So, the 2008 NFL Draft is over and done. The Patriots needed to get younger and better on defense. At the moment, they appear to have gotten younger. Whether or not they're better remains to be seen. Even if the young players step in and contribute on defense, it's hard to see the Patriots not taking at least one step back next season.

It seems highly unlikely that the AFC East won't improve at all in the coming season. Adding Jake Long should make the Dolphins offensive line (which was probably their biggest weakness among many, many, many weaknesses) considerably better. Granted, they still have a long way to go to be good in that area, but it's a start. Buffalo and the Jets should be slightly better than they were last season as well. All this points to the Patriots cruising to another division title, but it should be a tougher run and 16-0 isn't happening again.

The mid to late first round was the most interesting part of the draft, what with the trades and the run of mediocre offensive line prospects coming off the board the way they did. If I had to pick one team to blame for that crime against good taste, I think I'd have to blame the Lions. I don't see the sense in their trading down two spots to take Gosder Cherilus four rounds too soon. But that's just me. Apparently it was vitally important that they give Boston College something to brag about with two Eagles going in the first round.

After the Notre Dame game, I posted something to the effect that Cherilus had played himself out of millions of dollars in guaranteed money with the way Kerry Neal and Brian Smith blew past his feeble attempts to handle their speed rushes. Granted Cherilus was playing left tackle when people assure me that he is a natural right tackle. But if two true freshmen linebackers from an historically dreadful Notre Dame team cruised by him repeatedly as though he were Matt Light with a perfect season riding on his ability to block Justin Tuck or Osi Umenyura, how long will it take NFL defenses to exploit this flaw in Cherilus' game? But what would April be without the Lions making an inexplicable and indefensible pick?

I also think Atlanta gave up an awful lot to trade into the first round to draft their left tackle of the future in USC's Sam Baker. It is essential to protect a rookie QB's blind side, or any QB for that matter. But Baker wasn't so dominant in college that he was worth that risk and his injury history is a cause of some concern.

But the Falcons must be praised for picking up a temporary fix at QB until Ron Mexico clears up his legal issues and resolves his indefinite suspension. As I watched the draft coverage, I found myself unimpressed by the deep throw over the middle Matt Ryan completed against Maryland and Ron Jaworski broke down from two angles. And yet the same clip had to have been shown something like 20 times.

The first problem I had with the clip is that Maryland wasn't exactly a dominant team in the ACC last season. Then no mention was made of the fact that Maryland's defense was shifting around and looking very confused before the snap. Finally, with all the talk of throwing the receiver open, Jaws didn't bother to mention that NFL middle linebackers drop into their zones with a lot more precision and much better technique than the Maryland defender showed on that play (his shoulders were turned in such a way that he could do everything but cover the receiver on the play).

With the receivers and offensive line awaiting him, I don't see a very promising future in Atlanta for Matt Ryan. Yes, he was head and shoulders above the rest of the quarterback class of 2008, but that could just as easily be due to the weakness of that position group as a whole as opposed to a ringing endorsement of Ryan's potential.

I think the Cowboys dropped the ball big time when they passed on Rashard Mendenhall to draft Felix Jones. When the dust settles on this choice, I think we'll all be amazed that they passed on a better runner to draft a guy named Jones from the University of Arkansas because they were owned by a moron named Jones who went to the University of Arkansas. And I don't want any nonsense about Jones having breakaway speed. After watching the Rose Bowl, it should be readily apparent that Mendenhall has as much speed as any back with a ball under his arm.

Maybe the Steve Youngs of the world couldn't see why Brian Brohm plummeted the way he did. Personally, I think it's due to the fact that most teams didn't want to risk their future on a 23 year old with a receding hairline, a creepy pink shirt that made him look like he was auditioning for a dinner theater version of St. Elmo's Fire and bowl cut to top it off. He and Aaron Rogers would be set for the weakest QB competition in recent memory if it weren't for Miami taking a QB in the second round for the second year in a row. Chad Henne and John Beck are going to be a running punchline this season, just wait and see.

