Tiger Woods, NCAA Tournament and the Best Stuff of the Week

The plan was to use this space for a little quip about NCAA tournament brackets with a couple casual references to Mad Men's long-awaited premiere, but then Tiger Woods had to go out and actually win something.

Sorry, Kentucky. Apologies, Kansas. Step aside, Don Draper (and your party-throwing, song-singing wife). Mr. Sunday Red finally ended the most-discussed, precipitous, seemingly endless (yes, it really has been that long) slump in sports. 

That really is him smiling with a trophy in hand. Really. Blast from the past, for sure—nothing like that has come down the wire or popped up on your TV since 2009. And love him or hate him, Woods' return to the top is not only huge news, but a boon for the sports world in general. If he keeps it up, weekends get more interesting and provide us with something else to watch—especially when summer baseball monotony sets in.

That it happened now—when the Final Four's final pieces were also falling into place and the Oklahoma City Thunder were taking on LeBron James and Co.—only made it an even more enjoyable weekend for the sports-obsessed who find themselves on B/R. 

Weekends like these are why we watch, read and follow. They're why there's still so much to appreciate, even when our football overlords are on siesta. Cheers to an interesting weekend, and to what should be a great next week—especially for the state of Kentucky... 

Kentucky Blows Past Baylor

Enjoy the moment, Anthony Davis. You earned it. You earned it with your play all season, swatting everything in your airspace away from the hoop. And you especially earned it on Sunday after shaking off that bad landing and helping Kentucky blow past Baylor to earn a spot in the Final Four. 

As the AP's Paul Newberry put it, Davis and his boys could have busted out the scissors long before regulation was over. They're just too dang good. They just make it look so easy (even if all of Lexington's hearts sank into their stomachs when their unibrowed wunderkind went down), like they're in a class all their own.

An 82-70 win against a hot Baylor team looked almost too routine. 

And the best part now? We get to watch them play Louisville next weekend. You don't have to live in the Bluegrass State to know how much that is a must-watch. 

Kansas Finishes Strong

Twelve points. Really—12 unanswered points, against UNC, with the Final Four on the line. Those Jayhawks Rock Chalked their way to a 12-0 run to slam the door shut on the Tar Heels Sunday.

What more needs to be said? What more do we need to break down in an 80-67 victory that showed Ohio State's going to have its hands full come Saturday? 

It's hard to count Kansas out come bracket-filling-out time, and tourney runs like this one (even with a Boilermaker-induced scare) prove why. 

Smoke Wins in Rain

This was a meh, rain-shortened race on a track that produces snooze-level entertainment even when the weather's nice. Now that we've gotten that qualifier out of the way, it was still a great day for Tony Stewart, even if an ever-rare, yet completely inconvenient Los Angeles storm spoiled his victory party.

Smoke is continuing to prove that an owner-driver—a big part of NASCAR's past that went the way of the dinosaur—can still have a go in today's NASCAR. The 2011 title isn't a fluke; that's for sure. Who cares if he has Hendrick support (think the Yankees helping out Kansas City). He's still a smaller outfit than the lot, and he's outrunning them all consistently. 

Thunder Too Hot for Heat

First off, watch Dwyane Wade drain it from out of OKC's zip code if you haven't yet. That was a bomb of a shot, one he made look so effortless as the buzzer sounded. Still, it's just a side dish—albeit one of the delicious, "Top 10"-worthy variety—in a game where the Thunder rocked Miami. 

We've been waiting for these two teams to face off all season, and Kevin Durant stole the show (though the Heat definitely helped gift-wrap it). This was all Oklahoma City, no doubt. 

Tiger's Big Return

Well, welcome back, Tiger. It sounds cliche, but the sports world—fans, press, fellow golfers, anybody who has a television—has been waiting for more than 900 days to say something like that. When the unraveling started oh-so-long ago, nobody could have predicted it would be this long for golf's dominant force to win again. 

Yet it was. There have been 924 sunsets between his last win and Sunday's in Orlando. Now come the questions, of course, ones that will steal attention from the tourney and NFL draft talk for the next couple days.

Is he back for good? Will this translate into a major victory this year? Mentally, has he reverted to the competitor he was? Is this the spark he needed? 

No way to know right now. But it will be fun to debate.