Good to see Bill Self revive the old Roy Williams tradition of bringing a talented Kansas favorite to the NCAA Tournament and then turfing out in the second round. (I never forget a bracket scorned.) That's what you get for messing with Kurt Warner. Oh, don't think his blessed name won't come up a few times this week. If he's not sitting front row at the regional I eat this delicious Kansas sunflower and just shriveled up in front of me and died.

And it's not even over! Two more games for you to curl up by the fire with. Kentucky-Wake Forest and Kansas State-BYU. What's that? You've already had too much nail-biting basketball today? Well, suck it up, junior, because THAT'S JUST TOO BAD! You're going to watch and like it.

Seriously, you've come this far. What's two more games? John Wall. Frank "Don't Call Me Frank" Martin. JIMMER! It's a who's who of guys you barely know anything about are oddly fascinated by. Just order the pizza and cancel the babysitter. You're not going anywhere.

[Image via AP]

* * * * *

More hoops, curated by Barry P. tomorrow. Then you can finally watch those jumping tennis twins on "60 Minutes." Please tell more about these freaks, CBS! Oh, and I've decided I can definitely wait to take Stephen Strasburg until like ... round three. Sleeper pick!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

UPDATE: Bracket: busted. Teams might want to start guarding Ali Farokhmanesh. Just a thought. KU fans: Don't hurt yourself racing to create the "Revoke Tyrel Reed's Scholarship" Facebook group?

UPDATE: What a bizarre end to Murray State's season. Heads up play there by Gordon Hayward.

"What makes Kansas' coach so successful? Self confidence," by Joe Posnanski (from Sports Illustrated, 2010)
Suggested readers: Kansas fans who will need reminding of what makes Self so great if and when the Jayhawks get Bucknelled out of the tournament before the Final Four

OK, you have to hear the Oral Roberts story. Self was hired to be coach at Oral Roberts when the basketball program was at a low point. Self took the job and believed he would turn it around because, well, that's just how he ticks.

So, the day came when he was going to be introduced ... only this being Oral Roberts, it is done a bit differently. Self was brought to the giant chapel, where every student in the school was present. And, understand, Oral Roberts is an evangelical school; it was built, Oral Roberts himself always said, because God told him to build it. Self grew up in a quiet Methodist home.

Stop here. What would you do? What would any of us do, thrown into that chapel, 4,000 kids in the pews, all of them wanting to know a little something about the new coach?

Bill Self preached. He preached that he was going to bring a winner back to Oral Roberts. He preached that he and his staff was going to work night and day to make it happen. "It was unbelievable," says Hinson, Self's friend who was there as an assistant coach. "He transformed himself." In time, after a rough first two years, Self and Hinson and the team did become winners, did go to their first postseason tournament in a decade. But perhaps the most lasting memory happened that day in the chapel, when quiet Self preached and preached, and the students swayed with him, and he made everyone believe, and that when he finished everyone in the place, everyone, including Oral Roberts himself, said "Amen."

(Hat tip to Alan K.)

"Chris Bell: The Legacy of Big Star's 'Other Genius'," by John Jeremiah Sullivan (from the Oxford American; anthologized in The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing)
Suggested readers: Fans of Big Star, mourners of Alex Chilton

Chilton said to Robert Gordon, "Most of the Big Star stuff was searching for how to get through two verses without saying anything really stupid. ..." Add "playing" to "saying," and you have as apt a description of the task involved in writing good pop songs as has ever been articulated. Great songwriters learn as much from listening to bad music as they do from listening to what they love. They memorize pitfalls, dead-ends; the how, as opposed to the what, of poor taste and cliché. It's a strange, hair-splitting science, since, let's face it, when you're thinking in Shostakovich terms, the distance between a Brian Wilson objet d'art and a breakfast-cereal jingle is about three atoms wide. For a pop songwriter, each new composition presents countless temptations and traps, moments when the song wants to become "stupid," wants to go to the obvious chord or rhyme, wants to sound too close, as opposed to just close enough, to what we've heard before. The game is to thread your way through these traps without sounding as if you're trying to be unpredictable — melodically, lyrically, in whatever way. And success comes when you've taken all the crap the genre gives you to work with — limited instrumentation, limited melodic possibilities, limited time — and made beauty of it, then disguised the beauty as more of the good ol' crap we like to hear when we turn on the radio. Isn't that precisely what makes those classics, like "Baby, It's You," so moving, so overwhelming, what makes you have to pull your car to the side of the road when they come on? The beauty in them is subversive. It doesn't belong. It's been smuggled in under the radar of suburban teenage taste and purchasing power. That's why pop music is the art for our time: It's an art of crap. And not in a self-conscious sense, not like a sculpture made of garbage and shown at the Whitney, which is only a way of saying that "low" materials can be made to serve the demands of "high" art. No, pop music really is crap. It's about transcending through crap. It's about standing there with your stupid guitar, and your stupid words, and your stupid band, and not being stupid.

