So, the NCAA tournament is again upon us. I'm sorry that I haven't been posting much lately, but I haven't really had all that much to say. I'm staying away from commenting on the Celtics because my comments on the Red Sox throughout last season looked fairly ridiculous when October's travesty finally played itself out. And I just haven't really been all that motivated to watch a lot of college basketball these days.

One of the problems, I suppose, when it comes right down to it is that I hate Duke and I hate North Carolina. I just don't want to see either team do well. Nor do I want to see announcers grovelling at the feet of the coaches and players associated with either team. And unfortunately, while one can never escape the latter (especially where Duke is concerned), there was far too much of the former for my taste this season.

And then at the end of last week, Illinois launched an improbable, history making run in the Big Ten tournament. Too bad they fell short, but it was still a great story. And you can tell it was a great story, based merely on the reaction of the Chicago media's one man answer to the bubonic plague, Jay Mariotti.

I realize I spend a scandalous amount of time in a blog devoted (ostensibly, any way) to the Boston sports landscape shredding a columnist from Chicago. But if ever there were a person who deserves it, it's Mariotti. And since not every one has the time to read fine sites like Jay the Joke and Boise Wants Jay, there's always room in this space to let Chicagoans know that a few people on the East Coast feel sorry for what they have to endure.

I've been thinking this for a long time, but I am now just about convinced that Jay Mariotti is the biggest douche in the continental United States. It seems improbable that a moderately trained chimpanzee could spend a decade or so covering sports and manage after all that time to fail to understand why we watch sports. And yet Mariotti has not developed the faintest inkling of the curious appeal that a team like this season's Illini can have over even the most cynical, relentlessly negative, unpleasant people in America (i.e. me).

Illinois had, up until this month began, been one of the big disappointments in college basketball. They could do a few things effectively enough to hang in most of the games they lost, but they didn't do enough of those things well enough to win, or even be a particularly watchable team. And all of that changed this week, at least except the bit about being particularly watchable.

Although, as an aside, I should introduce this anecdote. I have a friend who did a semester abroad at St. Andrews in Scotland, mostly for the academics, naturally, but he managed to get in a round or two of golf. He came back with a term he picked up from the natives to describe what we might call a wormburner. In Scotland, some people call it a Sally Gunnels shot, after some female track star in the distant past. The rationale, as they put it: "She's not pretty but she sure can run."

Leaving aside for a moment that which is Scottish and very likely sexist, that was this season's Illini in the Big Ten tournament. In the words of Victor Frankenstein, it wasn't supposed to be this way, it was supposed to be a thing of beauty. But for three and a half games over the course of four days, Illinois reminded us that we look to sports as the last remaining area where David has a shot against Goliath.

In every other aspect of our lives, some one some where is probably micturating upon you in some sense and expecting you to believe that it's raining. It may be your boss. It may be Uncle. It may be the guy who lives three doors down from you and brings his dog to drop a deuce in your wife's flowers while you're just trying to get some damn sleep. Who knows. But odds are some one in life is making your life more difficult than it really ought to be and you probably can't do all that much about it.

And go figure it had to be Wisconsin who stopped Illinois. If ever there were a team custom tailored to play the modern American Goliath, it's Duke. But Wisconsin's a close second. In fact, I hate the Badgers and Bo Ryan second only to Duke in the NCAA landscape today. And for a lot of the same reasons. Wisconsin players flop shamelessly and whine incessantly.

If they wore blue and white instead of red and white, all Wisconsin would need to play Duke's mini-me is a Coach who looked enough like a certain German dictator to make me think there might have been something more than meets the eye behind the plot of the classic Gregory Peck film The Boys From Brazil. Too bad they have to settle for a cheese ball who looks like a frustrated, failing lounge singer, right down to the lame wardrobe and giant bald spot.

