We've been about as patient with college basketball as we can be, but it is clear that the sport is just not going to get with the program.

Plainly, the sport is going to persist in doing the one thing that cannot get you noticed these days -- play its games.

	Bob Knight has been on his best behavior -- for the most part.

And that's just not going to do. At all. With everything else going on in the entertainment world these days, starting with Michael Jackson, Citizen Of Neptune, and working on down, the only thing that gets anyone's attention is thorough public humiliation.

And college basketball hasn't even been able to scare up a good Bob Knight blowup. Way behind the curve, fellas. Way, way behind it.

Football has already had a slightly dodgy end to a national championship, a bizarre Super Bowl replete with a medicine-vs.-malfeasance debate, and a hilariously unjustified firing and subsequent screwball hiring. Plus Peyton Manning and Mike Vanderjagt.

Baseball is mired in a debate over how much garbage a man can shove into his body before someone says, "Hey, don't do that.''

Pro basketball has had Michael Jordan's endless 40th birthday/retirement soiree, Shaquille O'Neal's potato-chip toe and Kobe Bryant's subsequent Shots Across America Tour.

Hockey has had a daily bankruptcy.

Golf has had Tiger Woods, Annika Sorenstam, Hootie Johnson, Martha Burk, and Phil Mickelson complaining that Tiger won't use plastic Fisher-Price clubs.

The Olympics has had the USOC with its pants down in public, and in a non-Olympic year at that.

And boxing ... well, you know.

What, then does this tell us about what people want these days? Easy. It tells us that we want in sports what we want in our prime-time network entertainment -- reality freak shows and shame-fests in which the only plot line is, "Thank God we don't know any of those bilge pumps.''

And college basketball is giving us college basketball. I mean, who's in charge here, Joyce Brothers?

Even high school basketball figured it out. The LeBron James story and all its hilarious permutations have kept the hamster wheel to hell spinning cheerfully for months now.

But college basketball? Here's the best you got so far on the "You can't make this stuff up-o-meter'' -- an allegation that several members of the Arizona basketball team got into an argument with a vending machine.

Here's what's second best -- Rick Pitino Redux.

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But college basketball? Here's the best you got so far on the "You can't make this stuff up-o-meter'' -- an allegation that several members of the Arizona basketball team got into an argument with a vending machine. Here's what's second best -- Rick Pitino Redux. ”

And here's what's third -- there are about 18 teams who could legitimately claim to have a realistic chance of winning the national championship.

Oh, and games ... lots and lots of games. What a bizarrely retro idea.

Now with March Madness still three-and-a-half weeks away, college basketball does not have a lot of time left to change the theme into something juicier. The sport has allowed all the other sports way too much lead time to find ways to get people to laugh at them, and even after you allow for the fact that college basketball doesn't have a very good sense of humor about itself, this is just off-the-scale not happening.

So what can the sport do, other than pigheadedly continue to play its games each night as scheduled?

Well, Knight's out. Even though Texas Tech has slipped back below the radar, the head coach has made it clear he won't be the butt of America's jokes this year. Nolan Richardson's lawsuit against the University of Arkansas is still in pregame layups. Jim Calhoun has already come back from prostate surgery. Steve Lavin has finally made the overanticipated transition gone from "Road To The Final Four'' to "Autopsy 9.''

And the players? Well, James stole most of that thunder carrying Wes Unseld around on his back.

The administrators? Oh, that's too easy -- find a suit and rip him. Childhood stuff.

Frankly, the only hope we have is if the tournament committee, comprising as it does precious few actual basketball people, gets thoroughly liquored up before it goes into sequestration and comes out with the kind of three-day bender that doesn't fit in the overhead bin, and a tournament bracket that has Duquesne where Duke should be, Canisius instead of Kansas, and LeBron James in the play-in game.

And then to admit to Jim Nantz on the CBS Selection Sunday show that they haven't paid squat attention the entire year, and only got on the committee for the shrimp cocktail and the luggage tags.

Now that would work.

But don't get your hopes up, or down as the case might be. College basketball is just going to go its own way, doping only what it knows and nothing else -- players playing, coaches coaching, officials fouling up the block-charge, and Dick Vitale on the contra-bassoon.

You know. Business as usual. And how in God's name can you possibly sell that these days?

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com