NCAA Tournament's 'First Four' Round Continues

And now for your sports news, we're joined by NTV's Dave Martin. Dave, we've got some NFL, NHL, and some WNBA news, all the news today. But let's turn in college basketball because the first four round of the NCAA tournament continues tonight with two more games. Yes, starting off, you've got Prairie View A&M playing Lehigh in a game that just actually tipped off a couple of minutes ago. Both of these are 16 seeds. The winner of this game will play top seeded Florida on Friday. After that game, there's going to be a pair of 11 seeds tonight. It's SMU plays Miami of Ohio. If you want Miami of Ohio, of course, the team with the best record in the country at 31-1. The winner of that one plays number six seed Tennessee in the Midwest region on Friday. Tonight's game, the second game, is an estimated start about 9-15 Eastern time. Both games are on True TV. Now, if you turned into last night's contest, you saw a couple of games. Both came down to the wire. UMBC missed a three-pointer at the buzzer that would have sent the game to overtime and said Howard won their first ever NCAA tournament game in school history. For that, they will play top seeded Michigan on Thursday. Then in the second game, Texas' Tremont Marquette a jumper with one second remaining to beat NC State after really a nearly disastrous final two minutes for the Longhorns. But they advance to play the six-seed BYU next. Then tomorrow is when the rest of the action starts. The first round finally starts tomorrow. That's when the madness begins, Tiff. Are you ready for all this? Get those brackets filled. Yes, get your bracket filled, all right? Let me know, you know, when you have Kansas picked. All right. Shifting gears to hockey, though. Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby has been out for four weeks now ever since getting injured in the Olympics for Team Canada. When is he expected to return? Yeah, it looks like it's going to be tonight. That's according to Penguins head coach Dan Muse. He should return tonight against the Carolina Panthers. Now, the NHL resumed their season about four weeks ago after taking that midseason pause to allow some of their players to play in the Olympics. Crosby was one of those players, but he suffered what was called a lower body injury in Canada's quarterfinal win against Czechia. Lower body injury was all the media was ever told. In any case, he's missed the team's last 11 games. Pittsburgh still somehow won five of them. They are right now tied for fifth place in the Eastern Conference. Meanwhile, Crosby's 27 goals and 59 points still good enough to lead the team despite missing those 11 games. They play the Carolina Panthers at Carolina starting at 7 p.m. Eastern tonight, all right? All right. You got all that? That's basically right now. Moving to NFL news, though. The Denver Broncos have reportedly agreed to acquire wide receiver Jalen Waddle from Miami. Why do you think the Dolphins would trade one of their better players? Yeah, I think at this point Miami realized they're not going to be contenders next season. Now, Tore Tagovolo is gone, Tyreek Hill is gone, and they didn't make the playoffs last year with those two players anyway. Plus, Waddle gives them a pretty good return. He's a very good player, and he's still young. Reportedly, Miami will receive a first, a third, and a fourth round pick while sending Waddle in their own fourth round pick to Denver. This is according to ESPN. Elsewhere in the league, the Philadelphia Eagles have signed receiver Hollywood Brown to a one-year contract. Now, Brown was a member of the Kansas City Chiefs for each of the past two seasons. And finally, the New York Jets have reportedly agreed to trade quarterback Justin Fields to the Kansas City Chiefs for a sixth round pick. The Jets, of course, have already traded for quarterback Geno Smith in a deal last week. Geno Smith coming back to the Jets where he was drafted 13 years ago. All right, a lot happening there. Looking at WNBA news, though, the league has reportedly agreed on a new collective bargaining agreement less than two months before the season is set to start. What are some highlights of the new terms? Yeah, well, for one thing, the salary cap more than quadruples here from $1.5 million to $7 million per team. Meanwhile, the highest player salaries will start at $1.4 million. That's way up from just a quarter of a million dollars. This is all according to ESPN. In addition, the average player salary is set to be around $600,000. That's five times higher than it was last year. So the league clearly growing. I think that was exemplified when they added three new franchises, teams in Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia that haven't even played yet for $250 million each. That was what they each paid for their franchise fee. Now, if you compare that to what the $50 million of the Golden State franchise paid in 2023, it really signals a huge rise in value. So these increased salaries were certainly expected. In any case, the season is still expected to tip off on May 8th with the WNBA draft still set for April 1st. All right, well, Dave, as always, thanks for joining us. Thank you, too.