Tubby Luv

From 1950 to 1971, Williams Arena had the largest capacity of any arena in the country. Based on the reaction to yesterday's news, the University of Minnesota may need to reconfigure The Barn to seat all 4,919,479 Minnesotans.

While Charlie Walters holds out hope Flip Saunders could still be named coach of the Golden Gophers, here are a few little-known facts about Tubby Smith to help you get acclimated to the new reality:

• Tubby attended Marquette University, where he played as a walk-on in the 1967 season but was cut before his sophomore season.
  
• He has a degree in History.
• As a child Tubby won a national tap-dancing contest. He later appeared as a guest of Jack Parr on "The Tonight Show."
• In the 1970s Tubby was briefly married to actress Susan Dey.
• Tubby writes a blog for the Access Hollywood web site.
  
• He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
  
• He has a supernumerary nipple.

Last—and you may already know this—Tubby has a .714 career winning percentage and has taken his teams to the NCAA tournament for 14 straight years. So while that third nipple may not play well in bluegrass country, I say gimme some more o' that Tubby Smith!

How's your bracket looking? If your champion's still alive, take heart. You sill have a shot at winning the St. John's Hoops Al McGuire Memorial Final Four Contest.

Speaking of St. John's: Hoops tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. Please let me know if you will or will not be playing.

No hoops March 17

Sorry, chaps. Not enough bodies this weekend. See you next week!

Who cares about your bracket?

I don't. I really don't. Heck, I barely care about my bracket, so polluted is this tournament by what can only be called Affirmative Action for the power conferences. Purdue, Vanderbilt, Texas Tech, Stanford—how in the world did these teams get in?

Are you fired up for Texas Tech vs. Boston College? Having seen Illinois play twice, I'm not sure they could advance to the second round of the women's tournament. Indiana? Georgia Tech? I'd trade every one of the dozen or so 22-10 also-rans for a look at Air Force.

Over the past four years the number of mid-major at-large bids has been cut in half. Arkansas had just four victories against the entire tournament field this year: Oral Roberts, Southern Illinois, and Vanderbilt (twice). Meanwhile, only four teams beat Winthrop: North Carolina, Texas A&M, Wisconsin (in overtime) and Maryland.

Even with too many step-sisters and not enough Cinderellas the NCAA men's basketball tournament is the greatest 18 days of the year. But I still don't care about your bracket. Nope. All I care about is your Final Four. That's because it's time for the Saint John's Hoops Al McGuire Memorial Final Four contest!

You know how it works: Send me the names of the four teams YOU pick to be in the Final Four this year, specifying which team you pick to win it all and which you pick as the runner-up. (Several people miss this crucial detail every year and are disqualified.)

After the champion's been crowned, I will score everyone's picks as follows: 1 point for each team you correctly place in the Final Four, 2 points for naming the runner-up, and 3 points for naming the champion. The winner will receive a basketball autographed by the 2006-2007 Drexel Dragons men's basketball team, which was utterly shafted by the NCAA selection committee. The winner's team will also be spotted 4 points in a game to 11 in our first post-tournament game at St. John's. (A non-player winner will receive a prize of approximately equal value, whatever THAT would be.) In the event of a tie, the winner will be chosen by a random draw. All recipients of this e-mail are eligible to enter.

But there's more! Specify a fifth team, seeded 9 or lower, as your darkhorse pick. If that team makes it into the Final Four, you will win $64 and a six-pack of Summit Pale Ale. Doggone it, if there's a better NCAA tournament contest, I've never heard of it!

All entries must be received in my inbox by tip-off of the first game on Thursday, March 15.

After you submit your entry, please let me know if you will or will not be playing hoops at St. John’s this weekend. We tip off at 8:00 a.m., as usual.

Oden/Polynice

Ohio State's Greg Oden will surely be picked #1 in this spring's NBA draft, right? That seems to be the consensus.

This bothers me, as the Oden hype has all along. So he won nine consecutive high school championships by an average margin of victory of 849 points. So he was named a McDonald's and Dominos and Nike and Rapid Oil Change High School Player of the Year seven consecutive times. So he's anchored a Big Ten team that's been at or near the top of the rankings all season. Is he the second coming of Shaquille O'Neal? To me he's the second coming of Rashard Griffith.

In the history of the NBA (1950 to present) there have been 304 centers drafted. Of those, 20 were the first pick of the draft. Of those, seven stand out for the same reasons Oden does and will: They were true post players who led their college teams to the top of the rankings, were widely praised as the best players in the country, and were chosen first in the draft. They are Shaquille O'Neal, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Akeem Olajuwon, Ralph Sampson, Bill Walton, and Lew Alcindor.

Do you put Oden in that company? I don't. In terms of performance at the college level I'm not sure you can even put him the company of top picks Andrew Bogut, Michael Olowokandi, and Joe Barry Carroll.

(For reference, 98 centers have been chosen as top ten picks. To get sense of the range of talent available in the top ten, Joel Przybilla (9) was drafted higher than Willis Reed (10) and Bryant "Big Country" Reeves (6) higher than Robert Parrish (8).)

I've said since first watching him play—and have not changed my opinon after several games—that the college players Oden most reminds me of are LSU's Stanley Roberts and Wisconsin's Rashard Griffith. Roberts was drafted 23rd in 1991 and bounced around the NBA for several years before finally being banned for substance abuse. Griffith went 38th in 1995, never suited up for an NBA team, and has played overseas. Both received about the same amount of hype as Oden in college.

Curious, I looked up Roberts's and Griffith's career college stats:

	YRS	PPG	FG%	REB	BLK
Stanley Roberts (7'0", 290)	1	14.1	57.6	9.8	2.2
Rashard Griffith (6'11", 275)	2	15.6	55.4	9.7	2.4
Greg Oden (7'0", 280)	1	15.3	61.4	9.3	3.5

Yep, those numbers are remarkably similar. And so are their styles of play. So, while NBA analyst Steve Kerr has described Oden as a "once-in-a-decade player," you'll pardon me if I stay on the sidewalk while the bandwagon passes. Yes, Oden and the Buckeyes have had an excellent year, even as the big center has favored his left hand while he recovers from surgey to his right. But having watched my share of Sam Bowies, Jon Koncaks, and Benoit Benjamins pass through these parts, I'll reserve judgement on Oden until, oh, March of 2008.

A children's play in the gym means no hoops this weekend. Use the free time to brush up on your drop-step.

Alumni Killed in Bizarre Falconing Incident

I want to say something about this, but I'm not sure what:

Life insurance policies to fund Oklahoma St. athletics

Using an idea from billionaire donor Boone Pickens, Oklahoma State will purchase $10 million life insurance policies for 25 of its supporters in a unique fundraising program for the athletic department.

Oklahoma State athletic director Mike Holder said he believes the "Gift of a Lifetime" program is the largest such use of life insurance ever by a college athletic department. The university will pay the insurance premiums for the selected donors, with the athletics department being listed as the beneficiary.

The money from the policies will be used to endow athletic scholarships and pay for facilities and operations, Holder said.

Perhaps I'm just imagining it, but didn't I read about this in a Gregory McDonald novel? Say the Cowboys are in need of a new aquatic center, or more luxury boxes at Boone Pickens Stadium. Might OSU boosters start falling in front of buses or encountering mishaps while ironing in the bathtub?

Call me old-fashioned, but I like my ahtletic programs funded the old-fashioned way: By shady under-the-table payments from used-car tycoons.

Hoops at St. John's hoops has been entirely self-funded—non-funded, really—since 1994. Please let me know if you will or will not be playing this weekend. We tip off Saturday at 8:00 a.m., as usual.