It is the conventional wisdom among sports fans that the NCCAA basketball tournament is pretty much the perfect sporting event, with the nation captivated as a true champion is forged through eight rounds. That is especially the case when contrasted with the BCS Championship, which insists that the national football title be decided by one somewhat random matchup conceived by computers. So why is it then that I look forward to the football championship game more than I do tonight's basketball final?

It isn't that I prefer football to basketball. It's more that the football championship game, whatever its flaws--and they are legion--at least represents the emotional pinnacle of the season--even if the game proves, as it has the last two seasons with Ohio State overmatched against SEC champins, to be a disappointment. But the basketball tournament works the other way. "March Madness" is a genuine phenomenen and the pinnacle of tournament excitement is the first week with 48 games in four days and pretty much nobody yet eliminated from his or her pool.

The beauty of that stretch of the tournment is that if the game you are watching stinks, CBS switches you to a better game and then maybe an even better game than that. There don't have to be more than a handful of thrillers or a pair of upsets to convince fans that they have witnessed an exhillarating event. But after that, with fewer games and most of us licking our pool wounds, the tournament rises and falls on the quality of the games. And this year, they have been real stinkers.

Since the great opening week, the average margin of victory in the 14 contests has been almost 15 points per game and only two games--Kansas-Davidson and Xavier-West Virginia--were settled by less than double digits. Satruday's semi-finals were particularly horrid with UCLA seemingly rendered semi--comatose by Memphis' blazing attack and North Carolina playing the worst 15 minutes of tournament ball by a high-level team that I can ever recall. And CBS had nowhere to go. That might not have been the case for the viewers, most of whom, I suspect, missed UNC's gritty comeback which put the team in position to play the worst final 10 minutes of basketball I have ever seen. (Note: My pool pick had a UNC-UCLA final, but so did millions of others and even a reversal of the results wouldn't have been enough to put me in contention.)

There's no reason tonight shouldn't be a terrific game, but then again no particular reason it should. Of the eight NCAA basketball championships contested in the 2000s, only two have been close games--North Carolina 75 Illinois 70 in 2005 and Syracuse 81 Kansas 78 in 2005. I didn't pick either Memphis State or Kansas to reach the Final Four;I decided in my infinite wisdom that Memphis's conference schedule did not adequately prepare it for the tournament grind and that their inability to hit free throws would prove fatal and that Kansas' inexplicable inconsistency--we saw it at the start of the second half against UNC--would cost them too much against a good team.

Now forced to take a mulligan, I go with Memphis, with its rare combination of big and fast and a freshman guard, Derrick Rose, who will make some NBA lottery team very happy next year. My picks is especially good news for my fellow blogger Coatney, a hard-core Jayhawk. I haven't been right about much in this tournament and there's no reason to think that I suddenly got smart now. But here's one bonus pick about which I'm fairly confident: the game won't be any more entertaining--and probably far less memorable--than Western Kentucky-Gonzaga in the first round.