March Madness begins

The Southeastern Conference has a record 14 teams in the 68-team field this year in the men’s tournament. I think the schools are really taking advantage of the new landscape in college sports where they can basically treat the basketball players like professionals when they’re being recruited. The SEC dominated college football for years, but usually Kentucky and Florida were the only very good basketball teams in the conference. For some reason, the ACC, which is usually the dominant conference in men’s basketball, is struggling this year, outside of Duke, who has its usual stacked team. I did not watch very much college basketball in the regular season this year, but I’m excited to see what happens during the tournament.

The last week of spring training is upon us. I am very anxious for the season to officially start. This will be a very important year for the Phillies team because they have an older veteran starting nine, and they’ve had very high expectations for the past three years. It will be important for the Phillies to get off to a good start. The first series is against the Washington Nationals who are one of the weaker teams in the division. I think the division race will be quite close between the Phillies, the Atlanta Braves and New York Mets for the whole season. The first team to win over 90 games is going to win the division, and I think the LA Dodgers are going to be in the way of all the National League teams to make the World Series, but that is why they play the games.

I don’t usually get my predictions correct, but I said that the 16, 17 and 18th holes were going to be important in the Players Championship, and for once I was correct. Rory Mcllroy was able to defeat J.J. Spaun in a three-hole playoff on Monday on those holes due to the four-hour rain delay Sunday. The officials made the right decision to postpone the playoff until Monday morning. The only person who is not happy they didn’t finish the tournament Sunday was J.J. Spaun. He had enough momentum to beat Mcllroy in a Sunday playoff, but MclIroy played a lot better than him in the Monday playoff. This was Mcllroy's second Players Championship victory in his career.

This year looks like Rory's best chance ever to win the Masters tournament to complete the career grand slam. This is his second PGA Tour victory of the year. He also won the Pebble Beach ProAm in February. It would be great to see him earn the green jacket.