The Vice Sports Guide To NCAA Tournament Archetypes

There are fundamental things about the NCAA Tournament that do not change from year to year: there are all those thwarted-congressmen types with their arms folded on the sidelines, there's Bill Raftery barking with delight at every correctly executed defensive rotation, there are the ads that cycle endlessly through the constant commercial breaks, reminding viewers that Capital One loves you and wants to be happy and that there's a new season of "Pawn CHUDs: Long Island" coming soon on TruTV.

But the players turn over quickly, both in the sense that the best ones are only even on campus for a few months and in the sense that the pressures of March and their own galloping teenage anxieties tend to reduce March Madness' players into one contiguous mass of back-rimmed jumpers and stress.

Still, there are certain types of college basketball players who recur from year to year, often with lineages running back into college basketball's past. No one would ever expect you (or Charles Barkley, apparently) to remember every name. But if you can familiarize yourself with the different types of college basketball player, you'll be able to get plenty of enjoyment out of March's annual celebration.

The Jumping Bouncer

Matt Stainbrook, the handsome fellow you see above, is a pretty good basketball player and as promising a Jumping Bouncer archetype as college basketball types have seen in many years. Once plentiful—during the 1990s, when every power forward in the Big East was a 6'5", 260 pound rectangular, Jumping Bouncers were college basketball's dominant large-person type—Jumping Bouncers have since been hunted nearly to extinction by the gangly, 6'9" do-everything frontcourt players. This is sad for fans that enjoy their bigs hairy-shouldered and be-goggled, but it makes it that much more exciting when humble beeflords like Stainbrook emerge, park their girth in the lane, and do what they do.

Career Outlook: Stainbrook is tall by Jumping Bouncer standards at 6'10", and could well enjoy a pro career. Or he could join legendary Jumping Bouncers Jon Brockman and Don Reid at their youth academy, where young dudes set bruising picks on each other while John Mellencamp songs blast through speakers.

The Seventh-Year Senior

It's complicated, because Seventh-Year Seniors do not necessarily need to be seniors, or even to be old. Every college campus has a few kids on it that mysteriously look like circa-now Meat Loaf at the age of 20, and some of those kids are good enough to be basketball players. College basketball being the diverse thing that it is, there are players who actually are that old—Skyler Halford, the BYU guard seen above, did a two-year Mormon mission in Brazil, played this entire season at the age of 25, and looks old enough to have voted for Ross Perot twice. Seventh-Year Seniors don't need to be members of the Church of Latter Day Saints to achieve this status, though. Split a college career between two schools, mix in a year lost to transfer rules or injury, and there you go: a 6'9" junior with Paul Giammati's hairline who's halfway done with his MBA.

Career Outlook: Already has an advanced degree. He'll be fine.

Inflatable Used Car Lot Guy

Basketball is hard to play, and it can, paradoxically, look harder for those whose body types best suit the modern game. NBA scouts look for players with long arms and legs that move quickly, for reasons that are not terribly difficult to understand, but also long arms and legs are difficult to maneuver, especially for nervous 18-year-olds playing basketball on television and in front of a 20,000 screaming people. As a result, even the most physically gifted athletes can look like Jar-Jar Binks riding a rocket-powered skateboard at times. They'll grow into their bodies and abilities, or they won't. Not even NBA scouts know for sure. But it will always be difficult for them to find shirts that look good, and we should spare a prayer for them on that front.

Career Outlook: First-round NBA Draft pick, most likely.

Fine Young Men

These are basically people that go to Duke or seniors at larger land grant schools. They probably are fine young men, honestly, but that is not going to make it any easier to hear it mentioned, 11 times per game for as long as they last, that they are majoring in business administration. We already know they're majoring in business administration, Dan Bonner. It's implied.

Career Outlook: The Duke ones are already assistant coaches somewhere.

Kids

This is the one category into which all of the above—even Skyler Halford, who has almost certainly seen more of the world than you have—fall into. They are nervous and they will make mistakes; they will play basketball imperfectly because they are not professional-grade players for the most part, and because they are 19. Most people their age have to set multiple alarms in order to arrive, unshowered, at a 1:15pm class within its first half hour. These people are getting yelled at mercilessly by old scary millionaires, on television, because they were unable to throw a basketball through a hoop from 25 feet away with enough frequency.

They are not getting paid for this, naturally, and are in many cases being used as brand-builders and marketing mechanisms by extraordinarily cynical institutions and puffy pink adults who can't even remember when they stopped giving a shit about anything but protecting what they have. They are having an experience that's complicated and fluid, which can turn cruel at any moment and which is as likely as not to be one of the most important formative experiences of their lives. They can only do so much about any of this, because of how March works and how the world works, but they are doing it.

That's the thing that powers all this, and props up the whole moneymaking edifice. It's not the basketball, really, or the things that these various kids do or don't do. We are watching to catch a bit of the high they're on, and to experience a little bit of the wild and ungovernable—to experience them, in other words, and what they make together—from a distance that's more safely removed from the molten center they're circling. We are watching because it is thrilling to see something so unfinished as it works itself out.

Career Outlook: We might as well wish them all the best.