Tyler Hansbrough was named the AP's player of the year today.

I can't say that I'm surprised. The North Carolina center has rightfully been lauded throughout the season and did so on a wire-to-wire top-10 team as well.

His margin was 56-15 over the Kansas State freshman (myself being one of the 15), with Memphis' Chris Douglas-Roberts earning the other vote.

That it was a landslide is a surprise.

Understand, this vote was taken before the NCAA tournament, so any arguments about postseason success should be thrown out the door. It's irrelevant.

There are two philosophies in voting for a player of the year. One is to choose the best player on one of the elite teams. The other is to choose the best player, regardless of team, while attempting to adjust for competitive differences.

I respect both of those. I very much subscribe to the second, but can understand why other folks prefer the first.

What I can't understand is how someone can say "Player X is the better player, but Player Y is the player of the year." Not "more talented" player, but "better" player. And maybe more than any other year, that rationale has been trotted out with Player X (Beasley) and Player Y (Hansbrough).

It's painfully illogical if the point of the exercise. And while I think there are still enough voters who either believe (a) Hansbrough is the better player or (b) team accomplishments should be factored into individual honors to have tilted the voting to Hansbrough, I am dubious a whopping 77.8 percent of the electorate truly thought the North Carolina star was the nation's best player.

Not that Beasley will mind all that much. He'll be doing well for himself all too soon, and Hansbrough will possess not only some individual hardware but perhaps a national title as well. And no will care a bit about some voting.

But it's still interesting to see what you can learn from it. Some analysts brought up the veteran vs. freshman deal. There's obviously the team accomplishment factor. And then there's the "he works so hard" vs. "he makes it look so easy" line of thinking --- which is incredibly lame, by the way --- that some folks see as an argument stepped in sociological (and perhaps even racial) codewords.

It's probably all of them in some combination that I'm probably neither smart enough nor qualified enough to distill into a formula of some kind. Just like I'm apparently not sharp enough to discern how the better player isn't the player of the year.

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, after all.

--- Patrick Stevens