— Baseball season starts Wednesday night; Bronx at the Giants in San Francisco on Netflix, then a lot more games on Thursday/Friday. There are seven interleague series the first weekend this year.
— Tulsa 83, Wichita State 79
Tulsa led 30-6 early in the game.
Wichita led 72-70 with 4:54 left in the game.
Tulsa shot 12-29 on the arc, only 36.1% inside arc.
AAC rivals wound up splitting four games with each other this year.
— New Mexico 84, Saint Joseph’s 69
Visiting Hawks led 39-37 at halftime.
New Mexico was 22-28 on foul line, St Joe’s 8-11
Tomislav Buljan scored 27 points, had 11 rebounds.
St Joe’s was only 9-33 on the arc.
— North Carolina is firing basketball coach Hubert Davis, after the Tar Heels lost in the first round of the NCAA’s for second year in a row. Davis was 126-54 in his five years in Chapel Hill, 68-30 in ACC games, 7-4 in the NCAA Tournament.
The thing about North Carolina is that they’ve always hired alums/assistant coaches; this time, there is no logical replacement for Davis. Curious to see who they hire.
— Iowa Hawkeyes are in the Sweet 16; in their last ten games, their star Bennett Stirtz has sat out a total of three minutes, so he’s averaged 40.2 minutes/game in a sport where the games are only 40 minutes long.
— NIL budgets for teams in the Sweet 16:
$12M- Duke
$11.5M-Arkansas
$10.5M-Michigan, St John’s
$9.75M- Arizona
$9.5M- Alabama, Tennessee, UConn
$9M- Illinois
$8.75M- Purdue
$8.5M- Michigan State, Houston
$8.25M- Iowa State
$7.5M- Texas
$6.75M- Nebraska
$6.25M- Iowa
— Famous birthdays, March 25th
Joe Carollo, 86
Bonnie Bedelia, 78
Lee Mazzilli, 71
Avery Johnson, 61
Sarah Jessica Parker, 61
Tom Glavine, 60
Domenick Lombardozzi, 50
Kyle Lowry, 40
Pete Crow-Armstrong, 24
— Tennessee Tech hired Tobin Anderson as its new basketball coach; Anderson was at Fairleigh Dickinson when they upset Purdue in the first round of the 2023 NCAA’s, the second time a #16 seed upset a #1-seed. He then coached Iona for two years, going 33-34, 20-18 in MAAC games.
Tennessee Tech has had eight straight losing seasons; they haven’t been in NCAA’s since 1963.
— Tuesday night during the Dodgers-Angels exhibition, Dodgers TV had third base coach Dino Ebel miked for the whole game, and TV analyst Eric Karros asked him questions, so I learned a lot about the game, about coaching third base. Great TV that you can’t do during the regular season, but it was excellent TV.
— Monday night, Dodger P Roki Sasaki had a tough time against the Angels; he faced 14 hitters, didn’t give up any hits, but he walked six guys, hit two others, only got six outs. 66 pitches, only 32 strikes.
— Last year, Cleveland Guardians were 42-25 after the All-Star break, best record in the major leagues
— My godson is an assistant high school baseball coach on Long Island; apparently they use the pitch-com device during games, where the catcher presses a button on a device so the pitcher knows what pitch he is calling.
Surprised to hear that high schools use pitch-com, but they do.
— NFL updates:
Kansas City Chiefs signed TE Travis Kelce for three years, $54.7M
Seattle Seahawks signed WR Jaxon Smith-Njigba for four years, $168.8M.
Cincinnati Bengals signed 41-year old QB Joe Flacco for one year, $6M.
— About 10 years ago, I’m in Las Vegas for the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, I’m staying at the MGM Grand. It is the first game of the day, so its like 10am in Las Vegas, I was on my first Cherry Coke of the day.
I’m sitting next to three young guys; the game is about eight minutes in, and a kid hits a jumper to make the score 15-12, something like that. The three young guys explode, start hugging each other and giving each other high-5’s.
I ask the guy next to me, “Was that your brother who made that shot? Why you so happy?”
“First to 15 man!!! That hoop won our bet; we had Northern Iowa to get to 15 points first”
Turns out I had no idea you could bet on which team got to 15 points first in a game; I’m glad I didn’t know that, would’ve spent lot of time researching those numbers.
