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.

It's been a very long time since I attacked Jay Mariotti in this space. With the Red Sox roaring out to that 14 and 1/2 game lead in the first two months of the season, I was just too depressed to read Mariotti's appallingly dishonest carping. I just couldn't handle it. But with Humpty Dumpty falling flat on his face for the second time in as many starts, I thought I could handle it. I was wrong.

What bothers me most about Mariotti as a man and as a writer is the fact that he acts as though he were tough as nails right up until the moment confrontation could become conflict and then he backs off, whining with his tail between his legs. Just look at that infamous dust-up with Ken "Hawk" Harrelson when Mariotti said "I ought to slug you" only to back off and threaten litigation when Hawk showed signs that he intended to do harm to Mariotti.

A close second in the treasure trove of inadmirable character traits that make up the man, the myth, the fraud is his complete lack of scruple and honesty as a writer. The man has no sense of irony, either. Consider this piece he wrote for Monday's paper on the US Open. Mariotti calls Tiger Woods into question for his inability to catch Cabrera, while barely conceding the fact that Mariotti believed that Eldrick would win the tournament.

It's almost as though this column, which appeared in Suday's paper had never been written. I realize a two or three paragraph apology for the tortured logic, mangled metaphors, left-handed compliments, phony tough and crazy brave rhetoric and general poor taste exhibited in that piece would be out of the question, but a brief, humble little digression along these lines: "Look, I made a mistake. I thought the guy was going to win. I had a deadline and might have gotten carried away thinking I was a much better writer than I am. But I was wrong and I'm sorry" would have been nice.

That is far from the only instance. Earlier, before the US Open, Mariotti wrote this piece ostensibly feeling a bit of empathy for Phil Mickelson in his hour of difficulty. Then, after Mickelson missed the cut, Mariotti wrote a column to demonize Mickelson for complaining about the rough. I can't believe that editors, TV producers and the vast public tolerate him. Outside of a blogs, like fireJay.com, Jay the Joke and Boise Wants Jay, hardly anyone calls him on this nonsense.

Mariotti is currently lining up Mark Cuban for this treatment. At the moment, he is in favor of the rumored interest in acquiring the Cubs shown by the Benefactor. Part of it is due to the fact that Jerry Reinsdorf hates Cuban and Mariotti hates Reisndorf. I'm sure there must be, somewhere in the dark recesses of the back corners of Mariotti's oh so prodigious mind, the faint hope that Mark Cuban will buy the Cubs and bring his little freak parade to Chicago. I'm sure that will mean weeks and weeks of columns and hours of TV time for Mariotti to rip Cuban and the Cubs with very little intellectual effort. But I'm sure a nice guy like Jay hasn't thought of that.

Now it's time for me to go back to hating the Red Sox, at least until the fall. Once the Bears start playing again, I'm sure Mariotti will be writing articles like this more often. After all, when can a middle-aged never-was bully a massive, three hundred plus pound world class athlete? Perhaps that is the root of his appeal to whatever demographic Mariotti appeals. All the other frustrated Monday morning QBs must look to him to take the big and the strong down a peg since they can't do it themselves.

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.