Donald Trump proclaimed Liberation Day Wednesday, with tariffs one weapon of choice to reinvigorate the U.S. economy – particularly manufacturing.

Union workers in the White House Rose Garden for the ceremony cheered. Democrats and their lapdogs in the LameStream media, even some on supposedly business-oriented cable news channels, were horrified.

Understand, for these people on the business channels, the stock market is the economy and if it hits a rough patch, viewership goes down and they have a hard time spreading sunshine and lollipops to the masses; that the public might be more inclined to buy the stocks of the network’s advertisers.

If things get bad enough, some of these experts might even find themselves joining bureaucrats at the unemployment office, not that anyone need go to such a physical place any longer, sort of like those bureaucrats only had a fleeting relationship with their work stations.

They must have gotten the shakes tonight when Dow futures were indicating a 1,000-point drop tomorrow. My personal favorites, gold and silver, tanked in aftermarket trading and I had a standing order to buy some shares of a silver ETF execute. I have more buy orders at lower prices, but both metals have recovered much of their kneejerk panic drop as I write this at 10 p.m.-ish.

I don’t know if Trump’s bold action is going to work or not. I do know there has been a rush by some countries to reduce tariffs and companies are announcing trillions of dollars in investment in U.S.-based manufacturing plants to avoid tariffs.

I also know that the experts don’t know whether Trump’s plan will work overall. Remember, these naysayers are many of the same people who assured us for four years that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, completely up to the job of president, and anyone who said otherwise was a ridiculous propagandist.

They also were wrong about small issues such as COVID, Hunter’s laptop and Russia, Russia, Russia.

They are wrong, too, in refusing to admit that our current fiscal path as a debt-burdened nation inhabited by too many debt-burdened residents is unsustainable.

As a young child, I recall being ingrained with the story of the boy who cried wolf, and how proven liars find their credibility lost. Yet, these LameStream media types shed their lies like a duck sheds water and continue to be believed by an uncomfortably large percentage of incredibly dull members of the populace.

In a likely futile attempt to help these intellectual lightweights, allow me to borrow from a popular education method: Explain it like you’re talking to a 5-year-old.

The stock market is not the economy: If someone gives you a few dollars and you spend it all on candy, eagerly devouring it in a short time, you will find yourself hyperactive and about to become sick. That’s the stock market. Pumped up on a sugar high from too much loose money chasing too little candy (stocks) now there is a growing fear of no more money, no more candy, no more fun. A tariff-related price purge might be just what is needed to clear the decks for a better future. But Nvidia remains a great company and isn’t likely to lay off tons of employees, even if its stock dips 20 percent.

Our national debt could be terminal: If mommy and daddy buy you thousands of dollars of toys each week, using their credit cards to pay for it, you are a happy child. But, when mommy and daddy can’t pay the credit card bills, and they can’t pay the mortgage, and they can’t buy food, life becomes very unhappy very quickly. Countries, despite in some cases being able to create money, still need to have strong credit and when that’s gone, so is the country.

Tariffs are a tax on consumers and will stoke inflation: If you have 10 cents, and a piece of candy you typically buy for five cents goes up to eight cents, it really doesn’t affect you until you buy that more-expensive piece of candy. You can find less expensive candy to purchase. You can just not buy any candy at all. Or you can decide to spend the extra money for instant gratification and use more of your available cash. But, you make the decision and it’s not carved in stone you will be spending more money. Also, candy manufacturers, if the high price results in lower sales and revenue, might lower the price closer to the five cents to increase demand.

The United States is being a bully by charging tariffs: Suppose your teacher at school decided to teach a lesson in free enterprise to a class of 20, with the student who makes and sells the most products to the other students getting first prize. All students are given the same amount of play money to purchase the products of others. You sketch five drawings and try to sell them, but the other people decide to add 50 percent extra on your price to slow your sales to them. But, when they try to sell their products to you, or to each other, no add-ons to price are allowed to balance the trades. Would you be surprised if you sold less and they sold more? Shockingly, Trump is the first modern U.S. president willing to address such unfair trade practices. This does not make him wrong.

