(HARDY)—Missouri’s record=breaking running back Ahmad Hardy was shot in the left leg at a concert at a biker club in Laurel, Mississippi early Sunday morning. He’s undergone emergency surgery and is in stable condition.
Missouri is three months away from opening the 2026 football season. ESPN reports there is “optimism” that he will be able to play football again although it’s too early to establish a timetable for his return to strength.
Police say another man also was shot. Three people are in custody. Hardy is 20, a Mississippi native. He set a new Tiger rushing record last year.
Laurel police say the shooting took place during a “melee” after a rap concert. Reports n Laurel say the cause of the shooting is still being investigated.
The Tigers had been looking forward to a 2026 season with the return of its one-two backfield punch from ’25 of Hardy and Jamal Roberts. Roberts ran for 753 yards on 124 carries last season and scored six touchdowns. Hardy went for 1,649 yards, a new school record, with 16 TDs and was a finalist for the Doak Walker Award.
Hardy and Roberts made Missouri the only team in the SEC with two running backs in the top ten in yardage last season. Coach Eli Drinkwitz told reporters last season that Roberts “is as good a back as there is in the country.” Hardy had been expected to go high in the 2027 NFL draft after staying out of the transfer portal. Roberts did the same thing and has two more years of eligibility remaining.
Missouri does have some depth at running back if Hardy isn’t ready by the start of the season. The Tigers picked up a couple of portal transfers in Hawaii native Va’aimalae Fonoti III, who moves over from Montana, an FCS school. He’s 5-11, 207 pounds with three years of eligibility left. He was 84/418 rushing with five touchdowns. Last season.
Also coming in is Houston Christian;s Xai’Shaun Edwards, who averaged five yard a carry for 1,019 yards last year for another FCS team. He scored a dozen touchdowns.
Missouri also will have true freshman Maxwell Warner on the roster. Warner is from Chicago and went to the same high school that Mizzou basketball coach Dennis Gates attended. He was considered the top running back in Illinois. He also played defensive back.
(NCAA)—It’s going to be easier for our Missouri teams to get into the NCAA tournament in the future. The men’s and women’s basketball tournaments are being expanded by eight teams to 76 teams. The plan has come under some harsh criticism but an association spokesman says none of the 32 conferences in the NCAA opposed the plan.
Ben Portnoy of the Sports Business Journal thinks the new plan gives the Power Four Conferences and their “increasingly bloated size” more dominance in college sports. In the pas five year’s tournaments, twenty teams were listed in the “first four out.” Thirteen of them were frm those four conferences.
“Let’s not kid ourselves, this is being done, at least on some level, to appease the richest and most powerful leagues in the country.” The new format opens dozens of new sponsorship opportunities and a subsequent jump in association and school revenues.
(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals have finished their toughest part of the season so far—going 9-7 in seventeen days against the Dodgers, Mariners, Pirates, Padres, and Brewers. All of those teams are playing better than break-even ball and all are considered playoff contenders.
The Cardinals finished the week 23-17, three and a half games behind the Cubs, tied with the Brewers for second place in a division in which all five teams are playing better than .500 ball.
(WHERE ARE THEY NOW?)—Where are the major names that left the Cardinals in the last couple of years and how are they doing.
Nolan Arenado is hitting .273 with six homers and 18 RBIs for the Diamondbacks.
Sonny Gray is 3-1 with a 3.54 Era for the Red Sox
Willson Contreras, also with Boston, is batting .259 with eight homers and 23 ribbies.
Paul Goldschmidt, in his second year with the Yankees, is batting 200 with two homers and seven runs batted in.
Brendan Donovan is hitting .295 with 3 home runs and 8 runs batted in.
Miles Mikolas is 1-3, 7.44 in eight games, five of them starts.
(ROYALS)—The Royals continue working back to break even after their eight-game losing streak. They finished the week wining seven of their last ten and pulling to 19-22. The Tigers ended Kansas City’s five-game wining streak Sunday.
(FIFA)—Arrowhead Stadium as a name doesn’t mean much to the millions of people worldwide who will be watching the World Cup Soccer Tournament (or as the official soccer folks call it “football.”) So the place will just be Kansas City Stadium when FIFA brings six pool play tournament games next month along with a match in the round of 32 and a quarterfinal contest.
The AP’s Dave Skiretta reports the Hunt family has spent millions of dollars reconfiguring the football field into a soccer field’s dimensions. The first teams to play on the redesigned field will be Argentina, the defending World Cup champion, against Algeria on June 16. The final contest is scheduled for July 11, giving the Chiefs a month turn Kansas City Stadium back into Arrowhead.
