Wait, what?

 The first round of the 2024 NFL Draft is behind us now, and ... wait, what?

You mean the Bears might not have done something stupid for once?

You mean they went ahead and chose the QB everyone wanted at No. 1, and then they scooped one of the top three wide receivers in the draft with the No. 9 pick?

You mean now they've got Caleb Williams and Rome Odunze, who joins a wide receiver room that already has Pro Bowl wideouts D.J. Moore and Keenan Allen? You mean that's in addition to a tight end room that includes Cole Kmet and Gerald Everett? You mean the Bears not only didn't go off the rails and use the No. 1 pick on an offensive lineman from Directional Hyphen Tech State, they also didn't use the No. 9 pick on an edge rusher who's a sack machine but who also has had surgery on his neck?

No, they by-God didn't. That was actually the Indianapolis Colts who took Neck Surgery Guy.

His name is Laiatu Latu, and four years ago he suffered a neck injury so severe it required fusion surgery, and he was told at the time his football career was over. His coach at the University of Washington even announced he'd retired.

But Latu sat out 2021, transferred to UCLA, and in 2022 recorded 10 1/2 sacks for the Bruins as a backup. Last season, as a starter, he had 13 more sacks, 21 1/2 tackles for loss and was the Pac-12 defensive player of the year.

Last night the Colts, with the 15th pick, made him the first defensive player taken in the draft. Some people thought this was a curious choice not only because Latu is Neck Surgery Guy, but also because the pass rush was a Colts strength last season; their 51 sacks as a team were the most since they became the Indianapolis Colts in 1984.

"Wait, what?" you're saying now. "This sounds like something the Bears would do! What gives, Mr. Blob?"

Hey, don't ask me. The world's a strange old place. I mean, right now we've a got a Supreme Court justice (Samuel Alito) who thinks former presidents should be immune from prosecution because if they weren't, they'd have to sit in court like any other Joe Schmo defendant and wouldn't even get to go anywhere decent for lunch.

(I'm not making that up. Go check out what Alito said.)

Anyway, you put that together with the Bears actually coming out looking like draft winners, and that is one Twilight Zone of a day. They weren't the Colts. They also weren't the Atlanta Falcons, who made Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. the surprise pick at No. 8 even though they just handed Kirk Cousins $180 million across four years to be their quarterback.

"Wait, what?" Cousins might have said, and probably did.

Others were willing to give the Falcons the benefit of the doubt, in keeping with the tradition of not  just blurting "Jesus, what a stupid pick!" on draft night.

"Maybe this could be one of those Aaron Rodgers/Jordan Love sort of deals," someone suggested., in so many words.

"Sure! Penix sits four or five years behind Cousins and then steps into the job!" someone else agreed, in so many words.

All of this, of course, ignores that Penix has the best arm in the draft (in the Blob's opinion ,anyway), and will be ready to light up opposing defenses long before that four-or-five-year window closes. So it seems all the Falcons have done here is buy themselves a nice juicy quarterback controversy.

"Not us, by God!" the Bears are probably saying right now, with a gleeful chuckle.

And there's one more Twilight Zone moment: The Bears laughing at someone else for once. Strange days.

Gettin' a bit drafty

 Tonight is the first round of the NFL Draft, and, boy, I can hardly wait for the three hours or so it will take because every team gets 10 minutes per pick to make decisions it made weeks ago.

This is one of the many hilarious/annoying aspects of the Draft, which the Blob hardly ever watches because you can follow it online and you don't have to watch highlight clips you've seen a million times. Also -- and this is a big "also" -- you don't have to listen to Mel and Todd and the other draftniks engage in boring geek speak for three hours. 

Mel: "Caleb Williams is the most NFL-ready quarterback prospect since Andrew Luck --and by 'NFL-ready',  I mean he's already been in a bunch of Subway ads, and his dad is already a pain in the ass, and consequently he already has the requisite sense of entitlement."

