Carleton Ravens’ CIS dominance overshadowed by imported March Madness hype

Canada likes to ship raw resources out of this country, so why not celebrate shipping raw talent out of the country too.

This is what one has to put up with as a basketball lover in this country: an American telling us it's great that more and more of our best hoops talent be outsourced because their home and native land isn't doing enough to retain them by providing a worthwhile competitive alternative is growth. It's irony on base level. To be fair, TSN analyst Jack Armstrong was just doing his job to build hype for his network's coverage of March Madness. However, he indirectly summed up something sad about the state of an all too common viewpoint in Canada when he said, "It's remarkable to see the growth in basketball in this country with over 80 Canadians playing Division I basketball." (Armstrong meant men's basketball only.)

One should celebrate the fact 27 Canadians are in the tourney. It is a positive on some level that Montreal's Kris Joseph stars for No. 1-seeded Syracuse, that Mississauga's Andrew Nicholson led St. Bonaventure into the dance and that Myck Kabongo and Kevin Pangos are the starting point guards for Texas and Gonzaga as true freshmen right out of high school. Marquette point guard Junior Cadougan, a Torontonian, is a great story. Calling that growth though, misses the big picture as badly as the Butler Bulldogs missed some of their shots during last season's NCAA title game.

Realistically, until there are full scholarships the crème de la crème of Canadian court talent will always go south, the same way the blue-chippers in the U.S. flock to name-brand programs such as Kentucky, Syracuse or North Carolina. That is a given. One could not help but juxtapose Armstrong's sentiment with — oh, here we go — the state of the collegiate game within this country, the one whose championship was not even shown on national television.

The Carleton Ravens, of course, captured their record-tying eighth CIS title on Sunday. They might not have been the best university team to ever take the floor in this country — would if you could adjust for chronology and put them up against a Ken Shields- coached Victoria Vikes team with national team stalwarts such as Eli Pasquale and Gerald Kazanowski, who were both NBA draft picks before the league cut back to a two-round draft — but no onehas been as dominant in their own time. (Carleton only finished fourth nationally in RPI, but that just shows how bad the bottom rung of their OUA East division was; this season York, Queen's and RMC were a combined 1-58 vs. the rest of the conference.)

Ravens coach Dave Smart has shown what a CIS program can be. Not to get too hyperbolic about it, but he might even be showing us how to live. There was still an air of melancholy about it on Sunday, though, while watching player of the year Phil Scrubb, fellow all-Canadian Tyson Hinz and sixth man extraordinaire Willy Manigat, a great study in perserverance, dismantle the Alberta Golden Bears in an 86-67 win. The coach asserted that his two stars are "50 to 60 per cent of the kids playing in the NCAA tournament, maybe closer to 80 per cent and yet they don't get that credit" and it would be hard to disagree. (The CTV affiliate in Ottawa might have indirectly proved Smart's point by misspelling both players' names.)

Carleton played beautifully. Time and again they pulled the string on passes that led to uncontested baskets, they stretched Alberta's defence with their outside shooting and they had strong takes. They made Alberta's lead guard, Daniel Ferguson, start forcing shots early.

Most conceded the game was over in the second quarter, when Carleton took a 20-point halftime lead. To brutally honest, it was over in the third quarter — of Saturday's semifinal vs. Fraser Valley, when Carleton found its shooting stroke as Scrubb and his older brother Thomas Scrubb led the charge to put away the Cascades. There was no turning back after that; in the media room at the Ottawa Civic Centre on Sunday, I scoffed at the suggestion Carleton could lose and predicted an 18-point win. With all due respect to Alberta, the Ravens made the drop-off from No. 1 to No. 2 look like the drop-off from Coke and Pepsi to the world's third-most popular cola.

However, it has to be put into context of how Canadians en masse ignore the CIS game and then blindly hop on the March Madness bandwagon. There were only 3,500 people watching Sunday at the Halifax Metro Centre. That is more than the game would get in many pockets of the country but still a far cry from what a national title game between Alberta and Ontario teams would have drawn even 10 years ago. (Ten years ago, there were 7,000 in the Metro Centre to watch Alberta and the Western Mustangs in the final.)

Armstrong, et al., are right on some low level to say it's growth to have so many Canadians go to NCAA Division I. That comes back to the great lesson of the last few years: who is the growth the media talks about for and is it good growth.

Far be it to say it's not growth to have so many players going south, making money for the athletic departments of major U.S. colleges, CBS and ESPN, while the Canadian game is starved (starving itself?) for adequate attention. Good growth would be having some idea if the CIS Final 8 will be back on mainstream TV in 2013 or of where it will even be played in 2015 after its upcoming two-year run at Scotiabank Place in Ottawa. Halifax's days of hosting seem to be over.

There is more to this than Carleton having won eight of the past 10 seasons. There is a wonderful game north of the border — like the Canadian Football League, a better game with good, just not great talent — and it gets treated as inferior. There are many steps being taken in the right direction. There's a fledgling pro league in Canada (where CIS alumni such as former York guard Tut Ruach have flourished). The success of new CIS programs such as Fraser Valley or former doormats such as Lakehead show many universities are realizing the value of a good basketball team to a mid-sized city.

In a world that is going to be a lot more local in the next 30 years, more needs to be done to get all CIS sports more of a primary concern. It's too bad the drive-by media is stuck in an old way of thinking, scurrying to tell you to keep an eye peeled for someone who plays seven minutes a game for 13th-seeded New Mexico State because he is a Canadian. Shame on them to validate that branch-plant economy mentality by highlighting scrubs south of the border instead of Scrubbs who are raising the game at home.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Contact him at neatesager@yahoo.ca and follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet (photo: The Canadian Press).