ESPN Super Regional Wrap – Day 1

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Hey Stitch-Heads.
So if you haven’t seen it already, here’s my Day 1 write-up of the Super Regionals that was posted on ESPN.com tonight. Check it out by clicking on this highlighted link here.
It was an interesting day in the Super Regionals on Friday. Florida and Vanderbilt looked like unstoppable forces, North Carolina held [...]

Day one of the Regionals could use more hours in the day

Wild Day In the Regionals

I was able to catch a few games and get some pics and write ups from others today. For those of you wanting to see what I wrote for my ESPN daily wrap-up,
click here and check it out.

Otherwise, read on…

In Defense of Some Regular Season Champs (While Running With the Wolves)

Holy crap.

This is getting out-of-control man. The last Friday of the regular season saw a bunch of stunners in and out of conference tournament play. The most stunning of which had to be a bunch of wild Lobos lunching on some suddenly-punchless Frogs. I can just picture the look on the bubble teams’ faces as they watched in head-slapping, fist-thru-the-wall frustration.

"I am a Golden God!" UNM's Logan Lippert strikes the pose after his catch deep-sixes No. 7 TCU.

But I’m going to start today’s entry with another shout-out and sincere plea to the NCAA selection committee. In a perfect world, I think every conference regular season champion would get a red carpet to the Field of 64. But if we can’t have our perfect world scenario and have to settle for the warped world of craptacular reality, I’d still like to propose five regular season champions that should get at-large bids, if they don’t win their conference tournament of course.

It’s The End of the World As We Know It

Damn. There is so much pressure in each and every game as we dwindle the season down in college baseball for 2011. I can’t take it, I tells ya’. I just wish some great force would come along and end the world as we know it on Saturday. I can’t spectate under this much pressure.

Pepperdine's Joe Sever seems alone on an island as he makes a huge defensive play.

Then we wouldn’t have to put up with the high-pressure, high-profile games between Texas-and-Texas A&M, or Virginia-and-North Carolina, or Oklahoma-and-Baylor, or Vanderbilt-and-Georgia or LSU-and-Mississippi State, etc. etc. The list goes on.

Off to camp, have a good Friday the 13th.

Dude, I totally forgot about my weekend of fun and frolic I had planned up at Crystal Lake* with a whole group of people for this weekend. Probably won’t post much since I’ll be doing a lot of running around with multiple outdoor activities at the camp* there. I’ll see you guys after the weekend. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. Oh, and I heard Miami beat Virginia today? That’s scare-ree!… Wait. What was that noise coming from the woods behind me?

(*Replace the words “New Orleans” and “the French Quarter” in the above paragraph. Now you get my drift.)

Hogs still wild. As is a lot of the Friday action.

New Mexico State's Parker Hipp was one of the big heroes of the day.

Bizarre day in the SEC leaves a large cloud of dust in the East, of which South Carolina emerges as the frontrunner… again we emphasize that’s it’s given purely “for now” status.

Lots of other big time upsets and close shaves up and down the roster of games from Friday. If this is any indication to how the Month of May will be, we may be okay to wait a little bit longer for June to get here.

Now on to some of the goods and bads from around the country for this lidlifter Friday.

A Royally Upsetting Friday in College Baseball

There were a lot of bourgeoisie uprisings in college baseball today. You know, following that whole “meek shall inherit the Earth” mantra. So if you were a member of the upper class or the ruling monarchy, you probably had a pretty terrible day. You know, like when a prince has to get married to some commoner who really isn’t worthy.

The Devils Double Down

Cal baseball may have been saved last week, but the Devils damned it today. A solid complete-game outing from Kramer Champlin, a couple of key doubles and an error-less day in the field led Arizona State’s continued its mastery of Cal with a 5-0 win in Berkeley. After yesterday’s 17-inning marathon win, the Devils are up 2-zip on the Bears.

ASU's pressure haunted Justin Jones and the Cal Bears today.

I didn’t get to write much more today since I’m going to a concert in San Francisco with some friends tonight, so sorry ’bout that. Then again, with the crappy weather throughout the country, most of today’s scheduled games seemed to get cancelled anyway. Oh, and if you want to add your own “Three-Up, Three-Down” go ahead. The comment section is all yours.

Yep, Bedlam indeed!

Things in the state of Oklahoma are just freakin’ cruel man. I mean harsh.

In what had to be the most intense game of the day, Oklahoma State’s Dane Phillips busted the Sooners psyche into a million pieces with a bottom-of-the-9th dagger of a jog-off home run to win game one of the Bedlam Series weekend edition, 8-7.

A screen grab of Dane Phillips jumping on home plate after his game-winning home run. Sorry, the game wasn't televised in HD... obviously.

Trivia Question. (No Bonus Points Included)

Okay quick, name me a team that has already beaten two Top 5 teams, has a team ERA in the Top 6 in the country, has 21 wins, is ranked No. 21 in Boyd Nation’s more-accurate ISR and yet isn’t even within sniffing distance of the human polls and rankings?

This could be the best team in the country that nobody knows about.

Go ahead and guess… we’ll give you 15 seconds for your computer to reload here.