. The answer is balding, and if you disagree you are wrong.
**“But 2014 Forest Hills Drive was fire!,” you protest. Why are you reading my column, 13-year-old?
