Keith Strudler

When I first started working on today’s commentary, I was planning on talking about torpedo shaped baseball bats, which is this relatively new phenomenon of moving the sweet spot of the bat a few inches inward that this year is taking the historically unchanging world of baseball bats by relative storm.

This is my last reasonable chance to talk about college basketball before it officially goes into the cooler of the American sporting offseason. Unlike the NFL or even college football, NCAA basketball is not a year-round sport, except to the obsessed or those working in the profession. For everyone else, now’s the time when we move on to the NBA playoffs or the NFL draft or baseball’s opening.

Successful football teams often have an unstoppable weapon. Like for Army football, it’s the triple option. For the Tom Brady New England Patriots, it’s the two minute drill.

This is 100% bragging, but I am currently leading my NCAA Tournament office pool of 29 people. Not tied for first, but singularly ahead of the field after two rounds. And I have my entire final four and seven of my elite eight still alive, meaning I’ve got a huge range of points ahead of me. For reference, I’m in the 99th percentile on the ESPN Bracket contest. I’m not sure I’ve been the 99th percentile anything. So I’m pretty proud of myself.

There’s going to be a lot of disagreement about the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Like whether Drake is the best upset pick or if Florida can win it all – and the answer is yes. But here’s something pretty much everyone can agree with. We’re all against UNC, or North Carolina. Except Tarheel fans, of course. But the rest of the country, we definitely want them to lose.

Say this for Rich Rodriguez, the previous and now new head football coach at West Virginia. He did what American Government threatened to do but couldn’t.

I apologize in advance for both the indulgence and getting in the weeds. But last weekend, I went to Ithaca, New York, to watch the Indoor Heptagonal Track and Field Championships, which ran about five hours both Saturday and Sunday in Cornell’s Barton Hall.

Famously in The Legend of John Henry, man battled and defeated machine in a test of strength and efficiency in digging a railroad tunnel. Of course, that effort cost Henry his life, and, as we know, only served as a precursor for bigger and faster machines that would inevitably replace humans in excruciating manual labor. The analogy is indirect, but the tale is still relevant in a looming conversation about baseball and automated officiating. More specifically, whether humans or machines are better at calling balls and strikes.

It’s not uncommon if you dedicate significant parts of your life to working in or talking about sports and the world feels like it’s on fire, you start wonder if you’re efforts are a bit glib, like you’re picking a new kitchen backsplash when the house just fell down.

There’s a bunch of reasons I like college sports more than professional. Some of it is the imperfection of the craft, like they still make mistakes. Some of it the number of teams and underdogs.