UConn’s path to the championship had to have been one of the easiest in the history of the NCAA Tournament. To begin with, the Huskies were placed in the weakest bracket – the West. In the Sweet Sixteen, Connecticut avoided a tough NC State team and instead faced the weakest #6 seed, Vanderbilt. In the Elite Eight, the Huskies received an even bigger break when they played #8 seeded Alabama, avoiding Stanford, Syracuse and Maryland. After finding a miracle to beat Duke, a tough national semi-final opponent, UConn received a final lucky bounce by getting a banged-up 3 seed Georgia Tech in the finals. With Tech star guard B.J. Elder rendered virtually useless with a sprained ankle, the Jackets more resembled a 5 or 6 seed. It is of course difficult to quantify which champions have had the easiest road but I have made the attempt to do just that. The following table shows the sum of opponent seed numbers for each champion over the past 13 years. For example, UConn's six wins came against teams with seeds of 15, 7, 6, 8, 1, and 3 for a total of 40. Ironically, it is not this year's UConn team, but the 1999 Huskies that had the easiest road to the title (since 1992).

Boston College will join the ACC in 2005, which means that The University of Maryland and D.J. Strawberry (son of Daryl Strawberry) will eventually be playing a road game in Boston. Boston fans, are you ready? Deeeeeee-jay, Deeeeeee-jay. Deeeeeee-jay.

The Yankees are off to a 1-2 start after a second blowout loss to the Devil Rays. The question is: Will Joe Torre have a job in the morning?

Does anyone enter a Women's NCAA Basketball Tournament pool and not pick UConn over Tennessee in the finals? Of course, I'm assuming that NCAA women's basketball pools actually exist.

I'd like to thank the Oakland Raiders for making the deal for Warren Sapp. I’ve always wanted to root against Sapp, the obnoxious University of Miami product (is there any other kind of University of Miami product?), but really couldn’t because the Bucs have been my favorite NFC team for a number of years. Now that he plays for the hated Raidahs, I am free to root against Sapp with reckless abandon. My thanks also go out to the Cowboys for acquiring Keyshawn Johnson. I hated Keyshawn as a Jet but tolerated him as a Buccaneer. As a Cowboy, Johnson will go back into my Top Ten NFL Players to Root Against list. Here’s that list by the way (in no particular order).

• Jeremy Shockey
• Terrell Owens
• Keyshawn Johnson
• Ray Lewis
• Randy Moss
• Leonard Little
• Bill Romanowski (will he play again?)
• David Boston
• Terry Glenn
• Sebastian Janikowski

As my regular readers know, I love to rant about Hollywood egomaniacs that whine about the government and badmouth America. We’ve had spoiled brat Gwyneth Paltrow questioning America’s motives while living on foreign soil, Sean Penn acting as a human shield to help the regime of Saddam Hussein, Michael Moore inventing stories to discredit the President and Alec Baldwin telling Conan O’Brien how a Republican Congressman and his family should be stoned to death (yes, that was five years ago but I still love to talk about it). These multi-millionaires sit in their high security mansions while telling the world that people earning $200,000 aren’t paying their “fair share” in taxes. These hypocrites complain about the government’s destruction of the environment while tooling around in their custom-made, 9 miles per gallon Hummers and Ferraris. They complain about the business practices and greed of American corporations as their $20 million per film paychecks send movie ticket prices soaring toward the $10 mark. Fortunately, the Hollywood set is not all bad. Actor Gary Sinise (Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump to most people) is helping to run Operation Iraqi Children, a non-profit program designed to allow Americans to send school supplies and boooks to Iraqi schoolchildren in need. Sinise has unselfishly taken time from his busy schedule to not only work on this project but to travel to Iraq and visit with these children. It is unfortunate that the major television networks and most of the newspaper media do not want Americans to have access to any of the good news coming from Iraq.

Will colleges follow the American trend and rename their degrees in Liberal Arts to degrees in Progressive Arts?

The Patriots upgraded at the punter position by signing former Steeler Josh Miller. Miller should greatly improve on Ken Walter's performance of last season. Then again, the guy pictured to the right would probably be an improvement over Ken Walter.