Greetings from the sports desk located somewhere below the decks of the Good Pirate Ship RedState. Sammy the Shark and Karl the Kraken assure me they have been hard at work researching their brackets for the upcoming NCAA basketball tournaments ...

Gentlemen, you and I have entirely different definitions of the word “research.”

Anyway, ’tis the season for roundball mania. For reasons unfathomable to everyone except the NCAA and Warner Bros. Discovery, owners of TruTV, there will be four play-in games taking place, two on March 18 and two on March 19, to get into the tournament as obviously an entire season of teams playing each other, plus a postseason conference tournament, was not nearly enough evidence to determine whether any given team warranted entry into the tournament of 64.

Here’s where it gets complicated. Two of the games will determine the #16 seeds for the South and East tournament divisions. One will determine the #11 seed for Midwest. The remaining game will determine the #11 seed for the ... South. I’m sure there is a perfectly logical explanation for all this; no part of the same involving large sums of cash being fed by television networks into university coffers.

Given that when it comes to collegiate athletics, my team is Cal — thank you in advance for your sympathy — I have no rooting interest in the tournament. From this relatively objective viewpoint, as best as I can gather, should Cooper Flagg’s sprained right ankle sufficiently heal and hold up for the duration, Duke has an excellent shot of making our Sister Toldjah the happiest girl in the whole U.S.A. (or at least North Carolina) since Donna Fargo by being the last team standing on a ladder cutting the net down. It will not be easy; the South is determined to avenge losing the college football championship this past season to those pesky Northern aggressors from Ohio by rolling out a veritable plethora of top-notch squads. Consider this list of the top eight-seeded teams:

•  Alabama
•  Auburn
•  Duke
•  Florida
•  Houston
•  Michigan State
•  St. John’s
•  Tennessee

Only two of these things are not like the others.

I’ve joked in the past about how the SEC is a de facto farm system for the NFL. The conference is rapidly turning into the same for the NBA. Consider this curiosity regarding this year’s men’s tournament. There are 16 schools in the SEC. Out of that number, guess how many did not get selected for the tournament? Hint: it’s the same number as the number of “writers” I have on staff at the RedState sports desk. Yup, you guessed it. Two. Whether they all deserved to be selected is a question best left for the hoop junkies and bracket brainiacs, but by any measure that is one powerhouse conference.

The women’s tournament also gets underway this coming weekend. Brace yourself for an onslaught of mainstream media stories about any given player or players being The Next Big Thing or The Face of Women’s Basketball. They aren’t, nor shall they be, but why deprive the MSM of its cherished delusion the only woman player anyone cares about, and the only reason anyone pays attention to women’s basketball on any level, is Caitlin Clark?

Elsewhere in the sports world, the Major League Baseball regular season sort of gets underway on March 18 with a two-game set between the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers in Tokyo. Aside from providing über-rich fans with an excuse to travel overseas, I’ve long wondered what the attraction level is besides the novelty. There is the angle of one Shohei Ohtani playing for the evil empire … er, Dodgers to spark local interest. The Dodgers also have starting pitchers Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki on their roster. While Sasaki will start the second game of the series, Yamamoto will take the mound for the opener to face Cubs starting pitcher Shota Imanaga and square off against Cubs power-hitting right field Seiya Suzuki. That said, it’s a safe bet that if the Premiere League (the top tier of English soccer) were to drop a regular season game between two of the better-known teams almost anywhere here, they’d pack out the place. Back to the Cubs and Dodgers. We planned to cover the event in person, but Sammy and Karl have been denied entrance into the Port of Tokyo due to its strict “no sea monsters allowed” law. Something to do with an oversized lizard.

Enjoy the week, everyone.

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