The Masters, NBA Play Ins, and college basketball adjustments...

That was a fun tournament. We are going to talk about it.

Victoria, you missed all the madness on Friday. Apparently so. Apparently Mike Greenberg and I co-hosted the show the last half hour. Yeah. It was fun.

Nice. I hope you poked at him about the Aaron Rodgers thing. Yeah, we had to talk about it. Of course. I mean it's honestly, it's not a terrible thing for the Jets to do. No. And he just, he just wanted to make sure we can't use a first round pick on it.

He's right. You can't use a first round pick on it. But you can use the second round pick on it.

Sure. Quarterback of the future. But it hasn't happened yet so we'll, it would be so Jets if that thing completely fell apart. Yeah. And the Jets were stuck with Zach Wilson.

But Mike was also convinced that Zach Wilson might be the quarterback of the future. Oh. Okay. Okay. Wow. All right. Does he know something we don't? I guess.

I guess. Like I don't see it. We haven't seen anything from him in two years to lead anybody to believe that he is the quarterback of the future. We got, we have football things to talk about today. There isn't really much Panthers, no Panthers news really.

But there is NFL news which in a way impacts the Jets very indirectly. But we'll talk about that. We got a lot of things to do. We're going to talk about the Masters. The NBA playoffs are set. And we have to play in first. After the play is done then we can kind of figure out who's going to go where. But I have my ideas right now. If you made me make a pick right now, Bucks over Warriors in the NBA Finals.

If you forced me to make a pick, that's the pick I would make. But let's wait to see how everything plays. The play in games play out first. And then we'll go from there. All right. We might as well start. We got a lot of things to do.

We will get to the Masters. But first, Jeremy Roach from Duke declared for the NBA draft today. He released a statement. Everybody's, you know, you release your own statement. Do it on your own Twitter.

Control your own message. He declared for the draft. But basically if you look at how he said it, he mentions getting the feedback and the experience for the process. So depending on what the NBA tells him, I think there's a fair chance that Jeremy Roach comes back. You can make the argument that he's been here three years. All the players he got here with are gone.

So it might be time for him to move on as well. However, there is a lot of NIL money earmarked for Jeremy Roach and six-foot-one-inch, 175-pound shooting guards. I mean, he's really not a point guard for the NBA. So 6'1", 175 shooting guards, shooting guards, leadership guys. Those guys don't play in the NBA.

So I don't see where he goes. He could certainly play in the G League. You can't make half a million dollars in the G League. He could play overseas, but there are some of the very same issues that he would face in the NBA.

They would be over. That doesn't mean you can't. And that doesn't mean he can't find a place to play that will pay him a lot of money. I just don't know that any of those places are better than Duke.

So we'll see how it works out. But Jeremy Roach is at least putting his name into the NBA draft, but clearly leaving the door open for him to return. Here's the interesting, by the way, Roach, 13 and a half points, flew over 34% shooting from three-point range. That number went up this year. It went up, actually, this was his third year. All of the percentages have gone up each year he has been at Duke. I think ultimately down the road, he'll become something close to a 40% three-point shooter, which he'd have to be to have any chance of playing professional ball here. If he's going to play in the NBA, he's going to have to be a 40% three-point shooter.

He's ultimately going to have to be Quinn Cook if he wants to be an NBA player. I mean, there's no other option for it, but this is the smart move. Always go through the process, especially now. Sure, why not? Go through the process, find out where you are.

You absolutely owe it to yourself to do that. All right, to the other part of this, Kyle Filipowski tweeted out right after Jeremy Roach tweeted out. Filipowski basically said, darn, missed my window.

Guess I'll have to try this maybe tomorrow. So I was clearly joking. Right. Because he knew Roach was going to put that out. I mean, the players are all pretty tight.

I mean, I'm just kind of reading between the tweets here. I think Filipowski's going to announce that he's coming back, which means that Duke's roster should be pretty good next year. They're looking at some pretty good targets out of the transfer portal, including one of the better interior defenders who played in Virginia last year was at Keaton Shedrick. Big guy blocks a bunch of shots that, I mean, certainly would find a role at Duke. What did Derek Lively do this year for Duke? Basically, he rebounded and blocked shots.

He did. Shedrick can absolutely do that. So I don't know if Shedrick, and Shedrick probably is as good, just about as good a switch defender.

