4 Sports Things You May Have Missed This Weekend

Featuring cricket and multiple instances of Canadian disrespect

Hey friends! I hope you enjoyed a beautiful June weekend outdoors instead of watching sports or reading the essay I posted on Friday afternoon about low-level college football. I am still getting the hang of the details of newsletter writing, like “not posting essays about low-level football on Summer Friday Afternoons.

But now it’s Monday, so you can read that and catch up on some sports things you probably didn’t watch! If anybody can come up with a better name for my weekly roundup, I’ll gift you a subscription. (JK, they’re free!)

It’s Cricket Time in America

One of the benefits of living in the wealthiest countries in human history is that all the other countries are constantly trying to sell us on loving their sports. In the next decade, we’re hosting the World Cups in soccer, rugby (men’s and women’s) and for the next month, cricket. 16 of the 55 matches in the T20 World Cup will be held in the USA, with the rest scattered across the West Indies and the final in Barbados.

As hosts, Team USA got to participate in the tournament for the first time ever. (They came painfully close to qualifying in 2022, but lost a win-and-in game to the Netherlands with just a few balls to go.) And we got to play in the tournament’s opening game, and they queued up a beatable opponent: our most-hated rivals, the Scourge from the North, Canada. (Rest assured: I will never stop going in on Canada.) It was technically a rematch of the first ever international cricket match, an 1844 showdown in New York, although most of the players from that game have since retired.

Things looked bleak when the vile Canadians scored 194 runs in their innings, a massive number for the Americans to chase down in their tournament debut. But in stepped America’s new cricket hero, Queens-born Aaron Jones. And he had one of the most prolific performances in T20 World Cup history. You don’t need to really understand cricket to watch this video of him hitting the ball over the fence 10 times:

Jones had 94 on 40 balls, including 10 sixes, the last of which completed USA’s run chase. (To translate into American: He scored 94 runs on just 40 pitches, including 10 home runs and a walk-off.) Jones was just one away from the record for most sixes in a T20 World Cup match (West Indies legend Chris Gayle had 11) and only six runs away from being the 11th player in T20 World Cup history to score a century. He could’ve hit Gayle’s record if he hadn’t ended the game.

This was USA Cricket’s moment, stunning and easy for baseball brains to understand: We needed a bunch of runs, but we smashed the hell out of the ball over and over again and won.

Now all the Americans have to do is beat India or Pakistan to advance out of the group stages, which should be easy considering Team USA is literally undefeated all-time at the cricket World Cup.

It’s Canadian Hockey League Time in America

Did you enjoy that tidbit about an American team receiving a berth in a prestigious competition due to hosting duties and using that opportunity to break the spirit of our vile Canadian neighbors? Well you’re not going to believe this!

There are two ways of qualifying for the four-team Memorial Cup tournament, the pinnacle of Canadian junior hockey:

1. Win the OHL, QMJHL, or WHL, each of which are highly competitive 20-team leagues with lengthy playoff tournaments of their own

2. Host the tournament. And this is where the foolish Canadians messed up.

The Canadian Hockey League announced that the Saginaw Spirit would host this year’s Memorial Cup, the first south-of-the-border team to host since 1998. As American outcasts in a primarily Canadian league, the Spirit have fully America-themed team branding—their logo is a bald eagle which turns into an American flag, and they were the subject of a longtime running gag on The Colbert Report back in the day. And they understood their mission.

The Spirit were really good this year, finishing 50-16-2 and nearly winning the OHL’s Memorial Cup berth on their own merits. But they kept falling short of the London Knights, who finished just ahead of Saginaw in the regular season, beat the Spirit in a 4-2 series in the OHL playoffs, and won the Memorial Cup round robin matchup between the two teams. But Saginaw defeated the champions of the QMJHL and WHL to earn a spot in the winner-take-all championship game against the Knights in front of a raucous home crowd, and they beat the Knights in a thriller. Canucks draft pick Josh Bloom scored the go-ahead goal with just 20 seconds left in regulation, with the Spirit dogpiling on the ice while the Saginaw crowd went nuts:

It’s the first American Memorial Cup win since the Spokane Chiefs won in 2008. You have to assume the CHL will now disband all American-based teams in its leagues, like the CFL did when the Baltimore Stallions won the Grey Cup in 1995. It looks like we might no longer be able to joke about Canadian teams failing to win the Stanley Cup in a couple weeks, so I’m pivoting to joking about American teams winning the Canadian Hockey League..

RIP, Zombie Panthers

Birmingham Southern went on a deep run in the Division III baseball tournament, even after Birmingham Southern College closed down during the tournament. The 168-year old liberal arts college officially shut its doors on May 31st, the result of years of financial mismanagement and a loan denied by Alabama state treasurer Young Boozer III. (Really, I just wanted to talk about Alabama’s state treasurer being named Young Boozer III.) But the Panthers won their super regional to advance to this week’s DIII World Series, playing past their college’s expiration date.

The whole thing was presented with a “80’s movie about a sports team owned by a really evil rich guy who wants to shut them down for unexplained reasons but they win the title anyway” angle. They even had a spot on Good Morning America! It reminds me of the 2006 World Cup, when the team representing Serbia and Montenegro kept playing as their country officially split into two nations, one called Serbia and the other called Montenegro. But at least those guys still had countries to go home to after the World Cup! The BSC kids were playing for an entity that genuinely no longer existed. Their coaches had no jobs and they’ll have to figure out somewhere else to play going forward.

The Panthers kept the drama high. They beat Randolph-Macon on a two-out walk-off homer on Saturday night, but blew a five-run lead against Wisconsin-Whitewater on Sunday to end the school’s existence.

The Tank Bowl

The UFL was in dire need of late-season intrigue after its its playoff picture was fully decided with two weeks left in the regular season. So they had a great idea: Turn the last game of the season, a snoozer between the 1-8 Houston Roughnecks and the 1-8 Memphis Showboats into a battle for draft position. The UFL’s predecessor, the USFL, did the same thing in 2022, allowing the Michigan Panthers to select offensive tackle Jarrett Horst first overall in the 2023 draft.

Theoretically, it was a smart idea to inject some drama into an otherwise forgettable game. But it functionally looked a lot like a Week 18 game. There were no touchdowns in the first half and the most exciting play was a go-ahead pick-six by Houston that was eventually overturned due to an illegal block on the return. Memphis won 19-12, with all three touchdowns coming on run plays from the 2-yard line.

The Anti-Tank Bowl actually solved a long-running football argument. The reason late-season games between teams with poor records look so bad isn’t because they’re actively trying to lose. It’s because they’re late-season games between teams with poor records. They’re beaten-up, missing key players and in most cases, are not particularly good at full strength. Both Houston and Memphis lost their QB1 at some point in the season and waffled between ineffective backups; the Anti-Tank Bowl was the first start for Memphis’ season-opening QB3 Josh Love and the second for Houston backup Nolan Henderson. They combined for zero touchdowns.

And besides, Houston’s other football team won a Week 18 game they should’ve lost in 2022, costing them the first pick in the 2023 draft, and so far having the No. 2 pick has worked out just fine.