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.

We'd like to first nod in the direction of the enlightened folks at Basketball Prospectus, children of the Enlightenment all, who have used the razor-sharp tools of Reason and Science to determine that UCLA and Kansas will be winners tonight. And, you know, who are we to argue with the numbers crunchers, especially since they crunch so deliciously for Kansas fans?

Elsewhere things are not so tasty. The consensus at ESPN is for a Memphis-North Carolina final, while Sports Illustrated's experts see UCLA and Carolina as moving on tonight. Hmm.
 

Devin, one immediate thought is, and I'm probably going to regret this, but--bring on Davidson. Kansas has lots of experience handling phenomenonally talented scorers (See: Durant, Kevin, who put up 37 in his last game against Kansas, an 88-84 loss); they'll let Curry get his 40, get out and run and win 90-80.

And now I've officially bumped my team out of the tournament.

But to me Wisconsin poses more of a challenge, because they're kind of the Hillary Clinton of the tournament: They don't give up, and they'll do whatever it takes to win. Teams like that bother Kansas, because, while the Hawks are very good, they don't impose their style of play on others--instead, they take whatever style of play is being dictated by the other team and then win playing that game. This usually works, but Wisconsin defends like nobody else in this tournament except, maybe, UCLA, and the team seems particularly good at making the contest into an ugly, close game--and that's exactly the kind of game Kansas could lose.

Also, Starr, though I loved your story about your friend and the bottle of wine (and I'm going to use that same line the next time I'm in a similar situation), everybody knows that the proper response to the men from Madison is "Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' Badgers."

That gag's been cracking me up since 6th grade.

But enough of this wishy-washy analysis based upon nothing but emotion, friendship, and, in my case, too much late night ESPN. Let's look at some cold hard statistical numbers-crunching, especially because they crunch so deliciously for KU. Ken Pomeroy breaks down the Sweet 16 on Basketball Prospectus and finds that that team with the best chance to win it all now is....your Kansas Jayhawks. His take, based on his formula to determine how well each team is playing at the moment, as expressed as each team's percentage chance to move on to the next round:

                     Elite8 Final4 Final  Champ
 1MW Kansas          93.2   64.5   48.5  33.8
 1W  UCLA            92.1   71.3   46.2  22.9
 3MW Wisconsin       82.7   32.0   19.9  11.1
 1S  Memphis         69.2   44.2   22.9   9.8
 1E  North Carolina  56.5   34.3   12.2   6.0
 3E  Louisville      60.5   27.9    8.3   3.6
 4E  Washington St.  43.5   23.7    7.1   3.1
 2S  Texas           50.7   21.6    8.4   2.6
 3S  Stanford        49.3   20.6    7.9   2.4
 3W  Xavier          51.7   14.2    5.2   1.3
 5S  Michigan St.    30.8   13.6    4.6   1.2
 2E  Tennessee       39.5   14.2    3.1   1.0
 7W  West Virginia   48.3   12.7    4.5   1.0
10MW Davidson        17.3    2.3    0.6   0.1
12MW Villanova        6.8    1.1    0.2   0.03
12W  W. Kentucky      7.9    1.8    0.3   0.02

See? The smart money says Kansas, and that's good enough for me. In fact, why don't we just bow to statistical inevitability now, and save us all the trouble...