Maybe not quite as good because Lively was super long and quick, but Shedrick's not slow. So I think it'll be a good fit if he decides ultimately to come to Duke. He made an announcement.

He has five finalists and one of them is Duke. So, but Filipowski is my guess is that he is going to come back. Remember Jeremy Proctor, he's announced he was coming back.

Mark Mitchell is coming back. So Duke's got five recruits coming in, including two top 30 guards. So Duke should be pretty good.

I mean, nobody was surprised, right? So that's the college basketball front. And for those people who don't know, and I don't know why you wouldn't, but on Friday it was announced that Caleb Love was transferred to Michigan. Right.

He came out of the portal, went into the portal, came out of the portal, went into Ann Arbor. Exactly. So good for, look, I said this on Friday, good for him. It's still a big stage.

It still allows him a high profile platform to show what he is capable of doing. Caleb Love, just comparing Caleb Love and Jeremy Roach, right? Love is bigger. Love is stronger. They're about the same level of quickness.

Yeah. Love needs to demonstrate two things. He needs to demonstrate offensive consistency and he needs to demonstrate that he will lock in as a defender all the time. And those are two things that Caleb Love has not done yet. But if he does those things, Caleb Love is an NBA, at least a prospect. Oh yeah. Because of his size and his strength, all of that, makes him a prospect.

A bigger one, a better prospect than Jeremy Roach, in my opinion. Anyway, all right. Two, what happened? Like, I can't believe they got the Masters in this weekend. I know. Trees were falling and everything. It was very funny because if you watched on Sunday, there was no mention of the fact that three trees fell across the 17th tee box. No.

No mention at all. I mean, if you saw that from, depending on the angle you saw, how somebody did not get killed, how multiple people did not get killed. I know. Three trees. Huge trees. Three fell right there. And they showed a picture from, like, looking out from underneath one of the trees, like the base of it laying flat on the ground. That was a massive root system.

How people did not die, it is a miracle. Death sticks. Yeah. Well, that just shows you how much Augusta Nationals controls everything. Yeah, exactly.

We even control whether or not you live or die. Yeah. Yeah. But they were fortunate to get the Masters in. They were fortunate to play a lot on Saturday. Like, the weather report for Saturday was such that, I mean, I joked, like, oh, yeah, you're gonna be out here starting at 730?

Get out of here. You're not starting at 730. They not only finished the second round, they got far enough into the third round where, oh, yeah, they're gonna finish on Sunday. They had no problem. They finished at normal time. It's crazy.

So shout to them, man. It was absolutely tremendous they were able to do that. And I would say 10 minutes after those three trees came down, those three trees were gone. Oh, wow. That fast?

Anybody, oh, yeah. Anybody out there who has ever had a tree fall, how fast do you get it off your property? Mine's still in the backyard. Right? It's there. How fast do you get it off your property? Yeah.

It takes weeks. Yeah. Nope.

The Masters, it was gone in like 10 minutes. Wow. They need to come out to my house. They cut that sucker up and they just hauled it away so fast.

Good for them. It's impressive. Those are big trees.

Massive pine trees. So two inches of rain fell in about a day and a half. It was unseasonably cool. The schedule was so back lawned and they still completed the tournament on time. And because sometimes it just works out this way, the Masters delivered a champion that is simply one of the current giants in the game. Here's Andy North from ESPN on the weather and the champion.

Well, I think first of all, the weather that the players had to deal with this week was so difficult from super hot early in the week to really cold and windy and rainy and wet and coming off the golf course and coming back. I mean, John Romm was absolutely the best player from Thursday till the last putt dropped. I think that was the key. Remember the soundbite we played at the beginning where he was thanking his friend Zach Ertz?

Right. Because I was watching. I had the tournament on here on Thursday and I was watching John Romm and I watched him four putt the first green. And then I watched him on the second hole, which is a par five kind of down the hill that shapes from right to left. And he pulled his drive to the left and he was mad at the drive and he sunk his hand. Like he thought the ball was maybe not out of play, but not good. He ended up making birdie on the hole, but he recovered from an opening hole double bogey to win the Masters by four.

Here's John Romm. Hard to put it into words. Obviously, we all dream of things like this as players and you try to visualize what it's going to be like and what it's going to feel like. And when I hit that third shot on the green and I could tell it was close by the crowd's reaction, just the wave of emotion of so many things just overtook me. Never thought I was going to cry about winning a golf tournament, but I got very close on that 18th hole. And a lot of it because of what it means to me and to Spanish golf. It's Spain's 10th major four player to win the Masters fourth. And my second win, my second major win, it's pretty incredible. And to play the way I did today on Sunday, only one bogey on difficult conditions and coming in with a margin.

