It is Tuesday, April 7th, 2006. Welcome back to Hang Up and Listen, the sports podcast here at Slate.

Back with you again this week. I'm Alex Kirchner. I'm a contributing writer for Slate,

and I co-host Split Zone Duo, a national college football podcast. We have a big show for you this week.

We're going to talk about March Madness, now over, after UCLA and Michigan brought the Big Ten

a couple of national championships. We're going to talk about Rexum, the Welsh Football Club,

that may be on the verge of doing something even more unprecedented than what it's done

the last few years. And we're going to talk about some big debuts in Major League Baseball, not just a handful of really prized sought-after rookies,

but also, of course, ABS, which has already turned the sport somewhat on its head in just a week

and a half or so of its existence. As usual, joining me this week for all of it is Lindsay Gibbs,

women's sports lead at CBS Sports, and the publisher of Power Plays, a newsletter covering the key stories of the hour in women's sports.

Lindsay, hello.

Hello.

How's everybody doing?

I'm back in North Carolina after 12 days on the road for March Madness.

And I don't know what day or what time it is, but I know that it is no longer March, so I guess there's that. It is April. This is April. Things get mad in April. It can still be mad in April. Yeah, there's still madness. Don't get me wrong. You know, big trade news breaking while we're all, all the media people are at the airport just trying to at home. It's fun. And of course, we've got Ben Lindberg with us. Ben is a senior editor for The Ringer and co-host of Effectively Wild, a Great Baseball podcast. Ben, how are we doing? Doing well. I'm the only one of us who hasn't really gone anywhere. So you two have been traveling the world. I've been sitting at home,

but there has been a ton of sports to follow. You missed a lot, Alex. I mean, you probably didn't miss it.

You were probably following it from afar. But the Angel Reese trade that Lindsay just alluded to,

the sabers clinched a playoff spot. So it's official. The drought is done. We did a segment on that. NBA tanking,

going into overdrive. We've talked about that too, but Janus and the Bucks warring with each other

about whether he's fit to play. Good rookie of the year race in the NBA. Also, Donald Trump did

fix college sports, I believe, while you were gone. So you must have been pleased to see that news.

Yes, it's very funny to watch college sports conference commissioners, athletic directors, etc., fall over themselves to make sure that Trump doesn't get mad at them when they can't do the thing that he is trying to do by executive fiat.

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