About what you'd expect from the state school of New Jersey.

Anyone with kids who play sports is familiar with the age-old question -- any time it's revealed that a coach of a collegiate sport engages in some degree of borderline (or in many cases, over-the-borderline) abusive behavior, we debate with our kid-having friends and debate it even more intensely in our own minds:

Would I let my kid play for [fill in name of Serial Screamer here]?"

If you think that stressing positivity and civility, and teaching with some level of decorum constitute the "right" approach, then your answer will typically be "No." If you believe that things like throwing chairs, dog-cussing teenagers, and homophobic slurs are some form of "tough love," your answer will typically be "Yes."

Which brings us to recently ousted Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice.

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Just like what rec-center gym rats are used to.

As is the case in almost everything in 2013, the shelf life for enjoyment of the 2013 NCAA men's championship game (a thrilling 82-76 Louisville win over Michigan) was a total of about five minutes before we started looking ahead to 2013-2014.

Almost immediately after the game was over, already odds for which team would be conducting the exact same celebration that Louisville was conducting live on my television screen were floating around social media and the interwebs.

So without further ado, here they are, courtesy of R.J. Bell, founder of the excellent wagering website pregame.com (@RJinVegas, for an excellent Twitter follow), your 2014 men's basketball title odds:

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The bird is flying high....

A roller-coaster first half, which had Twitter in a frenzy of hyperbole, led to a grinding second half, and in the end experience won out as Louisville knocked off Michigan 82-76 to win Rick Pitino's second career men's basketball title, making him the first coach to win it all at two different schools.

Like any championship event, there were winners and there were losers, so as midnight approaches while I type this, here are my stream of conscious winners and losers from Monday night's spine-tingler:

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The original Angry Bird (except for Larry).

So, here we are. Championship Monday. A lot of you had Louisville in the finals, almost none of you had Michigan in the finals, and you sure as shit didn't have then knocking off Wichita State (barely) and Syracuse (barely, again), respectively, to get there.

So let's establish that right out of the shoot here before I give you some "items" for tonight's game that you can root for along with me -- nobody knows anything.

Jay Bilas, who watches more college basketball than virtually any other human and, unlike the other humans in that conversation, can actually articulate convincing arguments for his opinions well -- he had Duke winning the whole thing, and had New Mexico in his Final Four.

New Mexico lost on the first day of the tournament.

So, understand, and repeat after me, nobody knows anything.

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Coach Guy V. Lewis gets the ultimate basketball honor.

Legendary Houston Cougar basketball coach Guy V. Lewis has been selected for the Basketball Hall of Fame. It is a very well-deserved honor for one of the finest basketball coaches ever involved with the game. It is also an honor that should have been bestowed long, long ago.

Fans of the Cougars, fans of Coach Lewis, fans of basketball should be thankful that the voters have granted this honor. But fans should also question why this took such a long time. They should ask why the Hall of Fame so long chose to ignore Coach Lewis? And along with questioning the voters and the Hall, they should be pissed, righteously pissed, that this move took so long to happen.

It's been said in the past that Guy V. Lewis was nothing more than a regional candidate without national name recognition. Less benighted souls have stated that Coach Lewis wasn't worthy of induction because he never won a national title. And others have stated that he wasn't really a good coach, that he just rolled the balls out onto the court and let the players play basketball.

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Kazemi's allegations include both racial and religious slurs from the AD.

It's been four long, sad decades for the Rice men's basketball program. There have been a few moments of levity -- the opening of Tudor Fieldhouse, Morris Almond's mid-range jumper, Willis Wilson's mustache -- but, by and large, the tale's been one of cumbersome academics and milquetoast community support.

In 2013, though, that was supposed to change. With Ben Braun's hiring a half-decade ago, a bumper crop of recruits suddenly started spinning through Tudor. Decades of grind gave way to sudden promise. On the backs of guard Tamir Jackson and forward Arsalan Kazemi, both of whom generated talk of professional play from their earliest days, 2013 was set as the year that Rice finally broke from the decades-long doldrums and jumped to something approaching respectability.

And then, everything collapsed. During the off-season, assistant coach Marco Morcos left, eventually taking a half-dozen members of the team, including Kazemi, along with them. (You may have noted Kazemi's name recently, as he led the 12th-seeded University of Oregon to an improbable Sweet 16 run.) Everyone noticed the smoke, but no one could pinpoint the fire. And then, last week, Sports Illustrated informed us why Kazemi, the first Iranian-born NCAA men's basketball player, and his compatriots had fled the program en masse.

It seems that Rick Greenspan, who landed Rice's athletic director position after the construction boom of the Chris Del Conte years, determined it would be funny if everyone within earshot knew that Kazemi, who'd played his first three years with Rice, was of a different nation, a different religion and, per Greenspan's penchant for stereotyping dark-skinned 19-year-olds, a different political bent:

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Though the announcement won't come until Monday, it was been fairly widely leaked that legendary University of Houston men's basketball coach Guy V. Lewis has finally been elected to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, 2013 class. Lewis had been removed from the ballot for four years for lack of support, a condition of the Hall's by-laws.

Lewis won 592 games in his career with winning records in 27 consecutive seasons. He took his teams to 14 NCAA tournaments and to the Final Four five times. Players like Elvin Hayes, Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler played under Lewis at UH, the latter two as part of the famed Phi Slama Jama teams of the early '80s.

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...one in the what-where now?

And then there were four!

(I know, on the list of lame, cliched, bloggy catchphrases "And then there was (however many are left)" is right behind "Houston, we have a problem." but I'm still a little rattled from falling for the Dream Shake's April Fool's Day prank. I'm running simple plays here, nothing exotic today.)

The Final Four takes place in Atlanta this weekend. With a total sum of 18 on the Cinderella Scale (arrived at by adding the seeds of the four teams), this particular permutation of teams falls firmly in the "totally unexpected" category -- the tournament favorite (Louisville), two very live four seeds who spent most of the season in the top 5-10 (Michigan, Syracuse), and one nine seed who is, frankly, better than your normal nine seed.

On the way to Atlanta this past weekend, there were winners and losers. Let's take a belated look at who they are, shall we?

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Yeah, that's right Rick, you and the Horns lost again

The Houston Cougars play George Mason tonight in the second round of the CBI Tournament. The CBI is a third-rate tournament that takes the schools that aren't even good enough for the NIT. And the Cougars are, at this moment, one of those schools.

But mock the CBI all you want, mock the Cougars all you want, but there's one thing that the Cougars are doing tonight that the Texas Longhorns aren't doing. The Houston Cougars are playing basketball tonight. The Longhorns aren't playing tonight because they couldn't even win one game in this mediocre third-rate tournament.

The Longhorns aren't playing because they lost to the Houston Cougars last Wednesday night. Judging by the pained expressions on his face throughout the game, and his dickish attitude during the post-game press conference, Texas coach Rick Barnes couldn't believe that his clearly superior team lost to the Houston Cougars in the opening round of a third-rate tournament. A third-rate tournament that the slumming Longhorns should easily dominate.

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Photo by Groovehouse

In terms of the 2013 NBA Draft, Rocket fans are thanking the Lord for James Harden.

When it comes to rebuilding a professional sports team, the ultimate sign of the desperate fan is to take one possible outcome that has worked for a few teams before, apply it as gospel and then shout from the rooftops that "[fill in name of favorite team here] needs to [do that thing that's worked for some other team]!!"

Next, the desperate fan takes to talk radio with phone call after idiotic phone call saying that his team "HAS TO DO THIS!!!" (Tearfully crying, "It's the ONLY WAY!!" is optional.)

This brings me to the NBA Draft.

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