Alabama Crimson Tide basketball fans are excited. National college basketball pundits are projecting Alabama to have just the fourth or fifth-best SEC team. Many Crimson Tide fans are convinced those experts are wrong.

A few weeks ago, Nate Oats made a stunning statement saying the 2025-26 Crimson Tide could be the best shooting team he has ever coached. More recent opinions from some Alabama basketball insiders are that the Tide will also improve on defense.

The past week has fueled more buzz about the future of Alabama Basketball. Early in the week, elite 2026 prospect Caleb Holt returned to Tuscaloosa. The Alabama Mr. Basketball in his sophomore season at Buckhorn High School, near Huntsville, has made several unofficial visits. After a junior season playing in Georgia, he will play at Prolific Prep in Fort Lauderdale, FL. How good is Holt? The 5-star is rated the No. 2 shooting guard in the 2026 class and the No. 5 player overall in the 247Sports Composite. Before Holt, no Alabama sophomore had ever won Mr. Basketball. Had he not left for Georgia, he would have won it again last season. Like Brandon Miller was, Holt is perfectly suited for the Nate Oats system of play.

Holt was at a practice this week. What he saw, along with some Alabama basketball insiders, was a team loaded with talent. The buzz about Holt’s visit was expected. The buzz about how good the ’25 team looked was a bonus.

The new Alabama Crimson Tide

The Oats’ claim about good shooting is legit, and the summer indication is that Houston Mallette has a chance to be the best Alabama three-point shooter ever. The return of Labaron Philon portends an offense in which Philon’s dribble-dish penetration will regularly feature three high-percentage teammates outside the arc. With Mallette, Aden Holloway, Latrell Wrightsell Jr., Jalil Bethea, and Taylor Bol Bowen, Alabama may rain threes like never before in Tuscaloosa.

The early word is that freshman Amari Allen and transfers Noah Williamson and Keitenn Bristow will mesh well in the Crimson Tide’s player rotation. Nate Oats still has a roster slot open, but it is looking as though the only need to fill it would be a backup big man.

Summer can be flawed, but it appears that every bit of optimism felt by Crimson Tide fans is warranted.

What does Star Wars and Toy Story’s Pizza Planet have to do with the College World Series? LSU baseball star Jake Brown, of course.

It all ties back to the standout from the Tigers baseball team being an avid wearer of the popular shoes, Crocs. He’s been using some of his extra NIL cash to decorate his current pairs and revealed that he’d be interested in a collaboration if the brand was willing to work with him.

“I have some Crocs slides that I’ve decorated with Star Wars Jibbitz,” Brown said. “So, I have a Star Wars pair of Crocs, and I have Pizza Planet-Toy Story crocs that I bought with some per diem money thanks to Champ Artigues, our baseball ops guy. Thank you so much, Champ, and great purchase. I love my Crocs.

“And if they’re watching this, just shoot me a message on Instagram, or however else you can contact me, I’d love it.”

Brown pitched his very own LSU, or Louisiana-themed, pair of Crocs as well. He already had some ideas for the Jibbitz, which are the decorative accessories that can be attached to the holes designed into the Crocs.

“I don’t know, like some gators. Some alligators, something. A pelican, maybe a tiger, anything that we could do,” Brown said. “That would be super sweet.”

Brown’s pitch is aided by the fact that he’s one of the top sluggers in the LSU lineup. Batting .315 heading into the College World Series, he’s appeared in 59 games for the Tigers in 2025. Across 165 at-bats, Brown has logged 43 runs on 52 hits, including 19 extra base hits (eight home runs) and 44 RBIs.

In turn, his team enters Omaha with a 48 – 15 overall record after hosting both their own Regional and Super Regional. They’re 5-1 in those matchups after winning three of four in the Baton Rouge Regional, and sweeping West Virginia the following weekend in the Super Regional.

LSU will start its stay in Omaha by taking on a familiar foe during its College World Series opener on Saturday vs. the No. 3 seed Arkansas Razorbacks. First pitch between the two SEC teams is set for 7 p.m. ET at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha, Neb.

The Tigers will be participating in their 20th CWS — and are the seventh school in NCAA history to earn this distinction. They have seven national championships to show for that effort, and are looking to secure their second in three seasons later this month.