Todd: "Marvin Harrison Jr. from Ohio State is the most NFL-ready wide receiver prospect since, I don't know, his dad, maybe -- and by 'NFL-ready', I mean he skipped the combine and skipped the private workouts, and already people like me are saying he might not even be the best wideout in this draft. I mean, have you seen Malik Nabers from LSU and Rome Odunze from Washington?"

I don't know about you, but I can do without  all that. Also if I don't watch I don't have to see Roger Goodell every 10 minutes, so there's that.

Suffice it to say I'm definitely not the guy to ask if you want to find out who the Colts are going to select with -- what is it again? -- the 15th pick. Apparently they need wideouts, but the three marquee guys (Harrison, Nabers and Odunze) likely will be gone by then. So they'll be left with, I don't know, some guy from Oregon or USC, or some other guy from Ohio State or LSU or Washington not named Harrison Jr., Nabers or Odunze.

I'd put in a plug for Raymond Berry, but he's 91 years old now and already played for the Colts, and he's in the Hall of Fame and stuff.  So I doubt he'd be interested.

They could use another tight end, and Brock Bowers from Georgia is a really good one. So maybe the Horsies pluck him if he's still on the vine at 15.

Other than that ...

Well. I got nothin'. 

Oh, I've heard about all the quality quarterbacks in this draft, but I've been around long enough to know most of them will turn out to be Zach Wilson or Mitch Trubisky. I've also heard this draft is deep in offensive linemen and (as already noted) wide receivers. 

I also have it on good authority there's a couple late first-round steals from Bemidji State and Whatsamatta U. lurking in the weeds. 

OK. So I don't.

Your hockey news for today

 ... and, no, it doesn't involve the Florida Panthers, Colorado Avalanche, Nashville Predators and New York Rangers, all of whom won last night in Stanley Cup playoff games.

No, today's news comes from the U18 world hockey tournament, where Kuwait, which might or might not actually have a U18 hockey team, lost a tight one to Thailand the other day. The final score in this nailbiter?

57-0.

No, I'm not making that up.  

Not making up that Thailand outshot the Kuwaitis 121-1, either.

One-hundred twenty-one shots! Man, I can just hear the conversation between the Kuwaiti coach and his goalie before the next game.

Coach: Marc-Andre (probably not his real name), you're starting in goal again today.

Probably Not Marc-Andre: Nuh-uh!

This assumes, of course, that there actually is a Probably Not Marc-Andre, which the Blob regards as highly unlikely. I'm guessing the Kuwaiti goalie is actually a live-size cutout modeled on the goalies from your old table-hockey game. You remember, right?

As to the rest of the Kuwaiti players ... 

Well, I'm stumped. 

I have no idea where the Kuwaitis found players so bad they lost 57-0 to Thailand, which isn't exactly crawling with Connor McDavids and Auston Mathewses, either. Did the national hockey program begin, like, a month ago? Did they pick the team by lining everyone up at one blue line and saying "OK, everyone who can skate to the other blue line without falling down makes the team"? And who's the lucky kid who got Kuwait's only shot on goal, and was he treated like a national hero back home?

Other questions: At some point, out of simple human decency if nothing else, was a running clock deployed? When the game was over, did the Kuwaiti coach channel Herb Brooks and make 'em skate Herbies until they dropped? Did he try to fire them up with an inspirational Herb Brooks-style pregame speech?

Kuwaiti Coach: Tonight, you ... are the best hockey team in the world.

Kuwaiti Players (convulsing with laughter): As if!

Through all of this, I keep coming back to poor Probably Not Marc-Andre, and what a wreck he must have been after facing 121 shots. Or maybe the Kuwaitis tried three or four Probably Marc-Andres in the course of the game. In which case the Kuwaiti coach may have looked up after the game and seen three or four sets of goalie pads lying on the locker room floor, as if the Probably Marc-Andres had all been raptured up or something.

