The NCAA men’s basketball tournament started on Thursday and last night there was history made. For the first time in tournament history a 16th seeded team beat a #1 seed.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County or UMBC beat the #1 seeded University of Virginia 74-54 in 1st round tournament action last night. Not only was Virginia a #1 seed, but they where the #1 overall seed in the entire tournament.
The game was tied at 21 all after the 1st half and it looked as though the game was setting up the way Virginia likes to play. UMBC scored the first six points of the 2nd half and they where on their way to building a double digit lead. With 16:24 left to play Joe Sherburne hit a 3-pointer to give UMBC their first double digit lead at 36-24. Virginia was never able to get the lead under 12 points after that. As the game went on UMBC slowly added to their lead and in the end they picked up a 20 point win74-54 over Virginia.
Senior guard Jairus Lyles was the games leading scorer with 28 points for UMBC. Sherburne added 14 points while K.J. Maura had 10 points for UMBC. Arkel Lamar had a double-double for the Retrievers scoring 12 points and grabbing 10 rebounds.
Kyle Guy and Ty Jerome each scored 15 points to lead Virginia in scoring. Seven players in total scored for the Cavaliers.
Of course with the win UMBC advances to the 2nd round of the tournament. On Sunday they will play the Kansas State Wildcats. Kansas State advanced to the 2nd round with a 69-59 victory over the Creighton Blue Jays.
Of course one of the first questions that’s going to come up with you and your friends after this upset is, how’s your bracket? Well here’s what I think is a humorous story about my brackets.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know and or watch a lot of college basketball, but like a lot of people I enjoy filling out a tournament bracket. Now one of the things I always do is just fill out one bracket. While I understand that the more brackets you fill out the better chance you have to be right I just can’t handle filling out more than one bracket. Accidentally this year I ended up filling out two. I joined the group I was in last year and set up e reminder for myself so I could go in and fill out the bracket. When I got the reminder I clicked the link and it brought me to a blank bracket; so I filled it out. What I didn’t realize was the link to me to a generic bracket and not the one I had set up earlier. Since I was to lazy to go in and delete the work I had just done that I decided to just go ahead and fill out the second bracket.
Now it’s time for me to show off my college basketball knowledge. In the first bracket I did I had the Virginia Cavaliers winning the whole thing. Yes, you got it the same Virginia team that was just upset by the #16 seed last night. My other three Final Four teams Houston, Michigan State and Purdue did all advance, but my champion in this bracket was gone.
Now admittedly I took a few more chances with my second bracket because I didn’t want it to look to similar to my other bracket. After listening to some of the experts who have been watching college basketball all season I thought that the University of Arizona would be a good choice to win it all in my second bracket. Well on Thursday Arizona was beaten 89-68 by the University of Buffalo. Now again my other three Final Four teams Xavier, Villanova and Michigan State (again) all advanced.
As you can clearly see my college basketball knowledge really helped me out in picking a tournament winner. So as you can guess my bracket is a bit of a mess. Feel free to let me know how your bracket held up through Round 1.
We’re inching closer and closer to the start of the baseball season and there are a few teams out there still adding some of the lingering free agents.
There had been reports that the Washington Nationals where interested in added one more veteran starting pitcher. It seemed as though Jake Arrieta was going to be their target, but they where waiting for his asking price to go down. After the Philadelphia Phillies locked up Arrieta with a three year $75 million dollar deal the Nationals had to start looking elsewhere. Of course the first name to come to mind would’ve been Alex Cobb, but the Nationals went with some one else.
The Nationals chose to go with former 2011 American League Rookie of the Year Jeremy Hellickson, who they signed to a minor league contract with and invitation to the major league side of spring training. Hellickson made 20 starts for the Phillies last season before they traded him to the Baltimore Orioles where had made 10 starts. Over those 30 starts Hellickson was 8-11 with a 5.43 ERA covering 164 innings.
Hellickson pitched well for the Phillies in 2016, but didn’t have any luck on the free agent market then either and re-signed with Philadelphia for the qualifying offer of $17.2 million dollars. After what was a down year in 2017 Hellickson will be given a chance to earn the 5th starters spot with the Nationals.
Are you worried about Shohei Ohtani? In an inning and a third against the Colorado Rockies Ohtani gave up 7 runs on 7 hits. Now this was just his second spring start, but in his first start he also pitched 1 1/3rd innings. His numbers weren’t that much better in that start as he gave up 2 runs on one hit which was a home run.
I’m not sure if panic would be the right word to use here, but there has to be some concern from the Angels as Ohtani hasn’t hit particularly well this spring either. In 20 at bats Ohtani has 2 hits and has struck out 7 times.
I’m sure if you could get the Angels to comment on Ohtani they’d tell you that they expected their to be a learning curve, but with the season getting under way in less than two weeks you have to wonder how they’re really feeling.
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