“Great Team Chemistry No Match For Great Team Biology”

That was a recent headline from The Onion, and as usual, the short article that followed it pretty much wrote itself.

 “I’ve never seen a team work in sync with itself as well as A&M did tonight, but unfortunately, they were up against players who have bodies far better adapted for playing basketball,” ESPN’s Jay Bilas said. “The Aggies were finally healthy, they really had a sense of where everyone was on the court, when to slide over to help on defense, and when their teammates will make a move that will free them up to run to the basket or get an open look for three. The Jayhawks, however, have players who are actually naturally able to score a lot of points.”

King Kaufman regularly went at the “team chemistry” fallacy in his old Salon.com columns like, well, like hydrofluoric acid on a meth dealer’s corpse. The Salon.com search engine is too slow for me. Here is one of his pieces. If King stumbles upon this post, perhaps he can link others in the comment section.

With March Madness upon us, and thus far too much apparent randomness to explain away too quickly and with too little information, let’s keep this headline in mind.