By Rick Sarro
Now that it’s the end of the year, bear with me, as I have a tendency to get reflective, philosophical and look back at where we have been over the past 12 months. Some say you should not spend too much time worrying about the past and dealing with things in our lives we no longer have control over. I’m on the other side of that debate, thinking that where we have been foreshadows where we are going and what may lie ahead.
I will “stay in my lane,” which is sports; I don’t dare test my limitations on politics, the economy, geopolitical tensions, AI, climate change, energy, healthcare, Congress and just your run-of-the-mill megawatt world peace type topics.
This is not your standard ESPN-like top 10 sports stories of the year. That would be too easy, and easy peasy is not my objective here. I will give you my biggie events for 2024, both local in nature and national in scope, but will go a tad further and offer up what I think they mean and the results and changes I see coming down the road.
Nostradamus, I am not but here we go.
The Super Bowl is still the biggest single-day sporting event in the country, maybe the planet (sorry World Cup Soccer). The Kansas City Chiefs winning back to back championships wasn’t all that unexpected or shocking. To the contrary. It marked Coach Andy Reid and star QB Patrick Mahomes third Super Bowl ring in four tries. It meant the NFL’s present-day dynasty has a path to do what no other team in history has done, and that’s a Super Bowl three-peat. And right now, KC is my clear pick to win again.
All those one-score, close-game wins don’t scare me away. All the injuries won’t alter my opinion. And though seeing Reid, Mahomes or Travis Kelce in every other TV commercial on the air may give me KC overload, it won’t change my mind. The Chiefs will win three consecutive Lombardi Trophies, and Mahomes is over halfway in his quest to exceed the GOAT in Super Bowl wins.
The McNeese Cowboys basketball team made program history and broke team records at will in their run to a double whammy regular season and Southland Conference Tournament titles. Coach Will Wade, with a rebuilt roster and a star player in Shahada Wells, took the Cowboys to their first NCAA Tournament appearance in 22 long years. Their 12th seed was the highest in school history.
The double-digit loss to powerhouse Gonzaga in the first round was expected but it didn’t dampen the buzz and vibe around Wade and this resurgent program. What Wade has done is make McNeese basketball a regional power, gain a sliver of national attention, and lay the foundation for future titles and success. Combine all that and put a bow on it with Wade’s name, his recruiting prowess and enhanced resume McNeese, meaning he can now convince mid major and Power 4 talent in the transfer portal to come South to the bayous.
Wade did just that for his sequel season, and McNeese is the overwhelming favorite to win the SLC regular season and tournament titles again and to make a return trip to March Madness. Wade doesn’t have an outlandish or greedy goal this season, only to win McNeese’s first-ever NCAA Tournament game. And if he gets lucky with a favorable matchup, the head Bandit might just steal one this March.
The McNeese Cowgirls softball team stamped their mark to a growing SLC dynasty of their own by winning a third straight SLC regular season crown and three NCAA Tournament bids over the past 4 years. All this winning means Coach James Landrenau will continue to get interest for other coaching jobs, and it’s a bit surprising he has decided to continue his coaching and title marches here.
AD Heath Schroyer knows he needs to continue to sweeten the contract pot for Landrenau with more dollars if he can, payout incentives and extended years to keep the wolves at bay. The Cowgirls, in turn, will lose some talent to the transfer portal, which it has, but the coach can sell his championship culture in that same transfer train station.
Justin Hill has not strung together conference titles like Landrenau, but J-Hill’s baseball Cowboys have won SLC titles, have made the NCAA Tournament and, for the sake of consistency, McNeese has played in four straight conference tournament title games.
Hill’s Pokes have won some and lost some over that stretch, but getting to the tournament finals as consistently as they have means the program has a buzz, and that means portal players will take long looks at McNeese because of championship culture.
This past summer and fall, I witnessed things I have never seen in sports before, and some I hope to never see again.