WACO, Texas – Baylor softball head coach Glenn Moore has added Cambree Creager to the 2026 roster, announced Saturday.
 
Creager transfers from Arizona State to join the Bears with three years of eligibility. The sophomore pitcher spent her first season with the Sun Devils.
 
Originally from Georgetown, Texas, Creager made 17 appearances and eight starts in the circle as a freshman. She became just the second freshman in three seasons to start the season opener when she took the circle against Maryland.
 
During her freshman campaign, she pitched one complete-game and had 21 strikeouts in 39 innings pitched. In the first game of her career, she held Maryland to just one run to become the first ASU freshman to start and earn the win in a series opener since 2015.  
 
A graduate of Georgetown High School in 2024, Creager had a 36-6 record with a 1.35 ERA and 412 strikeouts over three varsity seasons. She was named one of the Top 40 Right-Handed Pitchers by SB Live in Texas during her high school career. She closed out her high school career with back-to-back Pitcher of the Year honors in 2023 and 2024, including a district 5A MVP in 2023.  
 
To stay up to date all year long on all things Baylor softball, follow the team on Facebook, X and Instagram: @BaylorSoftball.
 
 

– BaylorBears.com –

Associated Press

OAKMONT, Pa. (AP) — Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller can look across the vast landscape of Oakmont where each won momentous U.S. Open titles and see in some respects how little has changed.

The course is longer than when Nicklaus defeated Arnold Palmer in a playoff in 1962, than when Miller set a U.S. Open record that still stands 52 years later as the only man with a 63 in the final round to win.

But it’s still about putting. It’s still those greens that feel like putting on a basketball court.

“I was talking to some of the guys in the locker room a few minutes ago,” Nicklaus said Saturday. “And they’re saying, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Well, obviously putting is the key out here.’ I three-putted the 55th green. I had one three-putt that week, and I’m still ticked off I three-putted that one. That was sort of my mindset.”

“Basically you had to figure these greens out and not let them get to you,” he said. “And be patient. One-under par won the tournament, and 1-under par doesn’t win a lot of tournaments today. But it did then.”

And it might now.

Only three players were under par at the halfway point for the 125th edition of the U.S. Open, and the record 10th one at Oakmont. Only 27 players have finished a major championship at Oakmont under par, and the next 36 holes determine how much — or if — that list will grow.

Miller’s win was epic, mainly because he thought he was out of it with a 76 in the third round of the 1973 U.S. Open, leaving him six shots behind. On a soft course, Miller delivered what he considers “literally a perfect round of golf.”

Almost. His only bogey in that round was a three-putt on the long par-3 eighth hole.

Miller was a premier striker of the ball whose putting was streaky, and what he marvels about even today was missing only one fairway and hitting every green, every shot except one left below the cup on the lightning-fast greens.

“That’s hard to do at Oakmont, to hit 18 greens and have no downhill putts,” Miller said.

Both also had to deal with Arnold Palmer, the King, particularly in his home country of western Pennsylvania. Palmer had won the Masters for the third time in 1962. Nicklaus was a powerful 22-year-old with a crew cut — “Fat Jack,” he was called — who didn’t care about anything but winning and didn’t realize the crowd was against him.

“He was the guy you had to beat if you wanted to win, and particularly here,” Nicklaus said. “It was really kind of funny because I never really heard the gallery. I was a 22-year-old kid with blinders on and not smart enough to figure out that people rooted for people. I just went out and played golf. That’s what I did.”

If he could have donated one club to the USGA from his Open title — as players are asked to do now — Nicklaus didn’t hesitate on the key to winning.

“I three-putted one time in 90 holes,” he said.

Miller never got around to answering what club he would have donated — driving was key to miss only one fairway, his iron play was sublime in hitting every green. He did what few others even consider at a U.S. Open. He attacked, because he had to.

“I was more of a guy that didn’t like it to be close,” he said. “If that ball is going in the hole, I’m going to fill it up until the round is over if I can. None of this fancy stuff about hitting away from the target. I wanted to have the thrill of going for knocking down pins out of the green. That was my fun. I liked to drive fast and hit hard with the driver and that kind of stuff.

“I don’t know, everybody does it differently,” he said. “But that’s just the way I thought.”

Miller spoke how he thought, endearing him to U.S. viewers with his 29 years in the booth at NBC covering the U.S. Open, never afraid to use “choke” when talking about pressure.

