HUSKIES PLAY FOR THE NATIONAL TITLE.  These Huskies are from DeKalb, however, not Storrs.

Image courtesy Wall Street Journal via Northern Today.

It is difficult to agree with the idea of sports pundits at the Wall Street Journal.  The article from which the bracket is extracted ran on April Fools' Day, but it appears to be serious criticism of the notion that a college football championship would be more orderly than the current set of bowls games.

To do this, we took the list of overall seeds for this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament and laid it next to the final regular-season BCS college-football standings (the ones that help determine which teams go to which bowls).

We then went through this year's NCAA tournament bracket and replaced every basketball team, by rank, with its corresponding football team. (In other words, Ohio State's basketball team, the No. 1 overall seed this year, was replaced by Auburn, whose football team ranked No. 1 in the BCS standings after the regular season. Kansas, the No. 2 basketball team, was replaced by No. 2 Oregon, and so on.)

Once the bracket was full, we "played" the games just as they've happened so far in the NCAA tournament to create our own "football final four."

The results don't exactly look like must-see TV. In one football final-four game, Northern Illinois (Butler's equivalent) would meet Air Force (our VCU doppelganger). In the other game, Kentucky's stand-in, Oklahoma State, would take on Connecticut's correlate, Virginia Tech.

Northern Illinois - Air Force will happen, perhaps during the regular season. Navy visited DeKalb a few seasons ago, and Army will be here for the season opener.

Perhaps basketball, unlike football, is a game in which a team can get on a roll at the right time and win the national championship.  Unless it's Wisconsin.  In the modified bracket, Louisiana State takes the place of Wisconsin, and Wisconsin takes the place of Florida.  Northern Illinois, taking the place of Butler, eliminates both.  But maybe a national tournament with a strong Wisconsin team isn't appealing.

Before this year, the two Final Fours that had the worst combined seed totals in the modern era came in 2000 and 2006. The 2000 version featured Michigan State, Florida, Wisconsin and North Carolina and didn't have a single game decided by fewer than 12 points. Its contribution to basketball history was a first half between the Spartans and Badgers in which the teams scored a combined 36 points.

That was one of the best defensive struggles ever to air on national television. Michigan State went on to win the national title that year.

Wisconsin recently provided a head football coach to Northern Illinois, and Michigan State a head basketball coach.  And if you want to do comparative oddities, once upon a time Northern Illinois beat Wisconsin who beat Ohio State in football, inspiring some wag at the Chicago Tribune to make Northern Illinois the national football champion.   Odder things happen.