From the moment NASCAR confiscated the C-posts from Jimmie Johnson's Daytona 500 car and subsequently stated that a penalty was likely coming, Rick Hendrick maintained his boys were innocent. Tuesday, he got the verdict he sought all along.

Chief appellate officer John Middlebrook overturned NASCAR's initial ruling against the 48 team, rescinding both a six-race suspension against crew chief Chad Knaus and car chief Ron Malec, and the loss of 25 championship points for Jimmie Johnson.

Immediately, Johnson vaulted from 17th in the Sprint Cup standings to 11th. Just as important, he won't have to do without his crew chief for the next month and a half.

"I felt from the very beginning that we were clearly by the rulebook, within the guidelines, and the car had been seen multiple times and raced everywhere we raced in 2011," Hendrick said. "I'm just glad this over."

The facts, as much as NASCAR has revealed, are thus: Prior to Johnson's Daytona 500 car running a single lap, NASCAR

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M – Baylor guard Brady Heslip "strapped the scene" Saturday.

In Baylor lingo, when a Bear sinks a 3-pointer, they say "strap." Heslip made nine in the Bears' 80-63 victory over Colorado in their South Regional third round matchup. So Heslip "strapped the scene."

No one outside J'mison "BoBo" Morgan, a senior center who is redshirting this season, knows exactly what the term means – "BoBo is the slang master," guard Pierre Jackson said. "He comes up with a lot of words that we don't even know." – but in the wake of Saturday night's victory, no one much cared.

All that mattered was that Heslip did strap the scene to the tune of 27 points – that's right, he scored all 27 of his points on 3-pointers – including back-to-back daggers that turned a three-point game with just over seven minutes to go into a rout.

For Heslip, the night provided some validation of his decision to transfer to Baylor before last season. He spent his freshman season at Boston College, but when the

ALBUQUERQUE – Quincy Miller's first reaction when he saw the yellow uniforms he and his Baylor basketball mates were going to wear throughout postseason play? Shock.

"I was like, 'Oooooh, they're kinda loud,' " Miller, a freshman forward, said Thursday. "I wasn't feeling it."

That's understandable, given the unis look as if they were colored with a yellow highlighter.

But Miller and the rest of his teammates have had a change of heart. They're 2-0 wearing them, having defeated Kansas State in the Big 12 tournament and, on Thursday, South Dakota State in the second round of the NCAA South Regional.

"I don't know where it came from," junior guard Pierre Jackson said after the Bears defeated the Jackrabbits 68-60. "We've got a pretty good record in them, so I could care less."

Of course, where they came from is a promotional idea from adidas. Countering Nike's all-gray look for the likes of Ohio State and Oregon, adidas has gone loud in outfitting three teams – Louisville, Cincinnati and

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – In the world of college basketball, where being 22 is considered ancient, Vanderbilt is stockpiled with AARP members.

The Commodores start – hold onto your Poligrip – four seniors and a junior, in stark contrast to Kentucky, the tournament's No. 1 overall seed, which has just two seniors on its roster and is led by 18- and 19-year-old freshmen.

Kentucky coach John Calipari has no problem recruiting a player he knows is NBA-bound after only one year of college ball because one year is all it takes to be a championship contender. Calipari proved it with Derrick Rose in 2008, with John Wall in 2010, with Brandon Knight last season, and is doing it now with Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist.

Conversely, in a time when raw talent is all the rage, Vanderbilt proves that experience still counts for something.

"A lot of teams are running with the Kentucky model, where players kind of come and go, but we wanted to leave a mark on our program, leave something behind,"

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Harvard is the greatest brand in education, and getting someone from Harvard to tell you that takes all the coaxing of luring a Kardashian in front of a camera.

Nauseating to listen to for the non-Crimson among us? Sure. But here's the thing: It's true – no testimony from a brand analyst necessary.

"[Insert school here] is the Harvard of the [insert location here]," the saying goes, and it's never the other way around and it's always Harvard, never Yale – or any other university for that matter.

This is the carrot Tommy Amaker dangles in front of potential recruits he wants to come play basketball for him in Cambridge, Mass. That the allure (which has been around since, oh, before George Washington) is finally working for a team that is making its first NCAA tournament appearance since 1946 is fascinatingly simple: financially, Harvard is more accessible than ever before.

The Ivy League doesn't offer athletic scholarships, so in the past if you had the grades and

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The history of the Daytona 500 has been chock-full of unforeseen drama right from Day 1. It took officials three days examining photographs and video recordings to determine Lee Petty won the inaugural event. The 1976 edition saw David Pearson and Richard Petty, running 1-2 through the final turn, wreck each other as they roared toward the checkered flag. Two years ago, a pothole opened up in the middle of Turns 1 and 2, halting the race twice.

None of that, however, holds a flamethrower (literally) to what happened in Monday night's 54th running of The Great American Race when Juan Pablo Montoya plowed into a jet dryer on Lap 160, spilling 200 gallons of fuel onto the track that immediately sparked into a massive fire that halted the race for more than two hours.

The fire, which lasted between five and 10 minutes, was so intense it melted a strip of pavement that necessitated a hoard of track officials – using water, speedy dry and, yes, Tide – to get Daytona

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The Daytona 500 is never without incident. But what happened 160 laps into the 54th edition of The Great American Race is completely unprecedented:

Juan Pablo Montoya was racing around the track under caution, trying to catch up to the field, when he lost control of his car and crashed into a jet dryer that was blowing debris off the track. What ensued was something completely bizarre.

Fuel poured out of the jet dryer, caught on fire and set a line of flames across the track rising some 20 to 30 feet into the air.

Montoya got out of his car unhurt, while the driver of the jet dryer, Duane Barnes, was taken to a local hospital, treated and released.

"I left the pits and I felt a weird vibration," Montoya explained. "We were on the backstretch and we really weren't going that fast. I could feel the car squeezing and when I told the spotter to take a look, the car just came right.

"He was OK," Montoya said of Barnes. "He just looked pretty scared."

The fire was so