Weekend winners
UTC. War Mocs. An overpowering performance Sunday – was it as good as any this season, UTCMocs? – put UTC in the SoCon title game tonight. A win gets the Mocs in the Dance. Everyone together, and you in the back, let me hear you, “Let’s Go Mocs,” (clap-clap, clap-clap-clap).
SEC basketball upper crust. Auburn, Tennessee and UK completed dominant runs in their home gyms and look like top-10 teams nationally as we head into the second week of March. Each should be no worse than a three-seed, regardless of what happens in Tampa over the next several days.
Jordan Davis. Dear Lord, I know I’ve sinned. I promise to do better and say fewer bad words and be kinder to strangers. But whatever you do, please do not send Jordan Davis calling for your pound of flesh. Buckets of bucks, the 6-foot-5, 341-pound for Georgia All-American defensive tackle turned the combine on its ear over the weekend. He ran the fastest 40 time of any player over 310 pounds at 4.78 and had the longest broad jump for anyone close to that size. Yes, it’s the Underwear Olympics, and the next time a defensive tackle is asked to standing broad jump across the line to make a play will be the first. But when you weigh the size and the athleticism – Davis weighs 120 pounds more than Patrick Mahomes and is faster than Patrick Mahomes – my word that’s dump truck with the pedal pegged rolling downhill friends. How great was this performance, Todd McShay said on ESPN over the weekend that he had always had Adrian Peterson, Calvin Johnson and Vernon Davis on his ‘Rushmore’ of combine performances, and Davis grabbed the final spot on the monument.
Scottie Scheffler. The rankings are computer-generated and scan at least a year, which is fine for the designation of the world’s top-ranked player. The world’s best player at the moment is Scheffler, is as long as anyone and putted with the steely nerves of a big-city Democrat going to a debate in Dunlap. And the big guy keeps cashing tickets with sterling Sunday performances. (Side question: Scottie is worse than Freddie in the ‘ie’ or ‘y’ names that really should be shortened when you become a grown up, right? Discuss.)
Bonus pick: NBA highlights this weekend. Whether it was Nikola Jokic dropping his second 40-point triple double of the season (all other Nights players in their history have one such performance), Ja Morant continuing to look like the most exciting young player in the Association, Jayson Tatum dropping 50-plus on the Nets or LeBron looking 10 years younger with 56 against the Warriors on Saturday, the NBA was filled with showstoppers this weekend. (Side note: Tatum now has two of the top four scoring performances in Boston Celtics history, and when you are talking Celtics history, well, kudos Mr. Tatum. It’s not like we’re saying two of the top four performances in Kings history here, people.)
Bonus pick, part II: Kentucky and local star Rhyne Howard grabbed the SEC women’s basketball title with a 64-62 upset over top-seeded and top-ranked South Carolina. The seventh-seeded Lady Cats were the lowest seed to win the SEC tournament since the event started seeding teams.
Weekend losers
Viktor Hovland. Dude’s a great player. No one has been that bad with the blade on a Sunday since Sam from “The Brady Bunch.” Wow, Holland was in position to grab a title and looked meager in the moment, if we’re being honest. As someone who has invested in Holland winning a major this year at plus-1000, gotta tell you I’m less confident this morning about those prospects. By a wide measure.
Wisconsin. What was that? A win over last place Nebraska – at home mind you – and you clinch the Big Ten title and no worse than a 2 seed by almost every measure. And Wisconsin gagged like a toddler taking a pull off a Marlboro.
MLB fans. Yeah, more games will be canceled at some point this week. Alas. And it really feels like these sides are not even close. Or dare we say, even in the same ballpark. Here’s what Glen Chaplin, the spokesman for the owners, told reporters after this weekend’ counter proposal from the players: “We were hoping to see movement in our direction to give us additional flexibility and get a deal done quickly. The players’ association chose to come back to us with a proposal that was worse than Monday night and was not designed to move the process forward. On some issues, they even went backward. Simply put, we are deadlocked. We will try to figure out how they respond, but nothing in this proposal makes it easy.”
Kenny Pickett. OK, the combine is the underwear Olympics. And Pickett had a great year for Pitt and will be one of the first two or tree QBs off the board. But dude measured an 8.5-inch hand, and while that in the grand scheme of things, really only recalls the Dad joke about hand size – “Know what guys with big hands have – big gloves” – the history and the tape are a cause for concern with a metric like this. First, Pickett had the most fumbles in college football over the last few seasons, something that is a direct corollary to hand size. Second, Todd McShay said Pickett’s worst game and worst day at the Senior Bowl practices were in hard rain, something that also can be impacted by hand size. As for history, well, Pickett’s hands are smaller than every other NFL starter and only one QB picked in the first round in the last quarter-century had hands that small. And that was Mike Vick, and he may have been a smidge faster than Pickett.
Final chapter?
I gotta admit, I was tickled by everything about the ending for Coach K at Cameron.