Did you see that piece about Bill James on the CBS news program "60 Minutes" on Sunday night?

Coming as it did on the heels of Kansas University's heart-stopping men's basketball victory over Davidson in the NCAA Midwest Regional final, the Morley Safer-hosted story seemed almost irrelevant.

Most of us around here know all about native son James and the Boston Red Sox, that the Beantowners have won two World Series in the four years James has been the club's senior advisor for baseball operations.

And we know James first started thinking outside the conventional baseball box more than three decades ago when he worked as a night watchman at the old Stokely-Van Camp bean plant in East Lawrence.

What we know that CBS didn't tell the nation, however, is that James is also a rabid KU men's basketball fan.

I realize the "60 Minutes" program is pre-packaged and lacks spontaneity, yet with all those promotional lead-ins during the KU-Davidson game, you'd think at least the post-game promo would have mentioned the context of James and the Jayhawks.

So how does James feel about the latest Kansas Final Four team?

"If KU plays against UNC the way they did against Davidson, it's going to be a long night," James told me via e-mail. "But this is certainly one of the most fun KU teams ever, I think."

Nothing makes a team more fun to watch than winning, and, in a sense, the 2008 Jayhawks are winning the same way the 2007 Red Sox did.

By that, I mean not a single member of the '07 Red Sox had what could be called a monster season, yet practically every Boston player had a very good year. You could say the same thing about the '08 Jayhawks. They don't have a signature player, but they have every base covered.

Kansas, for instance, is the only school headed to the NCAA Final Four without an AP first-team All-American. What's more, the Jayhawks don't even have a second-teamer. Or a third-teamer. Go figure.

Brandon Rush leads the Jayhawks with a 13.1 scoring average, and that's the second-lowest high-point total by a KU player in the last 34 years. Only Kenny Gregory's 12.8 ppg on Roy Williams' 1999-2000 team that finished 24-10 was lower.

However, right behind Rush are Mario Chalmers and Darrell Arthur at 12.7 ppg., followed by Darnell Jackson at 11.2 and Sherron Collins at 9.2. Next are Sasha Kaun and Russell Robinson at about 71â2 points apiece per game.

So the Jayhawks come up with points the way the Red Sox scored runs - by having a productive lineup from top to bottom.

But that's just the quantitative part. Another factor is involved. In baseball, they call it magic. In basketball, the term most often used is chemistry. James commented on that during his stint on "60 Minutes."

"It's mostly intangible," he said. "I mean, I don't understand most of it. I don't think that anybody in the Red Sox would tell you that we have that magic stuff figured out."

I doubt if anybody on the Jayhawks has the exact formula figured out, either. All we know is that it works, and that with 35 wins in 38 games it works at least 92 percent of the time.