Good Reading: Best of College Basketball over the Last Week or So

[coolhandgopher]

The NCAA tournament is really the only three or four weeks of the year when the larger sporting public really pays attention to college basketball. Often what accompanies that attention is some superb writing on my favorite sport, whether specifically to the Final Four/national championship game or on a broader scale. I am linking my favorite articles of the last week or so and invite others to include theirs in subsequent posts.

Charles Pierce, one of the most talented writers going, encapsulated the national champions quite well in this article:
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7769218/john-calipari-anthony-davis-kentucky-victory-new-orleans

Surely thousands of words were spilled in the week before the Kentucky v. Louisville match-up, but Dave Kindred's take provided a great deal of depth into this long-festering rivalry:
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7769218/john-calipari-anthony-davis-kentucky-victory-new-orleans

Deadspin can be a tawdry sports gossip site and then sometimes they cut through the b.s. so cleanly and efficiently, it's startling. This opinion piece on Calipari fits that bill:
http://deadspin.com/5898339/john-calipari-the-first-honest-coach?tag=marchmadness

If you haven't checked out the new sports website The Classical yet, I highly recommend. This is a three part series on Seattle University returning to NCAA division 1 with a look at the program's history, its coach, and star player (I linked to the final part, where you can access all three pieces of the series):
http://theclassical.org/articles/learning-to-fly-part-3

Others have probably had a chance to watch Anthony Davis a lot more than I this season, so my fascination with him in the national championship game and how he affects the opposition was like seeing something incredible for the very first time; this article does a nice job of putting it to words:
http://theclassical.org/articles/anthony-davis-in-space

This reborn article from an old Sport magazine (through Grantland) takes a look at the improbable rise of the Jacksonville Dolphins, UCLA's opponent in the 1970 national championship game. It's probably my favorite piece from this list for a few reasons: I love these types of stories that bring the history of college basketball to life; the reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same in many ways; that Coach Wooden wasn't reverently spoken of by the author of the article (nothing against Wooden, but it was startling and humanizing to read the author's description); and this sentence -> He spread his elbows on the white linen tablecloth and grinned like an old boy about to tell a shady story on the town beauty queen.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7744074/how-jacksonville-earned-credit-card-paul-hemphill

Finally, I have to recognize my favorite feature writer on college basketball, Dana O'Neill, with this analysis of Kansas' win over Ohio State. When your heart is longing for college basketball until it returns in November, head to espn's website and look for her columns, she delivers consistently great columns, even through the off-season:
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-bas...national-championship-game-defies-explanation

 

[Bad Gopher]

Coolhand, I want to thank you for pulling these together. Enjoyable reading. Some people here have badmouthed Grantland for being pretentious or snooty, but I think another word is 'literate.' I think the site rocks.