Happy St. Patrick's Day. It's Monday, March 17th, 2025. It's first thing with Kevin Mano. Thank you for being here.

I was off last week for spring break, and I'm happy to be back, and I'm happy at St. Patrick's Day, and I'm happy the show starts right now.

And we always start with the top story. It was a rough weather weekend for a large portion of the country.

Sadly, the death toll keeps rising.

And this morning, the latest I've seen is that 40 people lost their lives as these storms

pass through the Midwest and South.

I read that around 60 tornadoes were confirmed, ranging from Missouri, they were hit hard,

Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, all over the place.

Around 9 million people were under tornado watches over the weekend.

Hundreds of thousands were without power, many still are.

The winds were just insane.

I saw videos of semi-trucks just tipping over.

Those winds led to wildfires erupting in Texas and Oklahoma.

Very dangerous out there.

While the storms moved east over the weekend, I know they were weakening, but still very strong as they move into the southeast and mid-Atlantic today.

Be safe, everyone in that area.

This Thursday, by the way, is the first

official day of spring. Let's go. All right, okay. On to sports, March Madness is upon us,

the field of 68 teams for the men's and women's NCAA tournaments were unveiled last night.

Auburn is the number one overall seed for men, while UCLA is number one for women.

I'm going to link the brackets in the Instagram stories this morning.

I was going to be a lot up there at First Thing Pod on Instagram is where you find all the things I mentioned during the show.

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