Back in the early days of me working for Tribune-Review Publishing, owned by billionaire Richard Scaife, he hired freelancer Christopher Ruddy basically to write about the Clintons and their questionable deeds.

These days, Ruddy is worth, on paper, over $3 billion, more than Scaife’s wealth at its highest. No, this is not an April Fools story.

The explanation is, in a word, Newsmax.

Ruddy founded Newsmax as a conservative news site in 1998, in partnership with Scaife. Earlier this week, Newsmax stock started trading publicly on an initial public offering at $10 a share.

As I type this at 3 p.m. Tuesday, Newsmax (ticker symbol NMAX) is trading at about $214 a share and has been as high as $229 earlier today.

The sound you hear is me kicking myself in the butt – repeatedly. Here’s why.

First, I started watching Newsmax and Real America’s Voice cable news channels in the lead up to the 2024 elections because I discovered each offered some great insight, better than usual conservative staple Fox.

They also covered Trump events like blankets and had featured contributors who since have become household names, such as Charlie Kirk.

Ruddy would appear periodically on Newsmax shows touting plans to sell stock in the company. He was looking to share the wealth, so to speak, with the viewership.

I made a mental note, yet never really followed up on it. The whole concept seemed attractive, but I was more into waiting for the explosion in silver prices that had been promised, any day now, since 2011.

The Newsmax initial public offering had slipped my mind until Monday, when it debuted in meteoric fashion, rocketing into the mid-$80s a share.

Behold, the first figurative kicking of my butt. If I’d just bought, say, 100 shares at $10, I’d have made $7,500 or so in one day. For me, that’s notable coin,

But I hadn’t bought, so I chalked it up to opportunity lost.

My wife, not exactly a seasoned investor, told me I should buy more because it would keep going upward.

I patiently explained to her that this is called the greater fool theory in investing – or more correctly, speculation. You buy highly priced stocks or investments anticipating an even bigger fool will pay more due to fear of missing out and the like. It ends badly for those late to the party.

Call this the second figurative kicking of my butt.

Newsmax is up more today, so far, than it was yesterday. Again, I left a lot of potential profit on the table.

Will I buy now?

Of course not.

Will Newsmax race to the moon again when markets open Wednesday? Since I’m not on board, of course it will.

Elon Musk donned a cheesehead hat during a political rally in Wisconsin, trying to get the Republican candidate for state supreme court over the finish line. These days, such seemingly minor races have disproportionate political impact on a national scale.

There were a few protesters, which Musk acknowledged by noting he expected some George Soros surrogates and bade them say hello to George for him. Unlike Musk, who is willing to be in the open about his politics, Soros is a rich guy who lurks in the shadows dispensing money – seemingly often acquired from U.S. taxpayers – and pulling the puppet strings of recipients to further leftist causes.

This Wisconsin rally, and TESLA protesters in Texas quitting en masse at noon, reminiscent of the old days when shifts ended at Johnstown steel mills (not that the grass-roots protesters were being paid), were telling political theater early this week.

Back to Musk, his interplay with the hecklers suggested an update is needed to the lyrics of the George M. Cohan standard “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

Give my regards to Soros.

Remember me to Chairman Mao.

Tell all the gang on the collective farms

That I won’t milk a cow.

Whisper of how I’m yearning

To spend the dough that others make.

Give my regards to old Soros

And tell him just jump in the lake!

Give my regards to Soros.

And all of his ANTIFA friends.

Tell all the people burning the Tesla cars

Their fun is soon to end.

Warn them that Bondi’s coming

And there will be a price to pay.

Give my regards to old Soros

And tell him just to go away!

Talk about peasants with pitchforks taking on tanks, today’s supposed retail silver squeeze day is not going well.

