In case you missed it...

It was 18 to 4.

No drama. LSU takes, as you heard, their seventh national title. More impressive than that, the SEC has won five of the last six College World Series titles.

We have to say this every year, there wasn't one for COVID. And it's five different teams. There have been many years where, like, the ACC will win, you know, several NCAA basketball championships in a row, or like in the 90s, we won like half of them, you know, between Duke and UNC. But it's like Duke and UNC. Five different teams winning titles in six years is pretty impressive to me for ESPN. LSU started the season number one.

They finished the season number one. But also, I had to think, watching this last night, if you're Wake Forest, you're like, we were there. We were right there. We beat this team. And then we only had to win one of the last two with extra innings.

Couldn't get it done. Could have been a Wake Forest championship team. But we don't get it. By all accounts, several of the top players are going to get drafted were playing in this series. So that's cool to see the best players there. But maybe Wake Forest will be great for the next four or five years. Maybe they'll be back to the College World Series.

But I don't know. Virginia had a little bit of a run there. But typically, ACC teams don't make three and four consecutive year appearances in the College World Series, which is often what it takes to actually crack in and win the whole darn thing. I know we've seen UNC there. I know we've seen Virginia there. Sure, we've seen Florida State there over the years. Now we've seen Wake there.

It just doesn't come as often. So we'll see when they get back. Also, I did say five of the last six College World Series champs came from the SEC.

But of course, there's an asterisk on that Vanderbilt title because NC State got screwed. Never forget. Yeah. Hashtag pack 11. What were they going to try and play with?

Like 11 dudes or something like that? You may not have been producing sports at this time. Maybe not.

It might have been just music. It was still, I don't know, we should revisit this. NC State, it was the year after COVID. It wasn't 2020. It was 2021.

But everybody was still getting tested. And I won't get the details right. I guarantee if we say right now, hey, somebody call and remind me exactly what went down with NC State and the COVID. A mad NC State fan will call right now. 860-5326. Remind me what the COVID situation was.

919-860-5326. But State basically got screwed because they even had enough dudes to play that hadn't, didn't test positive. But then there was the whole contact tracing thing. I do remember.

You've been around people. Yes. And so they didn't get a chance to play. I do remember that.

A bunch of guys were wiped out from it. Yeah. So asterisk on your title, Vanderbilt. We're not letting you get away with that. Next up, getting out the gate. The PGA live papers.

That's what we're going to call them out. We finally got a contract. Remember when we first got a deal, it was like, there's a deal between PGA and live.

Like what is it? Like, don't worry about it. It's just a deal. Yeah. Well, the deal is they still don't have a deal.

Right. Here's the actual deal. They were suing each other and the PGA didn't know, didn't like how the lawsuit was going on their side. And they were gonna have to give up a bunch of information and they probably weren't going to win.

And the Saudi's whole goal was not to run some fun testicle golf league where dudes wear shorts and bros, you know, uh, chug beers and throw the Saudis don't have interest in running this. They were doing as it's been done in the past with expansion leagues. You do what you can to disrupt so that the actual league has to either take you in or at least sort of bring you to the table.

Right. Um, the NFL has, has seen this and the times the NFL, when they were less powerful and do at least, you know, talk to, uh, other teams. And when the NFC merged with the AFC back of the back of the day, NFL and AFL back in the day, right. More recently, people have tried to start up leagues to disrupt the NFL. And it's like, no, no, no, no. We're too powerful.

PGA thought they were, thought they could keep all their players together. But when, when it comes to monopoly money, I'm just, when people are flashing, just billions on billions around, it's nothing. So basically what we found out of the papers was how much of this deal was not about a business deal and was about avoiding the litigation. Um, there was one quote specifically from Jay Monahan. I wish I had it in front of me. I thought I wrote it down somewhere, but it was basically about, uh, here it is. I recognize everything that I've said in the past and in my prior positions, said Monahan, a leading architect of the deal said this month, I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite. Anytime I said anything, I said it with the information that I had at that moment. And I said it based on the based on someone that's trying to compete for the PGA tour and our players.

I accept those criticisms, but circumstances do change maybe, but here the circumstances, the change was like, you thought it was going to be one way and it didn't end up being that way. Uh, so again, there's no, the news is that there isn't really a lot of news in these papers. They have until the end of the year to figure out exactly what the deal is. Um, and it's just real murky. It was put together that basically it basically all the paper is is a white flag, but the PGA waved and said, all right, stop the lawsuit. That was the main two points. The only two things they agreed on literally, and I don't have to be a lawyer.

