Didn't you used to be player of the year?

That was a weird, sad scene watching Tyler Hansbrough in the Oklahoma game yesterday. In a battle of players of the year, this year's model, Blake Griffin, told Tyler where to go and when to go there. He dominated him inside, then took him outside so he could blow by him to the rim.

Thinking back, we guess it all started in the Final Four last year, when Kansas' big freshman came in and put the dog collar on Tyler. But it's still weird to see last year's POY as only the third (fourth?) best guy on the floor for his team.

It all culminated yesterday with The Dunk, when we could almost see the thought in Tyler's googly eyes: He was going to show us all who the real player of the year was. He then lifted off for an extremely ill-advised dunk attempt over Griffin. Like a rocket misfiring and heading for the sea, he must have realized that he was going to land far short of the rim, so he just threw the ball, hoping it would fall into the basket. And no, no foul call to bail him out. It was embarrassing to watch.

Any NBA clubs thinking of wasting a pick on Tyler probably saw all they needed to see yesterday. Does Chapel Hill have a D-League team?

Quick three: Doomed

1. Will Missouri ever get to the Final Four?
2. Can UConn win a championship before it gets put on probation?
3. What's the appropriate penalty for a bar that wants you to think it's a sports bar and has dozens of TVs tuned to the Sweet 16, but then holds Friday night karaoke and runs that through the speakers, not the game audio? Is any penalty harsh enough?

Jailhouse Honeys

We all do wrong (or are accused of it), even the loveliest among us. And that's how we get Jailhouse Honeys. Today's contestants, taken from online arrest records from around our fair country. No names or locations, just mugshots, vitals and bonus shots:

Age: 19
H/W: 5-7, 130
Charge: Misdemeanor -- Selling wine/liquor/beer/mixed beverage to someone under 21
Prior charges: None




Not quite in the league of hot teachers who take up with their junior high students, but there's a lot for an underage male to like here -- cute, and she'll sell you a Jagermeister shot.

Non-jail shots: OK, correction: Definitely in the league with the hot teachers. We love the beach.













Age: 29
H/W: 5-10, 125
Charge: Misdemeanor larceny
Prior charges: Speeding; reckless driving

You just don't get enough pigtails down at lockup. Or are those braids? We never can keep them straight.












Age: 27
H/W: 5-6, 115
Charges: Multiple traffic charges
Previous charges: More traffic charges, marijuana possession, felony fugitive extradition/other state.

Six mugshots online, and they get progressively more attractive. Lifestyle change? Better photog at the lockup?

Non-jail shots: Forgot to pack any clothes for the cabin.




















Age: 44
H/W: 5-9, 150
Charge: Misdemeanor solicitation -- crime against nature
Previous charges: Possession of drug paraphernalia, maintaining place for prostitution, misdemeanor possession of stolen goods.

Ahoy, matey -- d'ya get poked in the eye?

Tournament to-do lists

Tom Izzo
To do: In five days, figure out a way to stop one of Kansas' only two players capable of scoring.
Degree of difficulty: Easy

Arizona
To do: Keep playing like the team everyone thought you might be instead of the team you were most of the season. Better yet, find a way to distract Louisville, maybe wave a shiny object in their faces or put the pep band flute players in bikini tops.
Degree of difficulty: Difficult.

Missouri
To do: Scrap the pressure and come up with Plan B, because pressing Memphis is going to work about like hitting a water balloon with a hammer: They'll be going everywhere at once, and you'll look stupid.
Degree of difficulty: Impossible.

Blood and whistles

Gotta wonder how the refs are going to call the Duke-Villanova Sweet 16 game. Do we really think the refs will let the Novas send St. K's fine young Dookies flying across the court every time the Devils take a step toward the basket, the same way Villanova did against UCLA on Saturday?

We're thinkin' no.

Maybe it's the beer goggles, but ...

Siena looks a lot like that George Mason Final Four team from a distance. Just sayin'.

We are not criminals

You know that feeling, when they're not showing your team locally so you have to go to a bar, but your wife's not home and you have to take the kids, and your team is having trouble getting it going, so you're shoveling down beers, and you get paranoid, and you see people dialing their cell phones and you're afraid they're calling Social Services to turn you in?

Yeah, we didn't think you did.

Do they get birthday cake with that?

I'm adjusting a little slowly to having Vitaminwater on the sidelines at the NCAA games. I see that purple on the label and I think grape Kool-Aid. I expect players to come out of timeouts with big purple stains on their mouths, like 5-year-olds at a birthday party.

Worse than paying for a pillow

Next time your flight is an hour late and you're bitching about air travel, just remember: It could be worse.

You're perverts, and we love you

Our traffic numbers (such as they are) indicate that we could catch up with Yahoo! in a few months if we posted nothing but items about pep band girls in bikini tops (thanks, VCU!). Pictures would be good too, we imagine, though we had no reason to TiVo UCLA-VCU, so the video evidence has been erased from our hard drive.

