THE ELITE

THE MIDWEST

[3] Marquette vs. [1] Kentucky
{In Progress} Minneapolis, MN

Marquette is up by 19 at the half! Complete shocker. I suppose it's too late to make a pick on this game, but I'm guessing Kentucky will make a run at some point and get back into it. Marquette is so well-coached and solid, I really doubt they're going to let it slip away.

THE WEST

[1] Arizona vs. [2] Kansas
7:05 PM ET Anaheim, CA

The rematch. Kansas wants revenge for letting a huge halftime lead evaporate in a regular season loss to Arizona in Kansas. Both teams are talented as hell, but Arizona is definitely deeper. Nick Collison is coming off the best performance of his career and may need to duplicate it, and get help from Kirk Hinrich if Kansas is going to knock off the #1 seed and advance to the Final Four for the second straight year. My gut feeling is, Arizona has too much firepower and too many options on offense.

Pick: Arizona

On a programming note, CBS sucks. Last night, they screwed up their coverage so badly I was screaming at the TV. In both sets of games, they failed to switch over to or Look-In on close ballgames that were going on during their featured games. First, while we were watching early second half action in the Texas-Connecticut game, Butler was cutting into Oklahoma's lead and making it a game. By the time CBS got around to switching over, we saw Butler have a bad sequence with a minute or so left and the game was over. There were only two games going on at the time! That piker network couldn't even make us feel as if we were a part of both games. Completely dropped the ball. Then, they did it again. During halftime of the Michigan State-Maryland game, the Syracuse-Auburn game was coming down to the end. After a long series of commercials, we went back to the studio for first half analysis of the Spartans and Terrapins, ignoring the other game that was close and getting closer. Then another series of commercials, then back to the Michigan State-Maryland game for some on-court commentary. When we finally checked in with the Syracuse-Auburn game there was less than a minute left and Auburn was scrambling to tie it up. I'm glad we got to see the end and catch the excitement of that game, but why weren't we involved with it all along? It was as if CBS had never covered the event before and was learning on the job. Horrible inefficiency. Extremely frustrating. I can't wait until this current contract expires and ESPN hopefully will take over the gig and do it up right. We need Dickie V and Fowler and, well, I could do without Digger, but my point is, ESPN understands the sports viewer and CBS obviously has no clue. Pikers.