Sports Rain Man: Mets Week In Review, College Football, World Soccer

So the Mets had their best week in a long time. They swept the Cleveland Guardians and took two out of three from the Pittsburgh Pirates. That meant they went 5-1 this week, which they haven’t done in a long time—if at all this season. A couple more weeks like these, and maybe a few 4-2 weeks, and they might finish the season at .500.

Some people want to talk about what they’ll do next season. I’d rather not, because that’s just so far away with so many things to factor in. What I do want to note is that the National League East is actually the hardest division in all of baseball when you look at the standings and how everybody else is doing. The Mets and Nationals are only two games below 500, so that explains part of the difficulty of a very good division. Of course, that doesn’t excuse the massive underperformance for all the money spent buying players, while some fan favorites go because the Dodgers are doing pretty well out west with the number one payroll despite a couple of rough weeks.

We’ll see how this week shapes out for the Mets.

The college football season starts up soon, and since I’ve dedicated myself to let’s talk about stuff, I’ll add this. I don’t really talk about college football because I don’t care that much. But the thing that’s been really popping up is the influence of NIL.

The argument that’s been going around is that SEC teams and their boosters definitely paid kids under the table, and it led to why so many kids went to the SEC and why there were so many dominant teams over the years. However now with NIL, it seems the divisions are mainly that the Big Ten is making a huge push and competing because they can offer financial packages too.

But it’s a little weird because it’s not like Ohio State was ever broke compared to Alabama. But we do know Alabama boosters are bigger—college football success means a lot more in Alabama than it does in Ohio State to an extent. So I mean, it’s not a crazy argument. I’ll see what happens this season and who comes out based on money, because we all know success is based on… well, we’ll see how it plays out.

In world soccer, there were a couple of upsets. In the Women’s African Cup of Nations, Malawi beat Ghana, the debutants have been on fire so far in the tournament and Cameron beat Nigeria, so the winners move on to the semi-finals while the losers don’t go home yet—they still have to play to qualify for the playoffs to make the Women’s World Cup next year.

And a little closer to the US, the CONCACAF (North & Central America plus the Caribbean) U-20 Championship went to Mexico after they defeated the USA.