It is a uniquely American pursuit – played at the highest level in 47 states, in tiny windswept towns and enormous cities, in mountain campuses and at beachfront colleges.

Which is why, perhaps more than any other sport, college basketball is perfect for this kind of enterprise – an 11-day (barring breakdown), 11-team (at least), 2,000-plus-mile road trip across half the country to preview the upcoming season.

This weekend in the prairie town of Lawrence, Kan. the college season kicks off with a midnight practice called Late Night in The Phog. We'll be there.

By the time we are done, nearly two weeks later, we'll be in distinctly East Coast Connecticut, not far from the fog of the Atlantic and home to nearly everyone's preseason No. 1, the UConn Huskies.

In between we'll file daily reports from each team we visit along the way. There also will be a Traveling Violations notebook describing the people we meet and hijinks we find on the road.

If all this sounds familiar, that's because it

CHICAGO – The NCAA has stringent scholarship limits designed to stop basketball coaches from bringing in a bunch of kids and running them off if they aren't good enough.

Basically if a player leaves, you don't get that scholarship back until he would have graduated.

But the rules allow for zero leeway if a player graduates early, turns pro early or, most terribly, even if a player dies, as Georgia Tech's Michael Isenhour did last year.

By the NCAA's unbending and untrusting logic, a deceased player counts as a "run off" player. Your team is punished.

"Now wait a second," said none other than NCAA president Myles Brand. "That doesn't make sense. I don't think that was the intention [of the rule]."

If you follow college athletics you have said the same thing a million times. But to have the sitting NCAA president say it is historic. NCAA administrators never criticize NCAA rules. Ever.

But here was Brand, dare we say, preaching common sense. Plus, he did it in front of a room full of

The game was farce, a 40-minute layup drill for Baylor, which routed the anonymous "Houston Superstars" 128-55 in an exhibition game last November. Six days later it wasn't much different when the "Texas Bluechips" fell 101-83 to the Bears.

This is how college basketball's preseason operates, though, schools bringing in vagabond barnstorming teams made up of former college players to get a quick tune-up before the start of the real season. Few people pay any attention.

Except maybe they should.

Baylor paid both teams at least $15,000, according to sources, to play the game. To whom the checks were cut is problematic.

The "owner" of the Houston Superstars is John Eurey, who also runs a nationally prominent AAU-type high school all-star team by the same name. He annually coaches some of the nation's top recruits such as ex-Texas guard T.J. Ford and current Duke guard Daniel Ewing.

Texas Bluechips is run by Mitch Malone, who also coaches a summer team that has produced scores of Division

One of them, the critics contend, can't win the big one. The other, who used to hear the exact same thing until his kickers stopped going wide right, has been told lately he'll never do it again.

Texas' Mack Brown and Florida State's Bobby Bowden don't have a lot in common. But Saturday they both face that most unique of college football traditions.

The big one. The red-letter, must win, contract-extending, career-making, critic-silencing clash with the archest of rivals on the schedule.

Texas gets No. 1 Oklahoma. Florida State gets No. 2 Miami.

And while Bowden and Brown may rank 1-2 in consecutive winning seasons, bowl appearances and victories since 1990, while both have their teams in the top 15 and still in contention for a national championship, both could really use a win in a really big way Saturday.

Bowden to prove he's still got it. Brown to prove he can ever get it.

"This is probably the best Oklahoma team I've seen during my time here," said Brown, who has famously lost

It was a bad pass, grossly overthrown, which is why the basketball was bouncing out of bounds, about to become a turnover. From out of nowhere, a player sprinted it down with quick, long strides, leaping just before stepping on the sideline.

Back-to-the-basket he sailed, deftly grabbing the ball at the peak of a high bounce. He pulled it out of a tangle of his own limbs, spun around and fired a bullet toward an unsuspecting teammate standing under the basket, who was watching in awe like everyone else.

His pass threaded the defense and drilled its intended target between the numbers. Stunned, the teammate never even tried to catch it. The ball dropped harmlessly to the floor before the kid picked it up and laid it in for an easy basket.

As highlights go, perhaps this wasn't much. It wasn't a soaring dunk. It wasn't a violent blocked shot. It wasn't a three from another area code.

But 99 percent of high school players would never have been able to track the ball down.

Ninety-nine

The Meadowlands scoreboard read Jets 41, Colts 0, a humiliating score under any NFL circumstance, but much more demoralizing when the calendar reads January.

Pretty soon Indianapolis' idiot kicker was liquored up (or so the story goes) and questioning the leadership of Peyton Manning, echoing the talk radio callers who, while acknowledging their quarterback can throw it like few others, wonder if he can ever win the big one.

After all:

• He is a career 0-3 in the playoffs, isn't he?

• Tennessee won the NCAA title the year after he graduated, didn't it?

• It was 41-zip, wasn't it?

Manning, being the voice of reason amid the foolishness of NFL talk, didn't deny the problem.

"Facts are facts," he said this preseason. "We haven't advanced in the playoffs. We haven't reached a Super Bowl. The individual success isn't important. It's what the team does."

So here we are in Week 5. Manning is throwing like never before and the Colts are winning like never before. Indy is 4-0 heading into a major

Let's recount the crimes against humanity (or at least the Nittany Nation) that Joe Paterno has supposedly committed this season.

His team lost to Boston College. It lost at Nebraska. It lost to Minnesota. It only beat Kent State 32-10 and Temple by 13.

Penn State is 2-3, the winningest coach in college history is 76 and you can't walk into a breakfast joint from Altoona to Allentown without overhearing someone plotting to depose the legend.

Too old. Too stubborn. Too out of touch.

And we call coaches hypocrites?

You can't have it both ways. You can't blow a stack when Mike Price lets a hungry stripper spend the night, Dave Bliss defames a murdered player or Rick Neuheisel brazenly bets on basketball – and then say JoePa must go because he couldn't beat the Gophers.

You support, applaud and live with a guy who has done nothing but represent his school with class and conviction for 54 years. You don't stab him in the back and dream of bringing in the next slick young coach that

In July 2002, Oakland general manager Billy Beane thought he was on the verge of one of his trademark lopsided deals.

It wouldn't yield a big-name star because small-market Oakland never has the resources to pay one of those guys. It wouldn't even add an undervalued role player, the kind that annually fuel the A's late-season playoff push.

But the A's would acquire Kevin Youkilis. Yes, Kevin Youkilis, then an obscure 23-year-old Red Sox farmhand who was slow and couldn't hit for power and whom Beane himself considered fat.

But Youkilis was an on-base percentage fiend. His .462 clip was then the second best in all of baseball, trailing only Barry Bonds. (This season he posted a ridiculous .483 OBP in the minors and got on base in a record-tying 70 consecutive games.)

"The Greek god of walks," Beane called him and if there is one thing sabermetrics – the mathematical analysis of baseball of which Beane is the most famous devotee – values, it is OBP.

So Beane tried to sneak his way into a