Kentucky, it seems, has beaten UNLV in the finals of a national basketball tournament. This according to the USA Today website, which, as we know, contains all the news not fit to print. The tournament in question was called the Terrific 20, and was an exercise in the sort of speculative/delusional/participatory publishing that has replaced what was once called journalism. (We're not casting stones, folks; here at the Weekly, we love this stuff.) The Terrific 20 took all the NCAA champions since the tournament expanded to 64 teams and put them in a bracket (with UNLV's 1990 team inexplicably seeded 11th). Each "game" was determined on a best-of-three-votes basis, with one vote each from basketball pundits Mike Lopresti and Pete Simpkinson, and one from you, the American web surfer.
The Rebels defeated—er, were elected over—the 1989 Michigan club in Round 1, North Carolina '93 in Round 2 and Duke '01 in the semifinals. Then came the big game against Kentucky's 1996 team, which, according to Lopresti, would defeat UNLV '90 with "swarming, relentless defense" and a "limitless supply of fresh legs," dictating a slower tempo and keeping the score low. Simpkinson, calling it "the best game that never was," speculated that Kentucky would not be intimidated the way so many Rebel opponents were in '89-'90 and would, with experienced guards, force UNLV into plenty of turnovers and neutralize the Rebels' hot-shooting two-guard, Anderson Hunt.
Web surfers, meanwhile, chose Kentucky by a margin of 65 percent to 35 percent, with a total of 4,314 votes.
Meanwhile, we here in Las Vegas have one thing to say about all this: Yeah, right.