I really don’t have a strong feeling either way about tonight’s game… it seems that Florida has a better overall starting five, but the way UCLA gets after it on defense makes up for a lot of things. Vegas has Florida as a slight favorite, 1½ the last time I checked.

I’m gonna lean just a little bit in UCLA’s direction, just because there are times when Florida can be forced into some poor shot selection. I like their offense, and they are able to get good shots when they’re in rhythm, but they can also get a little bit impatient. That could work against them. And UCLA applied their double teams in the post really quickly and really well, so the advantage Florida has with Noah, Horford, and Brewer could be muted a little bit.

But, as I said… it’s not a strong feeling on my part. I could be talked out of it. Feel free to do so.

In terms of actual rooting interests, I’m also pretty Switzerland. I don’t really like seeing any SEC school succeed at anything, but I’m also kinda tired of Jordan Farmar’s face, always looking like he’s on the way to his N’Sync band audition. Slight edge to Florida because of Joakim Noah’s gap teeth.

Let’s just hope it’s actually a competitive game. If it’s like Saturday night’s games, I’m gonna watch Everybody Loves fuckin’ Raymond or something.

Arizone State met with NC State coach Herb Sendek at the Final Four, and offered him the head coaching job, double his current salary, a fan base that doesn’t hate him, and boosters who aren’t calling for his job. It took him about 10 seconds to accept.

I know not all NC State fans wanted him gone, but a lot of people did, and it made things difficult for him. And it’s too bad… I think he’s a damn good coach. And now NC State’s got to find someone to take the job with the knowledge that five straight tournament appearances, and a sweet 16 last year, just aren’t good enough. This is not going to be a positive step for NC State.

No one thinks of them as one of the nation’s elite programs. Yes, they do have two national titles… they’ve got the Jim Valvano video clips and everything else. But they’re just another team looking up at UNC and Duke in the ACC. I’m not saying they can’t ever get to that elite level, but they’re not getting there overnight, and there aren’t many guys more likely to get them there than Herb Sendek.

Nice little deal for Arizona State. Expect them to improve in the next 2-3 years.

Those are my picks for Saturday. I’d like to go with George Mason, but… I think Florida combines an organized, multiple-option offense that’s difficult to defend, with disciplined, poised, play, and freakish athletes. I don’t think they’ve played a team yet with that kind of combination. Wichita State lacked the freakish athletes. UConn and Michigan State lacked the organized, disciplined play. UNC lacked experience, poise, and focus.

It wouldn’t shock me if Mason won, though… they are that good. I could envision them really slowing the game down, feeding the post, getting Noah and Horford in foul trouble and taking their chances with some big-balls plays down the stretch. That’s going to be hard to execute, though.

It’s not that I don’t think Mason is good, I just think Florida’s better. I feel bad about it… I do want them to win. I’ll be rooting for them. I just don’t think it’ll happen.

And by the way, it would be a real nice change of pace for a team to win a tournament, and then take the microphone and say, “Hey, no one thought we could do it, no one believed in us,” and have it not be complete horseshit. I don’t think that’s happened since the 2004 NBA Finals.

On the other side, I like LSU. And again, it’s not because I think there’s anything particularly wrong with UCLA, but LSU has just mowed through everyone, teams who play a variety of styles. They’re peaking at the right time, they’re getting good decision-making from their guards, and their post players are just buck nasty. I think they’re beating UCLA by 10 or more. I like LSU on Monday night, too.

You?

Jim Boeheim and a few other coaches have gone on record as saying that they’d like to see the NCAA tournament expand the field. The argument is that there are more teams now, and in fact, more good teams, which is something I agree with. I still don’t know that it makes it necessary to have more than 64 teams in a tournament to crown a national championship, but it’s true… the mid-majors have really closed the gap on the big guys. Now, I’m not sure if these proposals are designed to get more Hofstras into the tournament, or more Michigans… but it sounds nice in theory.

I don’t think it’s something that’s really likely to happen, but the movement appears to be gathering steam. If it does happen, I a few requests:

1) If there are more play-in games, they should make every effort to make them seem like a real tournament game. I forget who Monmouth played in the play-in game this year, but that team, who won a conference tournament, did not get the same attention that the other teams in the tournament got… they got a Tuesday night game in Dayton. Congratulations. I don’t think it would be fair to make these conference tournament winners play in tournament games that aren’t really tournament games. In fact…

2) The play-in games shouldn’t always be just winners of the small conference tournaments. I’d rather see teams like Cincinnati or Florida State, big schools who didn’t quite have the chops to get in, duking it out for a spot. I think winning a conference tournament or regular season title, no matter how sucky the conference, is a bigger deal than going .500 in the ACC. I’d rather see the conference winners rewarded.

