Chalk

Interesting episode of Bones tonight. Boneless bodies and boats headed to the Caribbean. Plus, they brought out the wonderful, the marvelous, the fantastic James Hong to play the owner of a Chinese mortuary. In 1986 he was in two really fun movies, The Golden Child and Big Trouble in Little China.

Last year around this time I wrote this about the NCAA tournament and said that the Gods of College Basketball hated my living guts. While this may still be true, their wrath seems to have abated somewhat, at least for now. I decided to do a straight chalk bracket this time around, which means picking the higher seed to win every single time. I hate picking upsets, so this actually felt pretty good. I know upsets are going to happen, but it's impossible to predict with any amount of certainty which ones will occur. If somebody says, "Yeah, I saw that one a mile away," you can bet your bottom dollar they're not mentioning the ones they didn't see or the one they "saw" that turned out to be a mirage.

I've heard some griping that there is a lack of upsets or Cinderellas in this year's tournament. There are no double-digit seeds in the Sweet 16 for the first time since about 1995. Supposedly it makes the tournament more boring and lacking in story lines. I think this ignores the possibility--possibility, mind you, not certainty--that higher seeds lasting longer means better teams matching up against each other in later rounds, and that could mean better basketball games.

Having said that, I'd say that there are only three games on the schedule for the next round that seem intriguing at first glance. First would be Pitt/UCLA, the Ben Howland Bowl. Howland used to coach at Pitt, now he coaches at UCLA. The Bruins made the NCAA title game last year.

Florida/Butler was a very exciting first round game a few years ago, when Mike Miller had to drop a last-second floater in order to avoid a big upset. Florida went on to play in the title game that year, losing to Michigan State. Different players this time around, but if Butler shoots as well as they did against Maryland, they could give Florida real problems. Florida has been getting off to really slow starts the first two rounds.

I actually think that UNC/USC is an interesting game, mostly because nobody east of California knows anything about USC. Everybody and his brother knows about the Tar Heels. USC pretty much dominated Texas and has been a solid team all year long. UNC has talent to burn, a great coach, and a bit more tournament experience than USC. But with a week to prepare and a pretty good coach of their own, USC sure has a shot.

I saw 300 a couple of weeks ago and liked it. There's no point in reviewing it. It's violent. It's dramatic. It's kind of funny. Just don't go see it if you're Persian. Or if you're a stickler for historical accuracy.

I flipped on the Dallas/Cleveland game just now, and they said that Wilt Chamberlain holds the record for fewest games to 8,000 points in a career. 197 games, 40.6 points a game. It made me think of a couple of other Wilt stats I've heard recently. When Kobe Bryant scored 65 a few days ago, they mentioned that Wilt did it 32 times. A couple of weeks ago Dwight Howard put together a great stretch of three games where he hit something like 80 percent of his shots from the field. ESPN showed a list of players other than Wilt Chamberlain who had done the same thing. You know you were dominant when somebody is trying to explain how incredibly rare some feat is, and they have to leave out all the times that you did it.

One more thing: The Atlanta Falcons traded Matt Schaub to the Texans today. When Bobby Petrino was hired, they said that he would have the authority to bench Michael Vick if he wanted. There had been grumblings among some that Schaub was the better QB (better passer, anyway) and should be the starter. If you really wanted to put pressure on Vick to play better, why would you trade the only guy on the roster you might have confidence in to step up? You could argue that this move is telling Vick that he's definitely the guy and has nothing to worry about. I think it looks like Petrino is being paid five million a year to shut up and do what Vick tells him to.