Last night it was pretty clear: The best team won. And along with the title, John Calipari's Wildcats surely deserve consideration as one the best teams of the decade, rivaled only by the 2009 North Carolina squad and Duke in 2002. This season, Kentucky played superior defense, and they played unselfishly, two hallmarks of championship teams that deserve a special place in the conversation of “best ever.”

Of course, many fans around college basketball root against Kentucky; that’s just a fact. And it was already the case before Calipari arrived in Lexington. The program has deserved some of its bad reputation, most notably due to a massive recruiting scandal in [...]

We're about halfway through the conference season, and teams are beginning to sift into tiers of Final Four contention. Now is when talk of college basketball's individual honors starts to heat up, too. Some players who dominated last November have cooled off, while others have seen their stars rise. Interestingly, in each of the past five years (save when John Wall took the Rupp Award in 2010), one player each season has swept all six of the major Player of the Year honors: the Wooden, Naismith, Rupp, Robertson, AP and NABC. Last season, it was flashy BYU guard Jimmer Fredette who took home all the hardware.

Sportswriters traditionally make [...]

The non-conference season is over for most of college basketball, and midterm grades are out. Figuratively speaking, a few teams aced the first half, some have made a habit of relying on extensions and a bunch demonstrated that, frankly, they're not all that bright. None of the preseason top four teams is undefeated, and four of the preseason top 15 teams aren’t even ranked (Memphis, Vanderbilt, Pittsburgh and Xavier).

Of course, there's plenty of season left. A whole slew of teams currently flying high will bottom out in the conference campaign, and a few teams no one is talking about will finish in the top half. The pre-conference games [...]

The monolithic entity we call ‘Sports’ has had a rotten run of late. First, there was a month of non-stop coverage of what is consistently the most depressing and least enjoyable aspect of sports—owner-athlete financial bickering—when the NFL locked out. Then we had weeks of breaking coverage of the huge money grab and rivalry-busting of the major college football powerhouses and conferences. Then the NBA managed its own lockout (with attendant financial bickering). Then Tony La Russa and the Cardinals won the World Series, subjecting the rest of us to an entire post-and off-season of the oft-repeated fallacy that St. Louis is somehow a better America. And then we [...]

With the NCAA tournament starting next week, it seems like a good time to talk about why sports even matter. I've argued about this with more than a few people, most often un-athletic friends with unpleasant memories of high-school gym class. And it's true: This basketball tournament won't make any major illnesses disappear or stop people from killing one another (all told, sports probably hurts that effort). But it does grant us a distraction from the killing and suffering in the world—and at its best, contests like this offer us a way to judge what's important to us about competition, fairness, heart, skill and all those other major life [...]

It’s probably true that in this space over the past few months I’ve spent much more time pontificating about obscure French philosophers, junior high science fairs and my own internal angst than I have about actual college basketball this season. OK, it’s definitely true. While I’m confident that some of it has worked, I’ll let you be the judge. And then, like any patriotic American, I will dismiss your judgment until a ruling from a higher court comes through in my favor. Like anyone who’s ever been on stage, when you have an audience that will indulge your love for smashing watermelons with a sledgehammer, you don’t go off [...]

Usually, the only times you hear the word “marriage” intertwined with sports are when some meathead’s boorish behavior becomes front page news or in reference to the special relationship between a player/coach and his school/city. For example, “Ben Roethlisberger and the working class enclave of Pittsburgh are a perfect marriage.” Or, alternately, “The marriage of Latrell Sprewell’s fiery personality and hard-driving head coach PJ Carlesimo was doomed from the start.” Etcetera.

Speaking of choking, most of us of a certain age have experienced the throat-clearing discomfort of attending the wedding of two people everyone is confident should not be getting married, at least not to each other. That [...]

So how many NCAA basketball games did you watch this year? Two, three? One with a couple of college friends at a sports bar get-together? And now it's tournament time, and you're scrambling to find out which teams to pick in your technically illegal office NCAA tournament pool. I'm here to help, with some advice and pointers, broken down by region.

Of course, the great allure of the NCAA tournament, beyond the sheer zaniness and the last-second shots and the leaping and the raw elation of the winners, is the unpredictability of it all. While there is a method to the Madness, it's important to remember that nothing about [...]

We hear a lot about the teams that play in power conferences like the Big East, Big 10 and the ACC. Stronger teams from the mid-major conferences often get overlooked—which is too bad as many of them would present strong competition given the opportunity.

In basketball, unlike football, a single talented player can be the difference between a competitive team and a truly dangerous one. When a lower-profile program manages to end up with either a superior, pro-caliber player or more than one guy who could suit up at a high major program, that team goes from an upset possibility to a potential Sweet 16 team.

With [...]

Each February, the ESPN mothership in Bristol, Conn., dictates one week in the college basketball season as “Rivalry Week." The games over that particular stretch of days contain some of the biggest and baddest conference match-ups in the nation. Typically, North Carolina against Duke in one featured game, Kentucky and Florida in another, perhaps Syracuse meeting Connecticut, too. But few of these games really ratchet things up to 11. You may see a cut chin or some yapping, but the stakes for really getting into it with a conference foe, especially late in the year when NCAA seeding and participation and jockeying for conference preeminence are at the [...]

