5 sports things you missed Memorial Day Weekend

Everybody is mad about the NCAA baseball bracket, an international hockey hack, and more

I decided that I should send out a Monday morning newsletter listing great sports things you probably missed over the weekend. I figured that would be especially useful for Memorial Day Weekend, when there are a) a lot of things happening in sports you may not follow and b) a lot of reasons to miss out on sports, because of hot dogs, warm days, and cold beer.

That said, I wasn’t sure whether people would want to read it. But something happened this weekend which made me decide I was gonna go for it anyway. (I’ll explain later.) I’ll try to write it every week—TBD on the number of items and obscurity of sports covered.

I called it “5 Sports Things You Missed” even though I’m guessing you probably heard about at least 1.5 of them. I’ll think about a better title!

Enjoy!

Everybody is mad about the NCAA baseball bracket

In an absolute miracle, six schools whose athletic directors serve on the members of the NCAA baseball selection committee benefitted from borderline decisions made by the NCAA baseball selection committee. A quick rundown:

• The chairman of the selection committee is Coastal Carolina’s AD. Sure enough, Coastal was named one of the “last four in” by the committee—two days after their retiring coach, Gary Gilmore, gave a goodbye press conference in response to the team’s final loss of the Sun Belt tournament. Sorry Gary—vacation’s gonna have to wait.

• Indiana was also named one of the last four in with an AD on the committee. Meanwhile, Troy swept Coastal and won a series against Indiana, but was left out.

• The top 16 seeds get to host this weekend’s regional round of the tournament, making the cut line between the 16- and 17-seeds a big deal. East Carolina’s AD is on the committee, and East Carolina got the 16 seed.

• The top 8 seeds remaining after the regional round get to host Super Regionals, making the cut line between the 8- and 9-seeds a big deal; Florida State’s AD is on the committee, FSU got the 8 seed.

• TCU won four of five games against Kansas State, knocked the Wildcats out of the Big 12 tournament, and finished the season with a higher RPI and KPI. But Kansas State’s AD was on the selection committee, and—you’re never going to believe this—Kansas State made the tournament while TCU did not.

• Indiana State’s AD is on the committee and the Sycamores got an auto-bid after losing in the Missouri Valley Tournament. You know what? Hell yeah. You guys deserve it. Roll Trees! Win the whole damn thing! Let Robbie Avila pitch!

The committee also included 11 of the 14 teams from the SEC, a record for one conference. That includes five teams that went 13-17 in SEC play. One of the biggest exclusions was the College of Charleston, whose head coach Chad Holbrook was deeply emotional when discussing the snub. Holbrook seemed particularly baffled because when he went 13-17 at an SEC program, he missed the tournament and resigned. Now that’s apparently good enough.

All these decisions are considered somewhat reasonable by college baseball folks. But this isn’t worth it. There is no world in which athletic directors are so much better at selecting tournament fields than a computer-based formula or unaffiliated experts/media members that it’s outweighs the negatives from annual allegations of bias and impropriety. But why would athletic directors endorse that system when they could keep one where they get to pretend they’re smarter than everybody?

An international hockey hack

Czechia won the IIHF world championship for the first time since English speakers were directed to call the country “Czechia.” They’re so pumped about it they’re shaking public transportation. The MVP of the championship game was Bruins star David Pastrnak, who broke a scoreless tie with 10 minutes left in the championship game. He seemed much happier than he was last week, when the Bruins got knocked out of the playoffs by the Panthers.

Hockey is unique among major pro sports in that it holds an international world championship every year. Even more unique: it holds this world championship during the postseason of the sport’s most popular pro league. NHL players are free to participate, as long as their NHL season is over, leading to an unusual dynamic: You can win the tournament with NHL stars, so long as your NHL stars don’t do so well in the NHL postseason.

This year, nobody benefited from this arrangement more than the Czechs, who got multiple key mid-tournament additions after Bruins and Hurricanes were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs. (Team USA didn’t add any eliminated players; I feel like “fly to another continent to keep playing hockey after your long season” is a less enticing pitch than “go home after your long season, but keep playing hockey for a couple of weeks.”) Carolina’s Martin Nečas had seven points in just five games after crossing the pond; Pastrnak was the championship game hero.

Every sport should do this. We viciously mock NBA players when they get knocked out of the playoffs as if it’s a crime to be great-but-not-elite, or elite-but-not-the-GOAT. Meanwhile NHL players get to GO BECOME A HERO IN THEIR HOMELAND when they lose in the postseason. Clearly there’s one solution: FIBA World Cup held every May in Cancun.

