Off the wire

South Korea games on ESPN

ESPN will begin airing six regular-season games per week from South Korea’s KBO baseball league. The agreement with Eclat Media Group was announced Monday, the day before the league is scheduled to open its season. The first game featuring the NC Dinos taking on the Samsung Lions aired earlier today. Games will air regularly Tuesday through Friday. Most will be on ESPN2. The defending Korea Series champion Doosan Bears will be on Wednesday against the LG Twins while the 11-time league champion KIA Tigers take on the Lions on Friday. The agreement includes the postseason and the Korea Series bestof-seven championship. The schedule and where ESPN airs them is subject to change pending the status of other leagues whose schedules have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. ESPN announcers will provide commentary in English from their home studios. Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez will do three games this week. Jon Sciambi, Jessica Mendoza and Kyle Peterson will also call games.

Charity Skins match set

Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson headline a $3 million charity match for covid-19 relief that will mark the first live golf on television since the pandemic shut down sports worldwide. The May 17 match will be played at Seminole Golf Club in South Florida, a fabled course along the ocean where Ben Hogan once prepared for the Masters. It is to be televised by NBC networks, including Golf Channel, Sky Sports and the PGA Tour’s global TV partners. It will be the first golf event at Seminole shown on television. McIlroy and Johnson, major champions who have reached No. 1 in the world, will be partners in a Skins match against Oklahoma State alumni Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff. McIlroy and Johnson are playing for the American Nurses Foundation, while Fowler and Wolff are playing for the CDC Foundation. The match is titled, “TaylorMade Driving Relief.” All four players have endorsement deals with TaylorMade. McIlroy, currently No. 1 and the reigning PGA Tour player of the year, announced the match on the Today show with Carson Daly, with whom McIlroy has a podcast. He described it as a chance to “do a small part to raise some money and raise some awareness.”

D-I women to use NET

The women’s basketball committee will start using the NCAA Evaluation Tool instead of RPI to help evaluate teams for the tournament starting with the upcoming season. The Division I men’s basketball committee has been using NET since the 2018-19 season. “It’s an exciting time for the game as we look to the future,” said Nina King, who will chair the Division I Women’s Basketball Committee next season. “We felt after much analysis that the women’s basketball NET, which will be determined by who you played, where you played, how efficiently you played and the result of the game, is a more accurate tool and should be used by the committee going forward.” The women’s basketball NET algorithm is similar to the one the men use, although it doesn’t take scoring margin into account. The men’s algorithm factors in scoring margin with a maximize of 10-point difference. The men’s committee is meeting later this week and may make a few tweaks to their formula. The women’s version is based on their data from the past decade. “While the men’s and women’s basketball NET share high-level goals and individual components, the NET algorithm used in each is different,” said Lynn Holzman, NCAA vice president of women’s basketball. “The machine learning model developed for each sport utilizes only that sport’s data.”