NCAA Basketball Espn

Today's installment of Pardon the Interruption began with an April Fool's joke that was treated as a startling revelation: Kansas and Davidson will have to re-play the last 16 seconds of Sunday's game because an error allowed Kansas guard Sherron Collins to keep playing after his fifth foul.

Michael Wilbon argued that it's a great idea, saying, "Now we see a situation where the mid-major is treated fairly." Tony Kornheiser, however, said, "This is not fair." And then they acknowledged that the whole thing was made up, they blew noisemakers and they flashed "APRIL FOOL'S" on the screen.

It was pretty funny, mostly because of how convincing Wilbon and Kornheiser were: I would guess that the majority of viewers weren't fooled, but Wilbon and Kornheiser argued about it just as passionately as they ever do. I wonder how funny they found it on the Davidson campus.

The American people have spoken, and they agree with Barack Obama.

At least, they do when it comes to their March Madness picks. Obama has picked North Carolina to win the national championship, and the composite national bracket at ESPN.com shows that North Carolina is the most common pick of the more than 3.65 million people who filled out an ESPN bracket.

North Carolina was also the most popular choice to win its first-round game, with 99.6 percent of ESPN.com entrants picking the Tar Heels, and 0.4 percent picking Mississippi Valley State Mount St. Mary's. The other four No. 1 seeds were just behind, with UCLA picked to win its first round game on 99.5 percent of brackets, Memphis on 99.4 percent and Kansas on 99.2 percent.

In a possible sign of Duke hatred, the Blue Devils were seen by the fans of America as the most likely of the Top 8 teams to lose their first-round game. Still, only 1.3 percent of fans picked Belmont to upset Duke.

The most evenly divided first-round game? UNLV vs. Kent State, with each team picked by 50.0 percent of the public. Oddly, at least through the first half, that has been the most lopsided game of the day so far.

During last night's ESPN show analyzing the NCAA Tournament brackets, the subject turned to South Alabama, which made the Big Dance even though half of its wins came against teams that aren't in the RPI Top 200. ESPN analyst Jay Bilas doesn't think that's fair:

"If you're in a major conference you're going to get hammered for not going out and killing yourself in the non-conference. Let's be honest about it. If you're in a mid-major they're going to give you a break. That's OK, I just wish they'd admit it: They give the mid-majors a break. It's OK, but let's not go through this charade of it being the 34 best teams because I don't think that's what we're getting."

Bilas, of course, is a former player and assistant coach at Duke, so to the extent that he's biased, he's biased in favor of the power conference teams.

But with all due respect to South Alabama, I do think he's correct, in that particular case, that the Jaguars (who 75th in the Pomeroy ratings and rank 67th in the Sagarin Predictor) really aren't one of the 34 best at-large teams, and that choosing them in the field of 34 was an attempt to give a mid-major a break.

It's early march, which means it's time for us to hang on every word spoken by Joe Lunardi, the ESPN bracketologist who has carved out his own niche as the world's foremost authority on which teams are getting into the NCAA Tournament and which teams will be left out.

Lunardi is the guru of the Bubble, so what Lunardi said on ESPN Radio today was particularly interesting. Explaining why he wouldn't want to expand the Tournament field beyond 65 teams, Lunardi said, "The bubble is pretty bad."

Lunardi hasn't updated his bracket with the weekend's action, but going into the weekend he listed Arkansas, Arizona State, Virginia Tech and Maryland as the last four teams in, with Florida, Syracuse, Saint Joseph's and Western Kentucky as the last four out.

Fans of those eight teams won't want to hear that the bubble is bad, but Lunardi is basically right: The bubble teams aren't particularly good basketball teams, certainly not good enough that it's realistic to think they could win six straight games to win the title. So while the bubble teams are the ones that garner the most attention at this time of year, the bubble really isn't very good. And expanding the field would just make the bubble worse.

If you're a college basketball fan east of Arizona, you really have to go out of your way to see Pac-10 games before March. The reason is simple: Until March Madness, ESPN dominates the college basketball landscape, and ESPN doesn't show the Pac-10.

But that will finally change this year. ESPN announced today that it will show regular-season Pac-10 games for the first time since 1995, as part of a new deal with Fox Sports Net.

Granted, this isn't a big deal. It's actually a paltry deal: ESPN's schedule will feature a whopping two regular-season Pac-10 home games: Arizona at UCLA on Feb. 2 and USC at Arizona on Feb. 28. But that's still two more than we got in the past. For both the Pac-10 and college basketball fans outside the West Coast, this represents progress.