Your baseball update for today

And now, as an update to the Blob's previous rant about his moldy-cheese stinking Pittsburgh Pirates ...

They're on their way to 162-0, baby!

This after winning their season opener against the Detroit Tigers.

The bad news: It took 13 innings.

The worse news: The final score was 13-10.

The really, really worse news: The bullpen unveiled its new look for 2018.

Sigh.

Playing catchup

Geno Auriemma has no one but himself to blame. Isn't he the one who's always said that if the rest of women's college basketball didn't want his UConn Huskies to keep beating it eleventy-hundred to 12, the rest of women's college basketball needed to elevate its game?

Sort of like, you know, Arike Ogunbowale elevated as the clock died in overtime last night.

That would be Arike Ogunbowale of Notre Dame, UConn's nemesis if it actually has one, and her jumper as time expired rolled neatly off her fingertips and sailed true as true. And when it splashed down, Notre Dame had stunned the unbeaten Huskies, 91-89, in their NCAA semifinal.

It was the second year in a row UConn had been knocked out on a last-second shot two wins shy of yet another title -- Morgan Williams of Mississippi State stuck the dagger last year -- and, unless you're a fan of street-corner bullies, this could not be better news. Every year UConn fails to win is another step toward the women's game becoming healthier and more competitive. And that makes it infinitely more saleable as a commodity than it would be if the women's Final Four remained the Final Foregone Conclusion it has been until recently.

The irony of this, of course, is that it finally puts to rest the argument over whether or not UConn was hurting the women's game. The answer: Yes and no.

Yes, because the Huskies beating everyone eleventy-hundred to 12 and winning a gazillion games and a whole string of national titles in a row is not the sort of scenario that compels audiences to tune in.

No, because by winning all those games and titles and beating everyone eleventy-hundred to 12, UConn has done exactly what Auriemma has been saying: It's made everyone else raise their games. Although the Huskies remain the women's game's pre-eminent power, they're not the only power now. There are more quality programs in women's college buckets now than there's ever been -- Notre Dame excepted, because the Irish have been a quality program ever since Muffet McGraw showed up on the sideline.

So there it is. UConn has, in fact, been good for the women's game.

First by winning all those games.

Now by losing a couple.

Opening rant

Opening Day again in Major League Baseball, when the sun shines warm upon your face, the birds sing sweetly in your ear, and the air is perfumed with the scent of hotdogs and Cracker Jack. Unless, of course, you're anywhere north of Kentucky.

In which case it will be cold, dark and wet, and you'll be wearing a parka and using the hotdogs as hand warmers.

The perfect environment for the Blob's annual Opening Day tradition, Bitching About What's Wrong With Baseball

What's wrong with baseball is the Blob's baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, are going to stink like moldy cheese again.

What's with baseball is the Pirates' owners are miserly, penny-pinching, skinflint-y people whose souls have been sucked out through their nasal cavities, which is why they fire-saled the living hell out of the Pirates over the winter, getting rid of their only decent pitcher, Gerrit Cole, and also Andrew Freaking McCutchen, Pittsburgh icon and living baseball saint.

What's wrong with baseball is they've been replaced by people named Joe Musgrove, Michael Feliz, Josh Smoker, Colin Moran and Corey Dickerson, none of whom springs readily to mind as a baseball superstar, and who might in fact be part of the witness protection program.

What's wrong with baseball is that, as a result, the Pirates are going to be the worst team in the NL Central, worse even than the Reds, who stink like moldy cheese, too.

What's wrong with baseball is the moldy-cheese-stinking Pirates are scheduled to open up today in Detroit against the Tigers, which is contrary to the laws of both God and nature, on account of it's one of those benighted interleague games and the baseball season should not, not, NOT begin with interleague play. NOT.

(The Blob would also add that, while interleague games are fine in theory, baseball has ruined the concept by playing too damn many of them. A significant piece of the cache of the World Series has been lost as a result, because now the Series usually matches two teams who've already played eleventy-hundred times during the season. There's no mystery anymore.)

So that's what's wrong with baseball.

And what's right with baseball?

What's right with baseball is the Tigers are going to be awful themselves, on account of they have pretty much the same collection of minor-leaguers and kids who finished the season with a glorious 6-24 spurt last season.

What's right with baseball is the moldy-cheese-stinking Pirates therefore have a shot at being undefeated after today, which would likely qualify as the highlight of the entire season.

And what's wrong with that?

What's wrong with that is the forecast in Detroit today is for a high of 50 and biblical deluges of rain.

Play ball!

Name that name

And now, in honor of the Final Four, and courtesy of someone who remembers Prince McJunkins, here is Deadspin's annual Name of the Year bracket, always one of Deadspin's great achievements and passed along here by a grateful Blob.