The Bears draft started fairly promising, at least they finally tried to get younger on the offensive line. Why they drafted a running back in the second round when they had much more critical needs at quarterback and wide receiver is beyond me, however. Yes, Cedric Benson hasn't produced the way the team desperately needs him to produce. But part of that has to be due to the inferior offensive line play last year and the fact that the team wasn't a serious passing threat.

I won't deny that I have probably been Cedric Benson's biggest supporter. Nor will I deny that he's disappointed my prediction that he would become a 1,500 yard rusher in the not too distant future. But no matter how you feel about Benson, it doesn't change the fact that the Bears top three receivers are Mark Bradley, Marty Booker's preserved remains and Devin Hester (who is at least another year away from being something beyond a novelty act in the passing game). And the less said about Bears' QBs the better. But maybe their later picks will turn out better than I think.

As a final note on this draft, why did the top two picks from Notre Dame have to go to teams I hate? I like John Carlson as a football player, or at least I did. Now I have to root against him because no one in their right mind wants to see anything good happen to the Seattle Seahawks. And why did Trevor Laws have to go to the sinking ship that is the Eagles? Putting a quality run stopper on a team like that is like putting a lace doily on a bowling ball. One can only hope he becomes an excuse for Donovan McNabb's inability to put the team over the top and he goes on to a team where he can thrive.

In other matters, it's been too long again since I've ripped Bill Simmons. First, I need to point out something from his piece on the Bruins Canadiens series. This is the verbal indictment of the Boston sports fan I've been waiting for, and true to form that jerk Simmons thinks it's a good thing, but here's a sentence he wrote:

We won an emotional Game 3 in overtime, followed by a number of postgame brawls on and around Causeway Street between Boston and Montreal fans, at least 50 of them involving guys named Sully and Murph teaming up to beat the hell out of someone named Pierre.

That's one more reason Boston sports fans are overrated. It takes two of them to beat down a French Canadian named Pierre. General Patton would be rolling over in his grave if he gave a damn about Red Sox Nation. If it takes two to beat up a lone Canadiens fan, how many does it take to throw a piece of pizza off the back of a Canadiens fan's head? On the plus side, I suppose I should thank God for the shanty Irish, otherwise Irish Americans might look like they make a contribution to American society instead of being degenerate drunken bullies. Thanks for bringing our ethnic group down once more, people of Boston.

Now consider this paragraph from Simmons' playoff awards column:

The Brian Fantana Memorial "Hey, Champ, Maybe You Should Stop Talking For Awhile" Award
To Charles Barkley for declaring last weekend that Rasheed Wallace is the most talented player in the league and could have been the greatest player ever if he wanted it. Chuck Wagon, we love you ... but you can't possibly believe that, right? Rasheed couldn't handle the responsibility of being great every night, true, but part of being great is that you've made a conscious choice to accept that everyday responsibility and live up to a different standard of pressure and expectations. It's like a chicken/egg thing. If Vince Carter was wired like Michael Jordan, he would have been Michael Jordan. If Derrick Coleman was wired like Kevin Garnett, he would have been the greatest power forward ever. If Sam Jones was wired like Jerry West, he would have been the NBA logo instead of what he was -- a top-50 player and one of the NBA's memorably clutch shooters. Rasheed was much closer to the Sam Jones camp than the DC/Vince camp, but all of them had one thing in common: They didn't totally want it. And that's part of being great.

Is it just me or did he rip Barkley and then go on to make exactly the same point Barkley made which made Simmons rip him in the first place?

Happy trails to Pat Riley, who has given up his coaching duties in Miami. When Dwayne Wade becomes this generation's Michael Ray Richardson three years from now, I'm sure every one will blame Star Jones, but a few of us might wonder what might have been had Riley given up after the 2006 title run or at the very least hadn't acquired spare parts like Shawn Marion and Ricky Davis (two very talented players but more concerned with stats than wins or team play).

