2222 Promotion/Relegation
I am writing this as a history, and as though it could be read by people living 200 years ago.
This is about college basketball, and about how we play it, but it’s also about the world we live in, and how we got here.
I’ll start by telling you just a little bit about how we live in 2222 C. E., then we’ll go to basketball. As we move along, I’ll tell you more about my world, and how it got to be the way it is.
The world of your time, say 2020 or so, was rapidly falling apart. None of the systems that hold societies together were working very well. The Great
Depression of December, 2019 destroyed the world’s economy and led to a world filled with chaos. There was mass starvation, looting, theft- a struggle to simply survive for the world’s nearly 8 billion people. Things continued that way, with the population shrinking steadily, and life being a dire struggle, until the Great Epidemic of 2049. That wiped out most of the world’s population. No one at the time had any way of knowing how many people were left alive, but our historians and anthropologists tell us it was about one billion.
Interestingly enough, and for no conceivable reason, the overwhelming majority of the survivors had higher than normal intelligence, and/or possessed valuable skills- valuable in rebuilding and maintaining a working society, that is.
Let’s leave it there for now, with my promise that there is much more to come, and let’s move on to the present.
The world of 2222 in brief: We keep the population of the world at about a billion. More on that later. There are 100 countries in our world, each with a population of as close to ten million as possible, and none are overpopulated. Yes, LOTS of boundaries were redrawn. There is no poverty, and there is no excessive wealth- not anywhere in the world.
Progress, mostly technological, has made work mostly unnecessary. 99% of our people are at an IQ level of 130 or higher (We use a wide variety of measures to define intelligence, and we group and average them together under the term “IQ,” because it was in wide use when all of this started, but it is not actually about IQ at all.) The machines do virtually all of the work in our world, and this frees up the population. People do pretty much as they please, within certain sane limits. Government exists, but it has minimal functions. Big business does not exist, as it is unnecessary. Yes, we have crimes, and yes, we have ways of dealing with them and with the criminals when they are apprehended and convicted.
We have made vast improvements in all sorts of things. I’ll speak of transportation and use that as a segue into basketball.
Here in the former U. S., a plane carrying 500 passengers can fly from New York to San Francisco in about 45-47 minutes. Most of that time is taken up with take off and landing. Most flights take from about 45-47 minutes to about 60 minutes (the very longest distances) because take off, getting into the proper flight pattern, preparing for landing, and landing take about 40 minutes. No, we don’t come anywhere near light speed, but we do not need to. Speeds of 500 miles per minute truly get the job done quickly, and that’s what our major airplanes cruise at. So, a trip to the farthest point from New York, for instance, would take about 60 minutes (20 minutes for the flight, plus the 40 or so mentioned above).
Okay, college basketball: College level sports are the high point of competitive sports, with perhaps the Olympics having more popularity and esteem.
There are no professional sports. Those wishing to continue playing beyond college play on club teams. Since money plays such a miniscule role in our lives they are not paid.
There are always movements to work toward national and world championships in basketball and futbol (soccer), the only remaining team sports that are in any way organized, but this has been stopped so far. Regional titles are as high up as the competition goes. There are, for example, 16 regions in what was the U. S. (now 10 countries), 24 in what was Russia, 32 in the former China, 8 in old Canada… Other sports that remain very popular include track and field, swimming and diving, gymnastics, figure skating, and a few others. There’s lots of volleyball, but almost all of it is local in nature.
College basketball in the former U.S.: 352 colleges play Division I basketball. They are organized into 22 Conferences with 16 teams each, in a Promotion/Relegation system where the top three teams move up one conference, and the bottom three move down one conference at the end of each season. Each conference is weighted so that the teams are as competitive as possible. The very best teams are in Conf. A, the weakest in Conf. V. The teams in Conf. A have the most resources and generally the best facilities, and it goes down with the drop in conference.
Okay, that’s a good start. Now to me, and the team I will coach.