I saw golf’s newly crowned Master’s champion and the world’s best player, Scottie Scheffler, arrested and handcuffed while driving to the opening round of the U.S. Open Championship. All those nutty and crazy charges were dropped, but this drama clearly affected his chances at winning a Grand Slam. What it also did was show the PGA and USGA they need better pre-entry organization and communication with security folks. It also re-focused Scheffler for the rest of the golf season to run away with player of the year honors.
I saw three of the world’s best at what they do shine ever brighter in the Summer Olympics. Steph Curry rained a storm of three-point shots against France to win the gold. If anyone had any smidgen of a doubt that Curry is the greatest shooter in basketball history, that game put the question to rest.
Simone Biles, just three years after exiting the Tokyo Olympics with mental and physical strain, returned to Paris to flip, soar, dance and reach for the stars for the all-around gold medal in gymnastics.
And former LSU Tiger Mondo Duplantis broke his own pole vault record with his ninth world-record-surpassing, historic jump in Paris to claim his second Olympic gold medal. Duplantis, who spent time living in Lafayette, is living a jet setter dream life with his Swedish model fiancé and aiming for his fourth international world cup gold medal. The mammoth leap in Paris cemented Mondo’s place as the greatest pole vaulter in history.
I could not believe what I saw when WNBA savoir rookie Caitlin Clark entered the league and proceeded to get knocked down, elbowed, pushed to the floor and mugged and endure cheap shots from jealous opponents at every turn. The NCAA all-time scoring leader (she broke Pistol Pete’s record fair and square by the rules, but Maravich still reigns in my mind because he couldn’t play varsity as a freshman and there was no three-point line when he set his records decades ago at LSU) set WNBA assist records while averaging double figures.
Clark literally singlehandedly sold out arenas across the WNBA, helped the league get new and more lucrative TV network deals, and further lifted women’s sports to a never-seen-before national and international level of attention with every three-point shot or sleight of hand magical pass. It’s not hyperbole to say Clark saved the WNBA and helped women’s basketball progressed decades sooner than the sport could have done on its own.
I hope I never see the ridiculous flag-planting fiasco in college football and a year filled with unsportsmanlike and classless behavior across college athletics.
I pray I never see Mike Tyson in the boxing ring again for a quick $20 million paycheck, but I fear I will. And someone please caution NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell about venturing into more streaming of games, reminding him of the Netflix tech debacle from the Tyson-Paul circus.
Fall arrived with high hopes around McNeese football as Gary Goff entered his third season with another replenished roster via the transfer portal. A solid 4-2 start was followed by a troubling three-game losing streak, and a promising season morphed into a mediocre 6-6 finish. Six more wins than the previous season’s disastrous 0-10 year, but not enough high marks and warm and fuzzy feelings to save Goff’s job. Days after that mindboggling loss at home to Lamar, AD Heath Schroyer announced Goff would not return as head coach.
A short week later, McNeese introduced former Cowboys head coach and blue-blood Poke Matt Viator as the team’s new leader. The 61-year-old Viator’s most salient statement was he was not coming back to do what he did nine years before, because it would not work in today’s college game. He added that he must be a better version of his coaching self to have success nearly a decade after leaving McNeese.
The Viator hiring was surprising on many levels, but it reveals that Schroyer finally came around to the idea that getting home-grown, passionate and committed coaches from SWLA might just be the recipe for long-term success, something that has eluded McNeese over three coaching changes in 5 years.
LSU was supposed to be in the mix for college football’s first-ever 12-team playoff, but that goal took an early ping when Brian Kelly inexplicably lost his third consecutive season opening game as the Tigers head coach. Two losses to Florida State and then another to USC had Tiger fans up in arms with claws out. As you know, Kelly got it turned around pretty quickly, but then his season was derailed again by troublesome quarterbacks fleet of foot and a three-game losing streak ensued that knocked the Tigers from the playoff hunt.
A complete meltdown was avoided with wins over Vandy and Oklahoma to finish 8-4 and an invite to the Texas Bowl again. Part of the LSU story were season ending injuries to stars like Harold Perkins Jr., John Emery and Jacobian Guillory. Despite these issues, LSU fans trusted Kelly to get them into the CFP-12.