And way to go Roger Clemens, thanks for having an alleged ongoing affair with a mediocre singer starting when she was 15. That really helps my effort to defend you against all logic. At least TO has been well behaved lately, so I have that going for me. Which is nice...

I find myself feeling very depressed at the moment. And it has remarkably little to do with the unfortunate collapse of the Texas Rangers earlier this afternoon. Rather like last season's impressive Mother's Day Miracle, this was a substantial comeback against a terrible team who probably never should have had that lead to begin with when compared with this version of the Red Sox.

This was shaping up to be a very average weekend anyway. There was good news tempered by bad news from the NFL Network. Bryant Gumbel has done the right thing and left the broadcast booth to pursue other challenges, presumably he will go on to bore and frustrate an entirely new audience in an entirely new venture. Good riddance.

Alas, that news can only be greeted with a moderate smile. In the same article, the NFL Network revealed that they are searching for a new partner to call games with Cris Collinsworth. Perhaps they can fulfill Bill Simmons' ultimate fantasy and pair Collinsworth with Gus Johnson. Not that it matters.

Unless they pair Collinsworth with a person who will backhand him whenever Collinsworth sees fit to remind us that he was probably the single most spectacular receiver of all time who never made a difference on the field and is the second biggest fraud ever to attend the University of Florida (and believe me, that is some stiff competition) behind only Steve Spurrier, this will not bode well for football fans.

Collinsworth is a terrible broadcaster and a dick. He also has a penchant for dressing as though he were the Man from U.N.C.L.E. or auditioning for the lead in a dinner theater version of the Ghost and Mrs. Muir. And sadly, he brings more to the table than any other member of the NBC NFL studio crew, which speaks volumes to the degree to which Olberman, Costas, King and Barber have elevated sucking to a form of high art. I didn't forget Bettis, but I still have a problem with bad-mouthing a man who turned in two transcendent performances in bowl games for the Fighting Irish.

That is my nightmare situation at the moment, that the NFL Network would pair Collinsworth with Tiki Barber. Perhaps two such massive egos couldn't coexist in a booth for four hours at a stretch, one can only hope. What a disaster that would be for fans. Especially since neither one of them ever brought enough to the table to justify having such prominent egos. I don't fault people for self-involvement, but those two guys' selves aren't anywhere near as impressive as they would have us believe.

In other news, two strange stories came to my attention recently. First, Dwayne Wade might be dating Star Jones. All I can say is...yikes. She, even more than Charlie Weis (who almost died in the procedure), is the poster child for what's wrong with gastric bypass surgery. She has a massive fat face on top of a grotesquely skinny body and a turkey neck. It's creepy.

But it serves D-Wade right. He became infatuated with the image the media projected on him during his first couple of wildly successful seasons, particularly the championship run of 2006. He took that "me against the world" suicide drive mentality to the extreme last season and into this year. His body is breaking down because of it. He's alienating fans because his style of play (when he plays) is no longer fun to watch and his team made the Titanic's sudden sinking seem like a relatively mild disaster. And apparently his judgement in other areas has taken a hit as well.

The other story that disturbed me was Michael Westbrook's recent revelation that the perception that he was gay damaged his NFL career. Apparently it had nothing to do with the fact that he was overpaid and underperformed. Maybe he just wasn't as good as we were led to believe, even in spite of his physical gifts. Now he's involved in mixed martial arts in Arizona. Rolling around on mats with strange men in varying stages of undress will go along way to convincing us he's straight. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

And one more completely unrelated matter... I recently found out that I am expected to fulfill every one's favorite civic duty. I have jury duty in July. And I opened the notice while I was watching Twelve Angry Men (the original version). And that coincidence is what is really depressing me at the moment.

