1. “I don’t teach passing, I teach teamwork,” says a Professor of Ball Handling at an elite university.
2. The more prestigious the school, the taller its students and professors.
3. The Bell Curve is about the advantages of being tall. Taller people have better life outcomes, the authors discover via analysis of a large data set. Curiously, the authors — both tall — conclude that tall people should be favored even more.
4. The better students say that at college they learned how to learn. They mean they learned how to learn to play a sport.
5. At “research” universities the professors spend more time playing basketball than teaching.
6. A Princeton, New Jersey company develops and sells a fast standardized way to measure basketball ability.
7. Sports Illustrated publishes an essay titled “What Every Educated Person Should Know.”
8. By graduation, students know very well how good at basketball they are but know almost nothing about their ability in other areas.
The excellent humorist Henry Alford wrote “What If” articles for Spy magazine and, more recently, for Vanity Fair, such as “What If Paris Hilton Were President of the United States?”