The Show.

International basketball tournaments are not fun.

If you ask the casual sports fan if he/she has been paying attention to the FIBA World Championships going on right now in Turkey, chances are the answer will be no. However, if you asked that same apathetic person how they think the tournament is going, I'd be willing to bet that they'd have the same answer as most other people, which would be some form of, "The US is probably winning, right?" Anyone with any basketball knowledge would assume this, and this assumption is going to be right about 95% of the time. It's that 95% of the time that makes any world basketball competition uninteresting. At the FIBA tournament currently going on, the US has won every game by an average of about 30 points. They did have a scare from Brazil, but overall it has proven, thus far, to be an uninteresting, trite basketball tournament. Now, I don't want to sound unpatriotic, but does anyone else kind of want the US to lose?

In my opinion, the US should never lose a basketball game. That's not to say that there aren't any good teams out there besides the US, but it is to say that when you match teams up on paper no one can come remotely close to the US. Now of course games aren't won and lost on paper, which is why the game is played, and as fans there are many instances where we watch in hopes of the paper being wrong. We watch because we don't always want to see the best team win. If the best team always won, regardless of the sport, boredom and disinterest would inevitably ensue. Predictability is the death of excitement, and that's what we get in world championship basketball. We know what's going to happen so we either don't pay attention at all, or we do pay attention but don't really care when what we expect to happen happens. Have you watched a UConn women's basketball game in the last two years? It's uncomfortably boring, not because what they're doing is boring, but because you know what's going to happen. It's too predictable. This is what makes the upset so appealing.

Now, I'm not sure if I want the US to lose as much as I just want to see something different and exciting. In fact, if it were any other country I'd want the same thing - it just happens to be the US in this particular instance, which probably makes me look like an ungrateful, unpatriotic traitor. However, I want to assure everyone that the reason for my craving an upset is not to see the US fall, but rather to see someone else triumph. During the 2004 Olympics people were shocked. Not only did the US lose, but they lost 3 times. They ended up receiving a bronze medal which was a tremendous disappointment, but in a way it was somewhat refreshing. Having this happen restored some passion, although mostly negative, into a sport that had been painfully predictable for far too long. Also, losing every once in a while makes you appreciate winning that much more. Simply put, the US winning will not turn my attention to the FIBA World Championships. The US losing, however, would certainly peak my interest.

To me, pure dominance in a sport is not as interesting as a well-balanced field. Watching a team that always wins takes the excitement out of the game, and we watch the game for the excitement. We watch to see, regardless of what the stats might be on paper, who the better team is on any given day. However, one good thing about such dominance is that the longer it stretches, the more excitement there is when defeat finally occurs. As previously stated, when people pick the US to win a world title, 95% of the time they're going to be right. I may stand alone in wanting the US to lose, but I want them to lose because that 5% is the epitome of why sports are great. That 5% that says, "regardless of everyone's opinion of who the best team is, they can still lose," makes fans passionate about the sport. So although my chances aren't great, I'm going to sit and hope that team USA losses. As well as the UConn women's basketball team.