As with most things athletic (or not), 2018's names are bigger, faster and stronger than their back-in-the-day predecessors. With, of course, the notable exception of God Shammgod, member in good standing of the Name Hall of Fame.

Of course, there is a Mosthigh Thankgod on this list. So maybe God Shammgod gets a run here.

There is also, wonderfully, a Zeus de la Paz, a Miracle Crimes, a Jimbo Ghostkeeper and, for fans of Dark Ages history, an Early Charlemagne. Late Charlemagne, presumably, did not make the tournament, on account of being, well, late.

Enjoy.

Head games

Sometime in the un-glimpsed future, they will find a way to make professional football a sport that doesn't use up its chief resource -- blood-pumping humans -- like disposable tissues. They will make it chess.

No one ever incurred traumatic brain injury moving a rook from queen's level three to queen's level four, after all. Although Bobby Fischer's tragic spiral into mental illness might make you suspect otherwise.

At any rate, until then, the powers-that-be in the National Football League will continue to chase unicorns, because no matter what rule changes it institutes or how unrealistically it expects the game to be played, the physics of it are inexorable. As long as players keep getting bigger and faster and stronger, the amount of foot-pounds of force with which they collide in a collision sport will continue to increase exponentially. As will the injuries inflicted by those collisions.

No rule change can stop that from happening. No rule change ever will.

And so to the Shield's latest attempt to hold back the tide: A new rule that will ban lowering the head to initiate contact.  The penalty will be 15 yards and potential ejection, and it will apply to ballcarriers, tacklers and even linemen. Bottom line, contact with the helmet on any part of the body could potentially be penalized if judged to be initiative.

The Blob has been more than vocal about the necessity of protecting the players from head injury. But I honestly do not know how the league expects football to be played without cranial contact.

I'm not a football player, nor ever were, but this rule seems both draconian and unrealistic, if not counterproductive. A ballcarrier in particular, for instance, lowers his head as much to protect himself when he runs inside the tackles or, in short yardage, runs at the goal line. How do you determine if that's why he lowered his head, or if he did it to initiate contact? And if the only way to avoid a potential penalty is to run at the goal line with his head up, how does he do that and still get low enough to protect himself (and gain the necessary leverage)?

Linemen are supposed to keep their heads up, anyway, if they're playing the position correctly, so this might not be as much an issue for them. But if you're a defensive back or linebacker, how you are supposed to be effective in a position that relies so much on split-second instinct if you're having to constantly monitor the position of your head?

And in any event, how do you decide what constitutes lowering the head to initiate contact?

Pro football is a game played these days at blinding speed, and so expect the consequence of this new rule to be more replay stoppages, because the potential for gray area here is immense. Did Player Y's head incline enough on contact for a penalty to be assessed? What if the impact itself caused Player X's head to lower?  And what if Player Z initiates contact using textbook tackling form and his helmet still makes contact with Player Y? Is that 15 yards?

Let's go under the hood and check out the replay!

Oh, goody. I can't wait.

But while I do, maybe I'll check out rugby. No one ever bumps his head in that game.

The empire strikes back

And by "empire" we mean "Clint Bowyer's wife."

The NASCAR driver from Emporia, Kansas, and diehard Kansas Jayhawks fan, put everyone in his rearview mirror Monday in winning the Cup race at Martinsville, delayed a day because of -- yes -- snow. But he couldn't get around his wife, Lorra, who, exhibiting excellent blocking strategy, nixed Bowyer's proposal that  take off to San Antonio next weekend to watch his Jayhawks in the Final Four.

"No," she said.

Every put-upon spouse in America could relate to her reasoning.

"I had my best friend and their two kids here for a week, seven days, and she enlightened me that that was a lot on her plate," hubby explained.

"Enlightened" him. Yeah. I bet she did.

Here's the thing: Because NASCAR doesn't race on Easter, the Bowyer family is headed for a much-deserved vacation (especially for Lorra, no doubt). So when Bowyer asked if he could go to the Final Four, here's what Lorra no doubt heard:

Hey, babe, I know you had to put up with houseguests for an entire week, and you've been looking forward to a vacation as a result, but what do you say I ditch y'all early to go to the Final Four? That'd be cool, right?

Yeaaah. No wonder she said no.

Although she did say if the Jayhawks reach the championship game next Monday, Clint has permission to go.

"I'm not that mean, lol," she tweeted.

Sounds like ol' Clint's a lucky man.

Your mascot moment for today

And now, because the Blob is a certified Mascot Appreciation Zone, and because Opening Day of the baseball season is in two days ...