Not so in sports. Every once in a while, there's a team like Illinois that, despite all signs to the contrary, manages to pull off an inspiring run like this weekend's trip through Indianapolis. And when that improbable run occurs, there's going to be some douche like Mariotti out there to try to ruin that for the rest of us. He's the guy who's going to sit through the sub-prime meltdown, the Bear Sterns China Syndrome and the damn recession that's falling down around our ears right now and rip to shreds the few bright spots that might give us a reason to smile for 15 minutes. Even I won't do that/

I guess the lesson here is that if you find yourself on the other side of what the guy I go to for my Red Sox info blithely refers to as "the douche trade" and I'm not standing there with you, you must really be king douche. So once more, congratulations, Jay.

In other matters, I have decided to revive last year's failed experiment. If you want to enter the Sedition in Red Sox Nation bracket challenge and prove that you can pick college basketball games better than a bitter dude whose motivations stem from bizarre, yet deep-seeded, personal antagonisms against coaches he's never met on campuses he's never visited in towns he can't spell, have at it.

Go to this link, and sign up: http://sirsn.mayhem.sportsline.com/e
The group password is s3dition

And I promise to cheat only if I lose.

What with the way the Cleveland Indians seem desperate to save Major League Baseball from the indignity of a World Series that somehow lacks a major market team despite the fact that both Denver and Cleveland are much bigger cities than Boston, I spent a lot of time searching for something to watch. The Illinois vs. Michigan game would have been a great candidate but for three serious questions.

First, why do the Marching Illini wear capes? Are they super heroes? Even the silly helmets on the USC band (the real USC not that disco with books that stands out for its subpar academic repute in the desert of ignorance that is the SEC) look far less ridiculous than the capes.

Second, could Brent Musberger be more biased in favor of the Michigan Wolverines? Ryan Mallet fumbled two snaps, and Musberger still raved about him as though he threw for 300 yards and 5 TDs. In the drive to respond to the Illin field goal which tied it at 17, Musberger raved about Mallett as though he led a drive reminiscent of Joe Montana's game winner in Super Bowl XXII. The only differences between the two drives, Michigan gained the bulk of its yards on the ground, not through the air, and the drive ended in an interception not a TD.

Third, why is it that no one talks about Rashard Mendenhall from Illinois as a potential Heisman candidate? I know Matt Ryan has the inside track because BC plays the very best Division 1-AA has to offer and a very bad Notre Dame team. Just because Illinois will have to wait until it plays Ball State to hope for some crumbs of attention in a Jason Whitlock piece doesn't mean Mendenhall hasn't earned some consideration.

I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the Red Sox game to some degree. There is some consolation for a person with my viewpoint in Curt Schilling's performance. It means that he basically can dictate his contract terms to Theo Epstein. Of course Theo lost any slight degree of leverage he had when Schilling put his house up for sale in September and started saying that he'd like to play in a place like Tampa. There is no way that Tampa is an empty threat. Schilling would definitely go to a team that will likely lost 90 games next season to pass the twilight of his career.

Of course no one can fairly blame Theo for being manipulated and outmaneuvered by a fraud who plays Everquest for hours on end. After all, getting into a bidding war with the Yankees for the services of Roger Clemens couldn't possibly hurt the club as it makes its decision to pursue or not pursue Schilling. There's no way offering a prorated $18 million to Clemens will embolden Curt Schilling.

In part, it made sense to offer Clemens that type of deal. Why not? There was a chance they could sign him. And making the Yankees go all the way up to $28 million (prorated, to be sure) was a big dent in the vast, vast, vast resources of the Bronx Bombers. After all, Boston had a lot of appeal to Clemens, with the patient, tolerant and very nearly but not quite human media and all. And Clemens really needed to break the tie with Cy Young for most wins in club history to cement his legacy right.

The question now becomes, given the humble bearing and equanimity with which Schilling approaches every situation, whether Schilling will be avaricious enough to demand certain concessions from the team. After all, it wouldn't surprise me with the way the team bent over backwards to throw money at guys who had nowhere near the track record Schilling brought with him when he signed in '04, if Schilling felt himself entitled to demand that his General Manager clean his pool or serve as human foot stool. Could it really be any more humiliating than paying JD Drew the remainder of his $70 million over the next four years, because the grand slam tonight didn't really wipe the slate clean?

