You may recall that, following hundreds of hours of research, I have picked Wichita State of the Missouri Valley Conference to win the NCAA basketball tournament that starts tomorrow in Atlanta. Despite all the time it took to choose the Shockers, who are coached by Gregg Marshall, as my favorite, it actually was a fairly easy decision. I go back a long way with Wichita State. All the way back to the early-1960s when chain-smoking, Scotch-drinking Ralph Miller was their coach. Miller had a 220-133 record for the Shockers from 1952-1964 [to be later followed by a 95-51 record from 1965-70 at Iowa], and some of his most memorable games in that era were against Maury John of Drake. One game Miller would no doubt like to forget if he were still living was the one on Feb. 10, 1964 against the Bulldogs at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in downtown Des Moines. I was still on the sports copy desk at the paper in those days, but I went to as many Drake games as I could. On that February night, Billy Foster sank a last-second shot to beat Miller's Wichita State team, 64-63. The next day, I contacted Paul Morrison, who then was Drake's sports publicity director, to tell him I'd like to interview him in the offices at Drake. Morrison arranged it, and I wrote the story for the next morning's paper. A year or so later, I was covering collegiate basketball and football for the paper, and I saw a lot more Drake-Wichita State games. The Shockers' games were played in an arena known as The Roundhouse, and an updated version of the place that seats 10,506 and is now called Charles Koch Arena [Henry Levitt Arena before that] is still Wichita State's home building. It's a great place to play and watch a basketball game. I covered just as many Drake-Wichita State games at Wichita as in Des Moines. On one road trip, radio announcer Ron Gonder, who then worked for KRNT in Des Moines, was with me when I visited the arena during Drake's morning shoot-around. We noticed that there was a 12-foot basket there. Why Wichita State needed a 12-foot basket I'll never know. But Gonder and I began shooting baskets at the 12-foot goal, just for the heck of it. Gonder had an advantage over me because he was about 8 feet tall. He later shrunk to 6-3, but that's a column for another day. By the way, don't bring up the Roundhouse to Lute Olson, who was Iowa's coach from1975-83. Olson and his Hawkeyes lost an NCAA Regional game to Wichita State when Lute forgot how to count. He told his players to call a timeout in the final seconds, but the Hawkeyes had already used all of their allotted timeouts, drew an automatic technical foul, and it was the Shockers, not the Hawkeyes, who advanced in the tournament. After the game, Olson took less than full responsibility for calling the illegal timeout. He called it a "staff decision." That's the Lute Olson I knew so well at Iowa.