It's amazing that in a world full of unanswerable questions, the biggest one on my mind right now has nothing to do with Bruce Springsteen's recent endorsement of Barrack Obama. This isn't so much a political complaint as a logical complaint. Given his recent track record, you'd think the Boss might go a different route, and endorse a candidate he didn't want to win, what with the fact that he hasn't backed a winner in what seems like a generation. But that's just me.

The real unanswered question of 2008 has to be why in the name of all that is good, just and holy is Mike Mussina still pitching. And more to the point, why did he think it was a good idea to pitch to Manny Ramirez. Generally, I like irony, and even those things we claim are ironic when they're mere coincidences. Not so much tonight.

The Red Sox under Dan Duquette's inspired regime brought Manny to town at what looked like a ludicrous price because, and only because, they were outbid by the Yankees in the Mike Mussina sweepstakes. Then, it looked like a panic move. Now it looks far too good.

Even with my extensive capacity to describe things that anger me, I am at a loss for words here. In the last season and a half, Mike Mussina hasn't aged. He hasn't decayed. He's fossilized. I would feel more comfortable taking the mound myself in a big game than letting Mussina pitch against a middle school girls' softball team. I was shocked to find that his ERA is still only 5.75.

There was always something funny about Mussina's career. Has another pitcher who won so many games in his career ever been so invisible? I know he played most of the best years of his career in Baltimore, but not all of those Oriole teams were horrible. A few made the playoffs. Ripken broke Gehrig's consecutive games played record. People paid some attention to Baltimore then.

And what do we really know about Mussina after a long and fairly successful career? He throws a knuckle curve. He won a surprising number of games when you look at his career stats. And right now he sucks so much it's not even funny. For the love of God, he was replaced in this game in the fourth inning by Jonathan Albaladejo. Now maybe this season will go down in history as the start of something bug for Jonathan Albaladejo, but it will surely be the sad finish to what was once a good career for Mike Mussina. And I'm pissed that he got two shots at the Red Sox before the curtain fell.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I also came across this interesting piece, attributing the reason the Mets acquired Johann Santana while the Red Sox and Yankees backed off in the end to the fact that the Mets turned a 30 million dollar profit last year while the Red Sox lost nearly 20 million and the Yankees lost almost $50 million. I just don't see how, even with their gargantuan payrolls, that the Red Sox and Yankees lost money last season.

The Mets landed Santana because they were desperate. They didn't make the playoffs. The Yankees did. The Yankees had the inside track on sports headlines in the offseason and in the early stages of this season with Joe Girardi replacing Joe Torre after over a decade of managing the Bronx Bombers. In order to stay even remotely relevant after last season's catastrophic collapse, the Mets had to make a big splash. They were more willing to part with prospects than the Yankees were to surrender young talent, some of whom have already played well at the big league level.

Assuming the Yankees don't come back tonight, they'll be 1 game down in the standings and 3 games down in the season series to the hated Red Sox. It's far too early to panic, since the Yankees are as young as they've been in a long time. They should get better as the season goes along, especially considering what Girardi was able to do with a younger, far less talented group in his one season in Florida. But when Bartolo Colon and Curt Schilling come back for the Red Sox, they'll still be fat and old.

And has any one asked why Schilling can blog and create new mods for his disturbing cyberLARPing fetish when he hasn't thrown a baseball yet this season? How will all the king's horses and all the king's men put Humpty Dumpty back together again if he's allowing himself to be distracted from his rehab? And as the presidential race heats up after the conventions, won't Schilling be distracted further by his efforts to keep McCain from winning by helping his campaign?

A funny thing happened on the way to the World Series last night. Chien Ming Wang and the undermanned, underhyped, undertalented made the Red Sox, otherwise known as the finest team to ever take the field, look a little ridiculous. Or the Red Sox hitters made themselves look ridiculous a long time before Wang took the hill and he just kept getting them out. What a shame that was.

Perhaps a little bit more shocking was the fact that the Yankees managed to get hits against Clay Buchholz. Didn't any one bother to inform these so-called Bronx Bombers that Buchholz threw a no hitter last season even before he was officially a rookie? Who gave them the right to beat the Red Sox at Fenway with the future of the Red Sox rotation facing them? It's simply outrageous. This sort of aggression won't stand.