We'll do our best to keep our eyes out for more, though honestly, there's a couple of bands we've seen that wouldn't mix well with bikinis. At all.

One bleeding moment

Howie Long is going to tell me I left my man step down for even thinking this, but doesn't the tournament seem a little, well, rougher this year. Enberg and Bilas spend most of the end of the Villanova-UCLA game rhapsodizing about Nova's no-layups policy, which involved putting a Bruin on his butt anytime he went to the hole.

The no-layup rule is something I prefer be confined to the NBA, where nearly everything else that I really don't like about basketball makes its permanent home. If you have a play on the ball it's one thing, but if don't, and all you can do is knock the guy down, it ought to be a basket and a free throw. Reward teams for playing defense, not for a Ray Lewis imitation.

Quick three: Brutal mismatch

1. They need to stop bracketing Big East teams against Pac-10 teams, if only because of the cheerleader mismatches. BC-USC was pretty stark last night, and Villanova-UCLA isn't much better today.
2. Not to keep going back to the NIT (NIT fever!), but it was nice to see Kentucky playing their game the other night at Memorial Coliseum. These big-time program that drop into the NIT should consider the same thing. I seem to recall North Carolina State and Georgetown finding excuses to play at their older, smaller, cooler gyms. One exception I can think of: South Carolina. Carolina Coliseum always looked incredibly dark on TV, to the point that it was hard to see who was doing what. Cocky wisely stayed in the new place for the loss against Davidson.
3. Have you seen the NCAA commercial showing young people wearing their athletic stuff while they do academic things? The tennis player is bouncing the ball on the side of her racket while she does computer-assisted design, the soccer player is playing the violin while he does ball tricks. It's imaginative, but then any commercial for the NCAA has to be. Because if you did a commercial showing what the NCAA does, it would show a bunch of bureaucrats pushing papers around in cubicles in Indy, figuring out ways to keep a kid from playing because he accepted a meal worth 10 bucks. And that wouldn't make for very good viewing, would it?.

Quick three: Don't let the door hit you edition

1. I'm happy Ohio State is out, and it's not because of any underdog love for Siena. No conference or geographic rivalry either. But I've been to several events where there were a lot of OSU fans, and in my experience they were loud, angry and way more into the we're-going-to-win-because-we-have-to-and-God-wants-us-to thing than any other school's fan base that I've encountered. Nobody beats Kentucky basketball fans for going over the top, but I haven't seen as much anger in them. I'm sure there are nice people among the gazillion in the Horseshoe on fall Saturdays; maybe I just haven't seen enough of them yet.

2. Somebody is trotting around the arena in Dayton with a "John 3:16" sign and getting it into the TV shot behind the free throw shooters. There's a long tradition of John 3:16ers, dating back to Rainbow Hair guy a couple of decades ago, and maybe even further back then that. The arena, the NCAA and CBS don't seem to care, but I wonder if they would react differently if the sign said "Allah Akbar"? Or "Satan is king"? (And not the blue Duke variety.) Or "There is no God"?

3. When was the last time you looked forward to an NIT game. Davidson at St. Mary's, 11: 30 ET Monday, be there.

Cindy, I presume?

As soon as I pop off, here comes Cleveland State, a blueblood underdog, way up on Wake with 7 minutes left. Kansas may be off the hook.

And the winners go to Detroit

How's your bracket? Ours isn't bad, but that's not a big deal. The first couple days of the NCAA tournament these days is pretty much a chalk affair, and if you stick with the big boys you'll usually be in pretty good shape for the second round, when the real work starts to get done. With four games left to play Friday, the top seeds to fall are a No. 4, Illinois, and a No. 5, Utah. Nobody really liked Illinois (key injury) or Utah (just not that good) anyway (OK, I picked Utah to beat Arizona -- I always hate on the big conference teams that crawl in as an 11 or a 12, and look at the thanks I get). So does that make Western Kentucky and Arizona our Cinderellas?

Well, no. The real Cinderella played earlier today and was as good as billed. Three North Dakota State players airplaned for loose balls in the first minute. Ben Woodside was unstoppable. They were undersized, undermanned, overachieving, crowd favorites, everything you could hope for.

Only one problem -- they lost. Kansas, which has helped create more Cinderellas in recent years than Disney did in a whole career, had just enough fresh bodies, got just enough shots to fall and, oh, yeah, had a seven-footer in the middle. So Kansas, much as it did last year with Davidson tore the heart out of the tournament. They just did it three rounds earlier this year. Thanks, Jayhawks.

After a couple of days on the couch, a short multiple-choice test for you. The correct answers are whatever you want them to be:

1. Which happens the least often during a game?
A. High-quality cheerleader upskirt shot.
A. Dick Enberg makes sense.
B. Tennessee looks like it knows what it's doing on defense.

2. Which of these things will happen first in coming years?
A. A 16 will beat a 1.
B. Oliver Purnell will win a game in the tournament.
C. A borderline call will go against Duke.

