The Daily Mauling 4.29.26

Through the Phog reminds Kansas fans that getting Stokes also sets up an interesting story line as Kansas will face Kentucky next season.

The Jayhawks haven’t played Kentucky since the 2023-24 campaign and are currently on the losing end of the series with 12 wins to 24 losses, however Self and Co. have been able to turn the tide recently, taking five of the last seven matchups between the two blue bloods, including 89-84 win when the sides last met inside the United Center.

Joshua Schulman over CBS Sports has grades on the supporting class/transfers that will be playing with Stokes next season:

Kansas got off to a slow start in the transfer portal this offseason, but it has made several additions over the past few weeks to make up for the mass exodus the roster suffered this year. The Jayhawks currently have nine scholarship players on the roster, and so far, three of them will be transferring in from other programs.

Other Links!

Over at Fangraphs, Michael Baumann writes about the Phillies firing manager Rob Thomson:

You can’t trade all these bums in April. Nor can you tear up the front office root and branch; even if you could, it wouldn’t make a difference. Managers were born to be thrown under the bus in moments like this. No one knows this better than Thomson, who got this job in the first place when Joe Girardi started 22-29 in 2022.

If you want to read about something that might give you nightmares, head over here about an art installation with robot dogs that have silicone heads of some of the biggest creeps you can think of at the moment:

Robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads modeled after world-renowned figures — including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso — can be seen roaming around a Berlin museum, occasionally “pooing” printed images of their surroundings which they’ve previously captured with integrated cameras.

Republicans can’t figure out how to fund anything even though they control congress and the white house.

WHAT A MESS. Today on Capitol Hill should be all about pomp and circumstance, with the historic speech of King Charles III before the U.S. Congress. But the pageantry of that royal visit is almost an afterthought, as Republicans struggle to advance their legislative agenda in Congress. Right now for the GOP, it’s a big freaking mess.

With the news of James Comey being indicted, this is a good piece that gets to whether or not what he did can even be considered a threat:

But let’s imagine for a minute that he was. Let’s pretend, just for a second, that Comey did, in fact, intend “86” in a violent way.

Lawrence Glickman writes at The Atlantic what we’ve all known and that’s of course people born in the US are considered citizens have been since the passage of the 14th Amendment:

This letter was, in many ways, typical. In the century after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, many people across the United States sent similar questions to their local newspaper about the citizenship status of children born to immigrants. The Buffalo News had answered a comparable question before. In 1894, a reader known only as W.F.S. had another such query replied to in the paper’s Answers in Brief section: “Children born in the United States are citizens by right, no matter of what nationality their parents were.”

The last link of the day is from Alex Kirshner at Slate on Brendan Sorsby and his apparent gambling addiction:

One of the dynamics in Sorsby’s case is uniquely tragic, even in this vast sea of similar scandals. Sorsby has likely made a few million dollars over the past few seasons as the QB at Cincinnati via NIL, and he was set to make something around $5 million at Texas Tech this year. Despite this, On3 reported that Sorsby made a habit of attending Reds games and placing live wagers from the stands on whether certain pitches would be balls or strikes. The bet amounts were between $1 and $2.50. The reported bets on his own team are why it’s so unlikely Sorsby plays college football again, but it’s the incessant live betting on balls and strikes that makes his story a public policy case. It just shouldn’t be this easy for someone with so much ahead of them to sacrifice their money and career at the altar of DraftKings and FanDuel.

QOTD: When is the last time you’ve had an argument or disagreement with someone that was 100% wrong but no matter how much evidence you show them, they won’t accept it?

My answer: yesterday