"For The Champion In The Rotisserie League, Joy Is A Yoo-hoo Shampoo," by Steve Wulf (from Sports Illustrated, 1984)
Suggested readers: People who spend half their March drafting fantasy baseball teams

"John Denny, two dollars," he said. We laughed.

He was, still is, Daniel Okrent, owner of the Okrent Fenokees. We were, still are, the Rotisserie League, a flock of loons who have and hold our own baseball teams. You could say that these teams are imaginary, but we prefer to think of them as real, and the Chicago Cubs as imaginary.

We gather every year on the first Sunday after Opening Day, at Corona Park, which is really the dining room of Corlies M. Smith, the former owner of the Smith Coronas. There we choose National League players for the coming season in a sort of auction. Each of us, in turn, introduces the name of a player and his appropriate price, and the highest bid wins him. We cannot spend more than $260 to assemble a 23-man team. In that way we are like Calvin Griffith.

The Rotisserie League is silly, and we know that. We also know that it has caused great changes in the lives of each and every one of us, mostly for the better. We play for money, of course, but we also play for friendship, competition, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Corona Park, on Manhattan's fashionable East Side, is a very special place, for it is here that we share our innermost secrets, such as the knowledge that one of us once paid $32 for Paul Householder. At 10 a.m. on draft day, we board a mysterious elevator that beams us up to Corona Park. We exchange pleasantries, sip coffee and then get down to business. Laden with books and charts, we take our places around the table, and a wonderful table it is — long and mahogany. That's the way it was when we gathered for the 1983 draft, and that's the way it always will be, we hope.

But it's last year's draft of which we speak. Someone said, "John Denny, one dollar." Pause. Okrent said, "John Denny, two dollars." Snickers, but no other bids, followed. After all, in 1982 Denny had been a combined 6-13 for the Indians and Phillies, giving up almost five earned runs every nine innings. Sold to Okrent for $2.

What genius! Denny won 19 games for the Phillies, had an ERA of 2.37 and gave up just 1.16 hits and walks per inning pitched. Denny also won the Cy Young Award in the National League, but that's for sentimentalists. "John Denny, two dollars," said Okrent. Of course, he also said, "Greg Minton, forty-two dollars," which comes out to about $2 a save, so what does he know?

Okrent certainly didn't know what he was about to start on that dreary January day in 1980 when he and five others rendezvoused at La Rotisserie Française, a restaurant — now morte — on Manhattan's fashionable East Side. They met for a regular session of the Phillies Appreciation Society, but out of that meeting came the idea for a statistical baseball league. The league was actually organized at another East Side eatery, P.J. Moriarity's — also now defunct — but the Rotisserie League sounds a lot better than the Moriarity League, don't you think? It's also a nice play on Hot Stove League, but you probably don't care.

And so the Constitution was hammered out in long, painful sessions. "I felt like Madison writing The Federalist papers," says Okrent, who, incidentally, is Vedie Himsl's biggest fan (see page 575 of the fifth edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia): "Glen Waggoner was Hamilton and Bob Sklar was John Jay. At one point Glen said, 'Why do this for money? It'll be fun to play for nothing.' We looked at him as if he were a Martian."

From Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis (1989)
Suggested readers: People who read Moneyball and plan to read The Big Short

At the end of the meal the eight-four-year-old Queen Mother tottered out of the room. We — the eight hundred insurance salesmen, the two managing directors from Salomon Brothers, their wives, and I — stood in respectful silence as she crept toward what I at first took to be the back door. Then I realized that it must be the front of the palace and that we fund raiser types had been let in like delivery boys, through the back. Anyway, the Queen Mother was headed our way. Behind her walked Jeeves, straight as a broom, clad in white tie and tails and carrying a silver tray. Following Jeeves, in procession, was a team of small, tubular dogs, called corgis, that looked like large rats. The English think corgis are cute. The British royals, I was later told, never go anywhere without them.

A complete hush enveloped the Great Hall of St. James's Palace. As the Queen Mother drew near, the insurance salesmen bowed their heads like churchgoers. The corgis had been trained to curtsy every fifteen seconds by crossing their back legs and dropping their ratlike bellies onto the floor. The procession at last arrived at its destination. We stood immediately at the Queen Mother's side. The Salomon Brothers wife glowed. I'm sure I glowed, too. But she glowed more. Her desire to be noticed was tangible. There are a number of ways to grab the attention of royalty in the presence of eight hundred silent agents of the Prudential, but probably the surest is to shout. That's what she did. Specifically, she shouted, "Hey, Queen, Nice Dogs You Have There!"