Hard to explain, a lot of pride, and I'm really proud of myself from what I did. So, look, I don't know how many people there's the whole numerology thing. Yesterday was April the ninth, 4-9. The bib number on John Romm's caddy, 49. And it also happened to be Seve Ballesteros. The late Seve Ballesteros would have been 66 yesterday. And he was the first Spanish player to win the Masters. And he is, he is kind of, he's a god to Spanish golf.

Sure. That he was an electrifying personality. He actually helped make the Ryder Cup the event that it is.

His personality, his competitiveness, his gamesmanship, which is not always a positive. He helped make the Ryder Cup a thing. And to Spanish golf, they all revere his aura, his legacy. Jose Maria Olutobol, who won two Masters, was behind the 18th green when Romm walked off. He clearly said something to Romm about Seve. I did not see Sergio Garcia, but Garcia also pays homage to Seve Ballesteros.

And John Romm did. He mentioned it is, if you watch the 18th green ceremony after everything was over, he basically thanked Seve. It was, it was, it would have been his 66th birthday yesterday.

It was a, it was a very cool thing. It was a nice birthday present to Seve. Romm was great and such a deserving champion. Look, he's the number one player in the world. Again, he wasn't number one going in. Scottie Scheffler was number one. After a final round, 300 par 69, he gets his second major.

That in and of itself is validation. He wins this one in comeback fashion. He won the 2021 US Open. I think he was three shots off the pace going into the final round.

Uh, I'll be honest. I did not see Brooks Koepke going 24 holes without a birdie. He birdied the eighth hole in his third round and then didn't make a birdie again until, I believe, the 15th yesterday afternoon. He, he, he just was not sharp.

And here's Brooks Koepke on his performance. I hit some shots where I also didn't feel like I got some good breaks. I mean, for that ball to sit there on nine, on four and six, he, some good shots.

He just ended up in some terrible spots. It is what it is. I mean, I tried. I gave it my all.

So I can go to sleep at night. Koepke played great, man. He finished second at the Masters. Yeah. So there was, I watched a little bit of Golf Channel over the weekend.

And I mean, I always do that during majors anyway. But I think it was Paul McGinley was having this debate, I guess, with Brando Chamblee about, well, live golfers. They're not used to the competitive fire of the fourth, you know, four-day event because they're only playing 54 holes. And he, I'm like, I'm not sure that he'll be able to hold up.

Well, Brooks Koepke did not hold up. But man, it's just a guess as to why. It's really just a guess as to why he didn't. Like, if you want to say, like, definitively that it's because he plays 54 hole events with no cut, that that's why he, you might be right.

I can't say you're wrong. But I don't see it that way because Phil Mickelson just shot a 65 the final round. Now, he wasn't in contention at the beginning of the day. As it turns out, if Jon Rahm doesn't play really well, Mickelson could have won it. Yeah.

You'd post a six, you're a leader in the clubhouse with, like, five holes to play. Okay. Like, maybe. But I don't see that, I don't see how you could say definitively that that is the reason why Koepke did not play well on Sunday. I mean, I understand the logic behind the thought. But I don't think you can definitively say that.

There are some other things about living. We're going to talk about it because I think they're interesting. And I'm not here to bash it. At all.

I'm not here to bash it. We're going to talk to Brad Fritsch a little bit later on. But I'll just say this about Rahm. There are major champions, and then there are major championships won by one of those guys.

And Jon Rahm is one of those guys. We are talking about the giants in the sport. And the difference I'll draw is Cam Smith won the Open Championship last year. And it was, he played great, shot a great final round, beat Rory McIlroy and Victor Hovland, and is a deserving major champion. Matthew Fitzpatrick won the U.S. Open last year. He's an excellent, excellent player. Deserves to win a major championship. They're not Jon Rahm. Jon Rahm is one of the giants of the sport today. And when you have a major championship and it's won by one of those guys, it's just better.

It's just better. And like Brooks Koepcke would have been one of those guys. I don't care what Tory plays on. Brooks Koepcke winning a major is, okay, one of the giants of the game.

