I feel very unfocused this week.
It happens almost every year at about this time. There are lots of reasons for it, and I won’t bore you with the details.
Why it matters to you is that you get a column with several different topics today.
Did you see the shot last week that put Iowa’s Caitlin Clark on top of the all-time NCAA women’s scoring list? It’s well beyond 30 feet out beside the giant hawk’s head logo, on the move, as easy and simple as you could ever imagine and straight down the middle of the basket.
It was both amazing and…not.
It was amazing because most humans—male or female—can’t hit the rim from that distance three out of 10 times. She makes four or five shots from the logo region near mid court every game! You look at her shots like those in the same way you’d look at a Michael Jordan dunk—you’ve seen them before, but they never get old.
She’s going to have a really interesting decision coming up when the season ends. She’s eligible for the WNBA Draft in April, and the Indiana Fever have the first overall pick in the draft. At the same time, Clark is in the unusual position of being able to make more money through endorsements and “NIL” deals than she probably can as a professional basketball player.
If she decides to move up, a trip or two to Indy to watch her play would definitely be in the plan this summer.
With the NFL season over, the Bears are now officially on the draft clock with the first pick.
We have heard Bears execs filling the air waves with their praises for current QB Justin Fields lately. That immediately made some Bears fans believe they were going to keep him and trade the pick for a bounty of picks this year and next.
But you cannot automatically interpret these statements that way.
It’s very possible that the Bears are expressing how much they value Fields in an attempt to set the price for getting him in a pre-draft trade higher.
They might be trying to convince other teams “We like Fields enough to keep him, so if you want him, you’ll to pry him away from us.”
Either way, it’s a lot of posturing and you shouldn’t read anything into it.
The IHSAA released the latest enrollment figures for its more than 400 member schools from Angola to Evansville.
Given the way the state will be dividing up the classes moving forward, some significant changes could be coming, especially in Warsaw.
What I am about to write comes with a disclaimer: until the IHSAA releases the official classification breakdown and then the sectional alignments after that, nothing is for sure yet.
That said, it looks like Warsaw will be moving down to 5A in football for the first time. It’s complicated, but two schools from 5A are moving up because of their recent success, and Warsaw would be eligible to drop down. That could potentially put the Tigers into a sectional with Goshen and Concord, or it could send them east or south.
For basketball, people who have done their own breakdowns of potential new sectional alignments say Warsaw would likely no longer play in Sectional 4 with the 4A Elkhart County schools and Penn, but would go east into a sectional with Fort Wayne area schools. Important to this discussion is that the IHSAA shrunk 4A in such a way that all basketball sectionals will have five teams instead of six.
I am not losing any sleep over it yet. We’ll see what the IHSAA says this spring.
Pitchers and catchers have reported to baseball training camps, but there are more than 100 unrestricted free agents who are still looking for new homes for 2024.
The same was true last season.
It seems that teams are starting to draw a line in the batters box about how much they are going to spend on players.
Players’ representatives are asking more and more for their clients’ services, and teams are just not rushing to write those checks.
I make no value judgements here about whether the players deserve it or whether the owners can afford it. It’s irrelevant to this discussion.
As negotiations go, we are in the tenth hour and the 11th hour is usually when things start happening.
For Cubs fans, with their favorite team and Cody Bellinger still about $40-$50 million apart, the waiting is getting very nerve wracking. But I believe that Bellinger is the lynch pin to the entire free agent market. When he signs somewhere, everyone else will start flying off the shelves.
Also consider these things.
Air friers are in the lead for the greatest inventions of the 21st Century.
I’d like to see VR companies come up with sports-related programs that make the user be the referee or umpire in a professional level game. I think that would change the way some people treat officials.
I miss Penguin Point chicken.
See ya next week.