North Carolina and San Diego State meet in the First Four on Tuesday night with the winner moving on to face Ole Miss in the South Region first round. 

Two teams that are used to NCAA Tournament success narrowly made the field of 68 of the NCAA Tournament, needing to win a play-in game to advance to the official tournament. It’s been a down year in particular for North Carolina, but can the team thrive in a tournament setting to get past San Diego State? 

Here’s our betting preview. 

Spread

Moneyline

Total: 142.5 (Over -110/Under -110)

Odds courtesy of FanDuel Sportsbook

San Diego State 

Nick Boyd: Pressure will be on the Florida Atlantic transfer to show up against a potent North Carolina offense. While he has struggled to maintain his three-point shooting in a more on-ball role for the Aztecs, Boyd shot only 28% from beyond the arc in Mountain West play; he did score 15 or more in eight of his last nine games to finish the season. 

North Carolina

RJ Davis: It’s the last run for RJ Davis in the NCAA Tournament, who will look to build on a strong end of the season that had North Carolina playing its best ball down the stretch. The senior guard is averaging north of 16 points per game since the start of February. 

The Tar Heels three-point shooting may prove pivotal in this game as San Diego State’s offense lacks the firepower to keep up with the current form of this North Carolina team. 

UNC has been shooting 42% from beyond the arc over the last month and change that has sparked an 8-2 finish to the regular season. The team remains a sound ball handling unit, but it’s been the rise from three-point range that makes me bullish about the team’s chances of winning this one. 

San Diego State’s pack-line defense allows three-point shots at the 10th highest rate in the league, but against a sweet shooting team it may be problematic considering the Aztecs are shot on offensive playmaking, 182nd in effective field goal percentage and also an incredibly poor free throw shooting team (66%, 334th in the country). 

North Carolina’s defense has been sound all season, but its offense makes me confident it can get margin on San Diego State in the First Four and cover the spread.

PICK: North Carolina -3.5 (-110, Available at FanDuel Sportsbook)

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PEORIA, Ariz. — Manny Machado is happy to say he is healthy for the first time in a while, which the Padres believe will mean the same good things it has in the past.

And Machado is not shying away from the reality of the path he has ahead of him, one that might lead to immortality.

“We all play for that,” he said recently. “We play to win, but I’m also putting myself in a good spot to be mentioned to possibly be a Hall of Famer. I mean, it’s an honor to even get in that conversation. Putting up those numbers, seeing those numbers, they just keep creeping up.”

Machado is at 1,900 career hits and is eight home runs away from 350 in his career. Just 297 major leaguers have ever had 2,000 hits. Just 77 have had 2,000 hits and 350 homers.

He turns 33 in July and has eight years remaining on his contract. It is likely he has time to blow past 2,500 and 400 (29 players), and it is not unfathomable he could reach 2,750 and 450 (16 players). With some good fortune, he could fend off Father Time long enough to reach 3,000 and 500 (seven players).

“Yeah,” he said with obvious appreciation of the exclusivity of the company he is on the precipice of keeping, “that list gets shorter.”

There were questions over the past two seasons whether Machado could regain his footing along the road to Cooperstown. Probably, for some, questions remain.

Perhaps that is because there is a lack of understanding what he has done in those two years.

“Thinking about how bad he was for a stretch of time last year, and he still ends up with 30 homers and 100-plus RBIs,” Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove said Saturday. “You almost don’t even — like at the end of the year, you look at the numbers and you’re like, ‘How the (expletive) did that happen?’ He always finds a way to produce.”

It has been quite a couple seasons for Machado. Just a grindy, painful slog.

Really, it has been the better part of three seasons, in that his right elbow pain began in 2022 and he played through a severe ankle injury that summer.

He did not take batting practice much in 2023, and je ended that season and began ‘24 as the Padres’ designated hitter.

Following surgery in October ‘23 to repair his extensor tendon, Machado did not swing a bat until a month before spring training last year and was still experiencing pain to varying degrees each day well into the season. He said the elbow was never 100% until some point this past winter.

So, a healthy Machado in 2025 means we should expect, well, not a whole lot different.

Because he has, remarkably, been pretty much the same as ever.

In the end, Machado produced at far closer to the same level he always has than should have reasonably been expected.

In word and deed, Manny was Manny.

Just playing baseball. He says that phrase all the time. He also refers often to something being part of the “beauty of the game,” and he finds that beauty even in the parts that hurt.