Here's a team photo of all the Major League Baseball mascots.

I notice the Cubs mascot, Clark the Bear, is discreetly positioned in the second row.

I assume this is because he doesn't wear pants.

Children's crusade

It's the kids who point the way. They almost always do.

Fifty years and more ago they sat at lunch counters and rode buses and went door-to-door in America's apartheid districts, where people of color lived in third-world poverty and the simple American act of registering voters could buy you an unmarked grave in an earthen dam. The civil rights movement was a long and bloody fight, and if it was Martin Luther King Jr. who was its public face, it was the kids who were its engine. They were the shock troops who drove it; they were the agents who finally effected the change the politicians would not.

It's the kids who point the way.

And so, over the weekend, on behalf of another cause, here were Anthony Rizzo of the Cubs and Jeanie Buss of the Lakers and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash and basketball Hall of Famer Bill Russell, marching or encouraging others to march. Here were almost a million people  in the streets of Washington D.C. over the weekend, evoking images of the March for Freedom in 1963 and  MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

In dozens of other cities all over the nation, people marched, speechified, demanded action. America is tired of living in an armed camp, and they let the gun-lobby toadies in Congress know it. And it was the kids who made it happen.

The kids from Parkland, scarred by yet another schoolhouse slaughter and damn fed up with it. Kids from communities all over the nation, including my own kid in my own hometown. They have been called naïve and stupid and unqualified to speak on weighty constitutional matters such as the rights of gun owners. Their leaders have been viciously smeared by ignorant political thugs, a distasteful display of alleged grownups picking on children. And the chief lobbying arm of the gun industry, the NRA, has accused them of being the pawns of unnamed shadowy forces committed to dismantling the Second Amendment.

And it all sounds astoundingly familiar.

For the last couple of weeks, you see, the book on the Blob's nightstand has been Bruce Watson's
"Freedom Summer," a chronicle of the dark summer of 1964 in Mississippi. It was a seminal turning point in the civil rights struggle, and it was the kids who led it. Idealistic college students joined forces with courageous local African-Americans that summer to register voters, build "Freedom Schools" and otherwise try to bring some measure of light to the darkest of those aforementioned apartheid districts. They were beaten and terrorized and three of them were killed for their trouble.

None of the latter is happening to the kids of 2018, of course. But reading "Freedom Summer" has been like a psychic echo, because the pushback they're getting sounds very much like the pushback the kids of Freedom Summer got: They're naïve, they don't understand, they're pawns, and so on and so on.

And yet, like the kids of the civil rights movement, they're the ones who have finally put the fear of God in the toadies. The Republican-dominated legislature in Florida pushed through new gun legislation in what seemed the blink of an eye, and Gov. Rick Scott -- a reactionary right-winger -- signed it into law. Even President Trump, himself an NRA fellow traveler, has been moved to advocate new gun legislation.

The message: In the face of passionate idealism, the forces of inertia and cynicism and entrenched quid pro quo have no effective response. All they can do is spit back the same old tired lines they've been fed by their benefactors, which sound older and more tired with every reciting. Or they become children themselves and resort to playground taunts.

I don't know much. But I do know that, after Columbine and Newtown and Aurora and Las Vegas and a dozen other slaughters, it's the kids who finally got the people who run things in this country to listen, albeit grudgingly. It's the kids, and their facility with social media to command the narrative, who galvanized the rest of us to finally shout loud enough to be heard over the lobbyists and their fistfuls of cash.

The rest of us being men and women of all ages and walks of life. The rest of us being gun owners and hunters and veterans of every stripe and rank who know the damage military-grade weapons can do to human beings, and who are horrified at how easily accessible they are to the untrained and  unbalanced. And, yes, the rest of us being athletes who seem to have rediscovered a social conscience -- and whose influence is far greater now because they represent both a multi-billion dollar industry, and a part of the American social fabric that has become all-pervasive.

Gun ownership is an American right and should remain so, the vast majority of these people believe. But they also believe the Second Amendment has been warped so completely out of round it would today be unrecognizable to its authors. And, as a result, America has become a nation not just of gun owners but gun fetishists, fed by the paranoid ravings of a gun lobby whose goal is to scare more Americans into buying more guns.

The consequence of all this, we see almost every other week now to one degree or another.

The good news is, so do the kids.

Those darn Ramblers

And now the griping will begin, as surely as your bracket is tiny atomized fragments of ash.

The best story of this NCAA Tournament is headed to the Final Four, but some people won't like it. Some people will say those endearing Ramblers from Loyola, who have so unexpectedly become America's Team, have literally gone too far. The upstarts knocking off the big boys is a nice storyline for the first weekend of Da Tournament, the narrative goes, but it needs to end before the second weekend is out. It needs to do this because what America really wants to see is Duke or Kansas or someone of that pedigree in the Final Four for the umpty-umpteenth time.

