Cornell - Mystery, New York
Every spring, small-college teams walk out from foggy shadows to X-out known basketball quantities, but there's less and less mystery in that these days. Every move of each of the 347 Division I teams is meticulously recorded and tracked now, and there is so much televised basketball -- internet pixelvision too -- that we can almost always see these Davids ahead of time, in full color.

The State Of The Other 22, Week 12
The State of College Basketball is a brand-new ratings system that uses a lot of good basketball sense, per-game team performance ratings and degradation of older results to rank the teams from No. 1 to 341 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the Final Four in a simulation of last season.

MMBOW #17 - Kevin Anderson, Richmond
With our final weekly award of the season, we celebrate the work of a young Spider who used a two-game stretch to strike a little bit of arachnophobia into the hearts of Atlantic 14 opponents heading into the league's elimination event. Kevin Anderson of Richmond is our seventeenth, and final, Mid-Majority Baller of the Week for the 2008-09 season.

Road Report - Empty City
NEW YORK CITY -- Who is the poet laureate of Long Island? I pondered this question as I walked along the Hempstead-Bethpage Turnpike from the train station towards Hofstra University, past Mexican laundromats and dimly lit gyro joints. In a flourescent storefront, ladies with tall hair were getting their nails done by patient and stone-faced Koreans. But who will tell them? .

Bracket Sale! Everything Must (As-You) Go!
March is coming, and that means brackets, brackets, brackets. We fill them out a little differently around here. We don't enter office pools or fill them out ahead of time. The best bracket is a blank one that stays blank until the games start. Then, as the games are complete, we write in the winners in the next round -- in big letters for Other 25 upsets, tiny letters for SEC and ACC teams.