My good friend David Glenn used to show it. He'd be like a lawyer. I could break down the legal things, right? There's no like legal agreement of who's running. There's, there's loosely some structure about the PGA technically is in charge of what to do with this team golf format that was called live golf, but live golf has, you know, not only a seat at the table, but a large stake and a large voice at the table.

The only two things that are agreed upon and the paper we saw that basically is the PGA live golf agreement is one. We're not suing each other anymore. Nobody likes that. It's too much truth that has to be told. People get deposed. People, you know, swear to tell the truth. You have to start revealing their books.

Nobody likes that. Now revealing books, rich people hate that, hate it. So they agreed to stop the lawsuit and stop all the discovery that was going on there. And number two, they agreed to not say bad things about each other.

Literally. They said, we'll stop saying bad things about each other. You'll stop bringing up nine 11 every day, you know, Jay Monahan and we'll stop. I don't know, whatever, whatever we were saying, we'll stop talking about how much more money we have to give your players than you do. So again, the, the, the stark reality is they didn't agree to a business deal.

They agreed to stop suing each other and stop fighting. And the PGA uh, wave the white flag. Next up, the NHL awards were last night in Nashville.

Now let me tell you something. The NHL gets a few things right. One, I like that they do an award ceremony.

It's super cool. I know not everybody shows up, but they do it coupled with their draft. You get a bunch, bunch of people already in the same place. You get a few more people in the same place. You give out some awards, you make it a night of it. Did I watch them?

No, I did not. But I think it's just a cool concept and the right way to do it. Right.

Have your little community. The other thing they get right by having it in a ceremony, they announced all of their awards in like two hours or three hours or whatever it takes. Right. Baseball, NFL, NBA, I'm pretty sure all of those, they give you the awards drip as I like to call it. Here's the best defensive player.

Here's tomorrow or next week or next month in our off season. You'll get the best coach. You'll get the, and then finally you get like the MVP or whatever. Dude, just give me the awards.

Yeah. If the votes are tallied, give me the awards. Pick a time and give me all the awards.

So the NHL, you get it right in that regard. Give me all the awards in one night. I'll even let you space them all out and not tell them to me all at once. You can give me a release at the end of the night.

That's fine. Not the drip, drip, drip of the other annoying ones to like drag out and make talking points every day. Now what the NHL gets wrong. You know, I've got to go here. I know like hardcore hockey fans will probably hate me for this. The names are ridiculous. The hockey player names? No, no, no, no, not the names of the player. The names of the awards because hockey expects us to know what all their awards mean. So it can't be Connor McDavid winning the MVP award, which then we could just have stupid debates as it wasn't most valuable to your team or most outstanding overall.

Well, whatever. We know what MVP is supposed to mean, whatever our definition of it is, but it's gotta be the heart trophy or the Vezna trophy or the Jack Adams or the Selke. I don't even know if I'm supposed to say the E at the end. That's like, it's intimidating to me to even say the names of the award for fear that I'll say it wrong.

People get mad at me. So why can't we just say coach of the year, defensive player of the year, best defensive forward, best rookie. Let's use the universal terms that we all use and you can keep these names on the trophies. Gotta be different. The Connor McDavid won his third MVP award and he was given the heart trophy.

Why can't we just keep it like that? I think in their tweets they did say MVP and heart trophy, but you'll see heart trophy a lot more than you'll see MVP. Here's my thing. I looked at the, first of all, I tried to look for like hurricanes where they showed up in the awards. Spoiler alert, they did not. Don't go looking deep for them. Occasionally they showed up in the top five, but again, that's kind of A, the Cane's MO is everybody contribute, everybody be a little bit dangerous, get points from everywhere. Don't let the team key on one people.

Wear a team down with our team energy, team grind, beat you in the third period when we've got more than you, that type of stuff. However, that might also speak to why the hurricanes sometimes seem to dry up a little bit in the playoffs. Maybe we need Andrei Svechnikov or Sebastian Aho to be a guy that's, you know, getting in the top 10 votes of the heart trophy, you know, that whether that's because they're scoring a bunch or a bunch of assists or just, you know, elevating that level of play or whatever it might be. I mean, I would bet a lot of times if Aho or Svechnikov were to go on just a tear in the playoffs, don't have to win the whole thing, the team goes to the Eastern Conference Finals or Stanley Cup Finals and one of those guys is like averaging more than, you know, a point and a half a game or something like that, then the next year they could have just one of their regular solid regular seasons and the decent chance that their profile would be raised and they'd get voted up there.

