Bestowing the nation’s symbolic basketball on… Kansas?

“If the United States had an official sport, what would it be? Baseball can call itself the national pastime until the sun burns out, but the correct answer is good old American football….

“But what if you had to assign one sport to each state, and could use each of those sports just once? How would you disperse our favorite pastimes among the 50 states and Washington, D.C.?…”

— From “The United Sports of America” by Josh Levin at Slate (Oct. 7, 2013)

OK, so Kansas gets the basketball. North Carolina got Ole Roy.

And there’s this exchange in the comments:

“I don’t want to be the person to inform North Carolina it didn’t get men’s college basketball.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty ridiculous. On the other hand, Kansas doesn’t really have anything else….”