March is a good month on the sports calendar, but it’s not a fun month as a teacher. My only day off was my annual personal day for the first Friday of the NCAA tournament. But the excellent month of sports started before that. I went to the Thursday night of the Big East Tournament with Vin. I think this was my twelfth Big East Tournament and my ninth with Vin. I was hoping we’d get to see St. John’s. In all my years going to the Big East Tournament, I don’t remember ever seeing St. John’s when they’re good. That’s mainly because they haven’t been very good this century. Since I started college in the fall of 2002, they’ve only made it to the NCAA Tournament in 2011, 2015, 2019, and now 2025, and 2026 (after making it 20 out of 27 years from 1976-2002). It looked for a while like we would get to see St. John’s. We were getting the 2 seed in the first game and the 3 seed in the second game and St. John’s had a good chance of being the 2 seed. But they ended up sneaking their way up to the 1 seed late in the season. So UConn was the 2 seed and they played Xavier in the first game. Villanova was locked into the 3 seed for a while and they played Georgetown in the second game.
I have a clear hierarchy for how I root for teams in the Big East. It goes like this:
Tier 1- Villanova. I will always appreciate them for winning National Championship Games against North Carolina and Michigan.
Tier 2- Providence, Seton Hall, Georgetown. This tier is the Catholic Schools from the Old Big East besides Villanova and one other. We’ll get to them.
Tier 3- Xavier, DePaul, Marquette, Creighton. This tier is the New Big East Catholic schools.
Tier 4- St. John’s and Butler. St. John’s would be in tier 2, but their head coach is Rick Pitino, one of my least favorite people in basketball for multiple reasons (going back to his time with the Celtics). I want them to be good because it’s good for the Big East and Madison Square Garden is more fun if they’re good, but I want somebody other than Rick Pitino to be their coach so that I can root for them. As for Butler, I have nothing against them. I rooted for them when Brad Stevens was their coach. If the school converted to Catholicism, they would be straddling the line between the second and third tier even though they’re not an Old Big East team.
Tier 5- UConn. There’s a big drop off from tier 4 to tier 5. There’s nothing to like about UConn. Danny Hurley makes them even more unlikeable.
That’s how I root for the Big East teams in general. But I am willing to break those rules under certain circumstances. For example, I was rooting for anybody other than St. John’s, UConn, or Villanova to win the tournament this year because those three were locks for the NCAA Tournament. And they were the only teams the Big East was getting in the tournament unless somebody else won the Big East. So I was rooting for anybody else. Unfortunately Xavier didn’t get the job done. It wasn’t competitive in the first game as UConn won 93-68. Vin had to leave early in the second game. I stayed until there were about eight minutes left in the first half. It looked like Villanova was on their way to victory. They led 27-18. ESPN says that they had an 89.2% chance to win at that point. But I guess they didn’t play well at all after I left. Georgetown won 78-64. While I was rooting for somebody other than St. John’s, UConn, or Villanova to win the tournament, I wasn’t too excited about that result because I didn’t think Georgetown had a chance to go any further in the tournament (I was thinking Seton Hall might be the only other team that had any real chance to win the tournament). And not surprisingly UConn beat Georgetown 67-51 the next night. St. John’s beat Seton Hall in the other semifinal and then they beat UConn easily in the final.
We were in the first row of the 300s level which was a pretty good view.
It was good to see Vin for another Big East Tournament. Hopefully next year will be our tenth together. I might try to get tickets for the semifinals or the final next year. I’ve been to the semifinals and the final a few times, but tickets for those nights have been pretty expensive the last few years. I always say that the Big East Tournament marks the end of winter and to celebrate, I had my first Sam Adams Cold Snap (their spring seasonal) of the year. And now that we’re at the end of March, Sam Adams Summer Ale should be available any day now.
My dream continues to be Notre Dame rejoining the Big East for all of our sports except for football and hockey. We should always be independent in football and we should be in any conference other than the Big 10 or independent in hockey (since the Big East doesn’t have hockey). Of course, right now we’re in the ACC for our non-football/hockey sports and we have our football scheduling deal with the ACC (for an average of five games per year, which seems to have become six with Stanford joining the ACC and us keeping Stanford on the schedule annually for some reason). My ideal scenario would be a scheduling deal with the Big 10 and SEC for a total of seven games per year against those two conferences (USC plus six other games). The rest of the games would be three games per year against ACC/Big 12 opponents, the Navy game, and one buy game against a Group of 6 team. Of course, football is the most important thing, but I dream of being part of Big East basketball once again.