So such is how it goes. Matthew Kuchuk, for example, getting voted up there in Florida, although I don't know when voting happens for these awards. Is it right at the end of the regular season? Is that the playoffs?

Good question, I think so. All right, but here's my thing. Conor McDavid, they have first place votes, second place votes, third place votes, fourth place votes, fifth place votes. So everybody, like you're voting, you turn in your ballot with five names on it. Conor McDavid had 195 first place votes, which is almost all of them, right? Yeah. Then one other dude got a first place vote and whoever that person who didn't vote Conor McDavid first, didn't vote Conor McDavid second.

Oh, no. Or third or fourth, voted him fifth. So Conor McDavid got 195 first place votes, then zero second, zero third, zero fourth and one fifth place vote.

Who is this person that was so out of whack? It reminds me of, we have great moments in educating Victoria in local sports history. One time the ACC announced that Tyler Hansbrough was the unanimous player of the year. And what does unanimous mean to you, Victoria? Everyone, everyone's on the same page, same board.

Literally everyone? Yeah, like everyone believes. So if there was 200 people that voted and 199 of them, is that unanimous? Because if you get a unanimous judgment in MMA, that means all the judges say that you won that fight. And I think you're on the right track. I'm just, to clarify, if 199 people voted for something out of 200, is that unanimous?

100, no, it would not be. So the ACC announces Tyler Hansbrough, unanimous player of the year. They lied. And then somebody says, I didn't vote for him. And now you're in a bit of a pickle because either this person who's voting is lying and we probably have a ballot somewhere. And then the ACC had to sheepishly come out and say, well, sometimes if it's really, really, really overwhelming, we just say unanimous. Okay, we can make fun of the one, if one person is really that out of whack or let them write their column defending it, but it ain't unanimous. That's not what the word means. And so that's what I was reminded of when I saw Connor McDavid not only get 195 and then one second place vote, but 195 first place votes and then a fifth place vote.

Wow. Other ones, Vesna trophy, we had no canes in there. The Bruins basically won everything because they were so good. Best defender, the Norris trophy. Ah, Adam Fox, are we calling him an honorary cane?

I don't know about that. Eric Carlson won his third Norris trophy. Selkie trophy, I believe this is, probably I'm pronouncing it wrong, people will be mad, but I believe this is the best defensive forward. And there we did have the captain, Jordan Stahl, getting a fourth place finish there. And that's what we were talking about where that's where his value shows up, right?

Is a lot of it is centering a line and taking out the other team's best player. The lady being our boy, Jacob Slavin, always shows up good for this. He got fourth in the voting. He's won that before. And thanks to a Corey Lavallett tweet, I can tell you exactly where the canes ranked in the awards. Again, we said Jordan Stahl got fourth in the Selkie. Aho also got some votes for the Selkie. Jordan Martinuk got one fifth place vote.

Look at him go. It probably was Corey Lavallett. It's okay to give a hometown fifth place vote, okay? Brent Burns, the Norris trophy, which I'm thinking he's won before. He finished 10th place. Slavin 17th place in the Norris.

And as I mentioned, fourth for the Bing. And Brendan Moore, I was a little mad. Didn't we finish with the second or third best record in the league this year?

And we lost Spetsnakoff and we lost Patchy or Eddie. I wasn't expecting Brendan Moore to win Jack Adams because I know the Bruins had the best record. But I thought that he'd be in the top five. He did finish sixth. So there we go.

Next up, getting out of the game. Dave Lillard. Tune into a sports talk show on TV and you will probably hear the name Dave Lillard. He's the big talk right now.

My question is this. Here's my big question about Dame Lillard. Because we hear about Dame every season. Anytime it's a guy who's a good player, has been good for a while, and still conceivably will be good for a few more years. He's not like faded, right? He's got a few more years in him.

Not 10, but maybe five. Is on a team that has just been underachieving and doesn't seem close to winning a title. We are always like, they got to play somewhere else. We want them to be somewhere else. We want to put them with a team that we've seen be good and need a missing piece. Like the Miami Heat could possibly use them, right? My question is, is this a thing that is actually happening or is this merely the absence of sports, the vacuum of late June. And so they're just things that people need to talk about.

Regardless, the people will talk about them. Here's Kidrick Perkins on being tired of talking about Dame Lillard every off season. Last three or four years, every single season, we're talking about if Dame is going to force his way out, or is he going to go find himself a contender to play for, whatever the case may be. And the answer is, I don't know what Dame wants to do, but I know that I'm actually tired of talking about it. Because if, unless he's going to walk in and say, I'm ready to get it done, then Dame is just going to be in Portland, putting up numbers, winning some games, maybe making it to the playoffs and having an early playoff exit.