Imagine Probably Not Coach Brooks' astonishment.

Probably Not Coach Brooks: Hey, what happened to Probably Not Marc-Andre, and the other Probably Not Marc-Andre, and the other Probably Not Marc-Andre?

Kuwaiti Players (pointing toward the showers): They're all in there, sitting in the corners, twitching and mumbling to themselves. It's kinda creepy, actually. Also they refuse to come out.

No doubt.

Caleb Williams vs. history

 The NFL Draft in Detroit is two days away, and you know what that means, Blobophile(s). 

"More lame jokes about Mel Kiper's bulletproof hair?" you're saying.

Nah, that's such a tired schtick it laid down in the middle of the road during rush hour and fell sound asleep.

"More ridiculing NFL general managers for the way they over-analyze everything?"

Nah, there's only so many way you can make fun of draft analysts obsessing over "tight skin", "burst" and "waist-benders."

"How the Bears will manage to screw up Caleb Williams, since it's almost certain they'll take him with the No. 1 pick?" 

Ah. Now you're getting warmer.

Now you're coming right down the street of a guy who grew up watching Jack Concannon throw the football into Lake Michigan and Bobby Douglass decapitate receivers with 110-mph swing passes, and learned early on how to tell  the difference between Peter Tom Willis and Slo-Mo Bob Avellini. (Hint: There was no difference).

So let me voice a healthy amount of skepticism that Caleb Williams, who has been pronounced to be All That by the people who look for tight skin in a player, will actually be All That.

I think he's got skills. I think he throws a good ball from a variety of stances and even non-stances. But is he that much better than Jayden Daniels or Drake Maye or Michael Penix or anyone else who won't be getting drafted by the Bears?

I don't think so. And not because of arm strength or eye-hand coordination or the hypotenuse of the cerebral cortex divided by the patellar tendon times the Heimlich maneuver squared or some such business.

It's because it's almost the Bears will take him with the No. 1 pick.

Every team has its own identity, and the Bears' identity, for as far back as most of us can remember, is that they never have a Dan Marino calling signals for them. Or a Johnny Unitas or Joe Montana or Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, for that matter.

Chicago is where quarterbacks go to die, in other words, or at least where they go to contract raging cases of Interception-itis. It's where Concannon and Douglass and Slo-Mo Bob and Peter Tom Willis go to hear "Dis guy sucks!" from the perpetually suffering Bears fan base. It's where Jim McMahon won a Super Bowl handing off to Walter Payton, throwing the occasional bomb to Willie Gault and watching the Bears defense vacuum-pack opponents.

Chicago is where McMahon  could complete a titch over half  his passes and throw almost as many picks as touchdowns and still win a ring.

It's where the only other time the Bears made the playoffs, Rex Grossman (or as he is colloquially known in  the greater Chicagoland area, "F****** Rex Grossman") was their quarterback.

That's some heavy history Caleb Williams will be swimming against, in other words. So if he indeed does become Patrick Mahomes 2.0, it will be a greater miracle than an open lane on the Dan Ryan at rush hour.

The Bears, to their credit, have done what they could to give the kid some weapons. They got De'Andre Swift from the Lions to beef up their running game, and Keenan Allen from the Chargers to pair with D.J. Moore. And they got Gerald Everett from the Chargers to deepen a tight room led by the dependable Cole Kmet.

And yet ... they're the Bears.

Who will almost certainly take Caleb Williams just three years after taking Justin Fields, figuring he was their quarterback of the future. And who Bears-ed that one up, right on cue.

Fields, see, turned out not to be the Man but just one more quintessential Bears Quarterback, although the Blob remains unconvinced he wouldn't eventually have become more than good enough to take them where they want to go. Now it's Williams' turn to try to break a particularly stubborn mold.

Natural-born pessimist and longtime Bears observer that I am, I wish him luck. Because God knows he'll need it.

