#division-ii

#division-ii

St. John Bosco, the new No. 1 high school baseball team in Southern California, took two of three games last week from the previous No. 1 team, Orange Lutheran.

You'd have to catch me off the record to answer that question. The implication was clear: Now that every school can pay players -- either through direct revenue share or name, image and likeness dollars -- Big Ten schools are no longer disadvantaged in recruiting by everything from booster bag men to shoe company AAU connections.

It's time for the CIF state championships in basketball and soccer (first time for soccer) in Sacramento on Friday and Saturday. Basketball will be played at Golden 1 Center. Soccer is at Natomas High.

Howard University's sports have been a punchline or worse my whole life, and since before I was even around, and that's a mighty long time. I learned too much about Howard's athletic awfulness when I covered D.C. sports for Washington City Paper beginning in the 1990s. My education started when I wrote about the school's 1996 basketball team, which was in the middle of the worst losing streak in the NCAA at the time.

Since 2006, Inside Higher Ed has used the NCAA's data on teams' academic performance to select its March Madness winners. First, we compare teams' academic progress rate, the metric the NCAA uses to measure athlete retention and academic eligibility. This year, we used data from 2023-24, the most recent available.

"You play, what, 36 games, and you try to put yourself in this situation as often as you can. I think every team that's here knows that this weekend is probably the biggest weekend of the year."

The late Joe Kapp could make that claim. He played two sports at Cal, best known for leading the Bears to their most recent Rose Bowl following the 1958 season. But the man who later quarterbacked the BC Lions to a Canadian Grey Cup championship and the Minnesota Vikings into Super Bowl IV also played hoops for the Bears. He was an All-American in football, a backup guard on the basketball team. Kapp played the 1956-57 and '57-58 seasons, averaging just 1.8 points each season.