CSI without William Petersen.

College basketball.

I anticipated the former.

I am a bit surprised by the latter.

Was it Hong Kong? Could be. Except I remained interested in every other sport I cared about before I left.

Is it the Lakers? Well, yes, they make all other Los Angeles basketball fairly unimportant, including UCLA.

But I think the biggest part of it … is the transitory nature of college hoops, these days.

The good players rarely last two seasons in college basketball, and often only one.

If you are out of the country for the first half of a college basketball season … 1) you’re not going to hear squat about American college hoops wherever you are. I mean, anywhere. And 2) you’ve missed half the career of the college game’s best players. Jrue Holiday (is that his name?) and Demar DeRozan (is that spelling right?) are about 10 games from the end of their UCLA/USC careers, respectively.

And after that? What is college basketball about? The same-old same-old of Big East teams and ACC teams beating each other in a regular season that means very little  beyond making sure you’re one of the best 65 teams in the country, and that didn’t amuse me even when I still cared about college basketball. So, a big nothing.

And I like Laurence Fishburne. He’s just not Gil Grissom.