The beleaguered Kelly did save some face and parts of his hide by signing a top 10 high school recruiting class (minus the nation’s no. 1 prospect QB Bryce Underwood) and then proceeded to secure one of the country’s highest rated pool of talent from the transfer portal. Kelly can’t change the 8-4 season, his worse in three years at LSU, but this infusion of portal power will no doubt put LSU back in the playoff and national championship discussion in 2025.
NIL and the transfer portal continued to feed the national debate circuit surrounding mostly college football. The $10 million plus Michigan ponied up to get home state star Underwood to decommit from LSU was at the center of the narrative. It wasn’t really Michigan that cut the check. It was more like Oracle founder and one of the world’s richest guys, Larry Ellison, whose wife is a Michigan alum.
The impending House settlement case on NIL, revenue sharing and anything else that has altered the college sports landscape made headlines in 2024. Just exactly what it means for the LSU and Ohio States of the world and also a school the size of McNeese is still very much unclear. What many in collegiate athletics are hoping for is sanity, clarity and purity in the system, and possibly a means to swing that pendulum back closer to players being more amateur student athletes.
Unfortunately, that will not be the case, because any time an athlete or his “management team” feels crossed they will go to the courts, where their batting average is near 1000. Case in point: Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia got a federal court judge to issue an injunction that ruled his two years of junior college football in New Mexico cannot be used against his NCAA eligibility. Pavia was given another year of football at Vandy and another year to make NIL dollars.
I don’t begrudge the spunky Pavia for the move, as he has no future in pro football. But this JR-CO ruling will no doubt expand beyond this one player, and soon a brigade of players will be awarded extended NCAA eligibility. And that means even more contraction and lost scholarship opportunities for the Jimmies and Joes in high school football around Louisiana and the country.
And finally, 2024 brought an end to the misery for New Orleans Saints fans and the franchise when owner Gayle Benson did something the team has not done in decades: fire their head coach in season.
In the midst of a horrendous seven-game losing streak, Dennis Allen was canned after just two and half years in the job. Allen didn’t gain any traction or consistency as the ringleader. Topping the list of coordinators who are not head coach material are Dennis Allen and former Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniel. Both top level coordinators who should remain in those jobs going forward.
The Saints have missed the playoff fun for the fourth straight season and will be in search of what they hope can be another Sean-Payton-like new head coach. The Allen firing was inevitable and necessary. The problem now for GM Mickey Loomis is selling this job to an experienced, elite coach or even to a trending hot assistant around the NFL.
The Saints are once again saddled with over $70 million over the salary cap, not much trade capitol to bargain with (they traded their one ace in the hole CB Marcus Lattimore to Washington and got three decent draft picks in the deal) and the return of an aging and oft-injured middle-of-the-road quarterback in Derek Carr.
Of all the head coaching jobs that will become available at season’s end the New Orleans gig is near the bottom of the popularity list.
As my passage back across 2024 ends, I recall the collegiate GOAT’s retirement as Nick Saban ended his championship run at Alabama, and the NFL’s GOAT Bill Bilichick, opting to coach college football at North Carolina and not pursue Don Shula’s all-time NFL wins record. There were Freddie Freeman’s home runs and Shohei Ohtani’s brilliance everywhere except being on the mound in the Dodgers World Series championship. U-Conn’s repeat as kings of men’s college basketball and South Carolina doing the same in the women’s game. Michigan enduring NCAA and Big 10 investigations and Jim Harbaugh’s suspension. The Wolverines were still too good, though, winning their first college football title in 26 years.
The good stuff outweighed the bad, as it usually does in sports. Too bad that’s not the case in the real world.
Catch Rick Sarro’s commentary and latest opinions on Soundoff on CBS Lake Charles on Tuesday and Thursday at 10:05 pm and on Saturday at 11 pm. Follow Rick on Twitter @ricksarro.
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