First, the basketball. Second, the baseball. Third, the football. It’s a straightforward day around here.
Gonzaga/Saint Mary’s, Round 3
It’s easy to make too much of one game when it’s the only thing on during its timeslot, and such could be the case with Gonzaga’s semifinal against San Francisco last night. The Zags looked dominant. The Zags looked lackadaisical. The Zags looked like an unstoppable force and then like a team that lacks the inner drive to make it through the right six games in a row unbeaten. In reality, the game didn’t tell us much about Gonzaga. But we paid attention to them, and we’ll pay attention to them tonight, with the WCC Championship the highest-billed of the six on the docket and the only one to feature even one NCAA Tournament at-large team.
For Saint Mary’s, the odds of a win are low, but they’ve done it before, just ten days ago, and they did it thoroughly that night. There wasn’t one thing Saint Mary’s did especially well in the matchup on the offensive end, but defensively, they kept Gonzaga out of its rhythm in a way we haven’t seen since last year’s national championship. Gonzaga scored just 0.80 points per possession. They average 1.19 points per possession, and have only been below 1.00 in the metric one other time this year, in that bizarre little post-Thanksgiving game against Tarleton State when they notched a 0.98. The game in Moraga wasn’t exactly slow, like the one against Tarleton was, but it was slower than most this team plays, and that general idea—forcing the game to be a half-court affair, rather than giving Gonzaga space to work with—is probably the key again tonight if Saint Mary’s is going to spring the upset.
We’ll see. Gonzaga should roll, but it’s not a gimme. 9:00 PM EST, ESPN.
Holy Jean-Baptiste, and Other Auto Bids
David Jean-Baptiste made one heck of a shot last night to send Chattanooga dancing and avoid what would have been a gutting loss to Furman for the Mocs, after UTC held the lead late and botched their attempt to foul up three. Chattanooga’s a talented team that’s struggled to stay healthy this year, with former Kansas big man Silvio De Sousa a familiar name down low. Their best win is still just a road victory over VCU, but they’ll be in competitive territory when the first round betting lines come out. They’ll also probably be a 13-seed, though there’s a chance they could nab a 12.
In the other conference championship, Georgia State took care of Louisiana-Lafayette to clinch the program’s first automatic bid since Ron Hunter left for Tulane. It’s hard to say where exactly Georgia State will land in the field, since it’ll depend which teams around them on current seed lists do and don’t win their conference tournaments, but we’ve been a bit low on them in our betting, so you may want to consider not listening to us when we say they don’t have much of a chance in the first round. They do force turnovers and grab offensive rebounds, and their defense has one of the longest average possession lengths in the country, all things that could cause trouble for the opposition. The question is whether they can score adequately, and the narrative that they haven’t lost since February 3rd purposefully looks away from who all they’ve played over that stretch.
Tonight, five more teams will punch their ticket (the tickets for Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s were punched months and weeks ago).
In the ASUN, Jacksonville visits Bellarmine, with the oddity that because Bellarmine’s not eligible for the NCAA Tournament until they finish their transition period into Division I, a Jacksonville loss would send regular season ASUN champ Jacksonville State dancing. That’ll be on ESPN2 at 5:00 PM EST.
In Rhode Island, Bryant hosts Wagner for the NEC Championship at 7:00 PM EST, also on ESPN2. Wagner was the class of the league until Elijah Ford went down about a month ago with an injury. They lost to Bryant in the regular season finale but have played like the better team so far in conference tournament games. The line is tight.
Simultaneously, UNC-Wilmington will be playing Delaware for the CAA Championship on CBSSN after the Blue Hens upset Towson decisively yesterday. UNC-Wilmington’s been a little-engine-that-could in conference play, nearly stealing the regular season crown away from the Tigers. They’re a slight underdog tonight despite being the higher-seeded team.