When last I posted here – having been laid low for a few days since Thursday by illness – I predicted in the face of rising silver and gold prices that silver in particular was due to be manipulated lower in coming days.

The calendar provided convenient cover with the end of the month and the end of the quarter, along with President Donald Trump’s April 2 tariff day.

The very next day (Friday) after last I wrote, silver declined 29 cents an ounce. As I write this early Monday afternoon, the next trading day, it’s down another 23 cents at $33.84 an ounce.

Also, as noted in that previous story, gold has been much stronger than silver. Monday was no exception to that trend, with gold hitting record highs of $3,124 an ounce on the spot market while silver languishes about $16 (about 40 percent) or so below its all-time highs, set in 1980 and 2011.

The silver movement, noting this discrepancy, hoped to rally the masses on social media. Alas, it turns out it’s easier to find radicals willing to firebomb Teslas for a few bucks, than it is to find people willing to spend some of their own money on arguably the most underpriced material on Earth.

There had been much anticipation ahead of today, hoping that massive buying of the actual stuff, the silver bullion, would overwhelm the paper market. It is a fool’s errand.

Exchanges allow certain types to sell huge paper positions to force price downward. Again, as noted in the previous post about this, some bankers have been convicted of price manipulation. But that is thought to be a small percentage of those committing these crimes.

Simply put, when you don’t need the metal itself to sell short, you have unlimited capacity. People buying are limited by liquid capital and metal availability.

And that is why I half-kiddingly suggested Elon Musk add taking on silver manipulation to his Quixotic quests. That one should be simple for the world’s richest man. Just begin buying silver publicly and the terrified short crowd (those betting on a price decline) would need to start buying immediately to cover those shorts and avoid bankruptcy.

Silver had been down 40 cents more earlier in the trading today, so maybe silver squeeze people are turning the tide. I plan on waiting for further evidence tomorrow, ironically April Fools Day, along with April 2 to make my call.

I did sell some gold earlier today near the all-time high, expecting that surge to be blunted temporarily. But the gold market is so huge and there are so many institutions, from governments, to international banks, to Chinese insurance companies, looking to buy some for long-term wealth preservation, that will be a tougher nut to suppress than silver.

If and when silver manipulation ends, remember that, according to an online inflation calculator, what cost $50 — silver’s price in 1980 — should cost just under $193 today.

That would make the wait worthwhile in the extreme.

Recent months have provided watershed moments for so-called conspiracy theory nuts to be proved correct over and over again.

We’ve learned that the justice system can and has been weaponized against political opponents (Republicans), that the whole propaganda network of governments and LameStream media spewed misinformation regarding COVID (both origins and measures to combat its spread), that USAID type operations have been funneling tax dollars to absurd, almost exclusively left-wing projects and, that Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie are, indeed, a gay couple.

Dare we dream that the lid is about to be torn off silver manipulation?

An excellent story about the capping of silver prices ran today on zerohedge.com.

Why should you care? Begin with caring because illegal manipulations of markets is not what this country is supposed to be about. And it begs the question of what else they are manipulating.

For context, silver traded as high as $50 an ounce early in 1980 and again challenged that mark in 2011. Note, there is a silver spot price and various contract month prices, so exact figures are a matter of choice.

But, it remains a fact that silver is one of the most useful metals, which ticks the boxes of being a precious metal, money, as well as incredibly useful in various industries such as electronics, solar power and medicine.

Yet, as I write this at midday on Thursday March 27, 2025, more than 45 years after silver first traded near $50 an ounce, silver’s current price is $34.32 on the spot market, up 72 cents on the trading day.

You tell me a similarly useful item trading at less than 70 percent of its price four and one-half decades back.

As another yardstick to measure silver’s suppression, gold now trades above $3,000 an ounce, up from about $800 an ounce in 1980 or $1,900 an ounce in 2011.

