New Mexico pulling for Crimson Tide
Who are you rooting for, New Mexico? According to the online gambling site, BetOnline.ag, the Land of Enchantment is pulling for Alabama in Monday night’s College Football Playoff Championship Game in Indianapolis.
The site claims it analyzed keyword association in Twitter data for more than a week and more than 200,000 tweets were used to determine who was rooting for whom. It also tracked hashtags for each team.
New Mexico, it seems, wants the Tide to roll over Georgia, giving Nick Saban yet another piece of hardware for a program that has made a habit of collecting the sport’s top trophies over the past decade or so.
In case you’re wondering, 31 states are pulling for Georgia according to BetOnline.ag. That includes most of the states north of the Mason-Dixon line, plus the majority of those on the East Coast. Only four of the 11 states with schools in the Southeastern Conference are on Georgia’s side: Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and Missouri.
Attrition and injury are taking their toll on the University of New Mexico men’s basketball team. The team announced Sunday forward Emmanuel Kuac will miss the remainder of the season after suffering a broken left leg in Saturday’s loss to Utah State in The Pit.
Kuac is the third Lobo to exit the active roster since the season’s start, and all three are low-post players. It began with the departure of center Valdir Manuel, then the exit of center Gethro Muscadin. Both left seeking transfers.
A 6-foot-7 junior out of Calgary, Kuac underwent successful surgery Sunday, according to a release issued by UNM. It said he suffered “leg fractures,” suggesting his injury was more severe than a typical broken leg.
It happened with 3:23 left in the second half when Kuac went up for an attempted rebound in the lane after a missed jumper by teammate Jamal Mashburn Jr. Kuac didn’t appear to make contact with anyone and replays showed he immediately contorted in pain after jumping off both feet under the basket.
He appeared in six games this season, making his first start of the year Saturday. He averaged 4.2 points, 4.5 rebounds and 1.5 blocks in limited duty.
The Everett Chavez Pueblo Pavilion will remain silent on the Santa Fe Indian School campus this weekend.
The Braves/Lady Braves Classic basketball tournament was canceled Sunday morning. The school had announced Friday a shift to remote learning. In a statement released on its website Friday evening, SFIS Superintendent Christie Abeyta wrote it was moving to remote learning because the company providing PRC testing could do so for staff and students for mandatory tests Sunday (staff) and Monday (students). The decision meant all basketball activities would halt until the school reopens next week.
It will be the second straight season SFIS will not hold its regular season tournament, as it did not participate in the shortened 2021 season.
SFIS athletic director Eric Brock said the Braves’ home game against Peñasco and the Lady Braves’ road game at Albuquerque Sandia Prep on Tuesday were canceled but he hopes they could be rescheduled. Also, there will be no in-person practices this week, but teams are allowed to do virtual workouts.
Brock said the teams will also try to figure out how to make up for the three games lost from the tournament’s cancellation, and possibly could play teams scheduled for the tournament in individual contests.
“We have a couple of bye weeks [during the District 2-3A season] where you don’t play on a Tuesday and a Saturday,” Brock said. “If one of those bye weeks aligns with somebody else, we would see about setting up a game.”
Don’t bury the Pecos Panthers just yet.
After suffering its longest losing streak in eight years, Pecos reversed course at perhaps its second favorite tournament (the state tournament, of course, being No. 1): the Northern Rio Grande Tournament. Pecos, the sixth seed in the biggest smallschool tournament in Northern New Mexico, entered with a 4-5 record but put an exclamation mark to the weekend with a 73-49 shellacking of Peñasco in the NRG championship game.
It marked the fourth title in the past five tournaments for the Panthers, who have played for the NRG title seven consecutive times. If history is an indicator, Pecos might need to clear some space in its trophy case. The previous three times it won the NRG championship, it won a state title.
For the sake of full disclosure, the Panthers lost to Mora in the 2018 championship game, but recovered to win the second of four straight state titles two months later.
If we’re being honest, March 12 was always going to be a busy sports day in New Mexico.
It’s a Saturday and the second weekend in March, which means it’s the finals of the high school basketball state tournament in The Pit. That alone makes it a very big deal.
Toss in a pair of other events in that immediate area and it’s a good bet you’re going to need a giant bottle of tension headache medication to deal with all the traffic at the intersection of University and Cesar Chavez in southeast Albuquerque.
The New Mexico United announced this week they’ll hold their home opener that night at Isotopes Park. That afternoon, UNM will host Fresno State in a key Mountain West baseball game.
Plan early. Leave earlier.
The passing of former Santa Fe Fuego manager Bill Moore came with a detail that will linger at Fort Marcy Ballpark well into the future.
Something of an old-school music connoisseur, he had a particular liking for Johnny Cash. More specifically, it was the man in black’s 1963 “Ring of Fire” that struck a chord with Moore.
It made perfect sense, then, that the ol’ skipper put two and two together when he was put in charge of the Fuego. The team’s general manager, Yvonne Encinias, revealed last week that Moore suggested the public address system play the song after every win.
Just like that, a tradition was born.
Thanks for that, Bill. You may be gone, but your influence will live on at Fort Marcy.
Santa Fe High senior wrestler Elijah Martinez continues to build on a promising season. He improved to 13-0 as he won the 182-pound weight class at the Conflict at Rio Rancho Cleveland meet on Saturday. He won fourth of his five matches by pin, including La Cueva’s Ernie Byers at 1:27 of a matchup of undefeated wrestlers.
Martinez is a wrestler on a mission, having lost the 5A title in the final moments in 2021 to Carlsbad’s Jacob Fuentes by an 9-8 count after holding a 7-2 lead in the second period.
On the girls side, Capital had three wrestlers finish in the top three. Cristiana Hernandez took second at 152 pounds, while Maliyah Maes and Nisa Gallegos were third at 145 and 235, respectively.
The money is flowing. It’s just not flowing to all the parts that need it.
In a recent study by Front Office Sports, 47 percent of the money paid from the earliest name, image, likeness deals designed to compensate college athletes for the use of their promotional services has gone to football players. More than 27 percent has gone to women’s basketball and roughly 16 percent to men’s hoops.
The tiny amount that’s left has gone to other sports like volleyball and baseball.