Bucs keeping the title gang together

Tom Brady doesn’t merely lead teams to Super Bowl wins on the field. He also helps keep together championship teams that have salary cap issues.

So sackmaster Shaq Barrett, fellow standout linebacker Lavonte David — and who knows who else — will remain in Tampa Bay.

Just as he had done several times in New England, Brady reworked his big-ticket contract last week to free up money in free agency. The Buccaneers used it to keep David, and on Monday, the first day of “legal tampering” before the NFL’s business year begins on Wednesday, the 28-year-old Barrett agreed to a four-year, $72 million contract with $36 million guaranteed, agent Drew Rosenhaus confirmed.

Meanwhile, back in Brady’s former stomping grounds, the Patriots were spending wildly in an attempt to recapture the glory he produced before heading south last season.

New England opened its vaults wider than any other team on Monday, something unusual for a club that normally avoids chasing the most expensive free agents. Of course, the Patriots went 7-9 without Brady in 2020.

Joining them are linebacker/edge rusher Matthew Judon from Baltimore; tight end Jonnu

Smith from Tennessee; nose tackle Davon Godchaux from Miami; and defensive back Jalen Mills from Philadelphia.

College basketball

INDIANS FIRES MILLER >> Archie Miller’s $10.3 million buyout was one of college basketball’s priciest.

Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson decided keeping Miller would prove even more costly.

Dolson fired Miller, armed with enough cash from private donations to cover the buyout and ready to answer a fan base angered by four straight mediocre seasons.

“It’s a results-oriented business and I didn’t feel like we had made enough progress,” Dolson said on a late afternoon Zoom call. “I thought we needed a new voice and a new direction.”

NBA

JAZZ INVESTIGATION The NBA said that an investigation into whether Jazz player Elijah Millsap had a bigoted remark directed at him during an end-of-season interview six years ago has ended and was unable to find proof that the statement was made. Millsap alleged that Dennis Lindsey, then the team’s general manager and now its executive vide president, said “if u say one more word, I’ll cut your Black ass and send you back to Louisiana” during that April 2015 meeting.

The Big Ten again has more teams in the NCAA Tournament than any other conference, including a pair of No. 1 seeds and two No. 2s among its record nine teams in the Big Dance.

That is one more than the eight Big Ten teams that made it to the last NCAA Tournament played two years ago, when the conference doubled the number of teams it had in the 2018 tournament.

Now that this regular season and all of the postseason conference tournaments have been completed, college basketball has gotten a step further than it did last March, when the NCAA Tournament was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic days before Selection Sunday and no 68-team field was set.

The ACC and Big 12 both got seven teams into this year’s tournament and the SEC got six. The Pac-12 has five teams advancing and the Big East four.

For the second NCAA tourney in a row, 11 conferences sent multiple teams. Before 2019, that hadn’t happened since 2015.

There were automatic qualifiers from 31 conferences, down one from the usual 32 after the Ivy League opted out of the season. That meant an additional at-large berth.

Big Ten teams Michigan and Illinois (23-6) are No. 1 seeds, while Iowa and Ohio State are No. 2 seeds, with those four teams all in different regions. The Illini beat Ohio State in overtime to win the Big Ten Tournament championship, and were still cutting down the nets in Indianapolis — where the Final Four will also be played — when their spot in the field was being revealed for tourney to be played exclusively in Indiana.

Illinois wasn’t even one of the eight Big Ten teams that made the NCAAs two years ago, when the Illini were 1221 in what was coach Brad Underwood’s second season. Now they are on a top line for their first NCAA appearance since 2012-13.

Rutgers, in its seventh Big Ten season, made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 30 years. That drought included the school’s 18 seasons as a Big East member. Rutgers was in the Atlantic 10 in 1991 when it last made the tournament.

Only the West Region, with Iowa as the 2 seed, has a single Big Ten team. The South and East regions each have three, including No. 11 seed Michigan State playing in a First Four game to advance in the East, where Michigan is the top seed.

South Region No. 1 seed Baylor leads the seven teams from the Big 12. That conference has three No. 3 seeds: West Virginia (Midwest), Kansas (West) and conference tournament champion Texas (East). Its other NCAA teams are Oklahoma State, Oklahoma and Texas Tech.