Silver price suppression is not just some crazy theory. As the zerohedge story that was referenced above notes, there have been incidences of traders for major banks being convicted of manipulating the silver price. There are even more examples than those mentioned in the story.

As someone who monitors this closely, I can tell you I have been taking profits expecting yet another silver beatdown. The plan is to buy back when the hit comes.

That thinking has not changed, even though price is up today. Friday or Monday would be opportune times to hit the price at the end of a trading quarter. Or April 2, when the Trump tariffs become official, is another possibility.

There are many reasons the government might want to allow the price of silver to be kept down, including reports that there are 500 ounces of silver in each cruise missile. That silver is not being recycled.

Also, rising gold and silver prices serve to remind consumers of continuing inflation.

From the cellphone you no doubt have surgically attached to your hand, to the electronics throughout your house, to solar panels, to high-tech batteries, to antibacterial applications in medicine, to electric cars, silver is useful in many applications.

Yet an estimated 70 to 80 percent of silver is mined as a by-product of acquiring copper, lead or zinc, so silver has no strong lobby. These miners see silver as a bonus to be added onto the profits from their main product.

Here’s where it could get interesting. The Hunt brothers helped fuel that silver rise to $50 in 1980 by buying physical metal and large amounts of futures contracts as a hedge against the high inflation of the time. Inflation back then was running at an annual rate in the low teens according to government figures that many thought understated actual price inflation for the consumer.

At the time, silver was a key to photographic film, so companies such as Kodak were not amused.

Rules were changed to combat the Hunts. The number of contracts per individual was reduced. When that didn’t work, the commodities exchanges, in effect, would not create new futures contracts and only allowed the closing (selling) of existing contracts.

This put considerable pressure on the price and the highly leveraged Hunts barely escaped bankruptcy. Think of the movie “Trading Places.”

To this day, silver remains a relatively small market in terms of overall cash value of available product. Someone such as Elon Musk, with a net worth on the far side of $300 billion as per Forbes magazine, certainly could just start buying and keep accumulating.

Musk’s interest would be acquiring metal critical to his many ventures, including electric cars, rockets and robots. If that would happen, $50 an ounce would be a mere waystation to a high in the hundreds of dollars per ounce.

Although I would hesitate to offer investment advice to Musk, he could quickly get back some of the damage to his net worth from the attack on Tesla stock.

Maybe I’d make a buck or two along with him. A win-win, you might say.

If I make enough, I might even buy a Tesla car. Probably not.

Opening day of the Major League Baseball season is upon us and, surprisingly, the Pirates are the most interesting pro team in Pittsburgh.

This doesn’t mean I’m expecting greatness from the Pirates, or even them making the playoffs. But, compared with the Penguins and Steelers, they have a vibe about them that could keep things interesting for a few months.

With one of the top pitchers in baseball, Paul Skenes, the runaway pick in ESPN’s preseason package to win the National League Cy Young Award this season, the Pirates have a rising star.

Still, the ESPN types don’t think Skenes is enough. Of 28 participants in the survey, none picked the Pirates to win the NL Central and only one thought the Pirates might slip into the playoffs as a wild card.

That owes to an offense that is a lot of question marks beyond Bryan Reynolds and Oneil Cruz and maybe DH Andrew McCutchen. The bullpen also is uncertain.

Skenes and Mitch Keller are great at the top of the starting rotation, reminding of the 1948 Boston Braves with their “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain” rotation. Some blanks beyond them need to be filled if the Pirates are to be playoff contenders.

But the competition for fan interest in the Pittsburgh pro sports scene is, shall we say, limited these days.

The Steelers are looking to continue a trend of shopping for starting quarterbacks in old folks homes. And, embarrassingly, one of those codgers, Aaron Rodgers, is being noncommital. A published report has the Steelers giving Rodgers until April 21 to make up his mind.

Judging by what Rogers has done lately on the playing field, the Steelers just might be better off if he wasn’t interested.