Me?

I say hooray for the Ramblers, and Sister Jean, too. And neener-neener-neener to the poopyheads who think the Final Four will be diminished with them in it.

The radio yaks who advance this notion always fall back on TV numbers to justify their position, which is that the Final Four will somehow be a lesser show because it includes a lowly 11 seed which hasn't seen the Tournament in 33 years.  They may be right about that, at least if their metric is TV numbers. But TV numbers and what makes a great show?

Those are two different things.

Listen: Inevitably, the TV numbers are going to be bigger when a Duke or a Kansas or one of the other blue bloods is in the Final Four for the umpty-umpteenth time. This is because the blue bloods have huge fan bases who are going to tune in. The Loyolas of the world do not, and so, yes, the numbers may not be as lofty.

Although with all of Chicago on board with the Ramblers, I wouldn't take that bet on a, well, bet.

In any case, this does not mean America in general wants to see, say, Duke in the Final Four again. Most of America is heartily sick of Duke, and just as sick of most of the other high-end programs. I mean, outside of the fan base bubble, how many of the rest of us really want to hear the same old tired storylines again?

And so, yes, hooray for the Ramblers. They are, undisputedly, the story of this tournament. They have, in fact, defined this Tournament,  in very much the way George Mason defined it back in 2006 when it got to the Final Four, or when Butler came within one delinquent bounce of winning the whole thing in 2010.

Those storylines made those Final Fours immeasurably better, TV numbers or not. Which, by the way, were the highest Final Four numbers in six years in 2010 and 2011, the two years Butler reached the title game.

So, yeah, poopyheads. Neener-neener-neener.

Hoosier heartbeat

Spring arrived this week on a wind like a fistful of razor blades, leavened only by a sun that reaches higher in the sky every day. This is the third week of March in Indiana, when the warmth of summer is mostly a tease, and winter is the houseguest who's snoring away on the couch, refusing to leave the premises.

But it was a glorious week down in Wabash.

It was a glorious week because the Southwood Knights are headed to the state basketball finals for the first time in school history, and in Indiana that still means what it always has. Hoosier Hysteria -- the exclusive name of the old single-class tournament, at least in the Blob's universe -- may be two decades in its grave, but high school basketball remains a bone-deep thing in Indiana, divided four ways or not. And just as it was the small towns that were the blood root of the old Hysteria, it is the small towns that continue to be the blood root of its partitioned offspring.

And that's why the dead past is right where it belongs. There, I said it.

I say it as someone who banged the drum as loudly as anyone for the old single-class system, arguing in print and otherwise that killing it would be fixing the unbroken. It was a good argument back in 1997. It's a lousy argument in 2018, even though some still try to make it.

And why is it a lousy argument?

Southwood is why.

What's happened there, see, is the very essence of what the diehards claim to miss most about the old days: The ability for some small school never before touched by basketball glory to bathe in it for a solid week. Those kids from Southwood telling the TV stations from Fort Wayne how everyone's been stopping them on the street and congratulating them? Those glowing faces marveling at how the entire community has rallied behind them?

Go back 20 or 30 or 50 years, and those kids were from Argos or Cloverdale or any other small school that made it to state back in the day. The thrill of the big city media coming to their school, the backslaps and go-get-ems from people on the street, even the words the kids spoke into those unfamiliar TV cameras: It's all the same.

And it would never have happened had the Hysteria not died a natural death in 1997. No matter how unnatural it seemed to most of us then.

Without the splitting of basketball in Indiana into four classes, what's happening at Southwood this week -- this deepest expression of our cherished Hoosier heirloom -- would have been impossible. Consolidation and a steady population shift to the cities have made the big schools too big and the small schools too small to realistically compete on the same stage. The demographics just don't work anymore.

It may be pleasant to cling to that old Milan mythology, but mythology is mainly what it is. Milan in 1954 was never the David it's been made out to be, and Muncie Central was never the Goliath. Milan had reached the state finals the year before, after all, and had everyone back from that team. And Muncie Central, like almost all the "big schools" in that day, comprised a touch over 2,000 students.

Today, the biggest schools in Indiana have enrollments running anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 students, and look more like college campuses than high schools. And the small schools are still small.

And never would have had a shot at having the week they've been having at Southwood.

Reveling. Marveling. Preserving the best of a heritage that didn't die with the Hysteria, but was merely reborn.

Update: Was not to be for Southwood. Morristown routed the Knights 89-60 in the 1A title game.

Two or none conundrum

The best of it, of course, is on display right now.

