Forget the obvious ways that college basketball’s vastly redecorated landscape has altered the way you look at the sport. Forget the money that changes hands, and the players who change schools year to year without consequence. Forget the fact that if you think too much about how the business of the sport is conducted, it’ll make you seek a shower at once.
Forget all of that.
Here’s the hardest part of all of this if you happen to be a fan of college hoops: It has fallen completely under the purview of William Goldman’s most famous quote. Goldman, who was the greatest screenwriter of his generation, a two-time Academy Award winner (“Butch and Sundance,” “All the President’s Men”) when he wasn’t living and dying courtside for decades with the Knicks, had a favored term that became the title of his first book on the business of Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”
In Goldman’s world, it referred to the reality that nobody in movies really understands what separates the hits from the bombs. You can make educated guesses. You can do everything right. And yet the mystery of why some films draw crowds that wrap around the block and others can’t even attract friends and family has always been elusive.
