Darren Collison (UCLA)

With college basketball tipping off this week, we put you up on some players to watch on the way to the Final Four in San Antonio…

Had Arron Afflalo stayed at UCLA rather than enter the ‘07 NBA Draft, the Bruins would be a popular pick to win the national championship this year. After playing in the NCAA title game in ’06 and going back to the Final Four last season, they would have returned arguably the nation’s best perimeter trio in Afflalo, PG Darren Collison and SF Josh Shipp, plus standout PF Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and stud freshman Kevin Love – already being compared to UCLA legend Bill Walton – controlling the middle.

The Bruins can still pull a Final Four three-peat, however, if Collison does his job and brings the abundance of talent together on the floor. The 6-1 junior, who served an apprenticeship under Jordan Farmar before taking over the reigns, averaged 12.7 points, 5.7 assists and 2.2 steals last year, putting up 20 points, 6 dimes and 3 steals against Cal in the Pac-10 tournament, then dropping 14 points and five steals against Kansas in the Big Dance. But even though Collison was a first-round pick on a lot of ’07 mock drafts along with Afflalo, he decided to stay in Westwood and shoot for that elusive championship.

Collison is a lockdown defender with excellent court vision and a pair of jets attached to his feet (both his parents were All-American sprinters in college and represented Guyana in international competition), but he’s got some work to do. First and foremost, he’s prone to turn the ball over too much: Darren had seven turnovers apiece in the aforementioned Cal and Kansas games, handed it over six times apiece in games against USC and Texas A&M, and also posted five-turnover games against Oregon State and Cal State-Fullerton during the season.

It isn’t just talk when they say Tournament success is all about the backcourt. UCLA lost its top guard when Afflalo bounced, but his partner-in-crime could end up rocking the ring that they couldn’t get together.