I take Bay Area Rapid Transit to work. Daily. It’s the screaming, clothed monster that moves passengers to and from Milbrae/SFO through the City then trifurcates into the East Bay. I get on at 16th and off at San Bruno. I have eight stops to read things on my phone – six if having cell service is required.

And so I fill my inbox with emails to myself with a subject line of “read” and a link to an article. These articles are collected throughout the day. Sent to me by many sources and discovered in many mediums. I crush these articles during said commute. I’m a slow reader but I can usually get about three articles read in a day while on the train – round trip.

Thus the genesis of “THREE FOR BART.” This is PacHoops’ latest – if not first – franchise in which I drop three thought provoking and (very) loosely Pac-12 basketball associated articles on you for our daily reading pleasure. I use “daily” hesitantly because I’m a dude and the profile says I’m supposed to fear commitment. But I’m going to try. This is for us, however you commute or whenever you can read.

Send me any good stuff that you come across please. Submit it all: blogs, Forbes, NYT, NPR, local, international, video, photo, tweet. It’s all fair game: pachoops25 at gmail dot com or @pachoopsab.

I want to connect us to intelligent stuff.

Maybe we’re not the best fans in the nation, but we can certainly  be the smartest and most well informed fans, leaving the tree poisoning, car burning, and player provocation for elsewhere (but if you happen to be a bag man, I’d love to hear your stories off of any semblance of a record).

Without further adieu, our first Three For BART:
(Note that I’ve been sitting on this concept awhile so the article won’t always be timely but always relevant. Or at least I’ll demonstrate the relevance. Or you’ll tell me otherwise. It’s gonna be great):

1. Jamal Crawford Is Trying to Keep Seattle’s Basketball Dreams Alive – This dropped over a month ago on Grantland but it’s stuck with me as a grassroots effort to get basketball thriving once again in Seattle. Have you noticed Washington lately? Me either. And when you did notice them they were plucking up talent from their backyard. No longer. But with the efforts of Crawford and other influential Seattlites (Steve Ballmer?) there’s a budding resurgence. And suddenly LoRo has three top-100 2015 commitments.
2. A Financial Model Comparing Car Ownership with UberX (Los Angeles) – As the pretense of this franchise is commuting, I felt this would be a worthy inclusion. Kyle Hill (author) studies whether or not UberX can be cheaper than car ownership. He’s trying this in Los Angeles which I find interesting because the West Coast boasts it’s wide open planes and space. It was built out not up. Is commuting everyday by bike always feasible? Can UberX be your daily? I dropped my car and while I’m not financially savvy enough to account for the cost differentials, I’m fairly certain I pay less (and drink more). Furthermore, outside the box thinking is always welcome on PacHoops which is why I’ll forever be agitated and impressed with Tony Bennett’s Washington State tenure. He flipped the run-n-gun model of Pac-12 basketball and won. The Taxi companies, however, are far more than agitated by peer-to-peer. And certainly not impressed.
3. Croke Park Lights up as sport and theatre collide – This is an Irish sportswriter’s account of Saturday’s Central Florida-Penn State tilt in Dublin. It is beautifully written in a unique voice that most certainly waxes poetic about American Football. You’ll love it because you love sports and he romanticizes the theater of sport. You’re a fan of that, right (COUGH oneshiningmoment COUGH)?