Trio of one: unparalleled parity makes this season as wide-open as ever, with three teams—Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kansas—the cream of the crop - thanks, mid-majors - Men's Top 25

Basketball Digest, Dec, 2002 by Tom Kertes

EVEN THOUGH COLLEGE HOOPS shall always survive--indeed, thrive--on its own unique merits, the powers that be are panicking bigtime at the sight of the annual avalanche of talent tumbling into the NBA.

Thus one of the sorriest ideas in the history of college basketball--no, in the history of sports--is gathering some surprising force behind the scenes these days. Unbelievably enough, a powerful group of coaches, college presidents, and other potentates feel that every single Division I team should make the NCAA Tournament field.

Yes, all 321 of them. Including such stalwarts as Sacred Heart, High Point, IUPUI-Fort Wayne, and maybe the FBI, CIA, and AFL-CIO, too. Talk about March Madness: Imagine the Culinary Institute of Cholesterol State and Podunk State Podiatry College hooking up with Duke and Arizona to play for the title.

The true motives behind such a moronic notion are obvious: it's part money (everyone will share in the NCAA pie), part job security (you no longer get fired for not making the NCAA Tournament), part sheer arrogance. But the idea smells so very rancid because it would take away what's best in college hoops: the immense importance of each regular season contest. For anyone to think that college players will put out 100% for 30-plus games over an esoteric concept such as "a better seeding in March" is just plain silly. Making, or missing, the NCAA Tournament--now that's something to play for.

So the idea is not that more teams should make the field. It's just that the right teams should. In this era of ever-increasing parity--the big teams' big players leave early, the mid-major guys stay all four years--it is no longer valid for the selection committee to ignore outstanding middies such as Butler (25-5, including a win over national runner-up Indiana), or Ball State (22-9 with wins over Final Four contender Kansas and Sweet 16 crasher UCLA). And the seedings given to Gonzaga (29-3 at No. 6) and Western Kentucky (No. 9, at 28-3, an 18-game win streak, and a road win over Kentucky) last March were a joke.

Look, we're all for the idea of the very best teams fighting it out for the national championship. But no one who was watching Boston College or Michigan State would have shed a single tear if they were absent from the fray. Last year at least, they were just not that good.

So we welcome "Bracket Buster Sunday," a February 22 event on ESPN aimed to give wider exposure to the best mid-major teams. And we are calling for the abolition--or, at least serious amendment--of the infamous RPI system that gives thrice the importance of who you play over how you play. Has anyone ever figured out what a "good loss" is, anyway?

If you want to fix what's wrong with college hoops, bring out the three-point shot to some reasonable distance (22 feet or longer). When post play is becoming an endangered part of the game--and when nearly 40% of all shots are taken from trey land--something stinks in Denmark.

As it surely did in Indianapolis, where the trey-happy but post-poor U.S. professionals proved to be the sixth greatest basketball power in the universe.

However, even that Titanic disaster can not quite emit the pungency of putting every team in the NCAA Tournament. We all know how ideas, no matter how idiotic, can take on lives of their own and become reality. Let's bench this brain-belch before it gets too late in the game.

That way we can enjoy an outstanding season of unparalleled parity in the NCAAs, and find out who among our top contenders--and Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kansas are the at the tops of the top--will make 2002-03 another year to remember.

1. OKLAHOMA

Brainlock. It happens to the very best coaches sometimes. Too close to the action to see the forest for the trees, there's that one game where, all of a sudden, they blank on their "essence," the one thing that, more than anything else, made their great team great.

It happened to Kelvin Sampson against Indiana in the Final Four last year. His highflying hitters got there by tiding a neonasty in-your-shirt D, based on their extreme quickness and strength. So who was that masked team playing a passive zone against the Hoosiers?

Who knows. "In this game, you either get fat from success," says Sampson, the well-deserving 2001-02 Coach of the Year in many circles, "or it makes you even hungrier." We're betting the Sooners are starved.

See, Sampson pieced this squad together last season with the chewing gum-adhesive tape-safety pin guys of college basketball (juco transfers). In most cases these players are not highly rated high school All-Americans--what would they be doing in junior college?--so the coach's accomplishment (31-5, Final Four) bordered on the historic.

Every starter except star insider Aaron McGhee is back. And his loss could be more than made up for by rookies Kevin Bookout and 6'11" Larry Turner. Redshirt Johnnie Gilbert is a gifted 6'8" with a seven-foot wingspan. Center Jahbari Brown, a willowy 6'10" rejector with a world of potential, became a more confident offensive player down the stretch.