Jack Eichel says he hopes Sabres fans can “look past” his contentious exit from Buffalo as he prepares for his first game against his former team Thursday.
Undefeated Nova Southeastern is the No. 1 team in the final DII men’s basketball Power 10 rankings before the NCAA DII tournament kicks off. Here’s a look at the full rankings.
It’s March and that means the 2022 DII men’s basketball tournament bracket has been released. Let’s try to make some sense of this year’s 64-team field.
USC has signed Andy Enfield to a new six-year contract after the coach was linked as a possible candidate for Maryland’s head-coaching position.
The New York Giants are expected to make a run at free-agent quarterback Mitchell Trubisky, sources told ESPN.
Hyunjung Lee never expected to come to America, let alone play for a Division I school and have a shot at a career in the NBA. That’s just what’s happening.
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – PGA TOUR officials are confident they’re prepared for what is shaping up as a potentially tricky stretch of weather at THE PLAYERS Championship. On the eve of the opening round at TPC Sawgrass the extended forecast calls for a high likelihood of thunderstorms over the opening three days. Perhaps more ominously, there could be four different wind directions throughout the tournament. As an ominous precursor, the Stadium Course was evacuated early Wednesday afternoon as storms approached the area. Saturday could prove especially challenging with 20-30 mph sustained winds, and even heavier gusts, expected out of the west/northwest. Thursday brings an 80% chance of storms and winds of 10-18 mph out of the west/southwest. The forecast for Friday sits at 90% chance of storms with an east/southeast wind of 6-12 mph. “Rain and thunderstorms are likely both Thursday and Friday as a frontal boundary drops into northern Florida and stalls,” TOUR meteorologist Wade Stettner said in his forecast Wednesday. “This front is forecast to bring periods of rain with embedded thunderstorms over the two-day period.” Temperatures are also expected to drop significantly on Sunday with a high of just 54 degrees. The wind will switch to a 12-22 mph challenge out of the north/northeast in what, weather depending, would be the final round. “By Saturday morning a strong cold front is forecast to arrive and bring additional thunderstorms,” Stettner’s forecast continued. “This front should clear Ponte Vedra Beach by noon Saturday with dry conditions for the remainder of the weekend. Gusty winds will develop behind the front on Saturday with peak gusts over 30mph at times. Much colder temperatures are forecast this weekend.” In anticipation of the high weekend winds, and the potential for weather delays over the opening two days, officials will pay especially close attention to green speeds and pin locations during the set-up process. With the natural drainage on and around the greens only a few pin locations would be severely affected by rain, but high winds could render some spots unusable. For example, it’s unlikely there would be a hole close to the water at the par-4 fourth and island 17th holes. “We will once again meet this afternoon with the agronomy staff with the latest information at our disposal and obviously adjust our plans accordingly,” Chief Referee Gary Young said. “We are confident we will be as prepared as possible for what lies ahead. We are meticulous in every aspect but it is certainly fair to say Saturday’s winds are a point of focus for us, particularly as we could be finishing up Friday’s round on Saturday, so that affects Friday’s set up as well. “We need to keep in mind we could have a good amount of Friday’s round playing in that Saturday wind,” Young continued, “and they are opposite winds, so we need to find something that works well for both and that’s a challenge.” While in perfect weather officials would prepare and maintain firm and fast greens, the current forecast calls for a gradual decrease from top speed – as the tournament begins Thursday – to as much as an inch or an inch and a half slower speeds by Saturday. That would presumably eliminate the possibility of balls oscillating and even rolling away on the putting surfaces. Officials will take care to make it a gradual change rather than a big overnight shift so players don’t have to make significant adjustments. “Thankfully we’ve got time to make adjustments because we know what’s coming, so that helps in the planning,” Young said. “We have our target speeds for the high winds and we just need to get to that as slowly as possible.” Defending champion Justin Thomas was hoping for the best but also preparing himself for the worst. “I’ve heard horror stories from Tiger and Freddy and some guys about having to hit 5- or 6-iron into 17 on those cold north wind days, and I haven’t experienced that,” Thomas said. “When you get wind and cold temperatures like that, it’s just a different animal, and it’s really just a survival-type thing. “It’s not like I’m going into this week preparing any differently… I don’t get too wrapped up in the draw or what’s the weather going to be like Friday or what’s the wind going to be, because at the end of the day, weather people are wrong all the time.” Adam Scott, the 2004 champion, has experienced tough weather at TPC Sawgrass before. THE PLAYERS the year prior to his victory here, and the tournament the year after it, were played in tricky weather. “It’s a long time ago, but I was around for Davis Love’s win in 2003 when it was horrible, and Fred Funk’s win in 2005, that wasn’t good weather either,” Scott said ahead of his 20th PLAYERS start. “I think we played almost 36 holes on Monday that year because of all the weather delays. When this sort of weather happens the guy who really has his game in shape comes to the top. He can make those adjustments on the fly when he stands on the tee and it is a different wind than the day before, but you just easily pick the shot you need to compensate. Those in control of their swings will be the ones to watch.”
