• Don't forget to weigh in on this week's Double-A Poll, which asks if defending champions should receive automatic bids to the next year's tournament.

• The field for the Division I Women's Basketball Championship was announced last night. Maryland, Connecticut, Tennessee and North Carolina are the tournament's top seeds.

• I received an e-mail from Ed Bemiss over the weekend, asking me to check out his Web site, which offers tournament simulations. Since you can click "play again" hundreds of times, the simulator can basically give you any outcome, but it's a pretty cool system and I had fun nosing around.

• We mentioned American in yesterday's featured post, but it's only right to give kudos to Portland State, Texas-Arlington and UMBC, all of whom qualified for the men's tournament for the first time.

• There are 34 at-large bids to the men's tournament and power conferences got 28 of those berths, giving us the exact same numbers as last year. Do you like the ratio?

• A report released yesterday by Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport suggested that the achievement gap between the graduation success of black and white basketball players is shrinking. While there is still tremendous room for improvement, it does seem that academic reform initiatives are having a positive impact. As for the top teams in this year's men's bracket - Western Kentucky, Butler, Notre Dame and Purdue would form the academic Final Four.

• While making my morning blog rounds, I stumbled upon a piece of brilliance from Kyle Whelliston at The Mid-Majority. Kyle used 1,166 words to tell us why we shouldn't join office pools this week and each word was important. Kyle has inspired me this Tuesday morning, and reminds us all why we should love college basketball.

• Our thoughts are with Minnesota senior Tom Pohl, who had emergency brain surgery yesterday. Pohl, a forward on the Gopher hockey team, fractured his skull in Sunday night's Western Collegiate Hockey Association playoff game. Although he had surgery on his brain, Pohl's superior intellect will remain intact - he was named to the WCHA all-academic team last week. Pohl was in fair condition following surgery.

• Basketball has become an international game in recent years and according to the Chicago Tribune, that trend will continue. On Saturday, Shannon Ryan wrote about the popularity of basketball in African nations and the impact it has had on the college game. Ryan notes that eight of the 25 teams in the most recent Division I rankings have at least one player on their roster from Africa.

• The New York Times reported possible academic irregularities by some student-athletes at Michigan, who seem to have taken an outrageous number of independent studies with a psychology professor. The report suggests that the students spent less than 15 minutes of schoolwork every two weeks and still averaged a 3.62 in the professor's courses. I have no idea which allegations are true, but I do wonder why any students are allowed to take more than one independent study with a particular professor. Shouldn't there be a limit?

• The Franklin Pierce women's basketball team knocked off unbeaten Holy Family last night to win its first-ever regional title in the sport. It's the third regional title of the academic year for Franklin Pierce, which won men's and women's soccer in the fall.