Sweet assassin.(college basketball player Casey Jacobsen)

Stanford finally has its missing piece --a supremely confident superstar --in nice guy Casey Jacobsen

Less than 24 hours have passed since Casey Jacobsen's brilliant second half against USC helped him retain the title of "best player on the nation's best team." It also is less than 24 hours before the next challenger, UCLA, will force him into one of his worst games and alter his title to "best player on one of the nation's best teams."

But for now, and these times are rare, Jacobsen's mind isn't on basketball. His mother, Becky, is in town with some of her friends for the UCLA game, and dinner is fast approaching on the agenda.

Standing outside Maples Pavilion, as students lay out sleeping bags to camp for tickets to the next day's game, Jacobsen is wearing a T-shirt, droopy sweat pants and a black hat that is on backward. He needs some better clothes to wear, and for that matter, a reservation would be nice.

Nice. Hmmm. That word fittingly describes him. He is polite as can be. Articulate. An excellent student at Stanford. Stanford, for crying out loud!

The guilty pleasure of this laid-back southern California guy is watching Dawson's Creek or Temptation Island And now he's working his cell phone trying to figure out how to get nicer clothes and reservations at a nice restaurant so he can have a nice dinner with his mother and her friends. Nice, nice, nice. Yes, fitting indeed.

Or is it? New Mexico's Marlon Parmer, whose Lobos played victim No. 17 on Stanford's string of 20 straight before the Bruins' upset last Saturday, says: "That dude's a killer. He's a trained killer." New Mexico coach Fran Fraschilla follows by saying: "(Casey) looks like a surfer, but he plays like an assassin."