Again Loyola hits the big shot for its 98-year-old darling, Sister Jean, and on to the Elite Eight the Ramblers go in a storybook run that has seen them win three NCAA Tournament games by a total of four points.

And there goes Kentucky out of Da Tournament, excused by a Kansas State team that finished fourth in its conference.

And so long, Gonzaga, and, hello, again, Florida State, which is on to the Elite Eight as a team that finished tied for eighth in its conference.

That's an 11 seed and two 9 seeds one win away now from the Final Four, if you're keeping count. And if it tells us nothing more about the landscape of college basketball these days, it's that the game may not be the doomed creature we've been led to believe it is. It may, in some ways, be better than it's ever been.

To be sure, there's still a one-and-done basketball factory out there -- Duke remains in this thing, after all -- but what we've learned in the last week is it's not the one-and-done factories like Duke and Kentucky that drive the game. It's the Loyolas and the Kansas States and the Florida States.

Which does not mean schools do not still pursue the one-and-dones, and that the pursuit does not plumb the depths of every ethical swamp there is. If what's happening in the Madness represents the best of college buckets, what's happening on those FBI wiretaps represents the worst. And to one degree or another it's always been happening, going all the way back to the point-shaving scandals that rocked the sport in the early 1950s.

That makes doing something about it hugely problematical.

The latest plan, concocted by an NCAA commission chaired by Condoleeza Rice and endorsed so far by the Pac-12 and the Big East, is for college basketball to replace the one-and-done with a two-or-none policy, and to create an "elite player unit" that will more closely monitor "players with realistic aspirations of playing in the NBA."  Like most grand schemes cooked up in a boardroom, this sounds great until you start wondering how exactly it will work.

Here's the thing: The two-or-none plan basically says a prospective college player, in order to play college basketball, must be contractually obligated to stay two years. Any player who opts to test the waters of the NBA draft, meanwhile, forfeits any future college eligibility.

This is basically the NCAA finally playing hardball with the NBA, which launched its absurd you-have-to-be-19 rule without an eyeblink of consideration for what this would do to college basketball, its de facto farm system. That the NCAA's much-belated response will hurt the NBA not at all, of course, is a given. As with most NCAA decrees, only the kids will truly pay the price.

If, in fact, any of this is actually feasible.

Contracts, after all, are made to be broken. College basketball coaches break them all the time jumping from one school to another, and never pay the price for doing so. And so if a young man  signs on to the two-or-none deal, then makes a significant jump and decides after one year he's ready for the NBA, what can his school possibly do about it? Garnish his rookie deal?

Yeah. Love to see how quickly that would wind up in court.

No, all the NCAA can do is tell a kid who tests the NBA waters the door is closed to him if it doesn't work out. And who does that hurt? The kid, of course. Not to mention how it once again gives the lie to the notion that the NCAA is all about providing opportunities and opening doors that otherwise might be closed.

Gee, kid, didn't get drafted? That's a shame. So what's next for you? College? Sorry, kid, but we can't help you there now. Hit the bricks, son.

And the beat goes on.

You da drunk!

We've all encountered That Guy before. Here is my story, or at least one of them.

It happened just last week in a place where I was watching the NCAA Tournament, accompanied by a tableful of Those Guys who'd apparently been staging their own tournament (i.e., First One To A .20 BAC Wins!). They were drinking Stella Artois like its demise was imminent. And so of course they all thought it uproariously amusing to periodically bellow "STELLA!"

And by "periodically," I mean "about every 30 seconds."

(And here I pause to acknowledge what you're going to say next: "But Mr. Blob, didn't you figure ahead of time that if you went to a sports bar to watch the NCAA Tournament, there would be a high probability of serious day drinking?" Yes, I did. But it was still annoying.)

Anyway ... this brings me to my point, sort of, in a typically meandering way.

I think Rory McIlroy is right about drunks on the golf course.

Apparently there was one seriously lit individual who (like the STELLA! guys) thought it would be amusing to periodically bellow the name of McIlroy's wife Erica as McIlroy headed for a win at Bay Hill last weekend. As with most drunken shenanigans, this is never as hilarious as you, personally, think it is at the time. 

At any rate, the incident prompted McIlroy to gently suggest that perhaps golf needs an alcohol sales cutoff, the way baseball and football and pretty much every other team sport has.

The Blob tends to agree. Although I don't know how cutting off booze sales after, say, the last group makes the turn every day is going to prevent Yelling Out Rory McIlroy's Wife's Name Guy from doing so, since a golf crowd is not contained and he'll likely be somewhere out on the course with a drink in his hand already. And maybe two drinks, considering the cutoff.