“I’m just so used to it, honestly,” he said when asked to look back at what he endured the past two-plus seasons. “I’m just so used to it. You gotta figure it out, man. You know, I’ve figured things out my entire life, and, you know, since I was a kid, you have to figure it out. I want to be a baseball player, so go figure it out. You know, ‘What are you gonna do to become one?’ And it’s just got (ingrained) in me, man. I just figure it out. Go out there and figure it out, whatever you need to do to go out there and play.”

He spoke of Buck Showalter, his manager in Baltimore, and players like Adam Jones and Nick Markakis and J.J. Hardy, guys who would rub a little dirt on it.

“They’re out there grinding it out,” he said. “And you’re 22 years old, and you’re just like, ‘I gotta go out there and do it, right?’ So it just got (ingrained) in me where it was just like, ‘Just figure it out.’”

This is the guy who played more games from 2015 through 2022 than any other major league player, refusing to go on the injured list even in ‘22 with a Grade 3 (as bad as it gets) ankle sprain in 2022.

So it should be stressed that he played in 290 games between 2023 and ‘24 rather than that he missed 34.

“It’s been the entire time I’ve played with him,” said Jake Cronenworth, who made his major league debut for the Padres in 2020. “It’s very impressive,  the level that he still performs at whatever he’s going through and doing what he does on the field. It sets a standard for the group. Me as a young guy on the team, seeing him hurt playing through stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, if something happens to me, I can’t just go down.’ He helps set a standard for what our group is.”

And while Machado has received plenty of praise, along with myriad questions about whether he would ever be the same during the past two seasons, maybe it has been at least a little overlooked that he was as good as he was.

His numbers were down.

His .790 OPS and 118 wRC+ over the past two seasons were the lowest of any two-year span since 2015-16, when Machado really began to emerge as one of the best and most consistent players in the game.

He still hit 30 home runs in 2023 and 29 in ‘24 and is the only player in the major leagues to have hit at least 28 home runs in nine consecutive full seasons (excluding the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign).

He still carried the Padres for periods, such as when he batted .301 with a .920 OPS from June 18 through the Sept. 24 game in which he started a ninth-inning triple play that ended the victory that clinched the Padres’ postseason spot.  Machado’s OPS tied Jackson Merrill for the highest on the team in that span, his 23 home runs were tied for fifth most in the major leagues and his 71 RBIs were fourth most.

He still had 28 games with multiple RBIs last season, and the Padres were an astounding 27-1 in those games. He still led the Naitonal League with 28 go-ahead RBIs.

And that was after the worst 69-game start of his career, in which he batted .245 with a .662 OPS while pretty much just figuring out how to swing.

“He was trying to really feel where he can put the elbow so it would be a comfortable swing,” hitting coach Victor Rodriguez said. “He did a great job hanging in there when he really didn’t feel good. … He was trying to find a comfortable way to do it because he was in pain. He tweaked here and there to find it and get comfortable, and in the second half he was impressive.”

Machado’s work this offseason has involved incorporating and returning.

Machado said he learned a lot from some of the limitations he had last season when he was forced to rely more on flexibility work in the offseason and throughout the year. This winter he got back to working with weights — hang cleans and squats, plus strengthening his chest and grip. Bulking up and increasing strength not only helps with power but with maintaining at the end of a long season.

He will blend that with the flexibility work – wall sits, planks, various things to activate his muscles and keep his lower legs healthy.

“I just feel like that stuff kind of helped me maintain my flexibility a lot throughout the year,” he said. “It helped me with the little muscles. There’s a lot of things that like during the year, you kind of forget about the little muscles. … I kind of started overseeing all the other stuff that kind of plays a bigger part in keeping your strength and keeping your elasticity going where it needs to be, to be firing every single day. You kind of lose that throughout the year.”

And this spring has been the ongoing work of refining his swing, trying to get it back to the fluid plane and swing path that allowed him to spray line drives to all fields with a motion that was both violent and effortless.

“I was around the ball last year a lot more than I was in the past just because I couldn’t really get into my slot with my (back) elbow and kind of keep it tight to my body,” he said. “Everything just started looking more round. So I kind of have to use a little bit more of my legs last year, more than I’ve had in the past. But yeah, hopefully this year, I can keep it.”

If he can do so, the year should involve some history.

It has been six years since Machado signed what was at the time the largest contract in North American sports history (10 years, $350 million) to play for the Padres. He is now in the third seaso of an 11-year, $350 million extension.