3. The worst part of the first round is:
A. The empty seats.
B. Tipoffs after 10 p.m. ET
C. The games themselves.

4. The redheaded flute player in the VCU band wearing the bikini top was:
A. Probably cold.
B. Thinking she should meet us after the game, and leave her bikini-top-wearing flute-playing friend at the Virginia Commonwealth hotel.
C. The most pleasant surprise of the tournament's first day.

OK, they're playing again in Dayton. Back to the couch.

Send our check to ...

Hey, ESPN or any of you regional sports networks: Instead of plugging junk time with cheerleader championships and gymnastics meets, try scheduling something like competitive pole dancing.

We read a newspaper story about this (since taken behind a paywall -- thanks, Orlando Sentinel) in which practitioners go to great lengths in the story to say that competitive pole dancing is not stripping, although the young woman in the story who's apparently a skilled practitioner of the art plies her trade in a gentlemen's club. But it's not stripping, did they mention that? No matter -- we do not judge.

But we do judge higher ratings and better ad revenue to be good things for TV, so somebody needs to ring up the folks at the U.S. Pole Dancing Federation (yeah, we were surprised there's one of those, too) and sign them to a deal.

Then, look out, "World's Strongest Man" and all those poker telecasts. There's a new girl in town and she's going to take your candy. And she's not a stripper.

Stuff we shouldn't comment on

The original headline said it all. Man killed girlfriend in fight over beer and tried to have sex with her corpse, Fort Lauderdale police say (our friends at the Orlando Sentinel took down their story, so we're linking to another version which killed the beer but kept the attempted necro angle).

But read down a little further and you'll find, as Paul Harvey liked to say, the rest of the story. Yes, Paul Harvey's dead too, and stay away from his corpse.

"Conde told police he and Trueblood were drinking together outdoors when she told him he couldn't have more beer. He told police he got upset and beat her up, saying she was on her back defenseless as he punched her several times in the face until he knew she was dead."

then

"Conde took off her pants and unsuccessfully tried to have sex with her, the arrest report said he told police."

Unsuccessfully? Uh, dude, it sounds like you may have had a little too much. She was right to cut you off.

then

"He then covered her up and lay next to her."

OK, bonus points for snuggling.

America's plummeting standards: Topless edition

OK, so a Girls Gone Wild party, whatever that is, gets a little out of hand. Breasts are bared, punches are thrown, and before you know it you have a decent little story for the local section of the newspaper. And who are we to judge? Times are tough, and sometimes a little breast-baring, punch-throwing, uh-oh-it's-the-cops kind of fun is just what everybody needs to blow off a little steam. Except the cops, maybe.

But even in this little snapshot of Americana, there are signs that we as a nation are slipping. Because our "girls" that went a little too wild for the local decency standards clock in at

18 -- girlish












32 -- nice try, but pushing it












41 -- OK, pretty girlish for 41, but c'mon












49 -- you gotta be kidding













Let the next mugshot be that of that guy that promoted this as "Girls" gone wild, charged with creating advertising even more fake than some of those breasts that were being bared.

Don't care/Do care

DON'T CARE: So Bobby Jindal fudged the central story in his GOP response speech last week (even though it was some of the numbers in the Obama budget that truly seemed unbelievable). Politicians=Folks who fudge, lie, stretch the truth, embellish, etc., and Jindal=Politician, so where's the surprise factor here?
DO CARE: Still can't believe Jindal used the government's response to Katrina as his centerpiece argument that government can't do anything right. Hey, Louisiana governor dude, it was your guy Bush that made it all possible by picking some horse guy to run FEMA. And it wasn't even some horse guy we had heard of, like D. Wayne Lucas or Jerry Bailey or the guy who hung with Mr. Ed (that's right -- he's hung with a horse). There's not a lot of agreement between the red types and the blue types, but doesn't everybody agree that the government should take the lead in emergency response? Geez, even the Libertarians are down with that.

DON'T CARE: So Georgia might be considering hiring Bob Knight to be its basketball coach. Listen, it wasn't that long ago that Georgia had Jim Harrick at the wheel, and let's just say that it doesn't appear all laws of God, man and the NCAA were followed during his tenure. Bob Knight might piss off everyone within the sound of his voice and turn all the press conferences into YouTube-ready cringe-fests, but the guy runs a clean program. You can't fault Georgia for making sure it stays on the right side of the law. Plus, crusty old white coach with a weird racial controversy in his past (remember the whip?) and young, successful black athletic director is a sitcom in the making, or maybe another ESPN/Knight reality series.
DO CARE: Anybody noticed what Bobby Jr. is doing back at Texas Tech? It's not pretty, unless you're a big fan of coach suspensions and losing. As one friend of the Staff asked the other day, has one of these name-my-son-coach-when-I-leave-or-else deals ever turned out well?

DON'T CARE: So a super-cheap Irish aerline wants to put pay toilets on planes. Don't like it? Don't fly 'em. It's probably just a publicity stunt anyway, and it's worked very well.
DO CARE: If the idea spreads from Irish airlines to Irish pubs, we'll be marching in the streets, and probably relieving ourselves there too.