A cynical theory could be advanced to suggest that the vastly superior Red Sox are simply lulling the manifestly inferior Yankees into a false sense of security. And one could say the whole of Major League Baseball, what with David Ortiz off to what can only charitably called a slow start this season.

An even more cynical theory could be advanced to suggest that maybe the Red Sox who are desperate to increase their fan base in the Pacific Rim didn't want to humiliate Chien Ming Wang, the darling of Taiwanese fans, because they may need to squeeze every cent out of that region. While it is improbable, it bears consideration. What with the subprime catastrophe and the dangerously large portions of American financial services companies being purchased by foreign sovereign wealth firms, the "tough yuppie" (and if you think that that term is an oxymoron, ask a Red Sox fan and he'll tell you, or at the very least whip a piece of pizza off the back of your head when you turn your back) is facing tough times. And we all know that this legendary "tough yuppie" is the backbone of Red Sox Nation.

A still more cynical theory could be advanced to show that the Red Sox who are starting off more slowly than their teammates this season are the guys who reinvented their careers since signing with the Red Sox. Now that George Mitchell's "report" has been exposed to the light of day and a member of the Red Sox board of directors is no longer serving as MLB's watchdog for illicit performance enhancing substances, it seems slightly coincidental that the thriving's run out for some of the players who feasted on opposing pitchers while under Mitchell's protection. But then I never was one for buying coincidences...

As for Mike Mussina outdueling Josh Beckett and not in that good Las Vegas way, but in the bad, let's see who can allow more runs today way... I'm not letting that worry me too much, either. Mussina entered whatever phase comes after the twilight of a pitcher's career before John Kerry invented Manny Ortez as a favorite current Red Sox player.

And so, let the not so dulcet tones of the Yankees Suck cheers ring in Fenway...

As famed New Englander (though a Californian by birth, I think we can call him a New Englander) and overrated archtool Robert Frost once wrote, two roads diverged in a yellow wood. Tonight, those roads are the respective seasons of the coiled, sleeping dragon Red Sox and the lumbering oaf on the verge of going over the cliff Yankees. The two teams meet in Fenway this weekend, and the Red Sox are poised to sweep.

Both teams have a 5-5 record, but the Red Sox are 5-5 because they're battling injuries. Beckett is going to get stronger with each passing start. Clay Buchholz is poised to have that breakout year we've been told by Red Sox Nation and its press cadre is all but overdue (even though he's a rookie and his inevitable late season heroics were derailed by a vague tiredness in his pitching arm). And Coco Crisp is hitting over .300 at the moment, so all signs point to the Yankees fading quickly and harshly.

After all, the Yankees are so desperate, they're forced to start their ace, Chien Ming Wang on normal rest. In any other club, and against any other team, this would be interpreted by any rational observer as business as usual. But this is the struggling .500 New York Yankees and they face the mighty .500 Boston Red Sox. Everyone who is anyone knows that the panic button is already pressed in the Bronx. Surely by this point tomorrow, the frantic phone calls to Scranton will begin in earnest.

The Red Sox, on the other hand, are so confident of victory in this series that they sent Mike Lowell to the 15 day DL this afternoon. The Sox didn't even make the move retroactive to speed his return. They don't need him in the lineup at the moment, given that Jason Varitek's batting .290 and has 2 homers. Given his recent track record, he probably does have two weeks of promise left before he remembers his bat was declared missing and presumed dead from the Red Sox lineup in late 2005. Rest assured, I will be updating this site frequently over the next three days or so to chronicle this spectacular instance of ships passing in the night in the offing.

