I love college basketball more than I should, and spend a disturbingly large percentage of my life watching it. And as we head into the second weekend of March Madness, I’m telling you: It has never been better than it is right now. I keep trying to convince people of this, and they keep yelling at me for it, which a reasonable person would take to mean it’s possible that they are wrong — but I am not a reasonable person.

For the first time since the days of Allen Iverson, the best non-NBA (and non-WNBA, for that matter) players can all be found in college basketball, even if they don’t always stay on the same team like they used to. The explanation for this uptick in quality is simple: players are finally getting paid. It turns out when you offer to pay people for doing a job, in a business that for decades made everyone except them rich, they tend to commit to that job a little harder and a little longer. Who knew?

I know the sport feels different, that following it is different than it was 20 years ago, that we can no longer tell ourselves the lies about college sports that we used to tell ourselves (they’re just doing this for the scholarships! It’s about student-athletes! It’s just part of the college experience!). But that it is different does not mean that it is worse. It means the exact opposite.

Still, unless you’re an alumnus of one of the remaining 16 schools or possess gambling-related loyalties, it’s not easy to figure out where you should direct your affections. So, as is tradition, I’ve put together a harmless, just-playing-around — please do not sic your school’s sub-Reddits on me — ranking of the teams and schools by likability, a hopefully helpful Guide to the Otherwise Unaffiliated. (Note: This is for the men’s tournament; the women’s Sweet 16 will be set by Tuesday morning, and I’ll put my picks in the comments of this post on Wednesday. Free content!)

Before we start, I should note that my alma mater, the University of Illinois Fighting Illini, are in the Sweet 16 this year for the first time since I started writing this series. (We skipped to the Final Four when I did this two years ago, the only time in the last 20 years the Illini have made it so far.) I love this team more than I love just about anything in my life, a pathetic thing to admit even before I tell you that I regularly write 4,500 words for an Illini fan site, every month, for free, just because I think so much about this team that I have to get those words out of my body or I will explode.

If Illinois loses, I will run screaming through the streets naked, causing generational trauma that my great-great-grandchildren will never quite be able to shake. My experience of watching their game against Houston on Thursday will be one of a constant, piercing primal scream; I will be clawing at my face until I look like the guy from Poltergeist in the bathroom mirror. There is nothing going on in the world that is more important than Illinois basketball, nothing whatsoever.

Which is to say: It is possible I cannot impartially rank Illinois on the rootability list. So I will not try. Just know that if you root against them my ghost will hunt you down and never allow you, nor any of your ancestors, a moment of peace or solace.

Ok,  we can start now.

On the one hand, there’s a lot to like about this team. Twins Cameron and Cayden Boozer — sons of Duke legend Carlos Boozer, who appears with them in an ad in heavy tournament rotation — are good dudes who play together well and seem to have legitimate senses of........

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