Hey, sports fans! How’s your week going? Dripped in the usual lovely bits of sporting events? A bit too descriptive for your tastes? Oh well.

With the NCAA national championships and the opening the 1997 baseball season dominating the sports landscape this past week, we’ll take a look at that.

First of all, we must congratulate the Arizona Wildcats for winning the men’s basketball championship on Monday against the defending champs the Kentucky Wildcats. It was the most thrilling championship game I’ve seen in a while, with the Zo-Cats winning 84-79 in overtime. Both teams played a great game, but Kentucky was simply dominated by the 4th seed Wildcats, who have the most regular season losses (nine) of any champion for some time.

Switching over to the ladies, the Tennessee Volunteers repeated as national champion by defeating Old Dominion last Saturday in Cincinnati. This is simply another notch in the belt of Vols coach Pat Summitt, who now has five national championships to her credit.

Speaking of Summitt, an interesting column in Tuesday’s edition of USA Today asked the question, should Pat Summitt be asked to take over the vacant men’s coaching job at Tennessee?

Should she be asked to run both the men’s and women’s teams? Sure, the playing style of each are different, and the men might not take to Summitt’s “my way or the highway” approach.

It does make you wonder about how good the Tennessee men’s coaching job is, with our own Tim Floyd and then Illinois State’s Kevin Stallings turning down the job in SEC country.

It would have been interesting to say the least. But alas, the job has been filled by the former coach at Oregon. So much for that idea.

Moving on to the start of the baseball season, my pick to win it all, the Chicago Cubs, have gotten off to a rocky start, dropping their first two games of the season to the stacked Florida Marlins Tuesday and Wednesday on ESPN. While I am not recanting my pick (hey it’s early), the pitching has me wondering a little bit. As I watched parts of the game on Tuesday, it seemed like every time I turned around, the Marlins were crushing a Cubs pitch deep into the left field foul territory, before popping out the run-scoring hit. I just hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.

Moving on to that “other” team in Chicago, the White Sox, Albert Belle, Chicago’s newest bad boy, has for the most part been behaving himself. While still in Florida for spring training, he signed autographs for fans and after Tuesday’s opener in Toronto, he even talked to the media.

Has hell frozen over? Apparently not, because Belle’s production has not even tailed, with 3 runs batted in Tuesday, igniting the Chi-Sox to a win.

To finish things, I’d just like to say that the NFL draft is three weeks away. With Peyton Manning having decided to stay in school for his senior year, this leaves the field wide open. However, Ohio State lineman Orlando Pace could be picked first and forced to go to football hell, the New York Jets.

ROB DANIEL is a senior in journalism from Zion, Ill.