Three days from tip-off--unless you actually count Coppin St.- Mt. St. Mary's (and you'd have to more than "mad" to watch that game over Celtics at Rockets Tuesday night)--and let the whining begin. Nobody loves Devin's Duke. Coatney's Jayhawks always disappoint. This is the kind of vintage whine with which you are blessed when your teams are perennial Big Dancers and, even more, contenders. So here's my whine: Being twice as smart as you guys, I have two alma maters. And for the first time in history, or at least my long memory, both of them made it t: Fo the Big Dance. So I was really looking forward to having a genuine, as opposed to simply a pool-driven, rooting interest in two of the 32 opening games. And lo and behold, my duo gets matched up in the first round--Stanford, a #3 seed vs. Cornell, a #14. I guess the only consolation is I'm the only one of us absolutely assured of having his alma mater make it to the second round.

As for Kansas, I do feel your pain, Coatney. A team that can't win with Wilt Chamberlain at center is probably snakebitten. (How many women did he sleep with the night before the 1957 NCAA Finals against North Carolina? You think it might have caught up with him by the third overtime?) Duke is the more interesting case and I'm glad Devin brought up the sensitive racial angle. He says the most hated player in college basketball is almost always a Dukie--and usually a white Dukie. I wonder if that is part of a backlash against the tendency of announcers, both white and black, to employ--probably unwittingly--affirmative action in overhyping white stars. Because we now view college and pro basketball as part of a continuum, it's difficult to judge a player as just a collegian. So while Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley and J.J. Reddick may have deserved all the praise they got as college stars at Duke, our ultimate judgment on them is that they were, at best, serviceable and, at worst, overmatched in the NBA.

Which leads me to this college season's Player of the Year debate:North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough vs Kansas State's Michael Beasley. If you read the debate and the votes on ESPN.com, the edge seems to go to Hansbrough, the cog in the middle of the number one team in the country. But if "team" was supposed to make the difference, then Greg Oden should have won last year over Kevin Durant. Beasley's numbers are comparable to Hansbrough's, maybe even slightly better, without quite as much talent around him. Our former colleague Jonathan Meltzer wrote me that he was struck by how many of those supporting Hansbrough cited how gritty he was, how hard he played all the time how relentless he was. All true, we agree. But Meltzer noted that these are arguments that almost always get made on behalf of white players.(Think David Eckstein for some crossover sport reference.) The only adjective missing from the white vernacular was "heady." Hansbrough is certainly a worth candidate, may even deserve it, but I think Meltzer has a point about the debate and the bias.

Now that I have all that out of my system, maybe next time we can move onto picks. My daughter called from Cape Town, South Africa this morning for help on her brackets. She's going to be trekking through the Namibian desert for much of the tournament so I asked her, "What's the point?" Stupid question apparently. Doing your brackets no longer appears to be optional. Everybody plays, whether they know anything or care about any of the teams.