The Iceman still cometh

 You might have missed it with the Stanley Cup playoffs getting started and the NBA playoffs, too, but over the weekend one of the more enduring eras in sports continued to, well, endure.

Out in Long Beach, Calif., in one of IndyCar's most venerable street-course races, the most venerable man of them all showed 'em the fast way around. Call him Dixie or the Iceman or just the Best Racer Of His Generation -- he's all of those, and no arguments to the contrary will be entertained on the last one -- but call Scott Dixon your Long Beach winner.

And in perhaps the most remarkable drive of the season so far.

Scott Dixon started eighth, worked his way to the front and then kept a host of eager throttle mashers in his mirrors by somehow stretching his fuel beyond the boundaries of convention. He made one load last 50 of the 85 laps, led 42 of them, and balanced speed and endurance on just enough of a knife's edge to hold off Colton Herta and Alex Palou and Josef Newgarden, who were once again amazed by IndyCar's old man.

"Once he took (the lead), I was like 'He's going to make it work'," said Palou, Dixon's teammate.

"Seems like Dixon is the only one that goes for these things sometimes, and they always work out," Herta concurred.

If that was another way of saying no one's better at the speed/fuel conservation thing than Dixon ... well, maybe that's because he's been doing it awhile. Long Beach was the 57th win of an IndyCar career that goes back more than two decades; only A.J. Foyt, with 67, has won more. 

The only anomaly in all of that, of course, is an echo of another golden era driver, Mario Andretti. Like Mario, he's won the Indianapolis 500 just once, in 21 starts.  That was 16 years ago, in 2008. Dixon was 27 years old, and no one doubted more milk-dousings were to come. But despite finishing in the top five six times since, it hasn't happened. 

And yet ...

And yet, he won his first major open-wheel race in just his third start back in the CART days, then won his first IndyCar championship the next year, when he was 23. He's won five more titles since -- and with his win in Long Beach, he's now won at least one IndyCar race for 20 straight years.

Twenty straight years with at least one win. Twenty straight years, as times changed and fortunes changed and the series got more and more competitive. And now he's 43 closing fast on 44, and there are more gifted young chargers in the series than it's seen in perhaps 30 years, and still the old man shows them all his tailpipes at least once every season.

The Iceman still cometh, in other words. And everyone else traileth.

The White Sox are terrible

 And now, time for another Cruds Break, but not the Cruds Break you think it is, even if my Cruds (the Pittsburgh Pirates), after a brief flirtation with competence, are inexorably making their way back to their ancestral home at the bottom of the NL Central.

"Wow, that's some impressive run-on sentencin', mister!' you're saying now.

And also: "But you ruined it because it was mostly about your bleep-bleeping Pirates. Honus Wagner is dead, dude. Get over it."

Fine, then. I won't write another word about the Pirates. At least in this post.

That's on account of the fact this post is about baseball's real Cruds, currently defiling the game in myriad disgusting ways on the south side of Chicago.

They're the Chicago White Sox, of course, and, man, do they stink. As of this morning, April 21, they're 3-17 and already 11 1/2 games out of first in the AL Central. Think about that for a second: They've only played 20 games, and they're already 11 1/2 games out of first.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be a White Sox fan right now. Or a White Sox player. Or my friend and former colleague LaMond Pope, who's the Chicago Tribune's White Sox beat writer and one of the best people you'll ever meet.

Five more months of this poop show lies ahead of him. I can think of some people who might deserve such a fate, but LaMond not only isn't one of them, he's the least deserving of such a fate. The baseball gods are cruel.

Anyway, again, I can't imagine. Although I got an inkling last night at dinner, when my wife Julie and I sat next to an acquaintance who grew up in Chicago and started going to Comiskey when he was a kid, and has been a White Sox fan all his life.

I can easily imagine what he'd like to do to White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf right now.  But he's far too jovial a guy to say anything  about that, other than Reinsdorf is the worst, the absolute worst.