His initial signing and the way he has played — third in MVP voting in 2020, second in ‘22 — have played arguably the single-biggest role in transforming the franchise.

And now he is on the verge of having spent more time with the Padres than his original team. He is 52 games from passing his total (860) with the Orioles, the team that drafted him and with whom he played in the major leagues from 2012 until he was traded to the Dodgers in the middle of 2018.

“It’s crazy,” Machado said of how long he been with the Padres. “I think about that all the time.”

Machado became the franchise’s home run leader last season. Well before the All-Star break, he will likely trail only Tony Gwynn and Dave Winfield in runs, total bases and RBIs in Padres history. If he remains healthy, he will be in the top five in games played by season’s end.

And sometime before summer he will likely reach 350 hits and before it is over should get to 2,000 hits.

“I see that number, and I’m like, ‘Damn,’” Machado said. “I remember my first hit. And now you’re chasing down 2,000. You’re 100 away. I mean, that’s mind blowing. It’s surreal.”

A week of rainy weather, reminiscent of the Emerald Isle, set the stage for San Diego’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in Balboa Park on Saturday. Thousands of people dawned green at the 43rd annual Irish festival and embraced the warm sun.

Muddy grass smooshed under the feet of attendees milling about the festival grounds, some carrying beers and bratwurst while others shuffled over to a stage to watch local Irish dance students tap and leap in sync.

John Hyatt, a spokesperson for the Irish Congress of Southern California who organized the event, said the all-day celebration, which ran from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m., was completely put together by volunteers. The theme of this year’s festival was “Celebrating Irish Businesses.”

The one-day festival on Saturday offered an outlet for people to share Irish culture and celebrate St. Patrick’s Day whether they have Irish heritage or not. 

“I hope what (people) take away from the event is a feeling of hospitality that we’re known for in the Irish community,” Hyatt said.

Fifth Avenue was lined with families cheering on the bands of bagpipes played by the local firefighters marching in the parade, as well as the “Friendly Sons of St. Patrick” singing Irish folk songs, while some of the kilted men smoked cigars as they walked.

In addition to the show of local Irish dance troupes and community organizations, the parade also showcased other cultural groups in the parade. A woman adorned in shamrock necklaces waved a giant Mexican flag. She was followed by young girls in vibrant ballet folklórico skirts fanning the asphalt.

“Everybody’s Irish on St. Patty’s Day,” said Bay Park resident Nancy O’Hanlon, who was sporting sparkly shamrock glasses.

She’s been coming to the San Diego St. Patrick’s Day parade since the mid-1980s — the first one was held in March 1981. O’Hanlon said she enjoys celebrating her Irish heritage with friends each year and showing support to so many different communities in San Diego.

Joe and Laura Little drove about three-and-a-half hours from Edwards Air Force Base in Antelope Valley to attend Saturday’s parade. The couple said it’s important for them to share Irish culture with their sons, Noah and Seth. Plus, it was a fun reason to visit family in the area, including Joe’s 97-year-old, Irish American great aunt Mee.

Joe Little, who was wearing the Irish flag tied around his neck like a cape, said a family trip to Ireland is on their bucket list. For now, they were excited to experience the drums, bagpipes and Irish culture at the San Diego parade.

Cathy Ward, executive director of the Irish Outreach Center, said the parade’s emphasis on Irish businesses is important because it’s one way to give back to the community. She moved to San Diego in 1989 from County Wicklow after seeing a picture of it in a newspaper — at the time, she’d never even heard of the place she now calls home. 

As the head of the Irish Outreach Center, Ward helps connect San Diegans to their Irish heritage with resources such as passport services, local events and group trips to Ireland. For Irish newcomers, they extend their signature hospitality to get people settled into a completely new environment.

“It’s a soft landing,” she said. “Hundreds of Irish students come every summer to work seasonal jobs … so we invite them in and give them a little welcome.”

That welcoming connection made all the difference for Grainne McGuire, who came to San Diego a decade ago from County Mayo in Ireland. She got plugged into the local community right away and joined an Irish sports league, playing Gaelic football and Camogie.

Ultimately, that led her to found a business called Kiana Sportswear in 2023 alongside her teammate Sophie Grego, making athletic gear for female athletes playing traditional Irish sports. The two women credit the local community for supporting their aspiration and getting their name out there.

“We wouldn’t be a business unless we had the Irish community around us,” said Grego, who was attending the St. Patrick’s Day parade for the first time.

Originally Published: March 15, 2025 at 7:15 PM PDT