Tidbits from our travels and answers to your mail

	MAILBAG Grant Wahl will periodically answer questions from SI.com users in his mailbag. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

It's February, which means the 'Bag has reached the point where we've been on the road long enough that we have no idea where we are in the morning when the alarm clock goes off. Yet, there are indeed benefits to so much travel, not least picking up those little nuggets that you can only learn on the road. To wit:

• Above the urinals in the Texas locker room are color-coded charts that look like the sort of thing you'd find when matching shades at a paint store. Instead the squares match the varying colors of your urine depending on your hydration levels. Believe me, you don't want to know what the color-match for SEVERELY DEHYDRATED is.

• 'Bag Lingo of the Week: Now that I've heard this from four different sources, I don't think I'll get anyone in trouble. Whenever ESPN's No. 1 analyst Dick Vitale big foots another broadcasting team for an important game, the Bristol expression is the junior team has been "Dicked." (It appears to be in good fun, though. I think. And give Vitale credit: He logs a ton of miles during the season, which is no small energy drain, even for us younger guys.)

• I recently had the good fortune to witness North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough playing "Texas ping-pong," the Psycho T favorite in which the loser of two straight points has to pull up his shirt and get drilled with a forehand smash. The lucky recipient of said smash in the UNC locker room last week was former SI.com producer Matt Waxman, whose footage of the incident for CSTV's Hoops Odyssey can be found here. (Yes, the 'Bag was part of the group groaning in the background.)

• We're still coming to terms with the news that 'Bag fave Todd Bozeman has been slapped with a misdemeanor assault warrant for an apparent meltdown at a Farmville, Va., restaurant over what the Morgan State coach thought were too many ham sandwiches in a group order for his team on Saturday. (This is easily the biggest food-related coaching brouhaha since the Bob Knight Salad Bar incident.) We've always had a soft spot for Bozeman, whom we spent two days with in northern Nigeria at a big-man camp in 2004 while he was finishing out his eight-year show-cause ban for mega-violations at Cal. But we're left wondering what could have set him off: Did the guy behind the counter start screaming Jelani Gardner over and over again?

Opening The 'Bag...

A two-part question before Wednesday's Duke-North Carolina game. First, which loss surprised you more, North Carolina on the road at NC State or Duke at home to Florida State? Second, as good as J.J. Redick was for Duke, did his presence actually stunt the growth of the rest of the team? Not to suggest that Redick was selfish -- he wasn't -- but was he so good and efficient that his teammates became passive and now nobody has any idea how to be the Man? I'll bet even Coach K would agree, since last year he complained frequently about guys "J.J.-watching." One could blame K for that, but at a certain point a player has to take responsibility for his own growth, right?
-- Devin Gordon, New York City

Great stuff, Devin. First answer: the UNC loss at NC State surprised me slightly more than Duke losing to FSU at home. Why? Because the Tar Heels were absolutely rolling, not just beating teams but demolishing them. We've already seen Duke struggle at home sometimes this season, and Florida State is a pretty decent team when it wants to be.

As for Redick, it's not like you can complain that the guy had a historically great regular season last year. The idea of a Mike Krzyzewski-player being one of the nation's top two scorers still seems completely foreign and flabbergasting. Could an over-reliance on Redick have slowed the growth of, say, Josh McRoberts as a scorer? Sure, but guys step into bigger scoring roles every year in college basketball, so there's no reason to think McRoberts couldn't have done that, and it's possible he still might. At the same time, even the most patient of Duke fans has to start wondering if it's going to happen this season.