A brilliant foot ruined my weekend

The best game I watched this weekend was the women’s lacrosse national championship between Northwestern and Boston College. Northwestern was the heavy favorite—the reigning national champion with the all-time leading goal-scorer in NCAA history, Izzy Scane. They looked set to repeat, scoring six goals before BC could even put a shot on net.

But the Eagles rallied back. Northwestern trailed 14-13 in the game’s closing seconds, but seemed destined to tie it up as they hurled a flurry of shots at the BC goal. After a BC foul, Northwestern ran a perfect set play that sprung Dylan Amonte 1-on-1 with the net. But BC goalie Shea Dolce made an absolutely ludicrous 1-on-1 leaping kick save to preserve the lead and secure the title.

What turned things around for Boston College? Some are saying it has to do with my decision to tweet the video of Vince Carter mouthing IT’S OVER! IT’S OVER! after Northwestern took a 5-0 lead. At publishing time, I haven’t been able to reach any members of the BC lax team to determine whether my tweet was a motivating factor, as they are too busy celebrating their championship.

A very big win for a very small country

Formula 1 is a party for obnoxiously rich people disguised as a sporting event, which is why it fits perfectly in Monaco, which is a party for obnoxiously rich people disguised as a sovereign nation. The Monaco race leans especially hard away from the “competitive sporting event” aspect, as the country is so small that the famous racetrack built on its streets allows virtually no opportunities for cars to pass one another. There were literally no overtakes among the top 10 racers in Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix, who pottered around the breathtakingly beautiful circuit at sightseeing slow speeds and finished in the same order they started. It reflects the Monegasque national anthem, whose chorus is about how nothing in Monaco will ever change. (Seriously! Those are the lyrics!)

And on Sunday, they actually got to sing that song. The race was won from pole position by Charles Leclerc, an actual born-and-raised native of Monaco. It’s sort of like if someone from New York grew up to play for the Knicks and won the NBA championship, except New York is an actual place with millions of residents and Monaco is a yacht harbor with a seat at the UN.

Monaco has just 38,000 citizens, most of which are foreigners taking advantage of its status as a tax haven. As such, it has almost no homegrown sports culture. Monaco is one of just a few nations which does not even attempt to qualify for the World Cup. The most famous Monegasque athlete (not including Leclerc or famous tennis players who “live” in Monaco for tax reasons) is… the reigning Prince. Albert II competed in five Olympics in the bobsled, generally finishing close to last. (Ever wonder who finished behind the Jamaican bobsled team from Cool Runnings? Prince Albert did!) Monaco is home to highly successful soccer and basketball teams owned by a Russian oligarch which compete in the French league systems, but nobody goes to the games. This year AS Monaco finished second in Ligue 1, but dead last in attendance, with just 7,500 fans per game. (Leaders by “percentage of national population!”)

But Leclerc is legitimately Monegasque. He’s not French, although they did play the French national anthem when he won the Formula 2 championship. He grew up in The Money Country dreaming of winning his hometown’s biggest event—but his first two attempts at winning Monaco resulted in failures to finish the course. In his third, he failed to start the race. There was talk of “a Monaco curse,” but now Leclerc has pulled it off. They played the right anthem on Sunday, and I think they’d been waiting a while to do that.

Send it in, Big Man

On Saturday night the last Pac-12-sponsored sporting event took place, as Arizona walked off USC in the league’s conference championship game. Within 36 hours, the legendary Bill Walton passed away, as if he couldn’t bear to live in a world without his beloved Conference of Champions.

There will be better eulogies, so I won’t write a eulogy. I’m too young to have seen Walton as a dominant college superstar or an NBA MVP. But I did listen to him call plenty of college hoops games in the middle of the night. I learned a lot about nature, geography, and life. Sometimes, I even learned about basketball.

Walton was regularly driven to fits of ecstasy by well-played ball. He’d lose his mind over a big man making a pass out of the double-team to create a wide-open dunk for a teammate. It just so happened that every once in a while, his joy for basketball would be momentarily outshined by his joy for something else, and he’d go on a rant about animal migration patterns during a tight game when any other announcer would simply give updates on what was happening on the court.

Bill Walton understood sports are not the only thing worth caring about. He approached every broadcast fully aware he was calling a game, unserious by definition. But that understanding didn’t prevent Walton from being passionate about sports, or from appreciating the dedication people have for them. He found beauty in caring deeply about something which ultimately doesn’t matter that much; it was one of a few million things about life he treated as transcendent.

In short, he was the all-time best guide to sports fandom. Like I said, I wasn’t sure whether anyone would want to read this weekly roundup, but then I thought about Bill Walton, and decided I should tell people about things they can celebrate every week. Thanks for everything Bill—you won’t be on our TV’s anymore, but I bet you’ll find a way to keep in touch.