So, as most of us do, I awoke this morning from a dream about the NCAA Mid-Majors, the teams outside the Power Five Conferences (Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Big 12, and Big East). In the dream I was writing about the odd and often uncertain trajectory of Mid Major teams, like the University of Dayton.

Here’s the thing, I will not be writing about the Mid Majors, although there is a story there to be told, many stories to be told. The introduction of the transfer portal has meant that teams outside the Power Five lose their best players to transfer at the end of a season, essentially becoming the equivalent of the NCAA’s “G” League. These Mid-Majors were the universities we loved emerging from the dogpile as “Cinderella” teams in the midst of March Madness, the surprises victors: Richmond, Coppin State, Hampton, Florida Gulf Coast, Middle Tennessee State, Oral Roberts, St. Peter’s, Princeton, Fairleigh Dickinson, University of Maryland Baltimore County.

So, Cinderella’s pumpkins now leave town before the ball begins.

No, I will not be writing the definitive or even the cursory account of a subject that came to me uninvited as I hacked into my CPAP. I would not be writing even had I been stewing about the plight of Mid-Majors for the past decade. John Feinstein would have written a masterful and insightful book, had he lived to see the current NCAA basketball season end. He wrote about sitting on the bench with Bobby Knight in A Season on the Brink and in Caddy for Life, wrote about Bruce Edrwards, Tom Watson’s caddy who fought ALS. He loved sports and had the tenacity to research and write generously.

And then, there’s McPhee. 

John McPhee wrote A Sense of Where You Are, a profile of Bill Bradley as he finished his career at Princeton. The book came out in 1965 as I continued to slide happily past all formal attempts to educate me at Kenyon. McPhee’s book was an education. It is one of the two or three books that remains my touchstone as a reader and as a writer. I slept through classes but read everything by McPhee that I could get my hands on. I read The Headmaster, his book about Frank Boyden, legendary Headmaster at Deerfield. I read Oranges, which is, not surprisingly, about oranges. Later, I offered my sophomores Oranges, a short read, as a model of close observation in writing descriptively. I’ve read McPhee on bark canoes, settlers in Alaska, a hybrid airship, tennis, nuclear institutions, and the Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to control the Mississippi.

McPhee comes to mind because I just put down Rough Sleepers, Tracy Kidder’s recent account of the life and work of Jim O’Connell, the physician whose life work has been with the unhoused in Boston. It’s a remarkable book; O’Connell is a remarkable man, as was Dr. Paul Farmer, the medical anthropologist profiled in Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains. Kidder’s work is meticulous and animated, and he credits McPhee as his literary mentor, describing him as the most elegant journalist.

I will also praise two other writers: Roger Angell and George Will. 

Angell was the chief fiction editor at The New Yorker whose writing about baseball is evocative, elegant, elegiac. His Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion is a stunning account of one of baseball’s most dramatic half-decades and a particular favorite in that it features vivid accounts of Angell’s encounters with vociferous Tiger fans in Detroit.

Will is the Pulitzer Prize winning political columnist for The Washington Post, a notable voice in political journalism and a die hard, life-long fan of the Chicago Cubs. His columns on baseball are among the most engaging and insightful I’ve read, and his book, Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball has a prominent place on the bookshelf in my bedroom. His description of the skills that Tony Gwynn, Tony LaRussa, Orel Herschiser, Cal Ripken Jr., and Jim Gott brought to the sport equals McPhee’s account of Bradley’s squaring up to take a shot, recognizing immediately with a sense of where he was, that a basketball hoop was placed less than an inch too low.

I confessed to my daughter that I lack the grit to take on the Mid-Major story; I don’t remember if I called myself lazy and feckless, but I might have. She’s both insightful and kind, asking me to think about my statement slightly differently. I have done three editions of a book about more than a hundred American colleges and universities, America’s Best Kept College Secrets, a book that remains one of America’s Best Kept Secret Resources on Choosing a College. I had the juice to research and write that book more than once.

The Mid-Majors will have to fend for themselves. The world is upside down this week again; the Man-Who-Would-Be-King is trampling the economy and human rights. Our dogs just ate another carpet. I’m starting to be able to sing along with the tv ads for Jardiance.

Let’s see what shows up in my dreams tonight.