Forbes Magazine recently released two lists that should interest local sports fans. Estimating the financial values of college basketball programs, Forbes ranked Xavier as the 17th most valuable and Arizona as the sixth most valuable. The magazine also offered its list of the nation's most miserable sports cities.  

We made such a fuss a few weeks ago when Xavier lost three straight on the road in the Atlantic-10 Conference. We started wondering if the same team that could lose to tournament rejects on the road could beat tournament teams on neutral sites. What got into us? What made us forget that the regular season is such a colossal waste of time?  

Boredom might be a suitable attitude for sports fans after the Super Bowl, but one hates seeing a college basketball team assume that malaise, especially when that team was in the thick of the national picture. Thus we encounter the present Xavier basketball season as one of the most dumbfounding to pass this way in quite some time. The X-men rose as high as ninth in the national rankings on Feb. 2, only to mock their own prosperity with three dismal road performances in the Atlantic-10.  

Less than a month old, the college basketball season is so new that it doesn’t begin to add up. Among the names to be found on top of the RPI listings are Butler, Evansville, Clemson and Northwestern. But one highly placed name that doesn’t read like a sampling error is Xavier, which is ranked fifth or sixth in various RPI ratings, 10th by the media and ninth by the coaches.   

Those pedagogical purposes, however, don't mean there's not solid entertainment on area campuses. Of course, you might have to suspend your disbelief when a 20-year-old plays Willy Loman, but by and large scripts are chosen as learning experiences...