Linking Up: March 8, 2011

*Mack Brown dishes to The New York Times on Texas' offseason transition and what has changed within the program. It feels like I've written enough about Mack lately, so I'll leave this one alone.

*Budget cuts and an evolving news cycle mean that quality investigative journalism, especially in sports, is a luxury most newsrooms can no longer afford. That makes the work Yahoo! Sports has done in recent years uncovering college sports scandals all the more impressive.

Does that mean Charles Robinson and Dan Wetzel have Senator Sweater Vest dead to rights with their report that the Ohio State coach knew about the memoribilia caper months before the Buckeyes reported it? No. But Yahoo!'s recent track record should have people in Columbus feeling pretty uneasy.

*Columinst David Brooks has revived his blog on the NYT website. As a "moderate conservative," Brooks tends to look at modern-day social and political problems through a unique lens. His writing style may come off as overly pedantic, and he tends to overgeneralize, but his columns always bring cause for reflection.

Hopefully, Brooks' blog can inspire more of this kind of discussion with writers like Ezra Klein of The Washington Post.

*Tulsa World columnist Dave Sittler looks at the success of Bill Self at Kansas, where he has won the Big 12 regular season title in seven of eight years in Lawrence. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise, but I didn't realize KU has been that dominant under Self.

*"Likely, they will beat us more times than not, but anything can happen in a one-game series."

Oral Roberts coach Scott Sutton probably didn't mean to undermine the legitimacy of college basketball's tournament fetish. But his quote about the Golden Eagles' matchup with Oakland tonight in the finals of the Summit League tournament illustrates the fallacy in the argument that a playoff determines a "true" champion.