Several dozen insurance salesmen went pale. Actually they were already pale, so perhaps I exaggerate. But they cleared their throats a great deal and stared at their tassel loafers. The only person within earshot who didn't appear distinctly uncomfortable was the Queen Mother herself. She passed out of the room without missing a step.

At that odd moment in St. James's Palace, representatives of two proud institutions had flown their finest colors side by side: The unflappable Queen Mother gracefully dealt with an embarrassing situation by ignoring it; the Salomon Brothers managing director's wife, drawing on hidden reserves of nerve and instinct, restored the balance of power in the room by hollering. I had always had a soft spot for the royals, and especially the Queen Mother. But from that moment I found Salomon Brothers, the bleacher bums of St. James's, equally irresistible. I mean it. To some, they were crude, rude, and socially unacceptable. But I wouldn't have had them any other way. These were, as much as any investment bankers could be, my people. And there was no doubt in mind mind that this unusually forceful product of the Salomon Brothers culture could persuade her husband to give me a job.

It's usually because they're just so absurd or really lack even the most tenuous of news angles to give them the go-ahead. Other times it's because they're just absolute horseshit. But every Saturday until we get sick of running them, we'll present to you some of these not-so-shiny gems. All items should be treated as [Sic'd]. Enjoy...

A Former "Friend" Of Tiger Steps Forward To Tell Us Stories About Tina Trahan

Dear deadspin,
Just became aware of your article with many falsehoods in it. For instance how did Tina meet Jerry or Tiger for that matter?? I know the truth. From the sound of the article, it sounds as if she wrote herself. For instance, she is NOT 39 years old, to start with. I have more info about this whole topic. But for the readers concern, except for in Tina's head she did not KNOW Tiger as much as she may have claimed or wants the world to believe. She even went as far as spreading the rumor that she attended his wedding.
If you want the whole story, let me know.

I wish to remain anonymous at this time.

I knew Tiger Woods way before -since 1997 to be exact. She was NEVER part of the inner circle or she would not be public now. She was hired as entertainment for a party when she met TW (have the pictures) and she latched onto Jerry as a way to get "in". The only girls she ever introduced to that whole crew, along with many other high end guys parties, are women who she made money on. So the first couple of lines of the article, she is not a madame (well she never had an official agency, but her job was the same) and VIP party planner-i guess that one fits also.
To sum it up, she is a professional girlfriend. Everyone who is around her supports her in some way financially. She also thinks she is a celebrity. I think she doesnt know the difference between her own lies (has a different story to everyone she speaks to) and the truth anymore. Simply put, she was never a friend of TW-just a hired hand, so to speak. She is far from a socialite as she would want everyone to believe. The high powered men she sees all think they are her one and only boyfriend, as she leads them to believe, yet they are one of many.
Her daughter born to a man who was already married with his own children, that she knew of before she got pregnant. She is for herself only and everyone around her is simply a means to her material end.
Anyone who is a true friend of TW wishes to remain anonymous and out of the spotlight. Friendship is more important than material gain for some of us who are not Tina/Pam/whatever other name she is throwing around these days. I hope my friend TW is able to come out of this situation a stronger, better person. My prayers are with him and his family.

And...

Of course her name kept "popping up" that's all she does is name drop because she would tell everyone she even met for a moment how she KNEW TW instead of how she really was acquainted with his friends (hired for a friend's party). She is the reason her name kept "popping up". Like i said, she started the rumor that she actually attended the wedding to prompt her business, place in society. But for someone who knew him, he had no clue two years after she had a baby or that she even gave birth. A few years prior was the HBO guy...that's what she does is talk. If you ask any guy she was/is involved with they are convinced they KNOW her but half of them probably didnt even know her name till the article came out.
As far as talking, i am not really in a position to. I have a good reputation, a career and a life.If I become famous (even for 15 minutes) I'd like it to be for my own professinal accomplishments, not for knowing someone famous who is in a mess of their own. I regret ever allowing someone like Tina anywhere near my group of friends.
I know you make your living reporting, and these stories sell, but she is not story worthy.
From the sound of your article, you seem very kind in your portrayal of Tina. I wish you continued success in all your writing accomplishments and giving me the opportunity to speak to you.

Why Is This Woman So Interesting To People?