For some unexplained reason, I signed up to receive the BU student newspaper at the alumni website one afternoon when I was killing time. I don't know what good I expected to come of it at the time, if any, but I never hoped for this. As those of you who read this blog have probably come to notice, I am a keen observer, almost to the point of paranoia, of the tools that walk among us. And today, thanks in part to the travesty of a student newspaper at Boston University, I have struck what just might be the Comstock Lode of tools of note. And in this instance, this picture is truly worth at least 1,000 words...



There is a movement afoot on American college campuses that must be revealed and ridiculed (gently, and without recourse to cyberbullying, of course, as this site condones neither real nor pretend violence) instantly. Tools of epic proportions across the nation are putting together an event called the Intercollegiate World Cup right under our noses. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised when I discovered that this event took place at Middlebury College in Vermont, a school notorious even in a state filled with tools for archtoolery of every imaginable sort.

And the principal archtool (which would make him a pope of tools, or at the very least a cardinal) is a person called Xander Manshel, which, if it isn't an alias, is surely a terrible crime against taste on the part of this tool's parents and one of the great self fulfilling prophecies of all time. With a name like that, how could the kid have turned out otherwise?

And when I googled Intercollegiate Quidditch, wouldn't you know that the very first site that phrase brought to my attention, led me to yet another archtool whol blogs under the banner A Paperback Writer. I simply didn't want to devote any more time to discover further tools involved in or inspired by this event, so I am giving up at this point. But by now, I think you probably see why I referred to this as the Comstock Lode of tools of note. In case you don't know and are too lazy to look it up, the Comstock Lode was one of the richest mineral strikes in world history, and it was exploited perhaps too quickly and too haphazardly.

Sorry I haven't updated this site in a while. I know how desperately the two or three of you who read this regularly await each post and the host of insights it provides into the world of sports, life, the universe and everything. I just haven't felt much like posting.

I know a blog allegedly devoted to baseball, and the Red Sox in particular, ought to have had more baseball related content posted by this point in the season (to date, I think all I've done is a halfpost complaining about how fraudulent the season opening in Japan was and what a pointless waste of time the exhibition series in LA was). Hell, I haven't even gotten around to congratulating Kansas for winning the NCAA tournament thanks to my reverse jinx effect.

It's nice to see that the Red Sox haven't exactly lit the world on fire yet this season. I am going to wait a little before I celebrate, though. After all, a cursory check of the standings tells us that, at least at the start of tonight's games, the Baltimore Orioles are currently on pace to win 138 games this year. I wouldn't be much of a Catholic if I denied out of hand the possibility of miracles, but I just can't see this edition of the Baltimore Orioles demolishing the MLB record for wins in a season.

And of course we must assume that the Red Sox will only get better. After all, Curt Schilling is still rehabbing his injured shoulder and eventually he will come back. So what if he's more dangerous with his mouth (especially to Republican presidential hopeful John McCain) and his pointless blog than with his pitching at this point in his career. Humpty Dumpty will be back on the mound soon enough.

It was only a minor bump in the road when Beckett was roughed up by the Blue Jays in his season debut. After all, if Delcarmen hadn't allowed a grand slam to Frank Thomas, Beckett may not have gotten the loss. Then again, if Beckett hadn't stunk out the joint and left the bases loaded, Thomas might have had a hard time hitting that grand slam in the first place, but things will get much better for the Sox any day now.

Bartolo Colon and Mike Timlin are also going to come back at some point, we think. So this Red Sox team is best compared to a slumbering giant waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting American League. Other teams from whom big things were expected this year, like the Tigers and Yankees, can't be compared to slumbering giants, however. After all, I half-expected that the Yankees would just forfeit the season after Bill Simmons pronounced them the second most relevant baseball team in NYC right now.

I found that line amusing. The Mets may have acquired Johann Santana, but they'd have to win the next 13 or so titles in a row to overtake the Yankees in the hearts and minds of New Yorkers. Mets fans are a sort of New York equivalent to that guy who became a Red Sox fan in any other MLB city in the last 10 or so years. These people desperately want something to stick out their chest and feel big about, and rooting for the second biggest team in NYC or the second biggest team in America was one way to do it.

