Lots of catching up to do....

A year and a half with no posts?  Thank you, BlogSpot, for not shutting down this blog as abandoned.  Sheesh....

It appears The Year of the Cardinal has not yet died; the University of Louisville baseball team won a wacky, rain-ravaged regional at Jim Patterson Stadium to advance to a super-regional against upstart Kennesaw (Ga.) State, also at home.  The Cards now stand two victories away from their second consecutive College World Series appearance.

U of L, Kentucky, Kansas and Kent State spent more time battling the weather than each other.  UK and Kansas suffered nearly four hours of thunderstorm delays in the opening game, and as a consequence, the U of L-Kent State game lasted well past 11 p.m.  The next two days followed a similar pattern, culminating in a U of L-UK tilt that began more than four hours later than scheduled due to persistent lightning in the vicinity.

Not surprisingly, the game provided its own fireworks -- the benches emptied twice due to home plate collisions, but no punches were thrown.  In the top of the seventh inning, U of L's Alex Chittenden stumbled trying to slide head first, taking UK first baseman Thomas Bernal's legs out from underneath him.  Then in the bottom half, Bernal ran over Cardinal catcher Kyle Gibson and by rule was ejected.  The Cards won 4-1.

Thanks to No. 5 national seed Florida State's shocking early exit from its regional, the Cards now host the upstart Kennesaw State Owls and stand two wins from a return to Omaha.

Sweet.

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By UK men's basketball coach John Calipari's standards, U of L football enjoyed the greatest day in its history when three Cardinals were selected in the first round -- safety Calvin Pryor by the New York Jets, defensive end Marcus Smith by the Philadelphia Eagles, and quarterback Teddy Bridgewater by the Minnesota Vikings, who traded with the Seattle Seahawks to grab him with the last pick of the first round.

 

Bridgewater, who endured three months of badmouthing from the "experts" prior to the draft, now is being touted by some of these same "experts" as the frontrunner to start at QB for the Vikings.  I guess his supposed skinny legs and small hands wound up not as detrimental as they thought.

 

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The men's basketball team followed its national championship with a Sweet Sixteen loss to eventual runner-up Kentucky, in a regional dubbed by many the Murderous Midwest.  This regional included the previous two national champions, as well as two of the other three teams from the 2013 Final Four.

 

As far as I can determine, the only other time the previous two champions met was the 1962 final, when Cincinnati beat Ohio State for the second consecutive year -- the Buckeyes won the title in 1960.  Never before had three teams from the preceding year's Final Four been placed in the same regional.

 

It was difficult not to look at that bracket and suspect skullduggery within the selection committee.

 

Too difficult for me -- in my eyes, something surely was rotten in Indianapolis.

 

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In about four weeks, Louisville ends its one-year sojourn in the American Athletic Conference and joins the Atlantic Coast Conference.  While scoffers expect the Cards to get a general comeuppance from the stiffer competition in the ACC, I would caution naysayers to look at U of L's history under athletic director Tom Jurich.  Based on what happened when U of L moved from Conference USA to the Big East in 2005, I expect the Cards to contend for ACC championships in multiple sports within a very few years.

 

We have Tom Jurich; no one else does.  I believe that's enough.