That's it. It's nothing that the Portland Trailblazers could do to add someone to that roster to make them a championship contender. Again, I'm not sure this is Dame Lillard's fault. I think he's just been a really good player on a mediocre team. And so people are stretching for things to talk about. So we keep talking about Dame Lillard and he's like a nice guy.

So like, he won't come out and be like, shut up, quit talking about me. That's my take on that. Next up, yesterday in the Triad, Winston-Salem, North Carolina is the home for the last five or six years. It moved, it used to be in Salisbury, I believe, the home of the National Sports Media Association. And they gave out their awards yesterday. Our man, Dave Gorin, good friend of the program, is the head of that organization. They give out national awards and state level awards, which are pretty cool.

That's been going on for a number of years. The National Sports Media Awards, Ian Eagle won Broadcaster of the Year. We're going to see more of Ian Eagle because I believe he's slated to take over for Jim Dance at the Final Four. Well, Ian Eagle has been the number two guy for their NFL team for a long time. He's been the number two guy on their college basketball for a long time. He's a really good dude, very interesting guy, very smart. He's the Brooklyn Nets play by play guy, although I don't know, now that he's picking up more CBS stuff, maybe he won't be able to. But he's smart, huge fan of Broadway musicals.

That's one of the things I like about Ian Eagle. I think he grew up in New York, just a great voice. And I don't know how old he is. He's one of those guys, he's been around a while, but he also looks like he could give us a good, like 25, 30 years. I think he might be in like his 50s, maybe early 60s.

No, no, I bet he's in his 50s. I bet he can give us 20, 25 years. And then Dan Kelly, NHL and CBS Sports Writer of the Year State Awards. Stan Cotton won his third North Carolina Broadcaster of the Year.

I believe we will try and talk to him this week. He's the voice of Wake Forest. Got to have a lot of fun with a good basketball season. He's had good basketball seasons. And I don't know if he does baseball or if somebody else does that, but it's been a good time for Wake Athletics.

And of course, that does mean with him taking over, technically these are the winners for 2022, they sort of let people finish. A lot of people are doing sports, you know? And so they let them wrap up their sports seasons and then they can get more of these people in one place. Because I don't know if you heard, but there's like less sports going on right now.

So it's a lot easier to get the sports writers and sports announcers to come do your stuff. So Stan Cotton won for the third time, but that does mean Adam Gold, no longer reigning Sportscaster of the Year. He is your 2021 winner and maybe we'll see if he can go back and get it again. Go get it Gold.

Go do it. Andrew Carter, the News & Observer Sports Writer of the Year. What's interesting about that is Andrew Carter used to be a sort of everyday sports writer, was like a beat writer and then wrote some other stuff. And now he does investigative journalism. Much of it is sports. I would say a lot of the stories he writes are about sports, but he's not an exclusive sports writing and he's more of like a deep dive guy. So he's writing fewer articles and you're seeing like less of his work, but then it's a, you know, it's a big, did a cool story about, you know, the city of Kingston and its struggles, but also, you know, what basketball means to the city.

So cool stuff like that. And finally, as we get out of the gate, of course, the Adam Gold show is where you come to get your CONCACAF Gold Cup updates, right? Where else?

I mean, the Adam Gold show should be a sponsor of the Gold Cup. They named it after him for Pete's sake, but Martinique, they were two upsets last night. Martinique, huge upset over El Salvador. I think, I think it is.

I'm pretty sure I checked yesterday on the line. They scored two goals in the first 16 minutes. They held on to win 2-1 over El Salvador, even though they took a red card, basically played most of the second half with only two dudes.

And their second goal was nice. You have to go look at this. It was, he wasn't like about, you know, the classic, the best move in basketball now, other than dunking on somebody, the way you can most humiliate someone is to break their ankles. Like you cross them over, you do like a hip fake. And we don't, you rarely see a dude all the way fall down in football, but you'll get a similar effect of just like a, you know, a shoulder fake. This was close to that. Like a dude was being fed a ball and the defender saw that he could pass off to somebody and he got a shoulder shimmy faked in a way that made it look like he was going to dart with the ball.

And the, the defender was just, I thought he was going to trip on his own feet with the first time I watched it. And, but instead it just, the guy was able to easily dish off to his buddy, got it in also to one Panama over Costa Rica, a small apps upset there. So, uh, the U S back in action, I believe tomorrow night. Hey honey, can we talk?

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