And in the third of the 7:00 championships, Wright State plays Northern Kentucky on ESPN. This year was the first since 2017 that neither grabbed a share of the Horizon League regular season title. It will not be the first since 2016 that neither took either a share of the regular season crown, the conference tournament title, or both.
Finally, at 9:00 PM EST, back on ESPN2, South Dakota State plays North Dakota State. The Jacks are only favored by two or three possessions, and given how fast they play, that isn’t a lot. South Dakota slowed them down last night, though, back-dooring an under (we didn’t bet on it in our published bets, and by the way we could really use Wagner, Saint Mary’s, and Delaware winning to get us back profitable on those, so thank you in advance for your vibes), but it wasn’t enough to make the game competitive. NDSU will need to score if their rivals to the south aren’t going to wrap up an entirely undefeated Summit League season and tournament (21 games). If you like getting into potential Cinderellas at this stage in the game, South Dakota State’s a fun option to consider.
Another MLB Deadline
There isn’t a whole lot of buzz, making it seem unlikely it’ll amount to anything, but evidently there’s a possibility of the MLB lockout ending tonight and a 162-game season being reinstated. We sure wouldn’t mind that.
In the meantime, Morning Consult released a poll overnight saying the plurality of baseball fans blame owners for the work stoppage, with more than twice as many self-identified baseball fans saying they view the owners as more responsible than players for the failure to reach a new CBA. Interestingly, self-characterized “avid” fans and those who say they typically attend at least one MLB game per season were slightly less likely to take the players side, though they still favored the players by a good share.
In another good tidbit, fans are potentially wary of playoff expansion, though the difference between the support/oppose ratios when offered various options aren’t huge. 56% strongly or somewhat support keeping ten playoff teams, while 20% somewhat or strongly oppose it. Those numbers change to 47% support and 27% oppose when it comes to expanding to twelve, 38% support and 36% oppose when the expansion number is fourteen, and 36% support and 39% oppose when the expansion number is sixteen. In other words, fans both support keeping playoffs the same and support slight expansion, but the bigger expansion gets, the more their feelings shift. Finally, fans supported the universal DH by a margin of 56% to 22%.
The takeaway here, for me, are that fans are on board with booing Tom Ricketts, and that feels important, especially with rumors floating around that the Ricketts family, famously loud when they cry poor, is considering buying Chelsea FC, one of the most valuable professional franchises on the globe.
Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, Drew Lock
You should take everything I say about the NFL with an unhealthy serving of salt, since I don’t follow the league all that closely, but a question I’m turning to with Aaron Rodgers is what’s changed for the Packers since they drafted Jordan Love. Has Rodgers aged better than they expected? Has he proven more willing to work with them under the current architecture than he was earlier in the Gutekunst/LaFleur regime? Has Love not developed as well as the team expected him to develop? Or was the thought with Love always just that they wanted a strong second option? It’s a curious thing.
While we’re at it, the Broncos sure gave up a lot for Russell Wilson. Not with Drew Lock, specifically, but with all those draft picks. Wondering if this’ll kickstart a successful Seahawks rebuild, or if Pete Carroll’s lost the plot up there in Seattle and the picks won’t turn into enough to have been worth it. Wilson’s still pretty young, but he’s coming off a rough, injury-affected year, and Denver plays in a gauntlet of a division where the Chiefs seem like they’re staying strong and the Raiders and Chargers are probably both getting better. Thankfully, Seattle’s deep enough into the thick of the NFC that the trade doesn’t affect the Packers too significantly, even if it seems like the Broncos were waiting on the Rodgers decision to pull the trigger.
***
If forced to choose just one game a timeslot, I’d say to go with Wagner/Bryant at 7:00 (the home court atmosphere should be fun), Saint Mary’s/Gonzaga at 9:00 (with all due respect to South Dakota State), and then I guess Chicago State/Utah Valley at 11:30 on ESPN+, mostly because Utah Valley’s got a non-zero chance at winning five straight games in the WAC ladder, making them an intriguing figure over there.
See you tomorrow, as conference tournaments only escalate.