Even if the Red Sox come all the way back to go to the World Series, is it going to change the fact that Julio Lugo was paid $8.3 to be 1/2 of a baseball player? Will their be no repercussions for that little anomaly? Will Jacoby Ellsbury pushing Coco Crisp out of the lineup be sloughed off as a curious but not unpleasant quirk of the game? I understand that Red Sox fans are hypocrites, but Red Sox Nation might want to think twice about ripping the Yankee spending machine, even if it might be more intellectual activity than would kill a Red Sox fan or two million.

And speaking of hypocrites, it's been too long since I ripped Jay Mariotti. There is something very sickening about this recent column Mariotti wrote ripping the Bears for the Adrian Peterson performance last week. It seemed to me as though Mariotti was implying that the Bears somehow passed on Peterson despite Mariotti's urging and giggling while he did it. Perhaps I'm not as intelligent as Mariotti is, but I just don't see how the Bears could have drafted Adrian Peterson.

In a sense, it's possible to say that the Bears passed on Peterson by not taking a trade with the Washington Redskins which would have given the Bears the sixth overall pick in return for Lance Briggs. Mariotti did call for the Bears to trade for that pick, but he called for the Bears to acquire that pick with the express purpose of drafting Ohio State wide receiver/kick returner Ted Ginn Jr.

Ted Ginn is not playing particularly well right now, to be charitable. Moreover, he would provide the Bears with an adequate player whose skills might overlap with Devin Hester and Bernard Berrian without providing an upgrade on either player. Perhaps Adrian Peterson would do a better job running behind this offensive line than Cedric Benson, but there is no way to prove that. However, given the fact that Mariotti is a douche and universally loathed, perhaps it would serve his ends better to praise Cedric Benson than to bury him. Then, perhaps Benson would be benched.

Well, the first weekend of the NCAA tournament is over. And the bracket challenge disaster I predicted in the last post of last week not only happened, but happened twice over. I know I shouldn't do it, after the last 15 years of doing it, but I choose teams based on hatred or lack thereof and it kicks my brackets ass all the time. I picked Texas Tach to go to the Elite Eight because I hate BC and Georgetown. I picked Notre Dame to go to the Final Four because I hate Florida, Wisconsin and Oregon. And now my bracket needs teams from the NBA to lose, three of the original cast of MASH to die and four or five country wonders to occur for me to win.

For the record, I didn't really think that ND could win. I thought they were the first team that had a snowball's chance in the infernal region of beating Florida that I didn't hate. And even then I didn't like that pick. I love ND as a football school, but I've never been a big fan of their basketball team. I don't know why. But I think it has a lot to do with the fact that Mike Bray looks like a bad lounge singer with the slicked back hair and the mock turtleneck with the blazer. I just can't get behind the lounge lizard coaching the team. But I picked them, and they killed me.

And all of that was before Texas lost. That was a defensible pick, though. With the best single player in the tournament and a point guard that could play, they had a chance to get hot. Unfortunately, they didn't. But I'm not at the point in my life where I'm willing to forsake my hatred for the sake of a NCAA tournament bracket sheet. I am a sad, small, bitter, bitter man, but I'm fine with it, which makes me a good person.

One of the surprising stories of the tournament so far was the lack of an upset in the 5-12 matchup. Personally, I think there was an upset. When the officials swallowed the whistle as Virginia Tech played what resembled rugby more than basketball, that was an upset. Illinois got jobbed, and America's least coherent and honest columnist took entirely too much satisfaction in the defeat of his new mortal enemy Bruce Weber. By the way, can an Illini team that didn't deserve to be there in the first place actually choke? These are questions that trouble responsible writers, but not Jay the total fraud.