Now, granted, the incident that ticked off McIlroy probably was nothing compared to what you'd encounter at, say, your average NFL game in Buffalo. This is because it's golf and not football, and there are different parameters. Golf is supposed to be a sport played by gentlemen and women with a gentlemanly code of conduct -- i.e., a cathedral hush should accompany the proceedings at all times.

As result, the Blob has always considered golfers (and tennis players, who operate by much the same parameters) to be among sports' most notorious whiners. If it isn't deathly quiet, or the rough is too rough, or the pin placements are deemed unfair, they're going to complain about it.

(And in tennis, about fans moving in the stands as they prepare to serve or receive serve. For this reason, the Blob has always considered tennis players to have the worst concentration of any athlete. Really, a guy can stand on the free throw line with 12,000 fans screaming and waving giant cutouts of heads behind the basket and still splash a pair, but a tennis player gets distracted by some guy coming back to his seat way up in Section XX? And what's he or she looking up there for, anyway?)

But I digress.

The point is, in this instance, McIlroy's right. Something ought to be done.

In the meantime, he can take a small measure of comfort in one thing.

At least his wife's name isn't Stella.

Paging Steve Austin

Because, you know, if you're gonna get into the "Six-Million Dollar Man" business, you ought to go straight to the source.

This may not be exactly what's going on at Purdue University this week, but it's close enough. With center/offensive linchpin Isaac Haas out with a broken right elbow, and the Boilermakers headed for a Sweet Sixteen showdown with Texas Tech, the effort to rebuild Haas is well underway.

Which is to say, according to the Lafayette Journal & Courier, the Purdue sports medicine program has reached out to a group of Purdue mechanical engineers to design a brace for Haas' elbow the NCAA will approve, and that would enable Haas to get back out on the floor.

Hey, when you have one of the top engineering schools in the country, you might as well put it to work for you in a worthwhile cause. And what could be more worthwhile in West Lafayette right now than helping the Boilers move on in the NCAA Tournament?

Sure, it's just basketball, but then again, it's not. There's an abundance of data out there that ties success in Da Tournament to increased university enrollment and applications. George Mason got a huge bump in interest from prospective students after its run to the Final Four in 2006. Ditto Florida Gulf Coast when it reached the Sweet Sixteen in 2013. Ditto Butler when it came within a bounce of the ball on the rim of winning the NCAA title in 2010.

So you see, hoops are good for the general economy of the university. And so have at it, you Purdue slide rule boys.

Of course, it's not likely anything they come up with will turn Isaac Haas into Lee Majors. A broken elbow on Haas' dominant arm means, brace or not, he'd be severely limited in such minor details as catching the ball, shooting the ball and (as Purdue coach Matt Painter specifically pointed out) shooting free throws. So it's extremely doubtful how much good he'd actually be to Purdue, and far more likely he'd actually be a deterrent.

On the other hand, it's not like he's a man barely alive.

Smart medicine

We live in a work-until-your-drop world these days, because we live in an economy where the human resource is as disposable as it's ever been. Take a little time for yourself, or ease up on the throttle, and there's no end to the line of desperate people waiting to take your place.

So maybe it seems odd that a member of one of the most exclusive job markets on the planet is choosing now to step away for a few days.

His name is Tyronn Lue, and he's the coach of the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers, and it's the third week of March. The playoffs aren't here just yet, but you can smell 'em in the wind. And yet Lue is choosing to jump off the hamster wheel for the time being, mainly because he's 40 years old and would like to live to see 41.

He is, it seems, simply worn down by the pressures of the job. His health is in the tank. He's having chest pains. And so he's taking a break.

And the Blob, reaching back in its memory almost 40 years, says good for him.

Let me tell you a story, boys and girls.

This happened in 1980, and it involved a crewcut, intense man in Anderson, In., also a basketball coach, also 40 years old. His name was Bob Fuller, and he ran the basketball program at Highland High School. He was a superb coach, noteworthy in particular for his knowledge and mastery of the zone defense. His teams at Highland, usually terrifically undersized, excelled nonetheless because they played the most technically perfect zone the Blob has ever seen on the high school level. Watching the Scots play that zone was like watching the inner workings of a Swiss watch: Every piece in the right place, every shift so well-coordinated it almost looked choreographed.

Anyway, one week in 1980, Bob came down with a horrendous chest cold. He was desperately ill, but, being Bob, he refused to ease off the throttle. That Friday night, his Scots -- who would go on that season to be ranked No. 1 in the state -- played at Lapel. Bob apparently looked so bad on the bench in the first half that the Lapel coach, Dallas Hunter, actually went into the Highland locker room at halftime and offered to forfeit the game, since Lapel was down plenty.

