If You Like Not Being Scum, Root Against Coach K, Who Is Scum

Look. I hate Coach K. You hate Coach K. Everybody hates Coach K. Nobody needs a reason to root for somebody else—anybody else! Attila the Hun! Sauron! anybody!—to win the NCAA tournament. What I am saying is that you should actively root against Coach K. Root for his defeat. Root for his Virtue and Leadership School scam to implode in the most gruesome and humiliating fashion imaginable. Root for some Robert Morris University rando to dunk on Coach K's team so hard the shockwave travels to the sideline and vaporizes this sanctimonious, self-mythologizing fraud where he stands.

Mike Krzyzewski is scum. He warns against the corrupting danger money poses to " the academic missions and the innocence" of college sports, even as he hauls in seven figures a year off the backs of his underpaid workers. He styles himself as a leadership guru, and handles losing with all the maturity of a spoiled 13-year-old. He's an elitist twit; a joyless scold; a humorless prig who mewls about the incivility of a silly newspaper illustration and then returns to berating his teenage charges to tears. He's all the NCAA's undergirding pieties and outright bullshit made flesh. He is a repugnant little rat.

A 16-seed duffing his squad into an early vacation won't do a damn thing to topple him, his myth, or the grand worker's comp avoidance cartel his empty Molder Of Men shtick supports. It'll just feel good. It always does. It's the one time of year when his unfailingly passive-aggressive, self-congratulatory postgame press conference is enjoyable to watch. Of all its many delights, Coach K's nationally televised failure is the best thing the NCAA tournament can hope to give us.

After that, root for Kentucky. Next to Mike Krzyzewski, John Calipari might as well be Cesar Chavez.

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