Weekend winners

All of us. It’s Masters week, and if you do not love the Masters, well, that’s a you issue. And yes, we will have our Masterfully Mastering the Masters (Masters degree optional) Contest this week. Rules are easy: Submit five golfers, top four finishers count. Points for finish — first is 1 point, T4 is 4 points — and low score wins some stuff. Price is the same as always, as free as the speech before us. Well, more free actually. Cue William Wallace: “You may take our lives, but you will never our free (contests).” Or something like that.

LSU in particular and women’s college basketball in general. The Red Stick Renegades were awesome all weekend. Kudos and Geaux Tigers. My prediction was correct, Even if I watch every second of tonight’s NCAA title game, I will have watched more women’s Final Four than men’s for the first time ever. The game has true star power — a Kim Mulkey versus Geno season opener needs to happen and Caitlin Clark and Angel Reece return next season — for the first time in a while. There will be more of this in a moment.

Clark. She was sublime. She was as much must-see TV as a basketball player as Curry was when he was at Davidson, UK was when it was going for perfection and Duke was when it chased back-to-back. Her star power — a junior who could have two more years and likely has more NIL potential than WNBA earning power — is clear. Speaking of Clark and NIL, her first deal was with an Iowa food bank and she did it for free and volunteered her time.

Danny Hurley. In what has been a relatively forgettable NCAA final two weeks, Hurley’s dominating UConn wrecking crew has been awesome. A win tonight would move the Hurleys into some lofty places in terms of a basketball family since Pappa Hurley is a legendary Hall of Fame high school coach, brother Bobby is an all-time NCAA great and first-round pick and then Danny would have an NCAA natty as a coach. Plus, Hurley had me at hello when he said over the weekend he hates the idea of expanding the NCAA tournament field since it would continue to devalue the regular season. “Playing this tournament is a privilege not a right.” Amen Coach.

Shaq. Hard not to love the giant man with a giant heart and a giant list of nicknames. Here’s a great story about Shaq hearing about an Michigan teen with size 23 feet who was having trouble finding shoes. Shaq fixed it all, because “Shazam!” he’s that dude.

Weekend losers

Women’s college basketball officiating. Again, more on this in a moment, but wow, that was bad. And no, it would not have changed the outcome, because LSU was converting more caroms than a world-champion snooker savant. Still, it was awful.

Me. Yeah, I should have had a better finger on the national bracket of pizza toppings. The title game — true to this year’s March Madness — had a bona fide unknown with jalapeños in the championship. Traditional blue-blood pepperoni prevailed. We should have been following this from the start, to be honest.

Luka. Yeah, I’m a Luka fan. Love his game. But when more than half the league makes the playoffs, how truly great are you if you can’t lead a team (with Kyrie Irving on it, mind you) to the playoffs? And man, losing to the Hawks — like that — on Sunday was especially rotten.

PGA Tour. Yes the Masters is this week, and that’s a fine thing. But man, if this week’s Valero Open is going to be an example of the fields in non-priority events from the Tour, well, peep the leaderboard of the LIV and feel free to offer who had more star power. In an effort to beef up select events, will the PGA severely hurt the non-selected events, because LIV scheduling against the non-star-driven events will eventually convert viewers like me?

Women’s hoops’ big moment

When your sport operates in relative anonymity, the great stories gone by with a whisper.

So do the controversies, real, imagined or even contrived.

But when you hit the next level, and women’s college hoops did that this weekend, the spotlight shifts beyond your games, stats and scores.

Did you notice all the racial spin on Angel Reece’s face taunts and ring gestures to Caitlin Clark, who did some of the same leading into the title game?

Did you have any idea before this weekend the amazing job Kim Mulkey has done at LSU over the last two years? She should be Coach of the Year — across all levels — meaning yes, even Kirby Smart should send her his trophy.

What Caitlin Clark did was staggering. Consider all the great, great, GREAT players and great and historic teams the women’s game has had over the past few decades, and no one has attracted the attention she did. She WAS the story across a sports world that included the men’s semifinals, the first weekend of MLB, professional football, NBA regular season winding down, NASCAR and golf leading into Augusta.

What a shame it was that arguably the biggest talking point before the final seconds and the aftermath of what likely will be the most-watched women’s game in recent memory and maybe ever was the referees. Egad, what a (bleep)show. And let’s be really, really, REALLY clear, the way LSU played, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Helen Keller could have called the first half and Moe, Larry and Curley the second, and it would not have mattered.

LSU was the better team and dominated the backboards. But Jiminy Christmas the officiating was terrible, and the momentum-changing, game-altering technical foul on Clark was simply atrocious.

