American sports fans, do you know what you're missing right now? -- the magical, the legendary, the completely captivating Tour de France. Yup. In fact, the Tour has already reached its first rest day after eight straight days of racing.

Let's face it: for cycling fans, the Tour is the pure Nirvana. Thanks to the Versus (formerly OLN) network, US fans (all 12 of them) of skinny tires, incredible bike handling, and human suffering can watch cycling every day for three straight weeks. It just doesn't get any better than this. It's like the NCAA tournament, the US Open, the NFL playoffs, the NBA Finals, and the World Series all rolled in to one. Every night -- every goddamn night -- cycling fans can kick back in their recliners (or on their stationary trainers), drink in the international flavor, and let the joy of cycling wash over them. Every night! For three straight weeks!

That's what the Ohio State University and the entire sporting world, with the exception of diehard Gator lovers and their recently embarked bandwagon brethren across the land, are thinking after the University of Florida beat down the OSU 84-75 last night to capture the men's NCAA basketball national championship. It's OSU's second consecutive national championship game defeat to Florida, this year.

If you're thinking it's deja vu all over again, you're right. The Gators came into the championship game as the defending NCAA champs -- and went out the same way. Their hard-fought but decisive victory marked the first back-to-back basketball championships by any Division I men's team since Duke's 1990-1992 run and only the second repeat since the end of the John Wooden era at UCLA more than 30 years ago.

The first weekend of the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments is in the books -- are you still alive in your office pool? Not if you took the Road to the Final Four less traveled.

If you went with the favorites, chances are you're sitting pretty. With the exception of the toothless male Badgers of Wisconsin, all first and second seeds in both tourneys advanced to the Sweet 16. That's not to say that a few high seeds didn't get a scare or that some middling seeds will never get a chance to germinate into full-blown Cinderellas, but overall, both tournaments are sticking to the script.

Take a big whiff everybody, it's that b-ball time of year. You've got the men's NCAAs, the women's NCAAs, and the men's NIT. Don't even get us started on Division II, DIII, or the Warriors.

The men's NCAAs tip off this morning at 9:40 a.m., with the Bay Area's only entrant, the Stanford Cardinal, taking on their University of Louisville homophones.

It's hard to say which is more popular these days, watching postseason college basketball or "playing" an NCAA bracket pool or two, or seven.

Here's todays daily sports roundup...

And it's the (drum roll please)....BART. BART? ...

-The NBA's 2007 All-Star Game is tonight in Las Vegas. Excitement aplenty, to be sure. Yet there're no Golden State Warriors on the West All-Star team....

Who's that being spotted Hollywood clubbin' with Giants' curveballer Barry Zito? ...

The San Francisco Film Critics Circle announced their season ending yesterday, something of which we are constantly told could mean something when it comes to the Oscars. The idea, we guess, being that these awards are like the NCAA brackets: Movie A wins the SF Flim Critics and movie B wins the LA Film Critics award, then they go off to meet the winner of the New York Critics Awards with the winner being the front-runner for Oscar gold. Or something like that. ...

Lot of sports to talk about, so let's get r' done. -Cal beats Stanford to win the Axe. See what happens when you don't let the Stanford band play? Anyways, Cal played just enough to win and Stanford played well enough to win, but Cal still won. As for Stanford, the Walt Harris death watch begins. ...

We know this is completely wrong to admit, but voting here in San Francisco, the bluest of blue states, is always a bit unexciting. While the rest of the country is taking part in what we're always told is the Most Important Election Ever, we are once again left out of the thrills. Our gubernatorial race never took off and the race for Senate and Congress was such a no contest that one ran commercials featuring her grandchild and the other gave more speeches in Pennsylvania than here in her home city. It's kind of like rooting for the local Division AAA basketball team make their way through the Division AAA tourney while everyone else is obsessed with the NCAA Tourney. And while you want the local guys to win, you can't but help care more about schools you never attended in the Big Dance. What we're trying to say is that for whatever reason we seem more emotionally invested in the Virginia Senate Race than whatever is going on here. ...

SFist Krissy's weekly music review column's not only indispensable for the latest indie rock goings-on around town and those must-hear .mp3s, but also hosts some cool-looking art too. Ratatat! In news, North Beach cracks down on public drunkenness, as the mayor imposes a citywide curfew on kids under 13. Hope that doesn't cut in on his dating life. We've got your hot athletic action too -- SFist sports editor Jon debuts our daily wrapup of......

SFist Karen catches some Andy Goldsworthy-esque art on the beach. Meet the Ritual Roasters, the folks behind local politics website Usual Suspects, the guy who produced The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and some hot sexcake talk! Plus: we shamelessly speculate about the "CIA agent" posting notices around town. In sports: Giants (plus the new Barry show), A's, mountain biking, and the end of the women's NCAA tourney. We wish a fond farewell to abecedarian eater......

This year the women's NCAA basketball tournament definitely achieved a level of parity with the men's NCAA basketball tournament. But it wasn't all good.

Seattlest saw a house party get senselessly attacked with a shotgun and end in seven dead. A local senator is debated and their version of the big dig is investigated. To truly get to the bottom of it they interview the writer Jonathan Raban. Bostonist has its first birthday party and investigates how to attach more gambling dollars to the Red Sox. Benjamin Franklin is celebrated and Johnny Damon is not. Image by Ethan Bagley......

