Dan Shaughnessy should stick to writing about the Red Sox

This article was originally posted at Beyond the Arc.

"Who is Dan Shaughnessy and what does he do?"

I kid you not, I asked myself that very question when this column popped up in my email.

I'm a pretty well-rounded sports fan -- I'll watch anything from football to soccer and baseball to hockey -- but I freely admit that the vast majority of the reading I do in regards to sports is of the college basketball variety. I'm a busy guy. I have important things to do. The third season of Sons of Anarchy isn't going to watch itself for the third time. I'm trying to be proactive here.

So forgive me if I never paid much mind to a Boston Globe columnist. That's a pro sports town. This is a college basketball blog. Our topics of interest don't intersect all that often.

Which is why its so interesting to me that Shaughnessy decided to pen a column bashing the NCAA Tournament. You can go read it if you like. I'd recommend against it. Why? Well, its a lot like this:

OK, everybody likes their brackets. The David-vs.-Goliath themes are fun, great finishes always fascinate, and sometimes it’s nice to check in on old State U. But is there any connection between folks who actually follow the college game and this gluttonous festival of 24/7 bracketology bombardment? No. There isn’t.

Here’s a little test: Walk out your door and try to find someone who can name five players in this year’s tournament. You won’t find anyone unless you live next door to Bob Ryan, my boss Joe Sullivan, or one of the pudding-eating, basement-dwelling blog boys who’d normally be tracking UZR or NFL fantasy teams.

I'm going to refrain from voicing my true feelings on these two paragraphs, only partially because I'm no longer a basement-dwelling blog boy. I'm moving up in the world. This is NBC Sports. I'm now officially a living room-dwelling blog boy.

I'm also going to refrain from picking apart the rest of this column piece by piece. I'm not as funny as the guys from Fire Joe Morgan. And I'm probably too fired up to avoid saying something that could get me in trouble at NBC.

See? Living room-dwelling blog boy. I have some class now.

What I won't refrain from is pointing out that those two paragraphs -- and the column in general -- are entirely hypocritical.

One of Shaughnessy's main points is that everything about the NCAA Tournament is a cash grab. Whether its coaches with the exorbitant salaries and tournament bonuses, the television networks making 11 figures deals with the NCAA to broadcast the event, or the money the schools rake in from the event, everything about the NCAA Tournament screams cha-ching.

The irony in that?

The online media outlets covering the NCAA Tournament get a windfall as well. The traffic over at my site Ballin' is a Habit more than tripled during the week leading up to the start of the NCAA Tournament. I'm sure NBCSports and ESPN and Yahoo! and all the other major media outlets saw even bigger spikes in the traffic going to their college basketball pages.

You don't think Boston.com wanted a slice of the pie? Its a coincidence that this column was posted was posted online on Sunday, the last day of the first weekend of the tournament, right? And its also a coincidence that, after last season's tiff with Kentucky Sports Radio's Matt Jones at right around this same time of year, Shaughnessy made sure to get in a couple of paragraphs worth of jabs at John Calipari, right?

Because otherwise, that would have been a desperate grasp at the traffic bump that comes with the attention of Big Blue Nation.

The bottom line is that this column isn't about what is wrong with the NCAA Tournament. Its about what is wrong with college sports. And there is plenty wrong with college sports -- the recruiting violations, the agents, the lack of "student-athletes" at the highest level. I could go on for days.

Nothing that was written in this column was new. Nothing was enlightening. It was a pot-stirring rant looking to drive up the controversy to get a couple of extra clicks.

Dan Shaughnessy is a grumpy old blowhard writing for a newspaper in a pro sports town that decided to go on a rant about what is wrong with the world of college athletics.

Feel free to ignore what he has to say.