I'll believe in the Mets when I see them standing in the winner's circle at the end of the year. It seems every big ticket addition to the Mets takes at least one season to perform at the anticipated level. Carlos Delgado and Carlos Beltran took a year, and with the bigger deal, the bigger headlines and the fact that he's very old for a small power pitcher, makes me think that a slow April is just a sign of things to come from Santana this season.

Back to the Red Sox, I can't help but wonder when Congress will leave off investigating the likes of Roger Clemens and persecuting poor, innocent Bill Belichick to answer the real questions that vex those of us who observe the sports landscape. Based on a very, very, very small performance sample last season and countless pointless articles this offseason, I have been led to believe that Jacboy Ellsbury is the greatest outfield prospect since Mickey Mantle. And yet, he's bravely hitting .200 and hasn't made Coco Crisp expendable yet.

Just say that to yourself, out loud, one time. Jacoby Ellsbury hasn't made Coco Crisp expendable yet. And let's not forget that Coco Crisp has made himself expendable, making over $2 million to hit .220 (yeah, Crisp is hitting .250 at the moment, but I'm an incurable optimist) and produce an abysmally small number of runs for a number eight hitter in an AL East lineup.

Of course, there are intelligent Red Sox fans, like this blogger, who think one can bench the $2 million man in center and leave Ellsbury to founder and fail to fulfill his promise in center. Personally, I'd love that option. Using Crisp as a late inning defensive substitution would send a nice comment to those of us who sneer at the Red Sox attempts to out-Herod Herod (the Yankees), by wasting $2 million on a situational replacement. And forcing Ellsbury to play every day and founder under the criticism of the press and fans when he doesn't produce will, at the very least, imair this team's future.

Even though baseball season has officially begun for every team by this point, I'm still thinking more about the Final Four than anything else right now. Of the four teams that remain, I hate all four of them. But since somebody has to win this thing, at least according to the rules of logic and probability, I guess I'd rather see Kansas win than any of the other finalists.

I hate Memphis because I hate John Calipari. I never really liked him when he coached U Mass back in the day and I haven't seen any reason to change my mind since. As for this Memphis team, they are dangerously close to proving that they actually matter. They beat Texas, who was legit this season, even though Rick Barnes isn't particularly awe-inspiring as a big game coach. That said, there still is the fact that Conference USA is still going through the proverbial seven years of famine of which the Bible spoke since Louisville, Cincy and the rest fled to the Big East.

I've never been a Carolina fan. Just because they're a step above (and infinitely preferable to the Cameron Crazies) Duke doesn't carry enough weight to make me like them. I will root for them whenever they play Duke, but other than that, I have no time for them. Nor have I ever been swept away by the "romance" of Tobacco Road. Perhaps if General Sherman could have foreseen how things would turn out he would have been more harsh and not lest harsh in his treatment of North Carolina during the Civil War. Plus I'm not entirely convinced that Roy Williams and the current mayor of Boston aren't doppelgangers.

I'm not entirely sure why I hate UCLA, it's just something I've always done. It might have something to do with the light blue uniforms (like UNC). I don't think it has anything to do with the tradition, generally speaking I admire tradition (Notre Dame and the Yankees come to mind). Maybe it's the fact that I think I hate everything from LA. Or maybe it's a lingering resentment against the school that gave us Kareem and Bill Walton.

I really hate Bill Walton, by the way, and I hate him more every time he opens his mouth. Yeah, he helped the Celtics win a title and come within a whisper of another back in the good old days. But he's a long winded d-bag who looks at the world through a strange perspective wherein his contributions to the basketball landscape and the English language are vastly overstated. It's too bad that injuries derailed what would have been an epic career, and it's a shame that he stuttered till he was 30, but why should I be punished for that?