Note to the remaining teams in the 2006 Women's NCAA Championship basketball tournament: beware the number three seed Stanford Cardinal. ...

The NCAA men's basketball tournament resumes tonight with third-round (also known as the Sweet 16) action in both the Atlanta and Oakland regionals. Action in the Washington D.C. and Minneapolis regionals continue tomorrow and Saturday....

Pssst! Want a tip on the last undiscovered territory in college basketball? It's the women's Division I NCAA basketball championship tournament....

It's that time of the year. The 2006 NCAA men's basketball championship tournament starts this morning at 9:20 A.M. PST, ushering in nearly a solid month of the best that college basketball has to offer. Sixty-four teams from around the country, from conferences of different sizes and configurations, wade into the dizzying fray of sporting unpredictability that has come to be known as March Madness....

With the start of the World Baseball Classic upon us, we thought we'd let SFist Jon and SFist Jake duke it out over whether this thing will be any good. There wasn't much duking to be had, however, because both Jon and Jake pretty much agreed that this just might be the best thing ever. And despite all the naysayers, the cynics, and George Steinbrenner's whining, they're both excited as hell. In short, SFist's official stance is this: Play ball!...

With regular seasons winding down, college basketball conferences around the country are busily seeding teams for their conference tournaments. These tournaments embody the American Dream in that they give nearly every team in the conference one last shot to make the Big Show. For small and mid-major conferences that may get only one invite to the field of 64, the conference tournament actually supplants the regular season by giving the conference's automatic NCAA bid to the tournament champion rather than the regular-season champion. ...

t's time for American Football Spectacular's bowl preview! Assisted by red wine, our American college football consultant Doug "MC Fried Chicken" Mungin, and the sheer will to succeed, we push ever forward to bring you these scintillating projections. ...

Your Cal Bears are off to Vegas to play BYU in the Las Vegas Bowl. Fun, right? Enjoyment and excitement in America's gleeful den of inequity, right? Stuff that'd make shorthaired guys in visors and Abercrombie shirts go "WOOOOOOO!" with arms upraised, right? Well, yeah, in part. As pointed out by American Football Spectacular's religious consultant Ms. No, Mormons aren't supposed to gamble. Further, according to the BBC's write-up on Mormon ethical practices, "Gambling in......

Yes, Rai-duh fans, we have ourselves a full-fledged QB controversy as yesterday, in his press conference, Norv Turner said that he was maybe, sort of, possibly thinking about benching Kerry Collins and replacing him with sportswriters' worst nightmare, Marques Tuiasosopo. Said Marvelous Marv Turner: "We're going to look at the quarterback thing, the quarterback situation, and say, 'Hey, is it time to look at Tui? With his mobility, would that help us?" The positives......

Well, Google is set to announce their Google Talk and Google Desktop v2.0 tomorrow -- but folks have already been using Talk for a few hours now (and the client has been released). Was the leak to create 'buzz,' mayhaps? Danah Boyd doesn't call Google (whom she used to work for) out specifically, but it isn't too hard to figure out who she's talking about when she points out that when your competitor is......

Niall Kennedy has been a netizen since there was such a thing. He's also maybe the first NCAA Champion we've ever met -- winning a national soccer title in 1997 with the UCLA Bruins. If you're on the national geek conference or local nerd meetup circuit, you're more than likely to run into him. Chances are, he'll be the one with the Technorati t-shirt on -- see if you can spot him in this......

The NCAA tournament had us floating belly up in our betting pool. Our beloved UCLA Bruins lost in the first round to the biggest jerk in basketball, the infamous tamper tantrum prone chair throwing anger oozing Bobby Knight. For the L.A. haters around the bay, please do not waste any ill-spent karma here: we will be quick to reply that UCLA also produced he whose creaky back carries our local hoops hopes, Baron Golden......

Your weekly breath mint and fresh pair of pants to help you out of your 'bar rut'. Reviewed as always by barrespondent, Drew. 'Tis most certainly the season for sports bars. With the NCAA Tournament continuing on and basketball season starting to get interesting (especially when a certain Bay Area team has a [gasp] winning streak going), it's as good a time as any to find the bar with the most televisions in it to......

Screw Christmas, today just might be the most magical time of the year 'cause it's March Madness time. We may have no clue as to who is going to win, but we do know that the next couple of weeks will definitely feature several last minute game-winning shots, shocking upsets by colleges we've never heard of, and office pools being won by elderly secretaries over basketball fans who claim to know everything there is to know about Wisconsin-Milwaukee. How big is the NCAA Tournament? Between time spent pondering office pools, constant checking of internet sites, and sick days, businesses claim that March Madness costs business 1.4B in lost productivity. Throw in the fact that the first day of the Tourney also happens to coincede with St. Patrick's day and well, SFist has been laying the groundwork to calling in sick by "coughing" as much as possible and whining about how bad we feel to whomever asked how we were doing....

The 49ers have now matched their worst-ever performances from the late seventies by beating the woeful Arizona Cardinals, 31-28, but are still officially the worst team in the league. SFist has never liked Dennis Erickson -- always one step ahead of the NCAA investigators during his college coaching career, the man has never coached a successful NFL franchise. We wonder why on earth he's still even working. Oh, right, the ineptitude of the 49ers' front......