Bill Simmons has been pissing me off for months now. He speaks like an authority about shit he knows very little about, including the fucking Kennedy assassination, but the one thing that pisses me off most is when he talks about college basketball. He doesn’t just state his opinions, but he actually mocks people like Chad Ford who watch more than 10 games before March. Of course, he decided to shit out this gem about the tournament’s effect on draft stocks, and I could not help myself from pointing out how infuriatingly stupid most of it is.

On Twitter last weekend, I mixed it up with my arch-nemesis Chad Ford on the following topic: “How much should March Madness affect our feelings about NBA prospects?”

I always like riling Chad up because he’s a conflict-resolution professor. Ticking him off is like getting Tim Tebow to swear. Anyway, he tweeted that tournament performance affects evaluations by NBA teams, for better and worse, although he didn’t think it was necessarily fair. I responded that it was fair. What better time to determine someone’s intestinal/testicular/mental fortitude than March Madness? It’s the ultimate “sink or swim” stage. Chad disagreed with my disagreement and it was on. Twitter fight!

This is almost too obvious to even bother pointing out, but clearly, Bill Simmons thinks March Madness is a key determinate in pro potential because it is the only time he watches college basketball. He has to make these games the main emphasis for evaluating talent, because otherwise, his opinions would be meaningless.

Here’s my case in a nutshell: Let’s say I owned Marquis Jet and wanted to find new pilots to fly my 12-seat airplanes. Let’s say I narrowed it down to 30 candidates and had a chance to fly cross-country with them in inclement weather. Let’s say 20 of them did fine, five were amazing and five completely melted down, to the degree that I had to grab the controls or we would have crashed.

Should this matter?

(Hold on, I’ll give you an extra second to think about it.)

(And … time.)

OF COURSE! OF COURSE IT MATTERS! I just looked into their souls. I just tested them in the most intense way possible. That doesn’t matter?

Wow. This is a horrible analogy. If you selected 30 pilots and 1/6 of them melted down in inclement weather then you’re the fucking moron. Playing basketball is not like flying a plane in any fucking way. The best players in the world have off nights, sometimes even on the highest possible stage, but this doesn’t make them bad at basketball. If a pilot started pissing himself one day because he saw a raindrop, I don’t think anyone is going to be saying, “You know Joe is a really good pilot, one of our best, he’s just in a slump.” One fuck up could be career threatening or even life threatening for a pilot. Most basketball players fuck up several times a game. The bottom line is that for any draft prospect, there will be a minimum of 30 games to base conclusions upon, plus for many of them, previous seasons and previous tournaments. Forget the stupid pilot analogy. Basing someone’s draft stock on 1 or 2 games would be like someone reading this shitty column and deciding on your worth as a writer.

Sink or swim. That’s March Madness. Should opinions on pro potential (or, as reader Shaun Fagan cleverly calls it, “protential”) be formed entirely on tournament performance? Of course not. That’s ridiculous. But in a perfect world, Madness accentuates opinions we’re already thinking and feeling. What are those things? I narrowed them down to 10 questions. I don’t need all of them answered, or even most of them … but if I can get three or four protential answers, I am delighted.

Can’t wait.

Question No. 1: Does Player X pass the Foxhole Test?

In other words, would you want him as a teammate if you were playing a pickup game to 11 with the following stakes: Losers spend the weekend in a movie theater watching a 48-hour marathon of “The Backup Plan”? Kansas State’s Jacob Pullen passed this test Saturday: gamer, warrior, tough as nails, totally unafraid, bounces off bigger guys, carried KSU all game (eight 3s). Scouts are dubious because, basically, he’s a 6-foot-tall 2-guard. Or so they think. Because I see him evolving into a goofy hybrid of Kyle Lowry and Aaron Brooks: a shoot-first point guard with 3-point range who battles on every play. You could do worse in the second round, that’s for sure. At least we know he’s a fighter.

This is a perfect example of Simmons watching a player for two games and making a rash judgment. I would be willing to bet that Jacob Pullen is playing somewhere in Europe next year. His best case scenario is probably the D-League. A hybrid of Kyle Lowry and Aaron Brooks? You have to be fucking kidding me. How about a hybrid of Carl Krauser and Allan Ray?  

 (Important note: I swear on my son’s life that I first wrote the previous paragraph Wednesday afternoon, a day and a half before Pullen donned the hero’s cape in Thursday night’s epic double-overtime victory over Xavier. See? The Foxhole Test never fails!!!!)

Yes, this is true. FOXHOLE TEST NEVER FAILS!!! Why else is Christian Laettner a surefire Hall of Famer? You got a better explanation for Miles Simon spending a decade on the All-NBA First Team? Throw in the careers of Keith Smart, Juan Dixon, Tyus Edney, Bryce Drew, Jai Lewis, Scotty Thurman, Mateen Cleaves, Ed O’Bannon, John Wallace, etc. etc. etc, and this becomes more than just a theory, it is proven fact. Evidence is evidence!

One other Foxhole guy I love: John Wall. It’s his single best quality; he detests losing and consistently ratchets up his game in big moments. During the SEC title game, with Kentucky trailing by two and needing to rebound an intentional free throw-miss, I watched him as the free throw was in the air, thinking “I bet John Wall finds a way to get this rebound.” And you know what? He did. That’s what I want from my Foxhole Guys: Find a way to win.

