Charles Euchner files a nice take on what new scholarship rules could mean for Harvard's NCAA tourney chances:

Harvard, Yale and Princeton perennially finish among the top five in rankings of universities for their academic offerings and research. Could they, one day, also compete for the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament?

Ivy League colleges have not been serious competitors in major sports since the signing of the Ivy Group Agreement in 1945, which banned the use of athletic scholarships. Harvard and Yale dominated college football in the late 19th and early 20th century but de-emphasized sports in the aftermath of a series of controversies over gridiron violence. (Harvard's invention of the "flying wedge," in which a mob of defensive players targets a single opposing player, led to the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.)

But now two Harvard initiatives—a dramatic restructuring of tuition assistance and aggressive recruitment of the nation's best high-school basketball players—could spur Harvard and other Ivy League schools to produce basketball teams worthy of March Madness. Basketball is likely to see the greatest change from these new rules, since one good player can significantly improve the fortunes of the team; see, for instance, the career of Bill Bradley, who led Princeton to the Final Four in 1965. Because of the volume of elite athletes needed, the initiatives are less likely to impact sports such as football or baseball.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

• 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.

NEWSWEEK's Sarah Kliff files a nice piece on the business costs of March Madness:

Along with the usual office pools and trash talking over rival teams, this year's March Madness comes with another major distraction: free live streaming of every game. For the first time the NCAA has teamed up with the CBS to provide March Madness On-Demand, a completely free Web stream of all 63 basketball games. Fans are eagerly signing up; fans had registered for 96 percent of the premium VIP spots--which CBS says will get fans quicker access to streaming video--by mid-day Wednesday.

Streaming NCAA games online isn't new; CBS has been doing it since 2003 when they debuted that year a pay-per-view model. In 2005, they netted about $250,000 in revenue using that system. This year's free, ad-supported model, supplemented by premium services, should earn the network "more than $21 million in total revenue," CBS President Les Moonves projected during a recent earnings call with analysts. That's despite the fact that operating costs for March Madness On-Demand have remained largely flat, according to Moonves.

But CBS's gain may be corporate America's loss. March Madness is already a big draw in the workplace; most surveys show that roughly 10 percent of Americans are interested enough in the tournament to participate in an office pool. But checking up on pools and touting one's team to a colleague takes only a few minutes here and there. Full desktop PC access to hours and hours of back-to-back games could prove a much greater distraction.

 
READ THE FULL STORY HERE
 

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.

I'm sitting here watching Virginia Tech hang in there against Number One North Carolina in the ACC tourney semis, and the thing that keeps crossing my mind (other than: My GOD the refs protect Tyler Hansbrough! He consistently initiates the contact, and yet the foul is called on the defender; my only consolation is that he won't get that treatment in the NBA) is this: Why am I not rooting harder for Carolina to lose?

As a Kansas native and graduate of the University, by the Generally Accepted Principles of Collegiate Fandom As Codified by Will Blythe, I should be happy to see Carolina fail. Tar Heel coach  Roy Williams is, of course, the man who broke the hearts of Kansas fans in 2003 when, after 15 fine years as the Jayhawks head coach (and, oh by the way, no national championships) fled for the Carolina job just days after his team lost to Syracuse in the national title game. Perhaps the most irked were his players--"I gave my right arm for that man," said forward Wayne Simien, who played much of that season with an injured shoulder, and there were plenty of bad feelings all around.

Much of this, it must be said, is rooted in the insecurity that comes with being a Kansas fan. After all, if the program is such a good job, why would anyone want to leave? Except that, compared to North Carolina, or Duke, or UCLA, um, maybe it isn't. Unlike all the other traditional college basketball powers, Kansas is located in a rapidly depopulating state (the island of Manhattan, my current home, has more people residing along its 13-mile length than live in my home state), with little local talent to draw on. Recruiting is always a hassle (though Lawrence has its charms, they're mostly hidden in February, when the daily weather forecast is always some variation on this theme: "Gray. Cloudy. 19 degrees. Wind. Blowing. No relief. Freezing rain. Hope fading. Remember sunshine? What happened to that? Oh for the love of God, where did the sun go?"), and there's a real feeling that all it would take is two bad years for Kansas to fall into a permanent second-tier funk. Remember when Holy Cross was a national basketball power? Yeah, me neither.

So, you know, the stakes are high. Now, though, it's five years later, Williams is beloved at North Carolina (where he finally did win that championship) and Kansas is coached by Bill Self, who, despite the fact that he has an entirely different coaching style, has pulled off the very neat trick of replicating both the regular season success and the postseason stumbles that characterized the Williams era. Me? I'm a fan, sure, but a subdued one. I've been hurt before. (As a side note, isn't it wonderful that now, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I can watch all those wrenching tournament losses all over again? Yeah.) I've become more philosophical ("I appreciate that they're well-coached, and play hard, and are fun to watch") and, unlike my brother-in-blogging Devin Gordon, I no longer refer to my University's team as "we."

Of course, that could change with a good tournament run. Check back with me in a couple of weeks.