• Stanford: I went to grad school there and, while I never went to a single basketball game, Stanford gave me my first taste of big-time college sports, namely football. The young among you are probably laughing, but once upon a time that was not an absurd statement. My stint coincided with the Jim Plunkett era (Plunkett would go to the Patriots as the #1 pick in the 1970 draft and later win a Super Bowl with the Raiders). Stanford won back-to-back Rose Bowls, one with Plunkett and another with Don Bunce at quarterback, over #1-ranked, undefeated and, as usual, overrated Big Ten teams, Ohio State and Michigan respectively.
• Michigan State: They were my Final Four sleeper and, if you can't win your pool, nothing impresses like picking the outsider in the Final Four.
• Villanova: More than 20 years later, my hat is still off to Villanova for the great upset over Patrick Ewing and Georgetown for the 1985 basketball championship. My favorite player on that team was Ed Pinckney, a great college player and a serviceable pro who lasted a dozen seasons in the NBA and averaged more than 12 points a game for his career. His sister, Cheryl, used to work in the photography department at Newsweek and was a lovely lady.
• Davidson: It isn't just that I am charmed by Stephen Curry, though you got to love a guy who can drill it from downtown and still stops to kiss his mom on his way onto the court after halftime. But I actually remember the great Lefty Driesell teams of the '60s there and, for reasons that I can't remotely recall, became a big fan of the school's biggest star, Fred Hetzel. That won't trigger a lot of memories, but he was a two-time All-American and the first pick overall in the '65 NBA draft. He only lasted seven seasons in the NBA, but he averaged 18.9 points and 9.9 rebounds a game with the pros, numbers that would earn him an eight-figure salary today.
• Wisconsin: So many of my friends went to Wisconsin in the '60s (and my brother-in-law went there later) that I have always had great affection for Madison and the Badgers. Besides, almost 30 years ago I had a memorable dinner at a restaurant called Ovens of Brittany. My dining companion ordered a German white that he didn't really like. I asked him if he wanted to send it back. He said, 'No, let's just drink it fast and try a different one." RIP Sean Toolan, killed covering Beirut in 1981.
• Memphis: I know John Calipari is a little too slick (OK, a lot too slick), but his UMass teams were some of my favorites ever. I owe him something for the great entertainment.
• Washington State: I was doing a story on decathlete Dan O'Brien who lived in Moscow, Idaho, but did his training for field events across the border on the Cougars campus. On a dank, drizzly, chilled afternoon, O'Brien tossed discuses while I gathered them and skittered them back (throwing them more than 20 feet was beyond my capability). Had I not been there, O'Brien, later an Olympic gold medallist, would have been fetching his own. I learned a lot that afternoon about just what it takes to attain greatness.
• Louisville: Two of my favorite all-time players--Darrell Griffith and Wes Unseld. And I've got a soft spot for the Big East.
• Tennessee: Once there were immortals like Red Auerbach and Red Holtzman, but the Jewish basketball coach is now a dying breed. I give you Bruce Pearl.

So in my first post for this NCAA tournament blog, I confessed to being a bracketology bonehead--no matter how closely I follow college hoops, I never win bracket pools, never even come close--and in case you thought I was being falsely modest, I am proud to report that I am currently in last place in Newsweek's 15-person pool. Actually, let me be more specific: I'm in distant last place. There's almost as much daylight between me and 14th place as there is between 14th and 1st. Oy. I've already lost my national title pick (thanks, Georgetown) and another Final Four pick (thanks, Pittsburgh... actually, thanks to the entire Big East for your support). At this point, my prediction that I'll nail 1.6 of the Final Four teams is looking spot-on, assuming one of my safe, remaining choices (top seeds North Carolina and UCLA) survives the second weekend. Give me some credit: yes, I'm always wrong with my tourney picks--but at least I was right about how wrong I'd be.

With that in mind, shall we turn to the Sweet 16? It could just be the wounds I'm nursing from Duke's early exit, but the two games in the West region are the only ones that don't really get my motor going. I think UCLA--given time to rest some nagging injuries--will put its sluggish tourney start in the rearview mirror and roll past a Western Kentucky team that probably should've lost in the first round to Drake. I'm similarly uninspired by Xavier-West Virginia, which should be a nice contest between two solid, well-coached teams, but if I had to bet my house on which Sweet 16 match-up is the least likely to feature the future national champion, this is the one I'd pick.

Ah, omens. There's an image that's been winding through our discussion, of Mark's daughter wandering lost in the desert, and I hope this isn't a foreshadowing of our own casting about for picks....Hmm. Resolutely, I'll plunge ahead. Though I'll bow to your superior ACC knowledge, Devin, I stand by my earlier assessment. If Hansbrough's so tough, let me see him take it strong to the rim, not just bull into the defender, flop and collect the foul. He shots 10 free throws per game, the most in the conference, and that's a big chunk of his scoring that, to my mind, isn't always earned.  

Speaking of omens, did either of you see the latest bit of statistical analysis from Bill James? Over in the Web pages of our corporate sibling, Slate, Mr. Sabermetrics says that 40 years of witnessing the University of Kansas blow out opponents at Allen Fieldhouse left him wondering, basically, at what point on the clock does it become impossible for the losing team to come back? (The subtext here: How much do the Jayhawks have to be up by in the second half before it's safe to bail early and get a head start on the crowds? (Lawrence traffic is murder on game days)). The piece comes with a nifty lead calculator (though: no widget? Basketball fans everywhere could use one of these for their Blackberries); just input the lead, time left to play and which team has the ball, and voilà! You get the chances that your lead is safe. According to James, as far has he's been able to tell, no team has ever lost after having what the calculator says is a safe lead.

Except one. As James notes, 

On March 2, 1974, North Carolina trailed Duke, 86-78, with 17 seconds to play—a safe lead for Duke. Duke had repeated misadventures in in-bounding the basketball and wound up losing the game in overtime. 

