This week's podcast featured a spirited discussion of the NBA's age-limit rule, why we believe it's terrible and unjust (which was expanded on in my Monday Sun column), and why college ball benefits from it so much. The boost it provided for college basketball and this year's tournament are obvious, and one of the places that breaks it down so well is on ESPN.com's basketball blog by Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy (who is a must-read for me, because now I routinely either passionately agree with or violently disagree with everything he writes). Here, he's clearly a fan, because he's back to being a fan of college basketball because of the talents of Greg Oden and Kevin Durant. Decide for yourself how important that is compared to stifling a player's wants or needs to go pro. But if you care far more about college ball than the NBA (and the players in it), how can you not love it?

Simmons today is also an essential read because, at the very bottom, he runs an email from a North Carolina student who knew the Ram mascot, Jason Ray, who died yesterday from injuries suffered when he was hit by an SUV in New Jersey while the Heels were at the East regional.

More on one-and-done: here's the now-infamous New York Times story from last week about O.J. Mayo and his "recruitment'' by Southern California - in which one of Mayo's people called coach Tim Floyd, told him Mayo wanted to come there sight-unseen, and that the coach couldn't have his number but that Mayo would call him. Which Mayo did, then promising him he'd also recruit teammates for him and yet still refusing to give the coach his number. The upshot is that Mayo simply wanted a place to polish his profile for a year until he went pro. Understandably and not unfairly, Mayo is receiving most of the condemnation for this, as any spoiled, entitled high-school kid should. But for agreeing to all of this, USC should abolish its athletic department and reassign Floyd, the AD and the school president to custodial positions. Oden and Durant aside, it's hard to see how this can be seen as beneficial to college basketball, especially the "college'' part.