Gheorghasbord, Sporting Edition

While we've been preoccupied by the flaming bag of monkey poop masquerading as William & Mary's basketball program/athletic administration, a handful of actually important, fun, and interesting things have been happening in the world of sports, American style.

On the important tip, Notre Dame women's coach Muffet McGraw delivered an impassioned sermon about the distance we still have to cover in terms of reaching some measure of equality in leadership in women's sports (set aside the chasm that still exists in sports in general). While there are elements one might quibble with (McGraw's hard-line stance on hiring men is at once evidence of her power and potentially actionable as discrimination), it's powerful in its fierce, barely contained contempt for a system that she's overcome for 63 years.



Moving on to fun, it was very cool to see the CAA's entry in the college 3x3 tournament played in Minneapolis this weekend run through the competition to capture the title. Northeastern's Vasa Pusica, UNCW's Devonte Cacok, Charleston's Jarrell Brantley, and Hofstra's Justin Wright-Foreman swept through pool play before winning three knockout round matches to reach the final against the West Coast Conference. Cacok's free throws gave the CAA a 21-13 win. Wright-Foreman was the undisputed man, putting on a series of shows for the Mall of America crowd, including this yam.

Justin Wright-Foreman with the cross and the SAUCE! 😲😲😲#3X3U #SCTop10 pic.twitter.com/pW8jY0gEFS

— 3X3U National Championship (@3X3UHoops) April 7, 2019

At the time of this writing, we've had five Final Four games across the men's and women's tournaments, and all five have been competitive. Four of the five have been one-possession games with gripping endings. Baylor won the women's tournament last night, holding off Notre Dame, 82-81 after blowing an 11-point 4th-quarter lead. Notre Dame star Arike Ogunbowale, who won last year's final with an improbable three-pointer, missed one of two free throws with two seconds left to allow Baylor to close out the win. She dropped 31 in the game, which she won't likely remember, unfortunately. Here's hoping tonight's UVA/Texas Tech game lives up to the games that came before. It's hard to figure a way that UVA can top its last two games, to be honest.

We'll close with our kind of whimsy. The Richmond Flying Squirrels are awesome enough, just as they are. I've got a Flying Squirrels T-Shirt, and I've got my eye on figuring out how to incorporate their logo into my family crest for tattoo purposes. This week, they went one better. From this point forward, the San Francisco Giants' AA affiliate will play its Friday games as the Ardillas Voladores de Richmond, a nod to both the increasingly large Hispanic population in Virginia's capital city and the flying squirrel's Latin name. The logo features a squirrel in a luchador mask. Come on, y'all. If you love me even a little, grab me some of that merch.