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Colin Cowherd (0:00)
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Virgin Voyages is where luxury meets travel. Book it and see what you've been missing. Learn more@virginvoyages.com or contact your travel advisor. Thanks for listening to the Herd podcast. Be sure to catch us live every weekday on Fox Sports radio and noon to 3 Eastern, 9am to noon Pacific. Find your local station for the herd@foxsportsradio.com or stream us live every day on the iHeartRadio app by searching Fox Sports Radio or FSR. Now let's get this party started. You're listening to Fox Sports Radio. Here we go on a Monday, ready to roll. Live in Los Angeles, it's the Herd. Wherever you may be and however you may be watching or listening, thanks for making us part of your day. One hour from now where Colin was right, we're Colin was wrong. Kelvin Sampson, coach of Houston in the Final Four will be joining us. So it's actually a great, great weekend of sports. Baseball was amazing. A little controversy in the Bronx. Great. College basketball and a fight in the NBA and a little bit of. A little bit of NFL news. But J. Mac, we've got our Final Four and it's all number one seeds. Great teams. Great. Yeah. The four best teams. I don't think there's any question about that. So it's Florida, Duke, Houston and Auburn. And yet somebody out there, a lot of people out there are saying this is one of the most boring marches ever. Oh, boy, oh boy. This is what guys do. I don't think women do this as much. Although I can't speak from experience. There's something about guys, they want you to know that they heard the garage band first or they, they really like mid major basketball and they're going to brag about it in the Internet. They're called nerds. You don't want to watch Duke in Houston. You don't want to watch Cooper flag in the most talented team in a long time in college basketball offensively against the best defensive team maybe ever in Houston. You don't want to watch that Kelvin Sampson. They played, they hammered Tennessee. A good Tennessee team humiliated Tennessee. They got past Purdue, they got past Gonzaga. Two of the top six programs in the country. Mark Few said the one team he didn't want to face Houston, and now they face Duke. You don't want to watch that. You don't want to watch Florida and Auburn. Y'all lectured me that Florida was gonna win the tournament. Now you don't like them. You were smarter than everybody else, guys. That and the garage band. You told me you watch it. You knew it. Auburn, Florida are the two best teams in easily the best college basketball conference. I mean, outside of Duke, nobody in the ACC won a game. So you don't want to watch these teams. And by the way, Duke has won 16 to 17 and Florida's won 16, 18. Like they're the hottest teams. We had a college football playoff Cinderella fan. Smu, Boise State, Indiana. How'd that work out? You thought that was good sports. I didn't. In fact, in the college football playoff era, the lowest rated national championship game had one of those Cinderellas. Georgia 65, TCU 7. I bet you like that too. Now those of us with a social life did not. We stopped watching mid second quarter. So these are red hot teams. They're the best teams. They've been challenged outside of Duke. And it's like these people in the movie industry who want to convince you Shape of Water was the best movie. A woman falling in love with a fish. They're really these weirdos. Yeah, I'm going to go with Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Spielberg, Mission Impossible, Oppenheimer. Yeah, I'm going to go with those, you know, which made seven times the money of a woman falling in love with a fish. But, you know, it's fair. I'm very artsy. I see things you don't. I watch mid major basketball. Congratulations. I went out with my wife. It was a good time. A couple of times during the tournament. Fun time, cocktails, good dinner, friends. I'm not watching Missouri Valley Conference basketball and I'm not going to pretend I care if SMU football rocks. They can't compete with the big dogs. So this whole thing about you keep telling me the ratings are up. So obviously I'm among the group of people who like Duke, who like the sec, which has really started paying attention to basketball. I said this in January. I'm like, folks, I don't know what you're watching, but SEC basketball is noticeably better than Big Ten. In ACC basketball, like, it's not close. They got more shooters, they got more athletes. The coaches are all well known. So Bruce Pearl on four number one seeds. Sorry. Drexel. Sorry. Lipscomb. Sorry. Community colleges. Sorry. We got four number ones. And here's Bruce Pearl. I told our guys right now we haven't beaten a team yet that I thought was better than us, and that's why we're the overall number one seed. And now we're going to the final four where there are four one seeds. And I think the four teams that are advanced, I think there are four best teams in the country. That doesn't obviously always happen. Okay, so we have ourselves a really interesting situation in baseball, and everybody's freaking out. And I think they're really freaking out because it's the Yankees. If this was the Rays, you know, or the Diamondbacks, it wouldn't be nearly the story. So the Yankees used an MIT analyst, Aaron Lernhardt. He's a former Yankee analyst. There are a lot of fans of the Yankees in New York and around the globe, frankly. And they had a couple guys on the roster. Volpe was struggling to hit, and so they did something totally legal. And it has been a massive home run. So they moved, shifted some of the weight in the bat from the barrel closer to the label. So in baseball, there's a length restriction and a diameter restriction, and the Yankees didn't Break either rule. Baseball tells you bats got to be this long and this big in diameter. It doesn't tell you where you have to put the meat