Cleaning out the inbox-Sports version

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It isn't often that women's basketball leads off the inbox.
It also isn't often that a women's basketball team wins 71 games in a row with a national championship and is on their way to the Final Four in Sioux Falls, South Dakota as the number one team in the country.
Now, imagine how rare that it is to have that team come from my hometown and you have the Division II dominating Ashland Eagles.
Head coach Robyn Fralick has a career record of 103-2 (of this writing) and has a unique assistant coach in her husband Tim, the former head coach of Ashland High School.
Barry Fortune of the Ashland Times-Gazette writes of the unique working relationship and how coaches function with a home life built around basketball.
When I grew up, Ashland was more of a hoops school than a football school, so men or women, it's nice to see the hoops programs doing so well there.

More on Ashland basketball as Eric Musselman, the son of Ashland University (then college) legend Bill Musselman, has led Nevada to the Sweet 16 after a huge comeback to upset second seed Cincinnati.
Nevada will play Loyola-Chicago for a trip to the Elite Eight.
If I was Louisville or Pittsburgh (Especially Pittsburgh) -ACC schools with a massive rebuilding project ahead, I would be looking into Eric Musselman as an excellent choice to be their person to attempt to bring back their program to tournament status.

Surprised to see Penny Hardaway as the head coach at Memphis.
I understand that Memphis missed the tournament in both years under Tubby Smith, but in the past flashy hires of former great players without college coaching experience hasn't turned out well (Houston with Clyde Drexler and currently Georgetown with Patrick Ewing and St.John's with Chris Mullin to name just a few), but the one thing that makes me think that Hardaway has a better chance than the others is that he is a Memphis icon coaching Memphis with a built-in recruiting hotbed waiting for him.
I'm not saying Hardaway will succeed, but I like his chances better than others that attempted this in the past.

Eleven Warriors uses the tournament (and adds football) to explain just why entering the Big 10 may be a great idea for dollars, but not such a great idea for success as it looks at the adventures of Penn State, Nebraska, Maryland and of course Rutgers and their struggles with their occasional successes.
When you consider that the Big 10 likely has one more expansion left in them, future contestants may want to measure winning against the bank account...

One passing of note as Ed "the Glider" Charles passed away at the age of 84.
Charles spent most of his career with the Kansas City Athletics, but best remembered by many for his 1969 postseason heroics with many key hits for the Miracle Mets against the Braves and Orioles.
Charles saved the best for last in his career as he never played in the big leagues after the World Series victory.

We wrap with the O.J. Simpson interview,
No, not THAT O.J. Simpson interview- Simpson did one last week that he hasn't done even well before that night in Brentwood as he talked football, his career with the Buffalo Bills, USC, his potential to possibly contend with CTE and even some about his time in prison in Las Vegas.
The Buffalo News managed to get Simpson to talk about these and other things in what I thought was a very interesting piece if only to get Simpson's thoughts on topics other than the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.