Among the many changes that have occurred since their glory days at Oakmont: money.

The prize fund is $21.5 million this week, with $4.3 million going to winner.

Nicklaus won $17,500 for his 1962 U.S. Open title. Eleven years later, Miller won $30,000. That’s true in all sports and particularly now in golf as the PGA Tour is in a money race with the Saudi backing of LIV Golf.

“Would I have loved to have had what’s going on here when we played? Yeah. Obviously all of us would,” Nicklaus said. “But I also was really pleased that … Johnny and myself both trail blazed the way for what’s happening today. I think if you look back at (Ben) Hogan and (Sam) Snead and those guys, they trail blazed it for us.

“I don’t think that would have made any difference, whether we were playing for what we played for or what they’re playing here today,” he said. “If we would have had the ability to do this, I think we would have tried to do the same thing.”

___

AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf

RALEIGH, N.C. — It has been a week since the House settlement with the NCAA changed everything about college athletics forever, and yet nothing has really changed.

As earthshaking as the agreement is, to dole out billions in back pay to former college athletes while opening the door to “revenue sharing” — a phrase concocted to give plausible denial that this isn’t just the semi-pro operation — universities have been planning for this for so long, the actual finalization of the lawsuit and implementation of its provisions actually amounts to business as what is now usual.

Six months ago, North Carolina’s term sheet with Bill Belichick specified $13 million of UNC’s roughly $20.5 million revenue-sharing pool would go to football, at a time when that wasn’t even technically legal yet. And the ink on Judge Claudia Wilken’s signature was barely dry before the NCAA and the power conferences started leaking drafts of favorable legislation in Congress. Their lobbyists have been waiting years for this moment.

All of this has been coming for a long time, and only a dispute over players who were losing their scholarships and roster spots delayed the actual settlement until June. The reality had set in long ago.

The House settlement isn’t perfect. There are major potential Title IX issues and real concerns over what scholarship caps might do to sports that have traditionally had big rosters like track and swimming. The fact that a big part of the back pay for former athletes is coming from NCAA basketball tournament revenue while the College Football Playoff doesn’t pay a dime shifts the financial burden unfairly from big football schools to everyone else.

It is, however, better than nothing. It ushers in a new world of college sports, one where athletes can be openly paid by their universities on top of whatever NIL deals they can still gather, one that’s long overdue. For one thing, all the money that used to change hands under the table will be in plain view now. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

For another, athletes long ago deserved a piece of the bags of money they generated for athletic directors, coaches, administrators, contractors, vendors, lawyers and everyone else who suckled at the sugar teat of a college-athletic industrial complex built on free labor. College athletes always had value, even if the world pretended they did not. Now they can actually collect.

It took a long time for that edifice to fall, and now that it has, none of the fear-mongering from petty tyrants trying to safeguard their turf has come true. Former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany once said his conference would have to drop to Division III if the O’Bannon lawsuit went through. For real! You know what came out of the O’Bannon lawsuit? Cost-of-attendance payments for players and a long-awaited college football video game that was the best-selling game of last year! The Big Ten seems OK!

Amateurism was always a scam. The ideal of the amateur was created by the British gentry to avoid having to compete against the lower classes, who couldn’t afford to row or play rugby as a hobby. Professionals started competing in the Olympics decades ago and the world kept right on spinning. There was never any reason why you couldn’t be a student and an athlete and get paid to do it.

Teaching assistants get paid. Students with work-study jobs get paid. Natalie Portman appeared in Hollywood blockbusters without compromising her eligibility for Harvard student drama. The only reason athletes were different was because there was so much money coming in that the adults wanted to keep all the profits for themselves. The only reason the NCAA bureaucracy as we know it exists is because those adults didn’t trust each other not to cheat and pay them anyway.

There is going to be more upheaval as everyone adjusts to this new world, even with a headstart, and a lot of the things fans like least about the past few years of college athletics aren’t going to change right away. The transfer portal isn’t going anywhere, although the ability to pay players directly may lead to more mutually beneficial arrangements that somewhat dilute the current annual free-agency system.

