College basketball fever has entered one local classroom. And it's for credit.

For Rob Bryan, a student in Nancy Rosoff's "Heroes and Heartbreak: Sports in American Popular Culture" at Rutgers University-Camden, the NCAA focus is a beautiful thing.

A huge sports fan, he would be watching the postseason games anyway. And Rosoff's class, he said, has helped him view sports through a new lens.

"I pay attention to how the media cover games, how they create stories, how they shape the way people view the tournament," said Bryan, 20.

Tales of the underdog - the player with the sick mother or the chronically injured knee. TV segments about hoops dynasties. Portraits of temperamental stars. All make people look at games in ways they wouldn't otherwise, he said.

As part of "Heroes and Heartbreak," an honors seminar, students watch, discuss, and read and write about many different sporting events. They have attended a Rutgers women's basketball game and watched Chariots of Fire, the 1981 Oscar winner about two British sprinters in the 1924 Olympics.

Rosoff, a historian and Rutgers associate dean, is a sports nut. She studies women, sports and popular culture and has taught honors seminars about sports before. Each has a slightly different theme, she said. One focused on films about sports and another on Title IX, the 1972 law that brought parity to women's athletics.

This week, Rosoff helped her 14 students gear up for the men's and women's Final Fours, which run tomorrow through Tuesday.

After watching at least five games - a mix of men's and women's - class members will discuss the coverage, then write five- or six-page analyses.

Don't just pay attention to which teams shoot best from the foul line, Rosoff warned her pupils Wednesday as they pulled tournament brackets from their course material and studied them intently.

"Look for things that might represent women's basketball as opposed to men's basketball," Rosoff said. "There's 'the Final Four' and 'the Women's Final Four.' What does that say?"

Lindy Iannacone, 19, said she was a different kind of observer now.

"Usually when I'm watching the games, I'll flip through the channels. I'll only pay attention to the last five minutes. Now I pay attention to everything: the announcers, the commercials," she said.

Robert Falconiero has noticed a telling difference between men's and women's coverage.

"With the men's games, there's a focus on what they're going to do with athletics after school," said Falconiero, 19. "With the women's games, they talk about their majors and their careers after college."

The class isn't all scholarly, though.

"We have to spend time in mourning for the Rutgers basketball team," Rosoff said, referring to the celebrated women's hoops team, which the night before had dropped its Elite Eight game to powerhouse Connecticut.

Osi Eigbe, 18, was eager to dissect the game.

"The first 15 minutes, it was all Rutgers. But then all of a sudden it wasn't," Eigbe said, shaking his head sadly.

Connecticut "showed how players that aren't typically the stars can step up when they're needed," said Theo Langason, 18.

And, no, Rosoff, a Malvern resident, won't predict the outcome of either tournament. But she will say she has spent a lot of time parked in front of the TV lately.

"I've been watching basketball like crazy the past couple of nights," she said. "It's going to be an exciting weekend."