Talk about a self fulfilling prophecy. This would be like calling Carmelo Anthony a foxhole guy in 2003. Just like Wall, he was the best player in the tournament. Does that make him a “foxhole guy”? Has he proven to be so in the NBA? Or was he just a really, really good basketball player playing against guys that aren’t that good? And is the rest just stupid bullshit? You tell me.

Question No. 3: If Player X is a perimeter scorer or scoring point guard, can he get to any spot he wants?

Put it this way: If he can’t make the executive decision a few times per game of “I’m going to beat my guy, get into the paint and get a good shot” or “I’m getting to the rim and either scoring or they’ll have to foul me,” then it’s not happening in the pros. Did you watch Oklahoma State play Georgia Tech? Poor James Anderson’s stock fell through the floor. At least for me. He couldn’t get anywhere he wanted to go. That means four words: “Welcome to the D-League.”

So let me get this straight. James Anderson plays 3 years against Big 12 competition, which means there is 3 years of data and 3 years of easily accessible film on this guy, yet the one game Bill Simmons watched is going to make or break his draft stock? If I remember correctly James Harden had an even worse tournament game and still ended up going 3^rd overall.

Question No. 5: Does Player X have a meal ticket?

Saint Mary’s Omar Samhan intrigues me for one reason: If you feed him the ball within seven feet of the basket, he’s scoring unless Dwight Howard is defending him. That’s his meal ticket. I don’t care that he’s slow, that he can’t jump, that he runs like someone removed his kneecaps. Doesn’t matter. If Aaron Gray can play for 8-10 years in the NBA (and he will), so can Samhan. He has to be one of the best 30-35 guys in this draft. Has to. You can count the number of effective low-post scorers in the NBA on two hands. Still, we needed to see him do it on national TV with the Madness lights shining on him. And he did.

There was a time, however briefly, that Aaron Gray was thought to be a top 10 pick. That’s how good he was in college, and in the Big East mind you. Omar Samhan has about as much chance to make it as an NBA player as Bo’s boy, Taylor Coppenrath, did 5 years ago.

That brings me to something I call the Gerald Green Corollary: You can’t make it in the NBA unless you can do at least one thing exceedingly well. Green was an incredible athlete, but he wasn’t good at anything. Throw in a Gump-like basketball IQ and he never had a chance. Meanwhile, Ty Lawson was lightning-fast in college; nobody could stay in front of him. Guess what? He’s lightning-fast in the pros. Eric Maynor had real command of the point guard position; he owned it, for lack of a better word. Nobody ran a team better last season. Guess what? He’s a valuable backup for a 50-win team. J.J. Redick shot the living crap out of the basketball in college. Guess what? He’s making 39 percent of his 3s on a contender.

Adam Morrison owned college basketball to the point that he was being compared to Larry Bird. Guess what? He barely ever sees the floor. Hasheem Thabeet blocked shots at a rate not seen since Patrick Ewing. Guess what? He’s in the D-League. Luke Jackson was a 6’7 assassin for a very good Oregon team. Guess what? Out of the NBA. See? As long as you do one thing well in college it will DEFINITELY translate to the NBA.

Question No. 7: How much are Player X’s teammates making/breaking his success in the tournament?

Five years ago, Deron Williams jumped Chris Paul on some lists (and ended up getting drafted ahead of him) because Illinois made the title game and Wake Forest got bounced in Round 2. I never thought this was fair. Paul was so superior to his teammates that I remember feeling bad for him; they just weren’t on the same plane. (Can you name one player Paul played with that season? I bet you can’t.) I thought Paul would thrive as a pro with better teammates … and in this case, I was right.

Originally the first sentence of this paragraph read: “Five years ago, Deron Williams jumped Chris Paul on some lists (and ended up getting drafted ahead of him) because Illinois made the title game and Georgia Tech got bounced in Round 2.” They corrected the article obviously, but someone had already called Simmons out on Twitter, to which he replied “We fixed. I have a mental block w/ those 2 schools, always switch them.”

So a guy who cannot even remember what school Chris Paul played at is challenging us to name one player that played with him. Were Deron Williams’ teammates better? Yes. Were Chris Paul’s teammates horrible? No. Was the difference in teammates why he went lower? No, it was because Williams dominated Paul physically early in the year, and had a tremendous season from start to finish, including an all-time performance against Arizona where he put his team on his back. Paul, on the other hand, melted down towards the end of that season by punching Julius Hodge in the nuts to get suspended for the ACC Tournament, and then fouling out of the West Virginia game on several dumb fouls. I love Chris Paul, but the bottom line is he was outplayed by Mike Gansey in that game. It was not his teammates’ fault that he got overmatched physically several times during his college career, most notably by Williams and Jameer Nelson, and that he allowed his emotions to get the best of him at costly moments, whereas Williams already had an NBA body and always seemed the definition of cool, calm, and collected. SO LEAVE ERIC WILLIAMS, JUSTIN GRAY, TARON DOWNEY, AND JAMAAL LEVY THE FUCK ALONE!!

I have to leave it at that with this article, or else I may have a seizure.