To be fair, Illinois could have been more aggressive offensively down the stretch. I understand that there is a natural impulse to go to your strong suit when you need to close out a game. Illinois played good defense, so they tried to take the air out of the ball, milk the clock and hope the 13 point lead was sufficient. And maybe it was a good thing for Brian Randle that the final foul was ignored. If he missed two more freethrows that would have tied the game, I shudder to think what the poor kid would have done to himself or the community at large.

At some point, it is probably as effective to sprint down the court and fire up a bad shot as it is to walk the ball up, run 25 screens, rotate the ball from side to side for 34 seconds and then take a bad shot. If you aren't scoring, you aren't scoring. Might as well be interesting while you're doing it. As far as the 9 turnovers VT forced, Brian Urlacher doesn't hack half as much to force a fumble in the NFL (a contact sport, for the record) than the VT press did. That loser the Grizzly Man experienced less contact in being mauled to death by a grizzly bear than the Illinois guards did in bringing the ball up court.

I was rooting for Illinois. I thought they deserved to win. I wish the refs called fouls on some of the VT contact, but that's life. But it got me thinking about something. And the Southern Illinois game vs. Holy Cross got me thinking too. Based on the score, the Holy Cross game was closer than the Virginia Tech game. Now does that mean Holy Cross was a better team and could have beaten Virginia Tech? The obvious answer is, hell no.

However, Southern Illinois likes to play tight defense and make the most of their opportunities on offense. That's how Holy Cross likes to play, which led to the tight game. Virginia Tech didn't play that way, Southern Illinois stifled VT and crushed them handily. But on the Southern Illinois-HC game, it was clear as day that SIU was much, much, much more athletic than Holy Cross. If they ran, the cross between Tarantino, Boo Radley and the Missing Link would have been gasping for air and out of the game.

So my question is, is it better to stick to your style or adapt and exploit the opponent's weaknesses? I think it's better to adapt, but SIU could have easily adopted a run and gun approach, lost discipline and fallen apart. Plus the first two paragraphs of this post are all about what an idiot I am and the shambles that once was a proud bracket challenge entry. Take that with my record for picking games (I have to count the SIU-HC game as a loss, since I predicted a bigger victory and the humiliation of double zero, neither of which happened).

By the way, I found out that Danny Ainge's birthday is March 17. I would wish him many happy returns, but I hate him. But what kind of Mormon is born on the biggest drinking day of the year? You know there's no way the stars were smiling on him. That's why he's mad such a shambles of the Celtics. He was born unlucky.

PS - I may seem insensitive in ridiculing the Grizzly Man, but he got what he deserved. It may be bad karma, and tempting fate, but that's how I feel. If grizzly bears are going to maul me, they're going to have to come to my apartment and maul me here. I'm sure as hell not going to go out and hang out with apex predators like they were my buddies.

PPS - I appreciate the Anti-Jay people for reading me and commenting on these posts. But I must ask the question, what has Boise done to you? I've never been to Boise, and God willing, I never will. But I'm pretty sure that the good people of Boise don't deserve him. He needs to go. Chicago is the best city in the world not named Boston, and he is a blight on its landscape. How about banishing him to Siberia? Or a research station in the Antarctic? While we're dreaming, let's dream big.

There is nothing short of personal tragedy or getting puddled like a day of watching ESPN and looking for sports stories on the web to turn a good mood into a bad mood quickly. I was happy, or at least as happy as I get when nothing bad has happened to a person I dislike, when I woke up. I am not happy now. But I guess I get what I deserve, in the end, because no one made me watch ESPN or surf the web.

Against my better judgement, I made my way over to the Chicago Sun Times site. Sometimes it pays to keep an eye on what the enemy is doing. Today, one of our favorite bullies has finally found a nice easy target for his aggressions. Finding Ozzie Guillen, Jerry Reinsdorff and even Hawk Harrelson too difficult to push around and being disappointed in his efforts to convince any responsible authorities to fight his battles for him, Jay Mariotti has taken it upon himself to crush the single greatest threat to American sports currently working in Illinois, U of I basketball coach Bruce Weber.

