Keith Strudler

Of all the differences between American soccer and the sport played around the world, perhaps the most notable is the concept of promotion and relegation. That’s a system where the highest finishing teams from one league move up to a higher division next season, and the lowest teams move down.

I feel like I write some version of this topic every couple of years, only with a different sport and a different city. It might be St. Louis, or the Nets, or the Raiders.

For women’s college basketball, this year has been the best of times, and the worst of times. But mainly the best of times. That was illustrated Monday night when Iowa defeated LSU in an Elite Eight game of the Women’s NCAA Tournament, a rematch of last year’s title game that was watched by 12.3 million viewers. That is officially the most watched women’s basketball game in history, narrowly eclipsing the 11.8 million that watched the 1983 championship game that featured USC’s Cheryl Miller.

Anyone who is at all surprised that with the increased legalization of sports gambling has come a rise of investigations into athletes and coaches tampering with games and sharing insider info is either oblivious to human nature or willfully ignorant.

If you watched college basketball last night, you likely had the unfortunate event of seeing Virginia have one of the worst offensive performances since the sport stopped using peach baskets. They lost to Colorado State 67-42 in a game that was not a close as the score might indicate. And perhaps the only people more frustrated than Virginia fans are anyone at Oklahoma, Seton Hall, and Indiana State. Those schools were likely the first three not picked in the field of 68 to play in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, where Virginia was definitely one of the last at large teams selected, much to the chagrin of schools with better analytics and resumes and all the other alleged criteria used by the selection committee to choose the field. So when Virginia played like a YMCA rec team after a night of heavy drinking, I’m sure all those on the outside looking in said some profanity laden version of “I told you.”

If you talk to University of Florida football fans, a community of which I consider myself a member, they will tell you times have been hard enough the last few years. The Gators haven’t won a bowl game since 2019 and didn’t even play in one last season. All the while we’ve watched SEC foes Georgia and Alabama win national titles and have recent losses to the likes of Kentucky and Vanderbilt, who we always assumed was only in the conference for their SAT scores. And depending on what you believe, it might actually get worse.

It’s not unusual to use sports metaphors in politics. Or really in anything. And if you like your politics laden with sports imagery, then you will enjoy the California election to fill Dianne Feinstein’s US Senate Seat. That’s because after last night’s open primary, one of the two final candidates is former major league all-star Steve Garvey, who is best known for his time playing for the LA Dodgers and San Diego Padres.

It’s not hard to get hurt playing big time college basketball. There’s on-court collisions, you can get hit, you might trip on something. And that’s just after the game ends. That is, if your game ends with court storming, when fans rush from the stands to the floor after a huge home win. This happens the most after a big upset of a highly ranked team. Like when Wake Forrest upset Duke last weekend, or when UCF surprised Kansas earlier this year. Increasingly, there’s a sense that if you’re a college student and your team is about to pull off a huge, unexpected home win over a Goliath, then it’s nearly a right if not obligation to join the celebration immediately thereafter.

When I was a kid, and admittedly long before I stopped wearing leather, my favorite pair of sneakers was a low top suede basketball shoe from Puma called the Clyde, named after basketball star Clyde Frazier. There’s a mythology that it was suede instead of traditional leather to make it easier to produce a broad range of colors to match Frazier’s fashion sensibilities, one of his many outstanding characteristics. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but I did think they were about the coolest things a kid could wear, even cooler than the three striped Adidas floating around our house.

In the post-script of Super Bowl LVIII, there will be considerable conversation about the Taylor Swift effect. Some of that will be conspiratorial, like whether the NFL and perhaps the US government secretly colluded to make sure the Chiefs both made and won the Super Bowl to maximize her impact on commerce and perhaps even change the fate of the upcoming election. But other parts will be far more grounded in reality, especially around the popularity of the sport and, in particular, the Super Bowl itself.