Meanwhile, although the Penguins remain mathematically alive to make the Stanley Cup playoffs, earlier this week the analytic site moneypuck.com reduced the Penguins’ playoff chances to zero, right there with the likes of Chicago and San Jose.

It seems the Penguins, like the Super Steelers of the 1970s, have made the mistake of holding onto star players too long and failing to replace them with younger talent.

This would mark the third consecutive playoff absence for the Penguins, with the record worse in each successive season.

Even though the Steelers started geriatric Russell Wilson at quarterback much of last season, the team did make the playoffs, but only to suffer a characteristic first-game loss, the fifth straight time for that.

When I was a young man, the Steelers just making the playoffs would have been cause for wild celebration. Six Super Bowl wins later, not so much.

It’s the same for the Penguins, whose fans aspire to more than seeing Crosby and Malkin rack up additional personal milestones.

On the other hand, for Pirates fans who last celebrated a World Series title back in 1979, the prospect of having a competitive team, with one of the best pitchers in the game, is generating some excitement for a season that begins today in Miami.

Imagine my surprise when I returned home after an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of day Wednesday to learn that St. Francis College was downgrading its athletic programs to Division III.

This came mere days after the school’s men’s basketball program had played in the NCAA Division I basketball tournament for the first time since 1991.

I was surprised at this move, but I guess I shouldn’t have been.

The compression of Division I sports into a few massive conferences, the embrace of outright free agency via the transfer portal, and the abandonment of amateur status by allowing players to rake in millions of dollars in Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) revenue, all have combined to change big-time college sports into semi-pro sports.

Some will call it progress, or embracing reality. I see it as sad.

I’ve read several articles recently pointing to this year’s NCAA Tournament, devoid of any mid-major or below Cinderalla stories as we reach the Sweet 16 round tomorrow. Instead, we see an abundance of teams from major conferences.

One writer went so far as to pronounce the death of any mid-major programs being able to make it several rounds in future tournaments.

These programs see their star players plucked by bigger programs and the offer of increased exposure and massive NIL money.

Where once these teams kept players for four or five seasons and molded teams, now they serve as farm teams for the big guys, who missed some of these talented players when it came to recruiting them out of high school.

The mid-majors take an unfinished prospect, mold him or her into a producer, and then lose them to the big boys. It’s often the same with the coaches.

St. Francis looked at the reality of the current landscape and pulled the Division I plug.

I’ve covered a lot of NCAA Division III games through the years, along with Division II and plenty of NAIA contests, those last being similar to NCAA Division II and III.

The games can be exciting and entertaining. Sometimes, they have a player or two who could perform on the Division I level.

But it’s not the same as Division I.

Then again, the overly commercial, mercenary, semi-pro product now being proffered as Division I by the NCAA while clinging to its absurd “student-athlete” mantra, isn’t exactly your grandfather’s Division I, either.

St. Francis has stepped down athletically to where it probably should have been for some time. That it felt compelled to do so under the duress of the moment is unfortunate.

Today’s bit of legerdemain will be to connect the seemingly odd couple of Myopia 2025 and the late, great Beano Cook in one blog post.

Nothing up my sleeves (actually I’m wearing a short-sleeve shirt) and using just the ten digits with which God gifted me, I will endeavor to employ the wisdom of the latter named personage to give perspective regarding the formerly listed organization’s current plans.

Pay attention and let’s go.

It has been reported that Myopia 2025’s ambitious plan to restock Johnstown’s abundance of vacant lots with 21 houses, to be built and then sold at cost to would-be residents of our once-fair, now economically downtrodden and crime-ridden city, is off and running.

Reports from the local NBC affiliate, on which the noon crew looks like aspirants for an Addams Family remake, are that while not a nail has yet been pounded, the first house has been bought by a local business, to be given to a local veteran.

Here’s where Beano Cook enters the picture. I had the great pleasure to spend many an hour chatting with Beano in various press lounges ahead of Pittsburgh sporting events. Beano seldom stayed for the entire game; sometimes even leaving before the games began.