And 3) Please don’t fuck with my bracket pool. If you’re still announcing the teams on Sunday evening, then you can’t start having 6 or 8 games on Tuesday. That doesn’t give me enough time to organize a completely legal, not-for-profit tournament pool.

A bunch of old guys that I’d like to hang out with pulled off a pretty sweet little trick… in 1963, some guys were sitting around in a bar came up with the idea of founding a fake institution of higher learning. They called it “Maguire University” and they used it to hoodwink the NCAA into giving them free Final Four tickets.

I don’t know exactly they went about it, but they must have just called the NCAA and said, “Hey, we have a school,” and the NCAA said, “OK, your tickets are on the way,” because really, all they had was their idea.  There was no team, no school, no nothing.  And it worked.  The NCAA send them Final Four tickets for two years. Air Force even called them up once and asked to schedule a game against them.

This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.  It ended when some Chicago columnist eventually broke their story in the Chicago Tribune, and that was the end of it. But they’ve still found a way to attend each of the last 44 Final Fours, which is oustanding. These men are heroes.

These are pulled from a Washington Post article today that makes George Mason seem like about the most likable team in college basketball history. It’s a nice article by Mike Wise, and gives you a look at the honest, goofy, nature of this team and their head coach.

• Coach Jim Larranaga does not use profanity.

• Larranaga’s salary is 1/9th of Billy Donovan’s.

• Larranaga’s first assistant coaches lived in his basement.

• A quote from freshman Sammy Hernandez, who loves Scarface: “First, you get the money. Then, you get the Final Four. Then, you get the woman.”

• Jai Lewis is nicknamed “Giggles.”

And here’s another good one from Adrian Wojnarowski at ESPN.com. It’s a little bit more about how Mason got to where they are, the kind of people they were looking for, and how they’ve gone about things. Both quality reads.

Deadspin asked yesterday if the current NCAA tournament was the result of great basketball, or just great finishes and not-so-great basketball. Could a team like George Mason get to the Final Four if teams today were as good as they were back in the day? And what was the deal with that ugly-ass Memphis/UCLA game?

It’s kind of a long answer… I believe the game this year is in just as good as shape as it was 5 years ago. I mean, I’m not thrilled with the current state of basketball in general, but this year isn’t any better or worse this year than in the past few. There’s nothing wrong with the top seeds. I think what you’re seeing is the result of a few things.

First, mid-majors are getting better and better athletes all the time, because there are more and more of them to go around now. The different between a guy who ends up at Mason and a guy who ends up at UConn might be just 2 inches in height. A few more inches on the vertical. A little more accurate jumpshot in high school. It’s not much. I’m so impressed with Mason’s post players. They’re 6’6″ or 6’7″, but they’ve got great moves in the post, nice touch, comfortable with their backs to the basket, they play patiently, the make good decisions with the ball… there aren’t a lot of guys in college basketball who can play like that, and Mason has a couple of them.

And of course, it’s easier for a team like George Mason to keep their guys together for four years than it is for Duke or UConn, who spit out NBA prospects like a PEZ dispenser. That means a lot… especially in an era where guys aren’t at all fundamentally sound to begin with. Give a good coach a bunch of guys who will work to improve, and in four years, he’ll have them playing intelligently enough to beat teams with superior talent.

As for that Memphis/UCLA game… aberration. If Memphis shot the ball at the same percentage they had all year long, we wouldn’t have heard a word about this. I think it was just an example of a young Tiger team getting nervous, tensing up, being unable to establish a rhythm, and shooting like Jerome James after a couple bottles of Mad Dog 20/20. And they dragged UCLA down with them, they played to Memphis’s level, and we had an ugly game.

Other than that, I think the basketball’s been outstanding. The teams that are playing the best are where they should be.

I must confess to being ignorant about the accomplishments about the only man in history who has a 2006 Final Four basketball team named after him. I felt pretty safe in assuming that he was dead and white, but that was about all I knew.

So I looked it up, browed around Wikipedia and a few other places, and I put together a list of facts that you can use to impress your friends at your Final Four basketball get together. Enjoy.