If women’s college hoops is serious about taking the next step — and that step is before it with some smart scheduling (Mulkey versus Geno, LSU-Iowa in a season opener on ABC with Chuck and Co. on special assignment in studio, think big) and the returning star power — officiating debacles like Sunday afternoon simply can’t happen.

What else the women’s game needs to figure out is a way to get firmly into the bracket craze. I have one regular reader who I greatly appreciate who always reminds me that I mention gambling too much. OK, point taken. But in this case, the brackets are about broad appeal more than bankroll.

In terms of March Madness and brackets, sheets are giggles, and the tournament erupted when the nation realized that almost every year a 12 beats a 5 and almost every year either order of K and U (Kansas/Kentucky) is going to break the brackets and the hearts of half the field.

And sadly, what social media before, during and in the aftermath of LSU’s beatdown of Iowa was everything that is great and rotten about Twitter.

Stars across all genres were in awe of the level of play and the buzz was true and palatable, especially in regard to Clark, who led every SportsCenter since Friday night.

Then the Reece-Clark exchange happened and Twitter erupted.

Some said Reece’s gesture and taunting were classless. I thought it felt more like emotion and the realization of championship dreams while beating a supremely hyped generational player who also has been a renowned trash-talker in this tournament.

Moreover, Clark seemed unfazed by it, and when we as a society decide to be offended for things that did not even offend the person they were directed at, well, dang, that’s a mighty big overreach whether you Black, white or polka-dotted.

Some said that angst was racial since Reece is Black and Clark is white. I think that is bupkis, and moreover, if everything is racist, then is anything racist?

Plus, I think in terms of sports and sportsmanship, it’s a heck of a lot more sexist than racist. Because the gyrations and gestures men do — and I am here for sports being as entertaining as possible with bat flips, 3 fingers on a pure shot from distance, you name it — compared to what brought the pearl-clutchers out in mass for Reece are off the charts.

Some even called out Mulkey on the social media sphere for reportedly not being as “supportive” of former player Britney Griner’s odyssey over the last year-plus, which is agenda-driven timing at best and issue-focused aggrandizing on almost every level.

Either way, controversies come with captive audiences, both good and bad. And here are three things I believe after watching all that transpired in Sunday’s women’s title game:

— Caitlin Clark is one of the true sports needle-movers we have in these games right now.

— Women’s college basketball has a real chance to take a real step in the hierarchy of attention and popularity over the next 12-plus months, and I hope they use it.

— And when you hit a certain level of notoriety — and it could be as I mentioned previously, a big step to long-term increased popularity — you generate a whole lot of viewpoints from a whole lot of directions.

And a whole lot of those opinions suck.

This and that

— So, hope you were riding the Plays of the Day last week. CHA-ching. JTC, make sure my math is right here. We entered Friday 6-3 for the week. We crushed the Lakers and swept the men’s Final Four. We split on the Braves, so a 4-1 finish made us 10-4 last week. We also offered four PGA small wagers (quarter-unit each) and despite three of those cats falling on hard times over the weekend, cashing Luke List to finish top-40 at plus-150. Luke’s finish means we lost .375 units on four weekend-long golf wagers. For casual players that’s still a loss of coin but a solid return on the entertainment investment. Our best bet of the day is now 74-48 all-time and with the weekend coins — plus-2.225 units including the golf — we head to Augusta up 48.445 units all-time. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick no?

— Missed the CMT awards. Did I miss anything?

— Speaking of Luke, he made a smidgen more than $36,000 for his T39. Considering his recent struggles — he’d miss the cut in four of his last five events — any check is a good check I’m sure.

— You know the rules. Here’s Paschall on the Vols and the Bulldogs hosting football scrimmages this weekend.

— And because Paschall is Paschall, he also had time to catch up with a couple of Baylor School alums as Harris English and Keith Mitchell head to Augusta for the Richmond County Invitational (aka The Masters) this week.

Today’s questions

Weekend winners and losers. Go.

As for Multiple Choice Monday, well, who is the biggest college basketball star over this weekend:

— Caitlin Clark

— Kim Mulkey

— April Reece

— Danny Hurley

— Other and please share

As for today, April 3, let’s review.

It was 45 years ago today that “Annie Hall” beat “Star Wars” for the Oscar. Wow, feels like we have done a Rushmore of biggest Oscar best picture snubs before, no?

That would be on my personal one. I loathe Woody Allen. For multiple reasons.

Wow on this day 50 years ago, arguably the most low-key, yet biggest transformative moment in our current lives happened.

On this day in NYC in 1973, the first mobile phone call was made.

Wow. Just wow, because think about how influential the cellphone has become?

Eddie Murphy is 62 today. Rushmore of 1980s comedy movie actors. Go, and show your work.