Fuller said something to the effect of no, no, I'll be fine.

He no sooner got the words out of his mouth than he suffered a massive heart attack and collapsed. Rushed to the hospital, he died later that evening.

And so when I read about Lue stepping aside for a time because he was having chest pains, I immediately thought of Bob Fuller. And then thought "Thank God he's doing this."

Better safe than sorry is a cliché with all the tread worn off it. But it works here.  

A fine smoking ruin

... is what your NCAA Tournament bracket looks like right now, I'm guessing.

The Blob's, of course, does not look like that at all, on account of the Blob didn't fill one out, for reasons it explained a few days ago. This means I haven't missed a game yet. Or it means I've missed them all. You can go either way.

At any rate, the Blob sympathizes with your spectacular failure, and asks if it would be OK if it grilled a few brats over the glowing remains of your bracket. Someone should take advantage of what was as Mad and memorable a first weekend as the first weekend of the Madness always should be.

You say you had all four No. 1s getting to the Sweet Sixteen, including Virginia and Xavier?

Sorry. UMBC and Florida State ruined that for you.

North Carolina?

Crushed by Texas A&M by 19.

Cincinnati?

Blew a 22-point lead against, um, Nevada.

Michigan State? Arizona? Tennessee?

Done, done and done.

This was true Madness at work, and perhaps karma. Some of those who got sent home, after all, seemed victims of a case of just desserts, if you looked at it a certain way.

Consider: Kelvin Sampson, a blatant repeat offender who somehow was allowed back into college basketball after blowing up the IU program 10 years ago, coaches Houston now. And of course Houston got taken out by Michigan in the cruelest way possible, on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer.

North Carolina?

Maybe getting laminated by A&M was retribution for getting away scot-free with one of the biggest academic scandals in NCAA history. Back to your fake classes now, Tar Heels.

Arizona, a sexy national champ pick fingered in the FBI's ongoing probe, got blitzed by Buffalo out of the Mid-American Conference. No soup for you, Sean "That Ain't My Voice On The Wiretap" Miller. And Michigan State, whose athletic programs (including, yes, basketball) seem to have a rather casual attitude toward sexual assault, got flummoxed out of the tournament by Syracuse and its fabled zone defense.

I don't know if the gods of the cosmos care about college basketball. But it sure seems like they did this weekend.

I mean, Sampson, Sean Miller and Carolina are gone, and Loyola and Sister Jean are still around. How do you not see some greater power at work in that?

Take me out to the gimmick game

The Blob will take a break this a.m. from the NCAA Tournament, except to congratulate Michigan for knocking Kelvin Sampson out of the tournament in the most painful way possible. A last-second 3-ball? Yes, please.

We'll return to your regularly scheduled Madness shortly. But for now ...

For now, gimmickry!

In other words,  baseball is finally doing something to speed up the game, which used to be played at a properly brisk pace and now is played at a pace somewhere between A) cement curing and B) grass growing in August. In other words, it's now the Waiting In Line At Disneyworld of sports, only more tedious.

This is even true in the minor leagues, where even untelevised games drag on and on and on. And so the minors have decided to speed things up with some fairly common-sense measures (a 15-second pitch count), and one spectacularly annoying one.

They've decided that extra innings will begin with a runner on second base.  

No. No, no, no ... no.

Listen. No one has pounded the speed-up-the-game drum louder than the Blob, which recognizes that doing so would only be returning baseball to its roots as a fast-paced game and not, like it is now, Still Life On Grass (especially when the Yankees and Red Sox are playing). But there are organic ways of doing it, and there are stupid ways of doing it. Manufacturing baserunners out of thin air is the latter.

This is because baseball, like most sports that aren't mixed martial arts, have rules and traditions that have stood the test of time. One of those rules and traditions is that a baserunner must earn his way around the bases. Simply sticking a guy on second willy-nilly is like driving past the house where Rules and Traditions live and throwing eggs at it. It's like leaving a flaming bag of poop on Rules and Traditions' front step, ringing the doorbell and running away.

I mean, can you imagine if this stupid idea had been around when they filmed that famous scene in "Bull Durham" where the manager yells at his young players?

SKIP: This ... is a simple game. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.

SMART-ALECK YOUNG PLAYER: Except in extra innings, when we don't have to do any of that stuff.

Talk about diluting the message.

Also, talk about driving obsessive baseball scorekeepers (Are there any other kind?) bat you-know-what crazy. How do you score a baserunner materializing on second out of thin air? Is it a stolen base? Two stolen bases? Do they count it as a walk and a balk? Two balks?

