To Voters for the Nancy Lieberman Award:

The task of picking "the best" of anything is always hard. It is tough enough for those of you who have votes in the national polls to accurately fill out your top-25 ballots every week when you have probably not seen the vast majority of the teams you are trying to rank play live, or even on TV.

The task of picking the best point guard in collegiate women's basketball, as the Detroit Rotary Club has asked you to do, is even more daunting.

But when you are asked to pass your judgement on a group of athletes whom you have not seen play, there is only one place you can possibly turn to complete your charge: the numbers.

You are all sportswriters and, let's face it, we are basically a huge fraternity of sports geeks. We all love numbers.

I know that deep down in the depths of your soul, you know that there is nothing more satisfying than pulling out a completely obscure statistic that helps you win a heated and probably pointless debate about sports.

While covering the Lady Lions this year, I have heard coach Rene Portland maintain all year that Jess Strom is the best point guard in the country, week-in and week-out. And it is not just her. After Strom single-handedly picked apart Wisconsin last week, Badgers coach Lisa Stone said: "If Jess Strom isn't the best point guard in the country, I don't know who is."

After hearing this, and seeing Strom's name on the list of finalists for the award you are trying to distribute, I decided to see if the numbers agreed with this sentiment.

Obviously just looking at the numbers you can find in a box score wasn't good enough. So I went on a personal online quest to find an accurate efficiency rating that would allow me to rank the 10 finalists for the Lieberman Award.

First, I tried to apply John Hollinger's immensely complicated Player Efficiency Rating (PER) system. This is a method often used to rank NBA players, but my attempts to grasp its complexities were fairly feeble, and I gave up after about 15 minutes when my head was thumping and my notebook looked like something out of this English major's nightmares.

Next, I tried the Prouty rating system, but didn't buy into the assumptions that went into creating the formula.

Finally, I settled on the Tendex System created by Dave Heeran about 30 years ago, sat down with my laptop, and went to town. Anyone that wants an explanation of how the system works or how I crunched the numbers, feel free to e-mail me -- I somehow doubt that I'll be getting too many takers on that one.

Anyway, turns out that what the numbers said surprised me.

It seems as though Jess Strom is at least one of the best point guards in the nation, if not the very best, but that was no surprise. What was surprising was how poor the numbers of some of these supposedly "elite" point guards looked when placed next to their peers'.

I assume that Jamey Carey of Texas will be a name that turns up on many of your ballots, and there is no doubt she has had a stellar career. But her efficiency rating is nearly 33 percent lower than Strom's and 50 percent lower than the player with the highest rating -- Oklahoma's Dionnah Jackson.

Carey is having a mediocre year on a team that has failed to live up to expectations, yet she still found herself on the final watch list for the Wooden Women's Player of the Year award. So did Jackson, much more deservedly so because no player in the country does more for her team than she does.

Jackson leads her team in every statistical category. Yes, she is a 5-foot-9 point guard and she leads her team in rebounds and blocks.

North Carolina's Ivory Latta has to be considered another favorite for the award, despite the fact that she ranks near the bottom of our efficiency rankings. Her name is also on the Wooden Watch List.

So is Rutger's Cappie Pondexter. Her numbers are gaudy and her story as the leader of the underdog Scarlet Knight squad that knocked off Tennessee, Connecticut and LSU is noteworthy. But Pondexter has started only three games all season. The fact that she is even a finalist shows how uniformed the world of women's college basketball is.

Strom's name is inexplicably not on the Wooden Watch List, and I have to assume that her chances of winning the award that you are voting for are equivalent to that of a snowball in the Sahara.

I am not writing this simply to push Jess Strom's cause. In fact, if I had a vote, it would be hard to vote against a player as dominant as Jackson.

The reason I am writing this is because in the five years the Lieberman Award has been handed out, it has been grabbed by a player from Connecticut all five times. No doubt Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi were deserving, but ...

The world of women's college basketball is changing. Parity is now the norm, and the days of single-team domination appear to be over. Women's college basketball is played, and played well, at schools other than Connecticut, Tennessee, Duke and Texas. Here's to hoping you take this into account before casting your vote.

Sincerely,

Justin Kunkel