Tournament, historic Final Four, anything but blah

Kevin Love anchors UCLA, one of four No. 1 seeds in a heavyweight Final Four. Robert Beck/SI

MAILBAG Submit a question or an opinion to Stewart. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

Sportswriters tend to be a pretty jaded bunch, but the guy standing a few feet from me in the Ford Field media room prior to Sunday's Kansas-Davidson game may have taken the cake.

"This tournament's been pretty boring," I overheard him tell a colleague. "I mean, other than Western Kentucky-Drake, Duke-Belmont, maybe one other game ... it's been pretty dull."

Mind you, this writer got to watch Stephen Curry in person for at least two games, but that's another story. His opinion doesn't differ that much from others I've heard before and during the tournament, most notably from Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon, who wrote on March 17: "[This] season was just, well, blah. ... There aren't many great teams, if any."

As you well know by now, this weekend's Final Four will, for the first time in history, feature all four No. 1 seeds. Most seem to regard this as largely a statistical factoid, the type of oddity that will one day become the answer to a trivia question.

How about focusing instead on just how rare a season it is to have not just one or two, but four truly dominant teams?

Memphis, North Carolina, Kansas and UCLA sport a combined record of 143-9. That's a .941 winning percentage. Comb through the record books if you want -- you're not going to find one higher than that. Even in 1999, the last time three No. 1s made it, the field of Duke, Connecticut, Michigan State and Ohio State had a combined mark of .895.

If there's a reason this season, or this tourney, has seemed "boring," it's because these four teams keep blowing everybody out. Of the 16 tourney games they've played so far, only three -- Memphis' 77-74 second-round win over Mississippi State, UCLA's 51-49 second-round win over Texas A&M and Kansas' 59-57 Elite Eight win over Davidson -- have been decided by fewer than 10 points.

The four are so loaded that you could see their superiority coming a long time ago. Last November, the AP and coaches pollsters tabbed a preseason top four of ... North Carolina, UCLA, Memphis and Kansas.

Personally, I have a slightly different standard when it comes to "dull." The 2000 Michigan State-Wisconsin Final Four game (won by the Spartans 53-41) comes to mind. So, too, does the 2002 national-title game between a Maryland squad no one outside the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., metro area remembers and an Indiana team its own fans barely acknowledge existed.

Granted, I'm a little bit on the younger side among those who cover the tourney annually. Many cling to the old days of Bird and Magic, Ewing and Jordan, Laettner and Hurley. Admittedly, when compared to powerhouses from those earlier eras, most modern-day teams do not belong in the same conversation, nor will they ever again. The game has changed too much.

On the eve of this historic Final Four, however, there's never been a better time to stop and appreciate just how far the sport has come in the past five years.

Decades from now, college hoops historians will look back at the late '90s/early '00s as the sport's indisputable low point. High-school players, particularly big men, jumped straight to the NBA at unprecedented levels (the 2001 class included Kwame Brown, Eddy Curry, Tyson Chandler and DeSagana Diop) and few truly great college players stayed in school longer than two years (the top four picks in the 2000 draft -- Elton Brand, Steve Francis, Baron Davis and Lamar Odom -- all fit that category.)

The result: Mostly mediocre teams and unmemorable players.

1 of 2