ESPN talking head Jay Bilas often leads the good fight against the NCAA. It was he who almost singlehandedly forced the NCAA to stop selling athlete jerseys, and he applied a good deal of the pressure that forced Kansas State to let Leticia Romero and Alabama to let Daisha Simmons transfer schools despite…

The saga of former Alabama basketball player Daisha Simmons looks like it is finally coming to an end. The University of Alabama announced Tuesday night that they had changed course and were supporting Simmons's waiver request to be able to play basketball at Seton Hall this upcoming season. If you're unfamiliar with…

Presenting your 2013 NCAA Tournament Metabracket. Click the annotations to see which teams Nate Silver, Joe Lunardi, Seth Davis, Barack Obama, Matt Norlander, Jay Bilas, and Luke Winn picked to advance through each round. (Click the "Next" button in the lower right corner to see the Sweet 16 and onward.)

If you dig those awkward silences, this one's for you: a discussion about "riding the hot hand" during last night's Notre Dame-Pitt game led to Bill Raftery springing a loaded question on Jay Bilas. Nervous chuckling, and a "moving right along" segue followed.

Lazy journalist Jay Bilas probably doesn't know anyone who has a special needs child, and I'm guessing all the people who RTed him with a LOL or LMAO or MUST BE BIG 10 COUNTRY! or any other number of intelligent add-ons don't know anyone with a special needs child as well. If they did, they'd understand that shitty,…

When Jay Bilas wasn't busy talking about "rims" he was busy talking about bodies. Last year it was all about hands, but this year the name of the game was "wingspan," "wingspan," and also "wingspan." Understandably the guy has to find something to talk about in the time that it takes David Stern to walk back and…

ESPN's NBA draft coverage has become so predictable it's inspired its own drinking game (one Jay Bilas even referenced on the broadcast). Every year features a buzzword like "length," "scorer," or the always-controversial "character."

With the first two rounds of March Madness complete, let's see how the pundits fared with their brackets. We scored pundits from ESPN, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, and CBS Sports, throwing in President Obama, LeBron James, and Nick Lachey for good fun (all three made their brackets available on ESPN).

Every week, ESPN basketball analyst Jay Bilas releases the "Bilas Index," his ranking of the top 68 teams in college roundball. He provides a short blurb with each team to justify their place in the index, for example:

ESPN basketball analyst and Duke graduate Jay Bilas sought assistance from "urban philosopher" Young Jeezy while breaking down Missouri's ability to score on Villanova during tonight's Jimmy V Classic game at Madison Square Garden. He's just keeping it real. [ESPN]

Last night, Jay Bilas had to talk for about NBA draftees for about five hours. Even for a person like Jay Bilas, who has probably known five hours of utter silence in all of his 48 years on this earth, five hours is just too much analysis. Faced with this challenge, our brave esquire-commentator had to talk about…

Just over a year ago, ESPN lost out on the rights to broadcast the NCAA college basketball tournament after CBS and Turner Sports teamed up with $10.8 billion to secure the big dance for the next 14 years. It was a bit of a snub to the Worldwide Leader, which ultimately couldn't match the bill. A snub like the…

We would like to repeat our favorite piece of biographical information about Jay Bilas: He once starred in a movie with Dolph Lundgren. The movie was "Dark Angel," and Bilas plays an alien named "Azeck." Man this makes us happy.

As an analyst, we've always liked ESPN's Jay Bilas. He's smart, low-key, occasionally understatedly funny and looks like the late, lamented Gob. We've been somewhat less impressed with his appearances around the ESPN loop in the last week talking about the Duke lacrosse case. He's a lifelong Dookie and seems more…

Because in a month we're going to be the only people who remember the show, we feel obliged to point out — per a reader's excellent, perceptive eye — that ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas and Will Arnett's ridiculously funny "Gob" from "Arrested Development" look so much like each other that it's freaking…