NCAA First Round - Friday's Games
MINNEAPOLIS -- There's no day more exciting and more highly anticipated than First Round Thursday, and there's no 12 hours quite as difficult to get through. As soon as the games begin, the NCAA Tournament teaches a hard lesson about the perfection that's necessary to compete against enemies with more available resources.

Doha, The Dream Before Waking
The airport and the city are separated by a basin of Persian Gulf water. The little bay, almost too perfectly circular, is ringed by a wide concrete walkway called Al Corniche, a feature of many cities in this region.

The Daily Paragraph 11/13/2006 (Lid-lifting Edition)
BLOOMSBURY, N.J. (en route to Charlotte) -- Hello again, friends, and welcome back to TMM's regular schedule. This here is The Daily Paragraph, which is specifically designed to be triply too clever for it's own good: it's a play on existing basketball literature, is a sarcastic/ironic attempt at one-upsmanship, and it features a similar built-in misnomer to boot.

MMBOW #11 - Ben Woodside, North Dakota State
There was that 51-minute, 60-point effort against Stephen F. Austin that earned him MMBOW honors back in December, which would have earned wider play had his team actually won the game. No matter about that, because ever since the North Dakota Bison have entered the Badlands Conference schedule, they've been victorious plenty. Dude's good.

The Harding Way
NEWARK, Del. — Professional basketball scouts and mid-major schools have quite a bit in common. Both groups are populated by outsiders who toil away in obscurity, well outside of “SportsCenter's” sphere of influence. Both are tragically underappreciated and overlooked. And both put in thousands upon thousands of thankless road miles over the course of a basketball season.