Another long college basketball season came to an end last night in perhaps the most unsatisfactory way imaginable. Connecticut head coach Jim Calhoun—one of the game’s least likeable and hardest to root for figures—walked off the floor in glory as Butler, everybody’s Cinderella, thoroughly humiliated itself in its biggest game. It’s impossible to sugarcoat just how bad the final was; it was without a doubt the poorest championship game in memory.

An odd end to what was an odd and, ultimately, probably pretty forgettable season. Here, at the end, let's look back at some of the major moments and storylines and how they may appear to us in the [...]

I spent the spring before I moved to Brooklyn diligently flattening out what was already a pretty mild Southern accent. The way I looked at it, I was moving up Nawth with no particular intention of returning to Kentucky.

What I didn’t know, being naïve and geographically provincial, was that in diluting my accent I was inadvertently losing something of myself. Sure, now I didn’t sound different than my colleagues from Connecticut, Boston, Pennsylvania or even Des Moines. But that turned out to be a shame. Nearly everyone I met those first few years would, upon learning where I was from, immediately ask me, “What happened to your [...]

Don’t ever tell me it could be worse. There is no single piece of ostensibly helpful advice that I detest as much as “It could be worse.” I can’t say I’ve never offered it myself to some poor friend or family member in the midst of a crisis and I had nothing more useful to say. I get why people fall back on it. Sometimes it seems like the only thing you can say is something like that, something intentionally devoid of deeper meaning. Better that than to enflame or further deepen some afflicted’s funk. But that doesn’t mean it’s good advice, or really advice at all. Of course [...]

The mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard is a favorite of my father’s. I recall vividly books by or on Bachelard strewn about our split-level ranch for a few of the mid-80s years Dad was index-finger-only typing out his dissertation on our silver Texas Instruments machine—the result a big, fat, impenetrable (to me, at least) treatise on the Frenchman’s philosophy and its relationship to higher education.

While the content of the Bachelard books—hell, even the descriptions on the outside covers—was lost on me (due to a typical American kid’s short attention span and/or disinterest in phenomenology at the age of 14), I was always picking them up [...]

We're now two weeks away from Selection Sunday, and Bubble Watching appears to have become the number-one pastime in the country. Judging from the sheer number of ‘Bubble Watch’ segments out there, every major sports outlet wants to try their hand, apparently. But then that's all part of the fun of the NCAA tournament process, and the anticipation and prognostication over who's in, who’s out and who’s sweating it will last until the CBS crew finishes announcing the brackets. In the spirit of fellowship, let's enter the fray and do some Bubble Watching of our own.

UCONN (17-11, 7-9 Big East) As the defending national champion (and preseason top [...]

In the language of coaching, there's rarely a distinction given between a “good” and a “bad” loss. Listen to some post-game press conferences and the line is almost always the same: a loss is a loss, whether the difference was one point or 31. But anyone who's ever been a part of a team sport knows this is just bunk—if you've ever been on the receiving end of a real, honest-to-goodness beatdown, you know that it leaves a mark. Taking a licking inside the lines can make a team question whether it's actually capable of winning. Winning is often an act of mental fortitude, and one part of a [...]

Since 2006, when the NCAA relaxed the rules on programs participating in so-called “exempt” early-season tournaments, there's been a proliferation of made-for-TV preseason events. This year, it seems there’s been a supernova of them: large and small, exotic locales and more familiar ones. Organizers try to pack as many as a dozen games into a few days to maximize competition and, more importantly in their eyes, occupancy at the resorts and venues that host.

Travel tournaments date back to the 1960s, but they really gained prominence in the '80s when big-name programs began using the events to boost name recognition and to spend some quality time bonding. Of course, [...]

It doesn’t take much to build a winning basketball program. Just wins and consistency and star players and loyalty and, oh right, lots and lots of wins. Big wins. Tournament wins. And yet, there are programs across the country that have done the winning part but still been thwarted on the way to lasting prominence by some unlucky combination of coaching attrition, failures in recruiting and/or the wrong bounce of the ball happening a few too many times.

This is what makes Butler University so fascinating. With this year's return to the Final Four, Butler is emerging as a legitimate basketball power—a title very few so-called “mid-major” programs [...]

Early last week, I spent a pleasant evening flipping back and forth between two fantastic college basketball games involving top 10 teams. On ESPN was Kansas State’s stunning obliteration of newly minted No. 1 Kansas. Jacob Pullen, the enigmatic K-State point guard was chucking silly three-pointers from way outside and just burying them. The crowd was freaking out. Great basketball atmosphere, great game (unless you're a Kansas fan, of course).

The other game featured arguably the best team out West, sixth-ranked San Diego State, scrambling to hold off a game UNLV in Las Vegas. Every time UNLV made a run at the Aztecs, San Diego State guard D.J. [...]

Oh, what a joy it was for me to watch BYU beat San Diego State in Provo, Utah on CBS College Sports last Wednesday. It had next to nothing to do with the game itself—a mighty performance from white basketball pundit boner-inducer Jimmer Fredette. No, my whole week was made when, at the halftime break, I was treated—all of us were, really—to the sight of Alaa Abdelnaby in the CBSCS studio.

Former Final Four participant and awkwardly oblong center with Duke, Abdelnaby arrived straight from the “Holy shit! It’s that guy!” file. Smiling, wearing a sharp suit, Abdelnaby looked relaxed and polished as he kidded around with his studio [...]