Does this tell us something about the future of this tournament? Maybe. I have my doubts, though, mainly because, according to my somewhat less scientifically calculated bracket, Duke and Carolina never get chance to play each other.  The papers in Kansas are giddy over the Jayhawks tournament draw, noting that in 1988 (It's the 20th anniversary of the last Kansas championship!) the Hawks played the first two games in Nebraska, before heading to Detroit, just like this year! Then, of course, unlike this year, Kansas played two Final Four games in what was essentially its home court in Kemper Arena. If only Kansas could get this years contest moved to Kansas City, I'd feel a lot better.

As I would if Danny Manning were 20 pounds lighter, 20 years younger, and on the court instead of charting plays from the bench. If there's one thing that Kansas has lacked over the past few years, it's the transcendent talent who can carry his team. North Carolina has that in Hansbrough. Texas has it in D.J. Augustine, to my mind the best point guard in the college game. So those two are in my Final Four. The other two spots...Devin, I may like Duke more than you in their draw, but I really think that if they can get by a tough Xavier team, they can get by UCLA. So make it Duke, Texas, Carolina and.....Kansas, as the One Team to Rule Them All. There's an omen for you.
 

All I could think about  yesterday while I was filling out my bracket was Starr's daughter, Sarah, wandering through the Namibian desert, blithely unaware that she's beating the snot out of me in some NCAA tourney pool. I can't carry around this secret any longer: I'm lousy at filling out the brackets. I love college basketball, follow it attentively, especially the ACC and my  Blue Devils, and each and every year I get my clock cleaned in bracket pools. I'm not terrible. I'm just completely mediocre. I'm correct just as often as the people who pick winners based on whose mascot would win a fight. So after a parting thought or two about the Hansbrough / Beasley debate, I'll get to my Final Four picks. If history's a guide, approximately 1.6 of them will be correct.

On Hansbrough / Beasley, you raise some valid points about the media and its propensity to over-praise white players, especially for "intangibles" such as grit and headiness. But this year is a tricky case, because this time, the prescribed narratives for each player happen to be true. Start with Tyler Hansbrough. Yes, it's become a cliche to talk about how tough he is, but the word "tough" doesn't really do Hansbrough justice. Plenty of kids are tough. Hansbrough's teammates call him "Psycho T."  See, if you're like me, you live by a simple rule of thumb:  Be careful around people nicknamed "Psycho." In ACC country, one of the most famous YouTube videos of recent years is this clip of Hansbrough and teammate Bobby Frasor playing something called Texas-style ping pong. 

If you watch it, you'll get my drift. Hansbrough isn't just the latest participant in some meta-narrative about race in sports. He's a certifiable nut job,  which is part of the reason why he's the first Carolina player I've ever really coveted.

And Beasley? There can be no mistaking his enormous talent, but as similar as their numbers are, he plays a very different type of game from Hansbrough. In a Jan. 10, 2008 Sports Illustrated profile of him, my friend Grant Wahl writes that Beasley's nickname is "B-Easy," a reference to his laid-back, almost goofy personality. He doesn't play with any lack of effort--you don't put up the kind of numbers he has by letting the game come to you--but his game is built around grace and fluidity, not skull-thumping. there's a limit to his intensity. Hansbrough? I think he'd eat Darren Collison with his bare hands for an NCAA title. And I mean that as a compliment.

OK, onto my picks. Like everyone else, I'm psyched for the first-round clash of the titans, the game  where all the celebrities will be  courtside, where Pat Riley's scouts will be out in force: Stanford vs. Cornell, the Nerd Bowl. Out of curiosity, Mark, who are you rooting for? Or are you unwilling to split that baby? I'm also very excited about the Gonzaga / Davidson game, having seen Davidson and their star Stephin Curry up close for years now thanks to annual match-ups with Duke--that's Del Curry's kid and like his old man, he can really fill it up. And of course, I'm keenly interested in the West Virginia / Arizona game--assuming we squeak past Belmont, we'll get the winner.    

First, I should make a projection for Duke, considering how much I've flapped about them this weekend. (If we lose to Belmont, I'm leaving the country.) We got a very friendly draw--our probable course to an Elite 8 showdown with UCLA is a very non-scary Belmont / West Virginia / Xavier stretch--but I've said all year that this particular Duke team is an unsual bunch. I think we can beat anyone in the country, but I also think we can lose to just about quality team in the field, and there are lots of them out there. We should get to the Elite 8 (where UCLA  will beat us by eight points in a game that  will not be nearly as close as the final score) but it wouldn't shock me in the slightest if we lost to West Virginia on Saturday.

My Final Four: UCLA, North Carolina, Pittsburgh and Georgetown. Not a ton of skill out there, so this year its all about tuffness, and these teams are big-time tuff. I'm picking Georgetown to win it all, if only because I can't resist the charm of John Thompson coaching a team led by Patrick Ewing to win the title. You should be pleased, Coatney. By picking against your Jayhawks, I've given them a fighting chance.