Tickets for those games aren’t cheap. For the first four games, ticket prices will range from $140 to $410. Some seats in the nosebleed section can be had for as little as $60 but don’t expect any kind of intimate viewing experience. Round of 32 matches range from $160 to $440.
If you want to take in the quarterfinal match, be prepared to cough up $485 to $1,125. If you buy previously=sold tickets through the FIFA World cup platform, be prepared to pay a 15% resale fee.
(CHIEFS)—The Kansas City Chiefs invited 76 undrafted free agents to their rookie camp this year. Only three were signed to contracts: WR Xavier Loyd, DB Marlen Sewell, and OT Kahlil Benson.
Lloyd in a Kansas City native who played at K-State, Illinois State and at Missouri. He was in 12 games for the Tigers. Sewell spent five years at Vanderbilt, had 52 tackles in 45 games.
Benson played 12 of the 16 games Indiana played on the way to last season’s national championship. He allowed only 24 quarterback pressures on 382 pass-blocking snaps last season.
They’ll be part of the squad for the offseason training program that starts later this month.
(BATTLEHAWKS)—The St. Louis Battlehawks head into the last weeks of the UFL season in a three way tie for their division lead. St. Louis, DC, and Orlando all are 5-2. Jarveon Howard of the Battlehawks leads the league in rushing with 354 yards. The ‘Hawks have the league’s best defense, giving up 247 yards a game, which they need because they’re last in total offense. But they’re pretty efficient. They are second in scoring average behind the DC Defenders, 30-23.
St. Louis beat Columbus 31-20 last week. There are three games left in the regular schedule, two against Houston and one against Dallas. Houston is 2-5. Dallas is 3-4.
(REMEMBER?)—Kansas Center Greg Ostertag, who played for the Jayhawks 1991-95 and then had an eleven-year NBA career, has been elected mayor of Mount Vernon, Texas, a town of about 2,500 about 100 miles northeast of Dallas. At 7-2, he is now the world’s tallest public official.
Now: Where the rubber meets the road:
(INDYCAR)===It’s been a long time between wins for Chistian Lundgaard—47 races, in fact—but he heads into IndyCar’s biggest race as a winner.
Lundgaard finished almost five seconds ahead of David Malukas on the road course at Indianapolis, his first win since July of 2023
The race had its chaotic moments beginning as the field surged into the first turn and things got too crowded and the cars of Scott Dixon, Felix Rosenqvist, Pato O’Ward, and Caio Collett tangled, triggering a full course caution.
Rosenqvist was able to run eight more laps before retiring in 23rd place. Dixon rallied back to fifth at the end. O’Ward and Collett finished on the leader lap but were 18th and 19th.
The race turned for many competitors when Alexander Rossi’s car quit because its hybrid power system failed and he rolled to a stop on the main straightaway. He fumed, ““It’s pretty annoying to have failures on the car because of a product we didn’t ask for that doesn’t improve the racing.”
Rossi sat in the safety of his stalled car as competitors roared past at racing speeds before a full=course caution came out. He finally climbed out and walked across pit lane where he told an interviewer, “The fact that it took that long to throw a full-course caution when the cars on the front straight were going by at 170 miles an hour also seems insane when they don’t let us drive in the wet yesterday.” Qualifying had been called off the day before the race because of unsafe conditions caused by rain, although IndyCar has run races in the rain several times.
David Malukis finished second after leading the most laps but giving up the lead to Lundgaard and Graham Rahal claimed the last podium slot.”
Qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 will be next weekend. The race will be on the Sunday of Memorial day weekend, May 24th.
(NASCAR)—Shane Van Gisbergen’s historic drive to the win on the Watkins Glen board course already is considered an epic.
The acknowledged master of NASCAR road courses (he’s 7-1 in the last three years) came out of his last pit stop in 26th place, 29.2 seconds behind the leader with 24 twisting laps ahead. .
He overhauled all of them and pulled away for a 7.3 second lead at the checkered flag.
His win leaves him only two short of Jeff Gordo’s all-time NASCAR Cup Series record for road course victories. Van Gisbergen has yet to win on an oval.
Connor Zilisch, a rookie in the Cup series, appeared to be the only driver capable of keeping Van Gisbergen in sight until a tire let go. He finished 20th.
NASCAR’s next points race will be Sunday night, May 24th, the annual 600 miler at Charlotte. Next weekend it will hold its annual All-Star Race, this time at Dover.
(photo credits: Hardy— Kris Sand, Columbia Missourian; Lundgaard—IndyCar; Van Gisbergen—Rick Gevers)