His thing was a chance to be the raconteur amidst an audience of sports-minded types.

And Beano never disappointed, with a string of one-liners reminiscent of Henny “Take my wife, please” Youngman.

It was on my way to such a meeting ahead of a Penguins game that I listened to a sports talk show on which Beano was a guest. I almost piled up the car on the Parkway East when Beano, asked for a good, but under-rated writer on the Pittsburgh sports scene, gave my name,

Later, I thanked Beano profusely for the kind words and gave him some investment advice in appreciation. Buy silver, I told him. Beano demured, saying he was too old and couldn’t take risks. Silver was $5 an ounce at the time in the spot market. It brushed $50 an ounce in 2011, the year before Beano died.

I loved to rib Beano about it and he always took it good-naturedly.

For some reason, Beano didn’t particularly like baseball, and this is why I think of him in connection with Myopia 2025. When our Americans taken hostage in Iran finally were released in 1981, they were awarded lifetime passes to Major League baseball games. Beano famously quipped, “Haven’t they suffered enough?”

So, Myopia 2025 has found a benefactor to provide a house for a veteran. Said house reportedly will be in Kernville, not exactly a garden spot, situated on a flood plain and, you might have heard, we do have floods throughout history.

When I mentioned this all to someone today, they speculated maybe the Myopia 2025 people and the business figure a veteran can protect himself, or herself.

Still, when I see the national TV ads for ex-military or first responders being given houses by charities, they always seem to be on scenic mountaintops, or in picturesque neighborhoods.

Myopia 2025 has promised 21 such houses for Johnstown, so maybe they’ll do a better job on location down the line. As they say in blackjack (21), hit me again.

Events unfold in staccato fashion and time is short, which prompts another installment of news and views.

NEWS: Tampon Tim Walz, in his never-ending quest to shore up his masculinity, was on the Gavin Newsom podcast earlier this week bragging he could kick the butts of most of his critics in the MAGA movement.

VIEWS: Prompted by this, one of those MAGA types offered Tampon Tim the chance to back it up with a fight for charity. That offended MAGA guy was Guttfeld show regular George “Tyrus” Murdoch, listed at 6-foot-7, 375 pounds, and with professional wrestling in his background. I know, I know, pro wrestling is scripted, but I’d still put my money on Tyrus vs. Tampon Tim. Hell, even though I’d much older and fatter than Tampon Tim, having seen him lose a wrestling match with a shotgun while trying to load it during the ill-fated campaign of him and Cackling Kamala (even then they were desperate to dress Tampon Tim in blaze orange and insist he was a man’s man), I’d like my chances vs. this real-life Elmer Fudd.

NEWS: Greenpeace has lost a lawsuit in North Dakota that will cost the group $667 million according to an article in the Washington Post.

VIEWS: See if this sounds familiar: Greenpeace funded protesters and is judged to have defamed the company building the pipeline in question in Greenpeace’s mission to hold up energy progress. Funny, when leftists rush to sympathetic courts to get their way, they are heroically following the rules. Now that a far-left group is staring into the financial abyss due to a legal loss, it is an outrageous over-reach by the courts.

NEWS: Senate minority leader crying Chuck Schumer is trying to fend off those who would have his job in the wake of him allowing a Republican continuing resolution proposal to pass the Senate.

VIEWS: Somewhere, Clueless Joe Biden is laughing as DR. JILL BIDEN !!!! explains the irony to old Scranton Joe. It was Schumer whose fingerprints, along with those of other prominent Democrats, were on the knife plunged into the back of Biden after his debate meltdown vs. Donald Trump confirmed Biden had little chance in the election. Now those figurative knives are out for Schumer. Payback is a female dog.

NEWS: London’s Heathrow Airport was closed Friday morning when a nearby electrical substation suffered a fire and backup generators failed.

