WJPA Sports

DENVER (AP) — They’re playing for more than trips to the Final Four and a chance to cut down nets at March Madness. It’s also a chance to see and be seen – by other teams. In yet another sign of the times in college sports, the transfer portal opens Monday, giving basketball players a 30-day window to switch schools. It means some of the 1,000 or so players on the 68 teams that qualified for the NCAA Tournament are playing to win, but also for more money, more playing time, a chance to be seen and potentially set things up for next year.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas has hired Xavier’s Sean Miller to take over the Longhorns basketball program. Texas is turning to the coach who just knocked the Longhorns out of the NCAA Tournament. Miller will try to spark a program that struggled in its first season in the Southeastern Conference. It is also the second time Miller is leaving Xavier, a Catholic school in Cincinnati that plays in the Big East, for a bigger program. He coached at Xavier from 2004-2009 before leaving for Arizona. He then returned to Xavier in 2022 after he was fired.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Bold decisions to change Major League Baseball’s longstanding rules quickened the pace of games and revived the popularity of stealing bases over the last few years. A similarly creative move may be needed to help starting pitching regain the relevance it enjoyed as recently as a decade ago. Thirty-four pitchers worked as many as 200 innings and all 30 major league teams got over 900 innings from their starters in 2014. Only four pitchers threw 200 innings last season and just four teams got as many as 900 innings from their starters.