NBA playoff setup pales in comparison to other sports

	A Butler team dominated by upperclassmen, including junior guard A.J. Graves (above), has reached the Sweet 16. AP

Also in the Weekly Quiz:
• MVP race is still Nowitzki's to lose
• Pistons sometimes hard to figure

1. Don't you love March Madness?

ANSWER: Of course. But may we please call for a moratorium on trite phrases like "Road to the Final Four'' as well as any mention of "Cinderellas'' and "glass slippers'' and "going to the ball.'' The brain goes numb hearing it day after day after day (thus, the madness).

2. Don't you love the NCAA tournament because it's "true'' basketball? Because it's played at such a higher level than the NBA?

ANSWER: Please don't tell me that you've been following Scot Pollard's advice.

The quality of basketball in the NCAAs is as poor as it has been in 40 years.

The reason for the tournament's popularity is its sudden-death format, which enables millions of people to bet on it with impunity (other than Rick Neuheisel). It's a terrific event, but it has little to do with the talent of the players or the way they play, which by any historic standard is inferior.

3. So you're saying that Greg Oden, Kevin Durant and Brandan Wright aren't great players? You've pointed out yourself that they're expected to be the top three picks in the draft.

ANSWER: They're top-drawer talents. They're also freshmen, which leads analysts to daydream about how good Oden or Durant would be if they stayed in school for three or four years. Turn that analysis around and it tells you that as freshmen they have a lot to learn.

If you were to draw a bar graph rating the talent of the NCAA tournament since the UCLA-dominated 1960s, when seniors ruled college basketball, the downhill arc would resemble the curve of President Bush's recent approval ratings. As an NBA scout puts it, "We've strip-mined the colleges to the extent that there's nothing left.'' It's so obvious that it's not worth arguing.

But the results aren't all bad: The tournament is more entertaining than ever because the playing field has been evened. Smaller schools are able to retain talent on campus for four years because the players aren't quite good enough to make the NBA. Their experience helps make it possible for the little nobodies to upset the more talented freshmen and sophomores at the major factories.

But, please, let's not hear any lauding of the quality of play. The NCAA compensates with a three-point line of 19 feet, 9 inches, which is the equivalent of moving in the fences to award 240-foot home runs in baseball. It's an artifice that gives underdogs a better chance, but it also has made the mid-range game almost extinct. Ask any college coach who makes the jump to the NBA, and he'll tell you it takes years to adjust to the more complex strategies of the pro game. Anybody who argues that the NCAA quality of play is superior is probably somebody who makes his living off college basketball.

4. I still like it better than the NBA, and I'm not the only one.

ANSWER: That's because the NCAA format is better.

The format means everything in sports. I love March Madness too, because every game means something. The NBA suffers in comparison because of its long, drawn-out format. It's hard to find an NBA game that means anything anymore. As entertaining as the Suns' upset at Dallas was last week, it probably won't affect the regular-season or MVP race (more on that later).

In substance, the NCAA is no competition to the NBA. But in style, the NCAA format is clearly superior.

The NBA's biggest problem is that the season goes on forever and the games lose their value. NBA people argue in response that their league has the truest regular season in all of sports -- mainly because the best regular-season teams usually win in the playoffs -- but they don't make that argument with a lot of oomph. They sort of whisper it, because they're never quite sure if they should be selling themselves as an old-school sports league to people my age or as an MTV reality show to my kids (when they figure it out, I'm sure they'll let us know).