There’s a way to fix all that, by moving toward some sort of collective bargaining with athletes that sets terms of pseudo-employment everyone agrees upon. The NCAA would rather push through legislation that sets those terms unilaterally post-House now that it senses favorable winds on Capitol Hill. But House, for all its faults, is a step in the right direction and long overdue. If it doesn’t feel like much has changed yet, it’s because so much already has.

For the past three years, there have been two windows for college football players to enter the transfer portal, one starting in December following the conclusion of the regular season and one in April at the end of the spring practice season. Coaches and administrators across college football, however, are eager to limit transfer movement to just one window each year.

Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork believes that window should be in the spring. He’s of that opinion based on the timing of both the end of the academic year and the start of revenue-sharing agreements, as the academic year for Ohio State and most other universities ends in May while annual revenue-sharing contracts with athletes under the new model created by the House v. NCAA settlement will run from July to June.

“If we ever say that we care about academics and we want to live by that, then I think the transfer portal window should be in the spring. And then now that you have a revenue sharing contract, where you will have an MOU with an athlete, from a fiscal management standpoint, it’s better to put it in the spring,” Bjork said Thursday.

Ryan Day has also suggested that he’s in favor of a spring transfer window, citing the strain that the winter portal window puts on teams who make deep runs in the College Football Playoff. Because players on CFP teams get an additional five-day window to enter the portal after their season ends, Ohio State had to fight off tampering efforts for many of its players last January following the national championship game, while it was unable to replace players who entered the portal during that window – most notably backup defensive tackle Hero Kanu – because the portal had already closed for every team other than Ohio State and Notre Dame.

“For us, if we didn’t have the second transfer portal window (in the spring), that is very, very difficult, because we’re trying to make decisions about next year yet our year isn’t even done yet,” Ryan Day said during an appearance on The Joel Klatt Show in February. “That affects your current roster, and it’s just messy. So I think you got to have two portals, unless you’re going to finish the season sooner. But if you’re finishing the season on January 20th, you can’t have just one portal window (in the winter).”

“If we ever say that we care about academics and we want to live by that, then I think the transfer portal window should be in the spring.”– Ross Bjork on his push for a spring transfer portal window

The elimination of the winter portal window would have some cons, particularly the fact that teams wouldn’t be able to add transfers to their rosters for spring practice. But the positives would outweigh the negatives for teams like Ohio State that expect to be competing for national championships every January.

The negatives might outweigh the positives for everyone else, however, and that’s why Ohio State appears to be in the minority with its desire for a spring transfer window.

The Athletic’s Chris Vannini reported Friday that momentum is building for a move to just one transfer portal window in college football. A final decision on when that portal window would be hasn’t yet been made, but one of Vannini’s sources described the preference for January over April across the sport “as an 80-20 split.” The American Football Coaches Association proposed a 10-day window that would run from Jan. 2-12 in 2026, which would come after the majority of bowl games except for the College Football Playoff semifinals and national championship game but would still be early enough for players to transfer into new schools in time for the spring semester.

“I want January,” Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire said, per Vannini. “I want to get my team, and I want to roll and get ready for winter conditioning, spring football, and take that team into the fall.”

An early January window with no spring window would make navigating the portal even more difficult than it already is for the teams that make deep CFP runs, as they’d have no choice but to evaluate the transfer market and make roster decisions in the midst of trying to win a national title. But those teams might not find much sympathy from the rest of college football.

“It’s really hard to be playing in a championship setting and having to deal with that,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart told reporters last month at SEC spring meetings. “When I brought that up as a complaint or a problem, I was told there’s no crying from the yacht.”

Regardless of which transfer window is ultimately chosen, Bjork believes college football needs a comprehensive calendar to govern what will happen over the course of the year from preseason camp, the regular season and the College Football Playoff to the transfer portal, signing day, spring practices, OTAs and more. And Bjork believes those details need to be hammered out as soon as possible with the 2025 college football season now under three months away.

“We have to keep pushing that. My colleagues and I in the Big Ten, we want to keep pushing that. We’ll collaborate, we’ll communicate, but we think we need to get that done sooner rather than later,” Bjork said. “‘Cause fall will be here soon, and all of these things are gonna be on top of us, and we need to have that transfer portal window cleaned up, for sure.”

RELATED Ohio State Athletic Director Ross Bjork Thinks Conference Commissioners Should “Take a Step Back” In Public Discourse Over CFP Model