ROSE AND LOVE= HEART

They're doing the starting lineups at the moment. Good comedy from the Memphis bench. By the way, have you seen Memphis backup forward Pierre Niles? The dude is 6-8, 310 pounds. If this young man isn't playing in the NFL in three years, it'll be a shame.

A few things I thunk of earlier:

1) Last week Memphis' mighty freshman guard Derrick Rose got cut above his eye in the Elite Eight win over Texas. Afterward Billy Packer of CBS teased him about not wanting to get stitches. Rose told Packer, "I hate needles."

        Okay. But, have you seen Derrick Rose's tatt'ed out arms?

2) Did you watch the final minutes of last night's Mavericks-Lakers game? There was a call late against the Mavericks. I thought it was, in the words of Bill Walton, "teaarrrrrible". Apparently, so did Maverick Josh Howard, who tossed his headband in disgust and was T'ed up for that. The ESPN announcers, Mike Breen and Jon Barry, noted that you just can't let your emotions overcome you at that point. But I was thinking, You just can't let a player like Josh Howard, whom you know is given to emoting, to wear a headband. No headband, no problem.

Terrific game thus far. UCLA is being extremely deliberate on offense while the Tigers have shot very well and are running every chance they get. UCLA has no offensive rebounding presence. At all. And Kevin Love's lone home-run pass was intercepted. But right now, it's just that the Tigers are only allowing UCLA one shot on every possession.

By the way, you see coaches do this all the time. On the play where the Memphis defender intercepted Love's long throw, he was falling out of bounds and blindly threw it behind him. Russell Westbrook of UCLA caught it and made an uncontested three. And Calipari did what coaches do: he yelled at his bench about how dumb it was to throw that save pass blindly over your head. Not at the player who did it, but at the bench. Half frustration, half education