Lot’s happening in the world of sports this past week, NFL Free agency continues, the madness is in full effect and apparently there was some baseball world championship thingy. Let’s jump in.

Every Free Agent is signing with a Super Bowl Contender:

You may not follow the whole NFL free agency scene like I do, so you may miss some of the comments after a player signs. Every player that signs with another team has a glaring endorsement of how great the team is. Which makes sense. They can’t be like Morgan Freeman in Hard Rain and say “We just want the money!”. I have actually never seen Hard Rain. But for some reason I distinctly remember him yelling that in the preview that was on tv way too much. Anyway…of course players who leave for more money are going to say can’t wait to be a part of a great team, this is a championship caliber team, etc. But some are certainly more believable. Recently Juan Thornhill said that Cleveland had all the pieces or something to that effect. He could be right but Watson looked terrible last year, their offense is uninventive and the defense was sort of eh, unless they were playing Joe Burrow before the Bengals started playing well. Also, they are the Browns. They never win anything. Since 1995, they have two playoff appearances and 1 playoff win. To put that in perspective, I was 16 in 1995. I am not 16 now. The even funnier one in my opinion, was Adam Thielen. He is now a panther. When giving reasons for picking the Panthers one of the reasons was to win a championship. The Panthers have been a disaster for most of their time as an organization. They currently don’t have a quarterback on their roster. Oh wait, I think they signed Andy Dalton. Like I said, the don’t have a quarterback.

The Jet jets for the Jets:

Mecole Hardman is now a Jet. His nickname is the Jet so it is fitting. Hardman got mixed reviews from Chiefs fans. Many were critical that he never performed up to expectations. While others said he never got the opportunity. Last year was that opportunity and he was somewhat effective but then he had a weird abdominal injury that kept him out most of the season. Perhaps we will never know what Hardman could be. But while many probably don’t care that he is gone, I for one always liked him. He and Pat always seemed to be a little off though so they never reached their full potential together but Hardman was fast, resilient and great around the goal line. He had some huge plays in the playoffs and was definitely a weapon. You could argue that there isn’t much he can do that Toney can’t do. However, even though Hardman was hurt last year, Toney is always hurt. Hopefully we draft another fast guy to run jet sweeps. Can’t have enough of those. I wish Hardman the best of luck…although I am also sort of cheering against the Jets because of Rodgers shenanigans. Anyway, Hardman was a part of the greatest runs in Chiefs history. Thanks for the memories, Jet.

Who has a good Bracket?

You get a busted bracket! You get a busted bracket! You get a busted bracket! Everybody gets a busted bracket!!! This is what I imagined Oprah was screaming last weekend as teams like Purdue, Arizona, ku, and Duke went down. I texted my sister and said my bracket is a disaster. And she said everybody’s bracket is a disaster. On Sunday night I texted my brother and said, I don’t have anyone left in the East. He was like that is rough. About 10 minutes later, he texted me back and was like wait…I don’t have anybody in the East either. This is the madness part of March. Sometimes the better, higher ranked teams win and it is sort of boring minus a few games and other times you get total chaos like we have now. FAU is in the elite eight for goodness sakes. Princenton plays Creighton tonight. The Midwest region is really the only one that makes some sort of sense as 1 plays 5 tonight and 2 and 3 play each other. But this is what makes college basketball fun and different from other sports. But next on the list is what makes it not fun.

Worst Officiating…ever:

Basketball is a great sport. It was probably what I was best at in high school. It is fun and you can play pretty long into your life. My dad played into his 50’s. And no officiating is perfect. I get that. People complain about the officiating in all sports and talk about things being rigged. I am usually the first to defend them saying they are humans too. But here is my struggle. I have watched a ton of high school basketball in my life and the officiating for the most part is pretty good. I have watched quite a bit of NBA basketball and the officiating is mostly pretty bad. However, it is consistently bad. You know what you are going to get night in and night out. You know what is a foul and what isn’t.

College basketball officiating is awful and inconsistent on a level like nothing else in sports. It’s hard to know what is a foul and what isn’t a foul. Things like over the back seem to no longer exist. At the same time offensive fouls are rampant so much so that you are in more danger of getting a foul if you touch another player if you have the ball than if you don’t. But the worst part is the wild inconsistencies both from game to game to within the same game. On Saturday I was flipping back and forth between watching my favorite team and my least favorite team lose games. At one point with both games in the second half with a lot of time left, there had only been 4 fouls in the Mizzou game. 3 on Mizzou and 1 on Princeton. Meanwhile in the kansas vs Ar-Kansas game, they were both already in the double bonus. Now were there really that many more fouls in that game? Then in the last 5 minutes of the Mizzou game all of the sudden there were a ton of fouls. And I am not talking about the very end when Mizzou was fouling on purpose to drag out my misery as much as humanly possible. I am not making excuses here. I am not claiming this is why Mizzou lost. Mizzou lost because they got outplayed and it was the tournament and if you don’t know about Mizzou in the tournament go back and read about it from my blog on Tuesday. But it is why the sport is so hard to watch. I used to love it. But now I’ll watch the occasional Mizzou regular season game and then the tournament. That’s it. And even that is hard to watch sometimes. I don’t know if they will ever fix it at this point. It’s been bad for a better part of a decade. And it is damaging a great sport.

Something was happening with Baseball:

So apparently, the US almost won something called the World Baseball Classic. Every once in a while, I would see a post about I hope the USA wins today. I thought maybe there was a gymnastics or swim meet going on I was unaware of. Or maybe we had gone to war with Russia and no one had told me. Nope, baseball stuff was going on. Which is fine. I don’t know why they picked the exact same time as March Madness to do it. But apparently there were some good games and stuff and we barely lost to Japan in the championship…I think. It might still be going on, I don’t know. This is how much I care about baseball. I loved baseball in the 80’s and 90’s prior to the strike. I would watch games, listen to games and even played a game called dice baseball that my dad taught me. I never had video games as a kid so I had to draw out a score sheet in a notebook and roll the dice to see if Tim Raines was going to get on base or be out. I would have lots marks on the side of my hand that only a left hander would understand. But post strike minus a few bits of time here are there, baseball hasn’t been my thing. So that is why I don’t know what was going on in this world classic thingy and I don’t think I was alone. But a big shout out to my 3 Facebook friends who were posting a lot about it. You are true baseball fans. I don’t know why you are true baseball fans but thanks for sharing and letting the rest of us know that this event was going on.

Enjoy the weekend everyone…and the madness. Check out the next top 10 on Tuesday of next week.