Baylor won the NCAA women's basketball championship Sunday night, dethroning defending champion Notre Dame, 82-81. The Lady Bears have now won three NCAA titles, likely all of them under current coach Kim Mulkey. Congratulations to Baylor.
Now, can Texas Tech make it a Texas Two-Step, and beat Virginia in the men's title game tonight? Stay tuned.
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La Loudmouth (LaVar Ball) just doesn't get it, and it'll be a while if he ever does.
With his shoe company, Big Baller Brand, fading away as expected because of overpriced merchandise, more than anything else, the Fred Sanford of stage parents was back in the news the last few days.
First, Ball claimed he was vetting the process of finding a new agent for son Lonzo, out for the season with an ankle injury, after Lonzo parted company with Harrison Gaines, and filed suit against Alan Foster, a family friend and business partner in Big Baller Brand who apparently got a little greedy in his own right.
Now LaVar tells TMZ Sports that he thinks middle son LiAngelo is better than Duke's Zion Williamson, who was just named the James Naismith Award winner for 2018-19. News flash. If as expected Williamson declares for the draft, like everyone thinks he will, that will give him more than a leg up on LiAngelo, who flushed his college eligibility down the drain last year thanks to his father.
Well, let's put it this way. If Lonzo is forced to retire early, he & La Loudmouth can mount a remake of Sanford & Son.......
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Speaking of Williamson, now there's reports that Nike, which supplied Williamson with his shoes this season, also allegedly paid his family to agree to send Zion to Duke.
Will this madness never end? In upstate New York, scholar-athletes don't have such vetting. It's between them, their coaches, and their parents, and that's as far as it's supposed to go.
In a nutshell, college basketball & football have been corrupted by sponsors who see dollar signs without bothering to do due diligence to see if the blue chip prospects that they're getting behind are actually worth investing in before he plays a pro game. Amazingly, college hockey & baseball have avoided such scandals.
In New York, we do things the right way. Period.
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Wrestlemania is in the books, and, for whatever reason, WWE decided to extend the show to an alarming 5 1/2 hours, which isn't sitting well with the New Jersey Transit Authority. The PPV/WWE Network portion of the show got underway at 7 pm (ET), and didn't end until 12:30 am this morning, and this was after a 2 hour pre-show, half of which aired on USA Network.
WWE finally delivered on fan service, as all but two championships changed hands Sunday night/Monday morning. To wit:
Seth Rollins ended Brock Lesnar's 2nd run with the Universal title in the PPV opener. It took just 2 1/2 minutes, as apparently, Lesnar didn't want to wait since his match wasn't the headliner, and with a UFC return rumored to be set for August vs. Daniel Cormier, this might just be, finally, hail & farewell to Lesnar, barring of course media mark/CEO/Chairman Vince McMahon deciding to bring him back again someday.
Becky Lynch won the Smackdown & Raw women's titles in a three-way, one-fall main event over Charlotte Flair & Ronda Rousey.
Australia's IIconics (Billie Kay & Peyton Royce) won the women's tag titles from Sasha Banks & Bayley in a one-fall, four team match that also involved two other teams from Raw in Nia Jax & Tamina Snuka and the Divas of Doom (Beth Phoenix & Natalya, who used the team name back in 2011-12).. However, the IIconics' countryman, Buddy Murphy, saw his cruiserweight title reign end at the hands of Tony Nese.
Zack Ryder & Curt Hawkins, a pair of Long Island natives, won Raw's men's tag titles from the Revival (Scott Dawson & Dash Wilder). Ryder & Hawkins last were champions on Smackdown all the way back in 2008.
Finn Balor, using his Demon King persona, took back the Intercontinental title from Bobby Lashley, as that title has bounced between the two of them the last few months.
Finally, Kofi Kingston unseated Daniel Bryan as WWE Champion. With the subliminal racial overtones in the build to this match, this was the right move to make.
The only champions to retain were the Usos, who won a 4-way of their own over Shinsuke Nakamura & Rusev, The Bar (Sheamus & Cesaro), & Ricochet & Aleister Black to keep Smackdown's tag titles, and Samoa Joe, who retained the US title in under a minute over a still injured Rey Mysterio. Despite reports that Mysterio had been cleared to compete a day earlier, he apparently wasn't 100% after all.
Also: Shane McMahon beat The Miz in a falls count anywhere match, his first singles win at the "Showcase of The Immortals" since 2001. Kurt Angle retired after losing to Baron Corbin, whom no one wanted facing Angle. It certainly seemed to me as though this was forced on Angle, but we'll never know the truth. Braun Strowman won the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal, but the absurdity of it all was having Saturday Night Live's Colin Jost & Michael Che hiding under the ring most of the match, then trying to eliminate Strowman. Carmella won the women's battle royal, for whatever that's worth.
The scene shifts back to Brooklyn tonight.
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