VIEWS: How long before Democrats rush to the microphones to blame Trump, just as they did when that crew landed a jet upside-down on a Toronto, CANADA, runway? Another possibility, leftist political leadership in England will blame the Russians. Maybe they can team up with American socialists and blame both Trump and the Russians. And the lapdogs in the LameStream media will run with it.

NEWS: Hunter Biden has received a ruling from a California judge that allows him to drop a lawsuit alleging his laptop (yes, that laptop) was hacked. Hunter is saying he lacks funds to pay his lawyers.

VIEWS: Funny how the money spigot was turned off mere months after Daddy Joe “The Big Guy” Biden no longer held a prominent place in the executive branch. Where once there was no shortage of advisory jobs even though Hunter had no apparent relevant skills, not to mention an endless supply of purchasers of his elementary school art, or his book, now Hunter is flailing around in the real world and failing there. The only thing worse would be if his Secret Service protection was pulled. What? That happened, too? ’tis quite a state of affairs for the man Clueless Joe once described as “the smartest guy I know.” This suggests Joe needs to get out more and meet people. But Hunter need only hang on for a year or two to get his share of Joe’s estate, presuming, of course, that DR. JILL BIDEN !!!! hasn’t auto-penned him out of the will.

If you blinked, you missed it. We speak of the stay in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament of the St. Francis men.

Playing in the first game, of the first night, of the so-called First Four, St. Francis fell by a 70-68 score to Alabama State Tuesday. And the overwhelming sentiment is opportunity lost.

St. Francis led by as many as nine points in this game. I was texting with a former sports editor of mine from when we both worked at the Woke Gazette and noted to him at halftime that St. Francis had a lot going for it.

While Alabama State’s first-half offense seemed to be the initial player to cross mid-court with the ball firing up (mostly unsuccessful) 3-point field goal attempts, St. Francis ran a halfcourt offense and repeatedly got open looks off two-man, pick-and-roll action.

Unfortunately, in the second half Alabama State rediscovered the joys of playing in the paint, and also upped the tempo defensively to force St. Francis errors.

Even with that, this was a game St. Francis easily could have won, if players had hit uncontested layups; if they had been able to handle the ball, including two horrendous gaffes just before Alabama State hit the winner.

Speaking of that winning basket, it was a layup following a length-of-the-court pass that saw the ball slapped around like a pinata before landing in the hands of Amarr Knox, who didn’t miss his layup attempt with a second remaining.

And so, St. Francis was denied its first NCAA Tournament win. I’d argue this is a bit of semantics, though.

Back in 1991, the previous St. Francis appearance in this tournament, the Red Flash won the Northeast Conference title, but also had to win what was referred to as a “play-in” game with Fordham to make the NCAA field.

The NCAA Tournament changed in 2010 to including four of these play-in games as official parts of the bracket.

In my mind, that 1991 team won a First Four game, they just didn’t call it such. But, technically, this contest with Alabama State was a tournament game, while that 1991 contest was not.

And so St. Francis kept another NCAA statistic perfect. The Red Flash were the 19^th team to make the field despite a losing record, and those teams are a collective 0-19.

It’s not that I would have expected St. Francis to give Auburn much of a battle in the next round, just as I anticipate Alabama State will go quietly. It would have been nice, however, had St. Francis gotten an official NCAA Tournament win over Alabama State when it was there for the taking.

As for the rest of the NCAA Tournament, the best team I saw in the conference tournaments was Florida, so the Gators are my pick to win it all.

The odds are an SEC team will prevail. Doesn’t that conference make up half or so of the field?

I’m not fond of the Big Ten contingent and the ACC, beyond Duke, is suspect, no matter that North Carolina pounded San Diego State in another First Four game. I’m similarly not sold on Big East or Big 12 teams.

Here’s hoping it won’t take St. Francis another three decades-plus to get back for another crack at the elusive first NCAA Tournament win.