of the bat. You could put it all in the handle and it would look weird, but you can do that. So the Yankees, because of this, are on a frenzy. Everybody's hitting home runs. They're first in runs, home runs, RBIs, OPS. They're number one in everything. And you know what? This is? It's peak. Bill Belichick, he knows the rule book better than you did. He knows it better than the Ravens did or the Colts did. The Colts, by the way, were piping in sound, which is illegal in the NFL. But Belichick knew the rulebook better. So all the Yankees did an MIT analyst, smart people go there, shifted weight from the barrel. They didn't make the diameter illegal. They didn't change the length of it. They just, and I mean slightly shifted it. Now, for the record, not every batter needs it. A couple teams tried it last year. Aaron Judge is like, yeah, I'm doing fine without it. Maybe you've noticed. Oshohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, not everybody's using it, but we've seen this in golf and tennis. We've seen innovations. And my take on sports has always been push the envelope. Let the governance, the governing body, the fcc, the SEC or Major League Baseball, let them reel you back in, like the tush push. I got no problem with the creation of it. I don't think it's terribly healthy. I don't think you should be pushing quarterbacks into the line. Lets everybody vote on it. But give the Eagles credit for creating it. They created it because they have a quarterback that can, you know, I mean, 660 pound leg presses, and they had the best center in the last 20 years in the NFL. So they're like, yeah, let's do it. Let's just automatically get two yards. It works. So, and I'll tell you, the answer on this Yankee stuff is never to complain and be rigid and be a traditionalist. It's like one and done in college basketball. John Calipari is like, yeah, it's legal. I'm going for it. Mike Krzyzewski got stubborn, and then Krzyzewski admitted, yeah, I'm getting beat by all these guys I'm passing on. Rigid, didn't win. It's like three pointers in the NBA. Lakers were rigid, warriors weren't. How'd that work out? It's like the portal, the transfer portal in College football. Ohio State's like, all in Georgia, all in Clemson's like, nah, nah, it's a little sketchy. How's that working for Clemson? They don't look anything close to Ohio State, and they did four years ago. So rigid's not the answer. I think in life and in sports, sometimes you got to take a swing, literally. In baseball and. And again, if you go to OBJ's Magical Catch in New York, it's those gloves, man. He didn't do it with three fingers. He did it with those receiver gloves, which were legal and developed over time. So, again, there's a famous Nike saying. When Phil Knight created Nike, he had this manifesto, and one of the things he said, it was like, number three or four is always on offense. Apologize later. I don't care if it's golfers. This is not kicking a golf ball. It's taking a baseball bat. They didn't cheat on diameter. They did not cheat on length. They did none of that. They simply shifted weight for a couple of batters who were hitting the ball off the handle, no problem. The Dodgers, with deferred payments, go ahead, complain about it or adapt. The warriors, their luxury tax payments, go ahead and complain about it. The NBA eventually changed it. The Eagles with a tush push. The Yankees with what they call now the torpedo bat. I have no problem with it. Again, this is not the Houston Astros, you know, banging on a can. That's not what this is. People get upset with the Dodgers. Dodgers are smarter than you. The Yankees here, they were smarter than everybody else. Here's Aaron Boone, you know, trying to be the best we can be. I mean, that's. That's one of the things that's, you know, gotten pointed out. But, you know, I say to you guys all the time, we're trying to win on the margins. We have a big organization that are invested in a lot of different things where we're trying to be better in every possible way. The reality is it's all within Major League standards. Yeah, I mean, think about this. At one point, the Tampa Bay Rays put a second baseman in right field. Then everybody eventually, over time, copied it. Now, the governance, Major League Baseball said, it's not good. It's keeping people off the bases. We want more base runners and stolen bases. So Rob Manfred said, okay, we're going to take the defensive shift away. But it was like, Joe, Joe, Joe Madden was down in Tampa and eventually won a World Series in Chicago. He's like, yeah, we're just going to put a second baseman in Right field, and we're going to move a shortstop over to behind the bag. And everybody was like, oh, okay, what's the difference here? It's innovation. We've seen it in golf, we've seen it in tennis, We've seen in baseball, NBA. And it's up to the league to figure out, like, the Tush push. That's up to the league to figure out. But every NFL team and baseball team and basketball team and college basketball program, as long as you are doing something that is legal. I looked it up this morning. Didn't cheat on length, didn't cheat on diameter. Pat Murphy's the manager of the brewers, and he came out and he just said, hey, more offense. Good for the game. I want my guys to be seeking any edge they can. Doesn't bother me at all. So I thought it was actually. I thought it was like beer league softball in the Bronx. I thought it was actually funny. I'm like, you know what, man? Say what you want. It. It. It's. It's work and it will be duplicated. Like, Clemson football is the great example. Like Clemson football. And I like Dabo Swinney, but he's like, I don't want to do this whole transfer portal. Well, watch Ohio State play. It doesn't mean you're sacrificing all the integrity of your program. It means, you know what? We could use that really good corner from Alabama and that left tackle from, you know, Missouri. Go get them.