I am tired of the media criticising certain coaches for succeeding with a group of players recruited by his predecessor. Whatever merit the charge may possess is undercut by the selectivity with which reporters use it. I said it this fall when a piece on Page 2 knocked Charlie Weis for taking a team recruited by Ty Willingham to a BCS bowl. I found it all too convenient that the piece failed to mention that Willingham had his best season in South Bend in his first year, with players recruited by Bob Davie. Also, not enough was made of the fact that 22 of the 24 starters on Florida's national championship team were recruited by Ron Zook.

Bruce Weber should be able to draw the best of the best recruits to Champaign. What with the beautiful beaches, perfect climate, vibrant night life and proximity to major cities (Indianapolis is only 120 miles away), it might as well be paradise on Earth. Who doesn't want to live in East Central Illinois? The Orange Crush provides a great home court advantage, but the facilities aren't overwhelmingly better than any of their chief competitors. And while the school has a nice tradition, it doesn't have the basketball pedigree of an Indiana, Kansas or Kentucky (or even Ohio State or Michigan, for that matter). So why is Illinois supposed to surpass the rest of the Big 10?

In the end, if Jay were honest (and that is a monumental if), he'd tell you why Bruce Weber deserves to be picked on by this particular knight of the keyboard. Quite simply, Bruce Weber is a nice, mild-mannered quiet guy. He won't fight back the way Ozzie Guillen did. After all, what fun is there in bullying a person who will stand up to you? Especially when Bud Selig won't step in and fight for the noble newspaper man against the big bad Venezuelan.

The attack on Weber and the Illini is not surprising. Any one who read this piece, written just two days before the attack on Weber, would wonder what happened in the meantime if they didn't know Mariotti. Only he could pronounce a team in the tournament then shred them so viciously when the team hadn't played another game.

Emerson once said that foolish consistencies are the hobgoblins of little minds. Of course there's no guarantee that he had ever met a mind as little as Mariotti's when he said that. I doubt that even Emerson would see a mind large enough to harbor a hobgoblin should he ever meet Jay the Joke through the miracle of time travel. Even the CHB would have had more shame than to drop that once, twice, three times a lady reference from the second piece linked above.

The other story that has me steamed is this one. Apparently, Terrell Owens did not know his playbook. As his last defender, I spend entirely too much of my time responding to stories like this. But I still do it.

Covering football isn't exactly breaking the Watergate story. So whenever I see a piece like this, I don't take it too seriously. An investigative journalist needs to protect his or her sources because these are often matters of life and death. A sports columnist protects his sources so he can get better quotes. Not naming a source makes me think that the player who said TO didn't know the playbook had a particular axe to grind with TO.

Now it could be that the axe is resentment against TO for all the drops. Or it could be a little bit of jealousy. Say you were a wide receiver on the Cowboys who had once been an NFL number one pick, but you hadn't lived up to that potential since your rookie season. Imagine then, that you had little to fall back on after football, since you attended a school notorious for allowing athletes to coast through an academic program that was something short of rigorous.

On top of that, a much more talented receiver with a lot of negative image issues came to town and stole your thunder. Would that make you angry enough to whisper a comment or two to a reporter, knowing that just about every person who knows anything about football will believe the worst about that particular player? It's the preferred weapon of the high school gossip, and just maybe a certain product of the Ohio State University.

I simply can't see how TO could have ended up with 85 catches and 13 TDs in a season if he didn't know at least some of the plays. After all the drama with Jeff Garcia, Greg Knapp, Donovan McNabb, Brad Childress and Andy Reid, almost every fan is automatically going to believe the worst of TO. If some story emerged from Dallas that had TO entering hospitals in the dead of night and juggling newborn babies while the staff looked on in horror, I think people would believe it.

Just once, I'd like to see TO help himself (and me) out by going one week without becoming national news. I don't think it's going to happen, but I can hope.