The World Baseball Classic is back for the first time in six years. And with 20 teams in the field, it's the biggest one yet.
How it works: Over the next week, four pools of five teams will compete in round-robins across four host cities. The top two teams from each group advance to the single-elimination knockout stage, which ends with the championship on March 21 in Miami.
The Big Ten men's basketball tournament begins Wednesday at United Center, the first time it's been in Chicago since 2019.
Why it matters: The tournament brings students and spectators from all over the country together to compete for the conference title and a possible trip to the NCAA Tournament.
Mexican-born mixed martial arts fighter Alexa Grasso stunned the MMA world Saturday after beating the heavy favorite Valentina Shevchenko of Kyrgyzstan to capture the UFC women's flyweight championship.
The big picture: Grasso's victory, which made her the UFC's first Mexican women's champion, illustrates how much MMA is growing south of the border.
The National Football League scouting combine concluded on Sunday in Indianapolis, where 319 prospects partook in an annual event whose usefulness has come under heightened scrutiny in recent months.
The backdrop: In December, NFL executive Troy Vincent likened the combine to a "slave auction" due to the nature of medical evaluations and interviews — the parts of the combine that are less publicized but often more valued by teams.
College basketball's embrace of analytics has transformed how games are played and how performances are measured. Now, analytics is changing how a conference seeds its tournament.
State of play: The Western Athletic Conference made a groundbreaking decision this offseason, becoming the first league to not use conference records to determine postseason tournament seeding.