I also remember way back when, when I was still a Celtics fan and the Cs and Nets were battling in the Eastern Conference finals. Walton was in the crowd in the Meadowlands, high-fiving Nets fans as though it were cool. Even though I have stopped being a Celtics fan as long as the Ainge era continues, I'm still not forgiving Walton. I probably never will.

Before I leave the topic of Bill Walton, I still want an explanation or clarification on his relationship to the Symbionese Liberation Army. Or at the very least a good explanation on what exactly the Symbionese are or were, from whom they needed to be liberated and why exactly kidnapping Patty Hearst was supposed to advance that cause. And as an aside, even though I am fairly conservative myself, I do not include his relationship to the Grateful Dead in my reasons for hating Walton. While I do not share their ideals, I do respect and enjoy their music.

I wanted to rip Bill Simmons for picking UCLA in his bracket column because I didn't think much of this team. Even though they'd made two (and now three) consecutive Final Fours, I just wasn't sold on this team. I guess I have no faith in Ben Howland because he's bald. I didn't go ahead and do so, mostly because my own history of brackets imploding quickly and spectacularly tends to shut me up for a change, at least on this particular subject.

Watching UCLA during this tournament, I have been wondering, like everybody else under the sun, what kind of pro Kevin Love will make. He is slow, and he hasn't been tested against the type of quality big man he'll face on the next level with any consistency, but I think he'll make it. Simmons compared a shot he made in the Pac 10 tournament to Bill Laimbeer's style of three point shooting. And I think that's the model for Love.

Love probably isn't as tough as Laimbeer was, and it's very unlikely that he will turn out to be the dick that Laimbeer was. But then this isn't the NBA of the 1980s, either. Expansion and internationalization have diluted the talent pool and virtually ended the concept of the legitimate enforcer in the NBA. The days of Rick Mahorn and Charles Oakley aren't coming back. That said, I can see Love having a long career where he averages 12 and 8 against an ever-shrinking population of true centers in the NBA.

It's strange that this should be the first time all four number one seeds have advanced to the Final Four under this format. These four teams have been dominant, but they all seemed just flawed enough that at least one should have fallen by now. UCLA maybe should have lost to Texas A & M, but for the bad call in the final minute that jobbed the Aggies, and Kansas came oh so close to losing to Davidson. But these four have survived, and it should be interesting to see how they match up with one another.

Kansas and Memphis seem almost like mirror images of one another. They have similar size and speed mixtures, but I think Kansas has better perimeter shooting and there is always the specter of free throw shooting for Memphis. Yes, they've shot much better from the line in postseason play than they did earlier, but the pressure increases exponentially at this point in the tournament. I think it will come back to haunt them, so they will probably advance.

UNC has great athleticism, but Roy Williams (even though he is only 3 years removed from winning it all) still strikes me as a guy who can find a way to choke and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at any given moment. And maybe I'm just convinced of this against all logic, but I'd really rather not have to rely on Tyler Hansborough in a big moment. Yeah, he has great numbers and he's at the top of the list of player of the year candidates, but I just have a bad feeling about this.

So if you're keeping score at home, based on everything I've said so far, it's Carolina over Memphis with Hansborough as your Most Outstanding Player.

In other matters, while I was surfing the ESPN site, I came across this piece by LZ Granderson on the NFL considering requiring players with long hair to tuck their hair into their helmet on the field. I don't see what the big deal is, it's not as though the league is mandating that players get hair cuts. And if it could protect a player, then they should go ahead with it. But if the policy doesn't come in, I'm fine with that too.

I linked to the piece because I couldn't help but wonder one thing. No matter how compelling one's case may or may not be, I think the argument is undercut from jump street when you lead off with a Waiting to Exhale reference. Even if you aren't making a sports argument. Even if you are for whatever reason making a Waiting to Exhale argument. Whatever claim to legitimacy, masculinity, street cred, or whatever other term you want to use for the same concept you had is gone as soon as you drop a Waiting to Exhale reference. You might just as well get a Subaru sport utility wagon and admit you've been gelded.