Kansas Jayhawks Links
As Mikeville covered in his post last night, the Jayhawks are moving on to their first ever NCAA Super Regional after defeating Arkansas at home on Sunday! Clinching the Regional Championship locks this season into clear success no matter how it goes next weekend.
KCTV5 has a nice little video covering yesterday’s game here.
Whole Hog Sports has a story on the game written from the Razorback point of view:
The attendance for Sunday night’s game was 4,007 at a ballpark with a listed capacity of 2,500.
“What a regional,” Kansas coach Dan Fitzgerald said. “I can’t say enough about the three teams in this thing and how competitive those three programs are … and how talented this thing was from top to bottom.
“Unbelievable crowd, unbelievable atmosphere and I could not be more proud and more excited to keep playing baseball.”
KWCH has a short write up on the game and reminds us that we’ll find out who we play next as Oklahoma and Georgia Tech face each other in their Regional Final this afternoon:
The Jayhawks will play the winner of the Atlanta regional which will be decided in a winner-take-all game between Oklahoma and Georgia Tech on Monday. If Oklahoma were to win, Kansas would host the super regional round in Lawrence. If Georgia Tech were to win, the Jayhawks would continue their season in Atlanta.
Other Links!
St. Mary’s knocks #1 UCLA out of the tournament in the first weekend. According to ESPN, this is only the second time the top seed hasn’t made it out of the first weekend. The other time was last year. Looks like the portal is bringing more instability or parity to college baseball:
“That’s a tough clubhouse to leave. Those guys have been such wonderful Bruins, teammates, and guys to coach,” UCLA coach John Savage said at his postgame news conference. “They’ve won over 100 games in the last two years. No one in the country’s done that. Do the math. Obviously, this weekend, we did not play up to our standards.”
The Bruins joined the 2025 Vanderbilt Commodores as top seeds who failed to advance to their respective regional final. According to ESPN Insights, before last year, no No. 1 national seed had ever failed to do so. Now, it has happened twice in two tournaments.
Stat or detail to know: JCCC hit 11 home runs in six innings.
Johnson County Community College has been on a tear on the JUCO circuit this season — at one point, the Cavaliers had won 41 consecutive games, and they’ve scored double-digit runs in 50 of their 66 games. But their demolition of Neosho County Community College might mark JCCC’s magnum opus.
Speaking of Johnson County, they won the JUCO World Series by defeating Blinn College:
The best junior college baseball team in the country wasn’t from Texas or Florida – it was from Overland Park, Kansas.
Johnson County Community College beat Blinn College (TX) 8-5 on Friday night to win the NJCAA Division 1 Junior College World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado. JCCC finished the season with a 67-3 record, the most wins of any junior college baseball team in the modern NJCAA era.
Man, baseball is rocking and rolling in Lawrence and Overland Park. Wonder how the team that plays in Kansas City is faring? They do have one of the best young players in the game, surely it’s going well right?
May is mercifully over.
Will June be any better?
You know it’s bad when that’s how the story from Anne Rogers opens.
And to keep the fun sports momentum going, lets look ahead at what’s coming in the NBA Finals as the Knicks try to take down the Spurs.
The San Antonio Spurs ended the Oklahoma City Thunder‘s hopes of becoming the first team since the Kevin Durant-led Golden State Warriors of 2017 and 2018 to win back-to-back titles, returning to the Finals for the first time since raising their fifth banner in 2014.
In their way are the red-hot New York Knicks, who stormed through the Eastern Conference, winning 11 consecutive games by an average of 23.8 points to reach the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 — when their title hopes were dashed by Tim Duncan and the Spurs.
I’m talking about what this team did to Chet Holmgren, an All-NBA player who is supposed to be the freakishly talented big man that the Thunder’s offense and defense are built around. He took two shots in Game 7, scored four points, and never once looked like he belonged on the court in this series. Think about how crazy that is. I mean, really think about it. Holmgren is not some fading star that had the misfortune of running into the best of the next generation a little sooner than he’d have liked to. This is a 24-year-old big man who is precision-engineered to be a dominant force in the modern NBA. He’s supposed to be the guy breaking other teams’ offenses and playing mismatches off the court, and yet suddenly the Spurs are here turning him into Enes Kanter.
QOTD: Did you ever compete in track and field? If so, what events did you do?
Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time in Wichita at the KSHSAA State Track Championships. This is billed as the largest high school meet in the country as they host all 6 classes on Friday and Saturday. It is a remarkable sight and a great viewing experience for the most part.* Last year, there were over 40 meet records broken. I haven’t seen how many were broken this year but it was at least half as many if not more. It seemed like every time they announced one of the champions on Saturday, they also said it was a meet record. I don’t know how it’s happening but these high school kids just keep getting faster and faster. Truly impressive.
*The one downside is some of the distance races. Running 6 classes back to back for boys and girls means each event is 12 races. Do you know how boring it is watching 12 4x800s back to back to back to back?
