The March Madness 'news dump' that made us question everything

A "news dump," in the parlance of our times, is when a company or other entity releases bad news at just the perfect time, a moment during which many other events are also happening, thus enabling the just-released bit of bad news to be quickly overshadowed.

As far as sports news dumps go, Indiana University just took one of Metamucil-sized proportions. Probably. We think.

Indiana has one of the most prestigious college basketball programs in America. Tom Crean spent nearly a decade coaching there, and he had a lot of success. But it wasn't enough. Not for Indiana.

So Indiana fired Crean, which perhaps was a necessary move but also underscores how far the program has fallen since its heyday some 20 years ago, and its last national championship, now 30 years on.

Credit Indiana with this much, though: They fired Crean on Thursday morning at pretty much the exact moment the 2017 March Madness tournament tipped off.

Normally, Crean being fired by Indiana coupled with speculation about who the Hoosiers might hire next would drive an entire college basketball news cycle. Instead, due to timing, Crean being fired by Indiana was just one of many, many prominent college basketball stories to emerge on the first day of the NCAA Tournament.

The timing was not lost on many.

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But wait!

Was this a true news dump, as so many assumed? Or was it announced exactly as the tournament started to underscore the fact that Indiana had not made said tournament?

Or ....

*hits vape pen, adjusts fedora*

Maybe Indiana released the Crean news as a news dump PRECISELY BECAUSE it knew that would get college hoops folks talking ABOUT the news dump, thereby actually ELEVATING the story and injecting Indiana into the national basketball conversation at a time it otherwise wouldn't be included.

This is becoming some three-dimensional chess shit though, which is definitely above my pay-grade. The real, concrete, non-debatable takeaways here are that Indiana fired its basketball coach on Thursday and that March Madness has begun.