So we talked about Bill Melton and Wilbur Wood and the Go-Go Sox of the early 1970s instead. And Bill Veeck and Harry Caray. And the Sox of '59, who had Nellie Fox and Jungle Jim Rivera and the ageless Minnie Minoso, and who lost the World Series to the Dodgers because (as my acquaintance recalled) an L.A. reliever named Norm Sherry kept trotting in from the bullpen to shut them down.

We didn't say much of anything about this Sox team, other than the fact they're the worst team in baseball and how could Reinsdorf put a team on the field that isn't even a major-league team? And still charge major-league prices?

And play not in old Comiskey, but in something called Guaranteed Rate Field?

The baseball gods are cruel. I know I said that already, but it bears repeating.

It's namin' time!

 The Phoenix Coyotes are officially toast on a stick, or maybe predator on a stick, and now the fun begins. Their new home will be Salt Lake City, and the team will go under the simple moniker "Utah" for its first season, but already the first submissions for a new nickname have been filed with the NHL office.

Here are your choices so far, America:

Utah Blizzard.

Utah Venom.

Utah Fury.

Utah HC.

Utah Hockey Club.

"Those all suck!" you're undoubtedly saying now.

Well, yes. Yes, they do.

Blizzard, to start with, is just another way of saying "Avalanche", and Colorado already has that one locked up. So it would violate the Territorial Rights To Winter-Weather Nicknames Rule, which I just made up. Although it's probably why the ECHL Utah Grizzlies are named the Grizzlies and not, say, the Utah Wintry Mix.

Utah HC, meanwhile, is a soccer name. The team won't be playing West Ham or Aston Villa any time soon, so that's out.

Venom? Meh. Fury? Meh. Utah Hockey Club?

"We already did that!" say the Washington Commanders, formerly the Washington Football Club.

So what should the team be called?

Well, let's start by thinking about some things for which Utah is known.

(Long pause while we all try to think of some things for which Utah is known)

(Longer pause)

(Reaaaallly long pause)

"I know!" you say at last. "Mormons!"

Well, yes. And someone's already suggested the Stormin' Mormons. But the Mormons might object to such trivialization of their religious beliefs, and they'd be right. It's why you don't see many Perturbed Presbyterians, Moody Methodists or  Battlin' Baptists in professional sports.

So what else is Utah known for?

Well, it's got some stunning national parks, to start with: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches. It's got the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It's got mountains and valleys and the Great Salt Lake, and ... mountains and valleys and the Great Salt Lake.

Also the Bonneville Salt Flats, where so many lands-speed records have been set. So I guess you could call the team the Utah Speed, but what would the logo look like?

(Then again, what do a lot of team logos look like these days? Like Picasso crashed head-on into Dali and then dropped acid with Jackson Pollock, that's what.)

Now, lots of suggestions have been thrown out there on the Magic Twitter Machine, some of them really bad and some of them actually quite clever. One of the more notable is the Utah Crawfish, which its author noted would play into the New Orleans appropriation theme begun when the NBA's Utah Jazz moved from New Orleans and no one cared enough to change the name.

Me?

Well, right now I'm thinking of the Salt Lake Buzz, the original name of the Salt Lake Bees, Utah's Triple-A baseball team. Both play off the fact Utah is the Beehive State, which of course opens up a bunch of possibilities.

I'm thinking the B's would work.

The Utah B's! (Or the Fightin' B's, because it's a Blob article of faith that every nickname is improved by adding "Fightin'" to it). The logo could be a fierce-looking capital B with glaring red eyes and a hockey stick. The mascot could be Alpha(bet) Andy, a fierce-looking cursive B.  And the team motto could be something like "The Utah B's: We Always Bring Our 'A' Game".

Questions?

"I've got one," you're saying now. "How do you manage to feed yourself?"

Very funny. And a cursive be upon you.