I read your article on Tina Trahan. f you want to know anything at all about this woman, call this number 847-xxx-xxxx. This is her closest closest friend from Chicago. Her name is Eileen. They are partners in crime and do everything together. She has kown her since they were young and travel all the time together.

I do have pictures of them hanging out with the entire Soprano cast and steven tyler and others. They used to hang outwith Frank Thomas and other athletes all the time. I attached a picture from her facebook.

If you talk to her, DO not tell her who gave you this info.

But Maybe She's Not That Interesting...

AJ,

Saw your story on Tina Trahan. I've known her for the last 15 years, yes, she was engaged to Chris Albrecht, and while you got the part about Frank Thomas right also, you make her life sound a lot more interesting than it is. The other names you mentioned she knows only because of Frank, they're barely acquaintances. For those of us that know her, we've gotten a great laugh out of the really exciting life this story portrayed. Her relationship with Chris Albrecht ended in 2004 and she's been living with a hedge fund manager since then (who never worked for Goldman). This is a girl who watches DVR'd episodes of The Office every night and orders in food, not the jet-setter your source described. Just helping out with the facts. Email me if you want.

But So Many People Are Eager To Talk About Her...

Hi, I'm sure by now you have all you need on Tina Trahan but I was her live in nanny for 4 years. She fired me, but I know everything about her life because I lived it. I may need a job reference so I may or may not want to go on record but if you want to call me my # is (847) XXX-XXXX. I lived with her in Illinois and New York.- XXXXX

VERY Eager

I GOT SOME INFO ON HER like her boyfriends name adress what kind of car she has

And You Can Gchat Me As Well:

BOB: I need to put you in touch with my friend xxxx xxxx
he just did an interview with TMZ
2:28 PM me: Yes you do.
BOB: former football player at xxxx, he slept with one of Wood's girls
and has pictures of her on his cell phone
me: So he's selling them to them?
2:29 PM BOB: I'm not sure what the situation with the pictures is yet, but he's an old friend of mine
we go way back and i know he's got a story to tlel
me: Which girl, btw?
2:30 PM BOB: Jamie Juner
Junger*
me: Ah.
2:31 PM BOB: If you want I'll put you two in touch
2:32 PM me: Yeah, why not. Don't know if I'll really use that but just for my own sake.
2:35 PM BOB: I gotta get you access to his facebook
xxxx looks like he's an extra on Jersey Shore

Wisky_and_Coke

Bellotti is leaving Eugene to become a college football analyst at ESPN, despite holding his athletic director job for less than two years. He swears he's not running away from the numerous paperwork headaches caused by his delinquent football team—and the basketball coach he had to fire—but there does seem to be a pattern. LaGarrette Blount, Jeremiah Masoli and LaMichael James were all recruited to play for the Ducks by Bellotti and all joined the team in 2008. After one year with them on the sidelines, Bellotti quit football to become the athletic director. Now he's quitting again "to get back into football" and not because those guys (and several others) are still driving him crazy.

Nope, not running away from anything at all. Just a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity to not be around Oregon football for awhile. But if the NCAA calls, you can totally give them his new email address.

Oregon's Mike Bellotti resigns as AD; will join ESPN [ESPN]
"George Schroeder: AD never wanted the gig" [The Register-Guard]
Bellotti's Resignation Not Necessarily a Sign of Anything [Conquest Chronicles]
Ducking Out: Mike Bellotti Leaving Oregon for ESPN [Sporting Blog]

Just to clear something up here, the announcers and therefore some of the people following the New Mexico State-Michigan State game were wrong about the "conspriacy theory" call at the end. The lane violation was not called on Wendell McKines for stepping in too early and it wasn't called on Troy Gillenwater for being "barely" over the line. Gillenwater stepped sideways, out of his little lane box and into the one occupied by Delvon Roe. That was the violation and he was pretty obvious about.

Is it ticky-tack penalty that would get ignored 99 times out of 100? Maybe. But a correct call in a bad situation is still a correct call. Did Michigan State get an absolute gift after an atrocious second half of a game they did not deserve to win? Definitely. The way the Spartans shot free throws, New Mexico State probably should have won by 10. Do I, as a Michigan State fan, give a crap? Absolutely not.

Two words: Kenny Anderson. Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.

* * * * *

Ok, we have two things to do today. Watch a crapload of basketball and get ready for my fantasy baseball draft on Sunday. (Tom Glavine is still playing, right? I always try to grab him early!) Oh, and I guess I'll do some writing here. Thankfully, the weather is gorgeous outside so that should help. (Grumble.) Eat hearty and come back soon.

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. More open threads for the games tonight, and Dash is here for you tomorrow.