I know he's been hurt a lot. But those guys, it just hits differently when one of those guys wins. So that was a great, great finish for the Masters. And again, they control life and death. Who knew?

They do. Who knew you could control life or death? We have some other things to talk about regarding the Masters. We'll get to that in a little bit. First, Cane's losing Buffalo on Saturday afternoon.

Oh, it was a meltdown. I had heard enough. I bashed Cane's Twitter and frankly, I laugh at the criticisms of it.

I don't care. I'm just sick and tired of the. It's not even criticism. It's just negativity. Naysayers.

It's okay to specifically criticize players, plays, situations, but. Every single time the hurricanes lose, and it's the same people I see you. The same exact people are off the deep end. Yeah, end of the world. It's over. We suck. We'll never win again.

First round that that that. Find something else to do. Just why put yourself through it? I offer this as just, I don't know, maybe advice.

If you get so mad about it. Yeah, knit. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Do a puzzle. Oh, puzzles are great. Yeah.

Words, word searches. Yeah. Sudoku, whatever. Love it. Mahjong. Oh, my job. That's a good one. One bam, two crack.

Yeah, I used my, my, my mother used to play that when I was a kid. So hurricanes, I know it's going to sound really, really, really crazy, but. They still have the best chance to win the division and shockingly as horrible as they are, they still have the second best record in the national hockey league. I don't know how that's possible. Maybe they're just saving it for the playoffs.

So I think there are real reasons to be worried about the playoffs. I've never, ever shied away from that. But holy cow, people. Your blood pressure.

My gosh. Just, ah, got it. Canes play Ottawa tonight. This is not going to be an easy game.

Ottawa was, I think Ottawa was officially out of it now, but Ottawa was a good team. They got good players. It's not going to be an easy win. They're playing for nothing but fun.

They don't have, they don't have to prove to any, anything to anybody. But they're going to make it hard on Carolina tonight. I promise you tonight, tomorrow at home against Detroit final home game at Florida on Thursday and Florida is going to need that win. I promise you Florida is going to need that win. That is a different level of desperation. And that's what Carolina has been going up against the last two games.

Team that had to win to keep playing. Not, uh, not easy to deal with. All right.

Here's a curious thing. We're going to talk about this on the other side of this break as well with will Brinson. So the Baltimore Ravens signed Odell Beckham Jr. To a contract that will guarantee him $15 million this year. For those of you who don't know who Odell Beckham Jr. Is, uh, he used to be a great wide receiver.

And I don't say that like facetiously. No, back when he used to play, he was a great wide receiver. Of course, he hasn't been a great wide receiver in some time. He's had great moments, but I can't remember the last time I watched Odell Beckham Jr. Run a game. Yeah.

I cannot remember it. But he turns 31 the beginning of November. He's coming off a second major knee injury.

Not good. He has played, did not play last year at all. No, he has played a total of 53 of the last 98 regular season games that he has been around for basically half.

Yeah. What are the Ravens doing? Jamison Hensley, who covers the Ravens for ESPN. The addition of Odell Beckham Jr. Not only improves the NFL's least productive wide receiver group. But it serves as enticement for quarterback Lamar Jackson. Last month, Jackson announced that he requested a trade from Baltimore.

And it's unknown whether Jackson will play under the non-exclusive franchise tag this season. But in Beckham, the Ravens have given Jackson his most accomplished wide receiver in his six years in the NFL. Last year, Jackson's most productive wide receiver was Demarcus Robinson. And in his career, Beckham has had 56 touchdown catches.

Compare that to Jackson, who has thrown just a total of 51 touchdown passes to wide receivers. Now, Beckham also reunites with offensive coordinator Todd Monken, who was Beckham's play caller in Cleveland in 2019. This offseason, Monken was asked about Beckham, and he said he wants the ball. But I've never been around a great player who doesn't want the ball. I think it's awesome.

All right. Reuniting Odell Beckham Jr. with anybody from Cleveland can't be a good thing. That's the first thing that pops into my head. And most of that was about how great Beckham was. Yeah, was.

Was. And the other part is, boy, there's an assumption that the Lamar Jackson thing is about to pop. Yeah, well, maybe it is. I hope it is for the Ravens sake. But that dude wants 250 million dollars that the Ravens don't appear to be interested in giving him. There's a lot of assumptions there. I can't help but think that they just got Tyler Huntley a really great wide receiver. And Odell Beckham Jr. is going to be looking to be somewhere else.