Fall of the giants

After spending the winter listening to the various talking heads and reading the assorted scribes tout the ACC as the be all, end all of college basketball, and that the Awesomest Conference in Creation could put as many as three teams into the Final Four, there has been no more pleasing development during the last week than the possibility that NO teams from the ACC make it to St. Louis.

All that's standing in the way of egg on the face of the ACC is a Wisconsin upset of North Carolina, which looked beatable Friday against Villanova.

One by one the teams tumbled, even future members like Syracuse and Boston College. And I'm sure every one of the losses was termed an upset by the ACC apologists. If you listened closely at the end of Duke's loss Friday night, you could hear Billy Packer sobbing.

An added bonus to the ACC's foibles is the startling success of the Big Ten, which was knocked repeatedly during the season by these same pundits, many of whom decried Illinois' championship chances since the Illini weren't properly "tested" in league play.

Now Illinois is in the Final Four, and two of its leaguemates have a chance to join the party.

Who knows, maybe the pundits will get the three teams from one league in the Final Four right after all.

This week's top 10 (reduced to seven after three items got busted in Cancun on spring break):

7. Viewing alert. The NHL may have extended its collective middle finger to fans, but college hockey is alive and well. Any of you puckheads with a satellite out there hankering for a hockey fix, tune in Altitude Sports or ESPNU for regional final games today (Minnesota-Cornell and Denver-New Hampshire). The Frozen Four starts April 7, and will be on ESPN2.

6. Dummkopfs in Detroit. The Pacers-Pistons rematch at The Palace, 18 weeks to the day after the brawl, showcased sports and its fans in fine form. A bomb threat delayed the start of the game 90 minutes, fights broke out in the stands between spectators, and Ben Wallace, one of the instigators of the original dustup with Ron Artest, nearly got into another one, this time with Scot Pollard.

What will happen if these guys meet again in the playoffs? Flak jackets will be standard apparel, I would think.

5. Creepy … just creepy. If you haven't had a chance, you should check out HBO's "Real Sports" playing this month. It has a piece on the NBA's weirdest couple, Jackie and Doug Christie.

It's been a long-running joke within the uber-male set to give a Doug Christie jersey to a buddy who is getting married, and a viewing of the "Real Sports" segment will illustrate why it's such a stinging zinger.

I won't spoil it, but restraining orders were invented for people who exhibit this much … ummm … devotion. It's a good thing for our already overburdened legal system the Christies' relationship is mutual.

4. Hall of Fame or Hall of Shame? The Associated Press conducted a poll of baseball Hall voters to see where they stood on inducting Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. McGwire fell well short and Bonds just squeaked by.

Some of the voters said they would not vote McGwire in on his first ballot as a way of making a statement against what will now be known as baseball's Steroids Era. Bonds, the argument goes, was a hall-of-famer before juicing became popular, so he shouldn't be punished.

Doesn't that strike you as being just a tad hypocritical and awfully sanctimonious? Hall voters - all of whom are journalists by day, protectors of baseball's honor by night - were more than likely leading the "baseball is back" charge in 1998 when home runs started flying out of parks like clothes off of Paris Hilton.

3. Rainy days and Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays always get the golfer down. Isn't the reason the golf tours start their seasons in southern California, Hawaii and Florida is to avoid inclement weather? After this year, it might be time for a new theory.

2. Labor pains not just for the NHL. How can the most successful sports league ever be flirting with danger like the NFL is with its collective bargaining agreement? And it's not even so much a conflict between players and owners as it is between big-market owners and small-market owners.

The NFL is 1,000-times more popular in the United States than the NHL will ever hope to be. And that means football has a million-times more to lose than hockey.

1. Removing all doubt. In case there was any question the NHL hates you and me, the league took the first step last week toward bringing in replacement players by filing a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board.

When companies bring in replacements for striking workers, they are usually called scabs. So what do you call replacements for workers the company has locked out? I'm not sure, but it's probably unprintable.

Andrew Hinkelman is a sports writer for The Daily Inter Lake. He can be reached at hink@dailyinterlake.com