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Scottie Scheffler was a fine young player with a bright future but no victories on the PGA TOUR. That seems like ages ago. It was only last month. Today, Scheffler could become world No. 1 with a third victory in four starts at THE PLAYERS Championship. He would need Jon Rahm to finish worse than 10th and Collin Morikawa worse than a three-way T2, but the fact remains, Scheffler has opened the proverbial floodgates. “I don’t really think about getting over the hump or monkey off the back or anything like that,” he said from TPC Sawgrass, where he missed the cut last year in his PLAYERS debut. “I will say second time around it definitely felt a little bit different being in contention.” To recap: Scheffler, who seemed destined to win when he dusted Rahm at the Ryder Cup in September, beat Patrick Cantlay in a playoff at the Waste Management Phoenix Open last month. It was lifechanging. There were tears. Then he tamed brutal conditions to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard last weekend. It was his second win in 21 days. His heater has been impressive, but not unpredictable. In fact, there’s a long history of players who have validated that first win with a second in short order. David Duval, the 13-time TOUR winner who now plays on PGA TOUR Champions, even strung together three Ws in three starts when he broke into the winner’s circle in October and November of 1997 after a series of frustrating close calls. No one has replicated that since, but a handful of players have been where Scheffler is now. “The first time I won, I went on a bit of a heater, too,” said Webb Simpson, who broke through at the 2011 Wyndham Championship, was T10 at The Barclays, and won the Deutsche Bank Championship at TPC Boston. “It was actually a bit similar to what’s going on with Scottie.” Two wins in three starts? Try identical. History, though, shows they’ve got company. Justin Rose won the 2010 Memorial, finished T9 at the Travelers Championship, and won the AT&T National. Again, two victories in three starts. (He led the Travelers by three but shot a final-round 75, leaving him one round from three straight wins, otherwise known as the full Duval.) “I’m kind of glad he’s got the monkey off his back,” Rose said. “He’s still a young guy, it’s not like it was a big monkey or anything, but he’d been in the hunt quite a few times. I felt the relief at the Memorial. I was 30 years old, I’d played on the European Tour and I’d won a lot, I’d probably won 10 times in my career, but still, the U.S. media, I feel, are very stats driven. “It’s about your batting average, or your 3-point shooting percentage, whatever it is,” Rose continued. “And obviously we’ve all been used to the stats Tiger put up, so when you’re not winning, it gets frustrating. I was aware of my inability to finish some situations and what that might look like on paper, so to start to reverse that was a relief but also confidence-building.” Rose had three runners-up and four third-place finishes on TOUR before finally getting his first win. Scheffler, the 2019 Korn Ferry Tour Player of the Year and 2020 PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year, played well enough to qualify for East Lake in each of his first two seasons despite his lack of a victory. He had 17 top-10s before breaking through, including two seconds and three thirds. Duval had seven runner-up finishes in three seasons before busting the doors down. Winning tends to alter people’s perceptions of the close calls. Winning twice or more in short order, early in your career, changes the narrative completely. Xander Schauffele got his first two TOUR wins, including the TOUR Championship, in eight starts in 2017. Later that year Patton Kizzire got his first win at the OHL Classic at Mayakoba, then won again at the 2018 Sony Open in Hawaii – two victories in a span of four starts. Adam Scott got his first three TOUR wins, including the 2004 PLAYERS Championship, in a stretch of 13 starts. Jimmy Walker collected his first three trophies in eight starts in 2013—14. The outlier, of course, was Tiger Woods, for whom the floodgates opened immediately. He won twice in his first eight professional starts in 1996, made it three-for-nine at the Tournament of Champions to begin ’97, and nabbed his first major title at the Masters that April. The open-floodgates phenomenon is not unique to the TOUR, and in fact intensifies the further you climb down golf’s hierarchy. Sungjae Im began his Korn Ferry Tour career with a quick win and runner-up in 2018 to lead the money list wire-to-wire. Mito Pereira won in back-to-back weeks last year and was the 12th in KFT history to get the three-win call-up to the PGA TOUR. The floodgates are even busier in college. Maverick McNealy, one of Scheffler’s teammates on the juggernaut 2017 U.S. Walker Cup team (Collin Morikawa, Will Zalatoris, et al), was a sophomore at Stanford when he shot 65 to win the Southwestern Intercollegiate for his first college victory. He won the Olympia Fields/Fighting Illini Invitational the next week. It was the start of a heater in which McNealy won six times in 13 starts for the Cardinal. “I remember writing in my journal, ‘It’s way more fun playing to win than playing to not screw up,’” McNealy, who’s 21st in the FedExCup, said from TPC Sawgrass. “It definitely comes in waves. I’ve had stretches where I haven’t missed the center of the driver face for a month and a half. I’ve had stretches where I couldn’t miss a putt for like a month. “Unfortunately,” continued McNealy, who has two career runner-up finishes on TOUR, “they haven’t lined up together at this point; hopefully they will. There’s so much random variance in this game, you just kind of have to ride it out. When you’re on a heater you gotta ride it out as long as you can, and when you’re off a heater you’ve got to shallow it out and get back on one.” McNealy didn’t win in his first year at Stanford; he equates his pro career thus far as four years of being a freshman. But as Scheffler reminds, that can change. Confidence builds. The hot hand is real. Winless today, McNealy could be a multiple winner and FedExCup No. 1 next month. Life comes at you pretty fast – especially when the floodgates open.
It’s time for another update on where baseball’s immediate and long-term future stand.
The Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass favors no one, which is why it is far from easy to predict a winner at the Players. Still, we tried.
