The stat, frankly, startled me.

Not necessarily because of what point it was supposed to make, but rather that somebody would have done all the tedious legwork to research it.

What was the stat? Well, don't quote me here because I heard it as Duke was getting bounced from the tournament by VCU at the time, but one of the announcers said that...

"This year's Duke team is the youngest at the school in over 63 years."

And I should care about this, why, exactly?

Sixty-three years. The "youngest" Duke team. Was this number based on the entire roster? Starters only? By pure age, or by class designation?

The notion that somebody went through 63 years worth of Duke rosters to pencil-whip this stat is rather comical. Who cares? What's the point? Oh, wait a minute, now I get it.

If you say that this year's Duke team was the "youngest" in 63 years it helps ignore a more important, yet politically incorrect observation.

Duke was also one of the whitest major D-1 team in recent memory.

Sorry. I said it. I know that you've thought it. But I said it. Somebody had to.

Now I don't have any stats to show that Duke had their whitest roster this side of the Washington Generals, but suffice to say it was Honky-riffic.

Of the 14 players on the roster, only four were black. And if you look deep down the bench, it appears that Duke has stocked up on enough Wally Cleaver-looking white guards between 5-foot-11 and 6-foot-2.

As they say, "not that there's anything wrong with that."

But it makes you wonder: if Duke is practicing against this "white hole" of talent every day, how could they possibly get much better?

Let's not pretend we're idiots here. The best basketball players in the world are -- by percentage -- overwhelmingly black. And even in the college game where "my people" (self-effacing pun intended) enjoy a greater penetration of the overall sport than the NBA, white players remain a minority.

This brings me back to the "youngest in 63 years" comment. Not only was it a reach to go digging that far for some kind of alternate excuse for this year's bad team, but look around college basketball today. There are plenty of "young" teams.

Hell, look 12 miles down the road to Chapel Hill. Roy Williams' starting five this year just started shaving. In Kansas, Bill Self is sitting on a No. 1-seeded beast driven mostly by sophomores and freshmen. Ohio State has three freshmen powering its attack.

How come I haven't heard how "young" those teams are?

Here, see if you can pick out a theme among the following players.

Ohio State
C Greg Oden Freshman
G Mike Conley Jr. Freshman
G Daequan Cook Freshman

Kansas
G Sherron Collins Freshman
F Darrell Arthur Freshman

UNC
F Brandan Wright Freshman
G Wayne Ellington Freshman
G Ty Lawson Freshman

If you said: "Easy. They are all freshmen!" then you are right, but wrong.

Sure, they are all freshmen, but they also share two other common traits.

1. They all happen to be black players.
2. I don't think any one of those teams would trade any one of those players for say, Duke's highly touted freshman guard, Jon Scheyer.

Sure, Scheyer, like a number of Duke recruits of late, comes with great high school credentials. And he might become another J.J. Reddick. But he's a kid from a predominantly white suburban high school, Glenbrook North in Illinois.

It's the same high school as former overachieving Duke point guard turned assistant coach Chris Collins.

And I know a little bit about this high school. I used to work for a Chicago based radio network whose headquarters were literally a soft 9-iron away. In short, it was hardly the mean streets of the South Side of Chicago.

To ignore the obvious difference -- in general -- between white basketball players and black basketball players is folly. While some black kids play like white kids (see: Casey Sanders) and some white kids play like black kids (see: Bobby Hurley), they are usually the exception and not the rule.

All of which is not to say Coach K is in any way racist, or seeking to remake the image of his team. Some of it may be academics. Some of it may be a growing distaste for coaching players who leave the program after one year for the pros.

But the bottom line is simple and obvious: even Coach K can't win like Duke is accustomed to winning with talent this average. For all the hype Dick Vitale hosannas, Coach K, like any other coach in college, is just a jockey hoping to land on a powerful horse.

And his most powerful horses have always been laden with mostly black starters and stars, with just a little sprinkling of white kids.

I know all of this is VERY politically incorrect, but so what?

Since nobody else is saying it, I'll be the guy.