Notre Dame basketball has been depressing. The men’s basketball team has been terrible in the post-Brey era. Mike Brey had done all he could and I had no problem moving on, but it has not gone well. It seemed like Micah Shrewsberry was a good choice to take over, but it has not worked at all and there is no reason for optimism right now. As for the women’s team, they haven’t been as good as they were at the end of the Muffet McGraw Era, but they had a surprisingly good run in the NCAA Tournament this year. The hockey team hasn’t been good lately. The baseball team had a great coach in Link Jarrett, but then he left. Since then, we haven’t been back to the tournament. We might have a chance to get in this year. But if you offered me a National Championship in football at the expense of being bad in every other sport, I would make that deal. Of course, we’re allowed to win a National Championship in football and still be good in other sports.
With Notre Dame being terrible in men’s basketball, my interest in college basketball has waned greatly. Still I love the Big East Tournament and the NCAA Tournament. The Big East Tournament was good (despite St. John’s and UConn being the two teams in the championship game). But the NCAA Tournament has been pretty boring. For the second straight year, no 13-16 seeds won in the first round. I don’t want a ton of upsets, but I want some. The Sweet 16 was all Power 5 teams (and only one Catholic school). People are speculating that this is the future of the tournament because it’s hard to build a team that can win multiple tournament games these days if you’re not in a power conference because your good players are just going to transfer to a power conference team. College basketball was already in bad shape and it’s somehow gotten worse. Duke finding a way to lose was nice, but the bad news was they lost to UConn. And we have Michigan in the Final Four. There have been some fun games, but this year’s tournament has been generally boring. Hopefully Arizona will save us from the nightmare scenario of Michigan winning.
In the NBA, it’s been a good season for the Celtics. I was optimistic at the beginning of the season when a lot of people weren’t. I just thought Jaylen Brown and Derrick White were too good for the Celtics to be bad. How many teams in the East have two players as good as the two of them? Not many. I did question my instincts about the Celtics when they started the season 0-3 and looking bad. But since then, they’re 50-22. Joe Mazzulla now has any many 50 win seasons as Erik Spoelstra. I love Joe Mazzulla. Things seemed bad for the Celtics when they had to replace Ime Udoka with Joe Mazzulla. That has worked out amazingly well. Joe Mazzulla is a better coach and he has a much more likeable personality than Ime Udoka. Joe Mazzulla is Catholic (he has rosary beads made out of the Celtics’ old parquet floor) and he doesn’t care about the British royal family. I love that guy. So anyway, I was optimistic about the Celtics, but they’ve exceeded my expectations. The Celtics are now the favorites to win the East. I definitely didn’t see that coming. If they win the East (they’re far from being locks, but it is very realistic), they will be underdogs in the Finals (as long as they’re playing the Thunder or Spurs), but the Pacers almost won the championship last year and I think the Celtics are better than the Pacers were. Regardless of what happens in the playoffs this year, it’s been a very fun season and there’s a lot of reason for optimism for the Celtics’ future.
And I’ll finish up with some baseball thoughts now that the regular season has started. The Dodgers are going for their third straight World Series championship and that is awesome. The big change in baseball is the ABS challenge system. Most people seem to like it. I do not like it. There are two reasons why I don’t like it. First of all, we’re not sure how accurate it is. Major League Baseball has said that they’re 95% sure that a pitch is within 0.39 inches of where the system says it is. So that sounds pretty accurate. But it’s not accurate enough. You could have a pitch called a strike and that batter challenges it and the system says it’s 0.1 of an inch off the plate and the call gets changed to a ball. But the margin of error is saying that the pitch very easily could have been over the plate. So why should that call be overturned? The other problem that I have with it is that it’s not using the actual strike zone. There are two problems with the strike zone that they’re using. The first is that they’re not using a three-dimensional strike zone over the plate. They’re using a two-dimensional strike zone over the middle of the plate. And why aren’t they using a three-dimensional strike zone? When there’s a challenge, they show you the flight path of the ball so it seems like it would be pretty easy to use a three-dimensional strike zone. And the second problem is that the strike zone is based entirely on a player's height. Two players who are the same height but have totally different stances do not have the same strike zone. If they were using the actual strike zone and they took into account the margin of error and didn’t overturn super close calls that might have been correct in the first place, I would be fine with using this system. But that’s not what they’re doing.
So I don’t like the ABS system, but I am happy to have baseball back. I should be attending my first game of the season later this week. Hopefully I’ll get to a bunch of games in various stadiums this year.