• He was majory influential in getting the Bill of Rights added to the constitution. In fact, Bill of Rights itself was based on his Virginia Declaration of Rights, which he wrote earlier. The Bill of Rights is that thing with all the amendments, including the first one about freedom of speech, which is why I’m able to have this blog and say things like, “Bill Romanowski is a dirty cocksucker.”

• The reason George Mason isn’t as well known as some of our other forefathers is because he pissed off George Washington when he refused to sign the original constitution because it didn’t contain a Bill of Rights. Mason kept pissing and moaning about it after the fact until George no longer wanted to hang out with him. But George Washington didn’t even make the Sweet 16. George Mason’s in the Final Four. Scoreboard, you cherry-tree chopping son of a bitch.

• He did own slaves. Much like many of our other celebrated forefathers, we’ve named a bunch of shit after him, and he purchased black people. We might as well put some shackles and a bull-whip on the Mason jersey.

• He also argued vehemently that slaves needed to be freed, and that if the government was going to be all about liberty, then we needed to put an end to the practice of slavery. I don’t know his motivation for such arguments, but considering, you know, that he did actually own hundreds of black people, they were probably less than 100% altruistic.

• There’s a George Mason Memorial in D.C., though it isn’t nearly as popular as the giant phallus named for George Washington. The Memorial is really just a bronze George sitting on a bench with his legs crossed. Here’s a picture of it.

• Also, he was the first man in recorded history to ever give someone a Dirty Sanchez.

And if you’re really looking to impress people with your Masonly love, here are some George Mason quotes you can break out:

•”Our All is at Stake, and the little Conveniencys and Comforts of Life, when set in Competition with our Liberty, ought to be rejected not with Reluctance but with Pleasure.”

•”I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.”

•”The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.”

I mentioned it on Deadspin on Saturday, but I wanted to bring it up here, too… UConn can suck me. The way Jim Calhoun whined and cried during the Washington game was a disgrace. He spent the entire first half acting like the referees were all conspiring to sodomize his wife. You’ve never seen a coach bitch so much… particularly considering that they got the benefit of a bullshit missed goaltending call that might have turned the game in Washington’s favor.

And then afterwards, at the press conference, he starts complaining about having to play a “road game” against George Mason.

“I just hope we have enough time to recover. It’s going to be nice playing an away game, too. I’m really looking forward to that. That pod system is really working out to protect the 1s, right?”

Hey, maybe he was right. Maybe it was unfair to the 1-seed UConn to have to play in such a terrible environment. Maybe that was too much to ask of UConn and their six-or-more future NBA players. Or maybe the players took a cue from their coach and started listening to his pre-made excuses, his whining, his crying, and they didn’t play like the champions they could have been. It was probably one of those things.

The behavior of a coach has a lot to do with the behavior of a team. And I don’t mean to slight George Mason at all, because I think very highly of their basketball team, but Jim Calhoun didn’t do his own guys any favors. Obviously, his track record is beyond reproach, the last two games were not his best work.

I didn’t actually see the end of the game, but numerous websites sites are discussing the tears of Adam Morrison and JJ Redick today. I saw Redick cry, and didn’t think much of it. I’m sure the last four years were very special to him… it came to an end unexpectedly… a lot of people would cry in that situation. Some guys will, some guys won’t. No big thing.

But Adam Morrison… you can’t cry when you still have a chance to win. It’s a 1-point game, and there’s 2.6 seconds left… that’s the time to fight. That is not the time to cry. I feel bad for the guy, as bad as I felt for Redick or anyone else. I’m sure he was hurting, so I don’t want to be too hard on him, but, you know… if I’m an NBA scout, and a guy I’m thinking of drafting out there crying on the court when there’s still even a sliver of a chance… his stock is slipping a little bit. That’s a pretty major thing. The time to cry is after the game.

I’ve never been a huge Morrison fan… it’s nothing against his game. He’s a fine player, obviously. But his emotions have always seemed borderline weird on the court. You don’t need to flex your muscles and scream and slap the ball every single time you get an and-one against Pepperdine in a January WCC game.

And there have been some comments from opposing players saying that Morrison’s the worst trash talker in the game… a San Diego player claims Morrison told him that if a train hit (the San Diego player) and he died, that he (Morrison) wouldn’t care. That’s not trash talk. That’s just… that’s someone who’s confused about trash talk.

And, I think it’s worth mentioning… The sight of a man who can’t grow a mustache, but has attempted to do so anyway, sobbing in tears… is not a pretty thing.