Or maybe the player will get to choose from several options to determine how he wound up on second:

1. A walk and a stolen base.

2. A walk and a balk.

3. A frozen rope into the gap in left-center for a standup double.

4. A frozen rope between second and third that the shortstop muffs and then throws into the dugout, allowing the baserunner to wind up on second.

5. An invisible airplane.

Me, I'd choose the latter. Just so my team could lead the league in the newest arcane baseball stat: RMWUISP.

As in, "Runners Magically Winding Up In Scoring Position."

Ruh-roh

This is why we watch. This is why we pile into places with wall-to-wall TVs on a weekday afternoon, why the boss thinks we're just out on a sales call (Shhh!), why the first two days of the NCAA Tournament are an unofficial national holiday, and the best two days.

We watch because UMBC (which stands for University of Maryland-Baltimore County) 74, Virginia 54.

We watch because a 16 seed beat a 1 seed -- and not just a 1 seed, but the overall 1 seed -- for the first time in 136 tries.

We watch because that was history happening right in front of us Friday night, and the upset of all upsets. And upsets are why we watch.

Does anyone care when Duke crushes Iona? Or when North Carolina rolls over Lipscomb?

No. No one watches these games for that.

We watch them to see Duke get taken down by Mercer, or Kansas get taken down by Bucknell. We watch,  as happened yesterday, to see Wichita State get taken down by Marshall, and Michigan State get pushed to the wall by (again!) those feisty Bison from Bucknell.

We live for the upsets. We fill out our brackets, and then, when some mind-boggling upset turns our brackets into cinders, we secretly love it. We moan and groan, but deep down inside we love it.

Which brings us back to UMBC over Virginia, the splendidly nicknamed Retrievers over the Cavaliers, the "Ruh-roh" moment of the tournament for all the bracketologists. Many, many people, including people who should have known better, had Virginia in the Final Four. Some of them had the Cavaliers in the title game. A whole lot of them had Virginia winning it all -- even though, as the Blob pointed out the other day, Virginia almost always craps out in Da Tournament, so proceed with caution.

In any event, those people's brackets are ash now. And how great is that?

After all, in an event driven by the thrill of the upset, this was the thrill-iest upset of them all. It even had a certain symmetry to it; Virginia is now on the losing end of the two greatest upsets in college basketball history.

The first happened in 1982, when an NAIA school (Chaminade) beat Ralph Sampson and No. 1 Virginia 77-72 in the Maui Classic. The second, of course, was last night, when a hyphen school that two months ago lost by 44 to Albany beat the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament by 20.

Shoot. A week ago, UMBC needed a last-second 3-pointer to knock off Vermont in its conference championship game. It was the first time the Retrievers had beaten Vermont in their last 23 meetings.

And now they whip Virginia right out of the box?

In the prison of the moment, some folks were comparing it to the Miracle on Ice, but it's hardly that. UMBC would have to have beaten the Golden State Warriors for a proper analogy to the Miracle. Frankly, I'm not even sure it's a more mind-blowing upset than Chaminade over Virginia, except of course in the circumstance.

 As lowly as UMBC is, after all, it's still an NCAA Division I school. Chaminade was an NAIA school. Think St. Francis or Indiana Tech taking down Kentucky or Duke and you're on the right track.

In any case, it's the biggest upset in this particular tournament's history. And it's what we came for. And now it's on to the weekend, where most of the provincial interest will be in 10-seed Butler taking on 2-seed Purdue tomorrow.

Purdue, which, just as Virginia lost its sixth man before Da Tournament, has lost the man through whom its offense runs, Isaac Haas.

Butler, which annihilated 7-seed Arkansas in its first-round game, and which lost by 15 to Purdue back in  December.

Ruh-roh.

MAC daddies

Ah. There you are, you little rascal.

All day long we waited for the cataclysmic upset, the oh-my-God moment, that seismic ritual of the first day of the NCAA Tournament: The Rending of the Brackets. Finally it came, almost on the stroke of midnight.

Altogether now, people who didn't have the good fortune to attend a Mid-American Conference school: You do not. Ever. Sleep on the MAC.

Unfortunately for the Arizona Wildcats and their coach, Sean "That Ain't My Voice On The Wiretap" Miller, that was a MAC school, Buffalo, playing opposite them. And the MAC school ate them without even chewing its food. In a 4-vs.-13 matchup, the 13 seed didn't just win, it staged a lamination, wiping out the Pac-12 pretenders by 21.

This likely done ruint a lot of brackets, considering how many of the Rumored To Be Smart People had Arizona as a particularly dangerous 4-seed. At least one of the Rumored To Be Smart People, the relentlessly annoying Skip Bayless, picked Arizona to win the whole value meal.

So lovers of chaos had that to celebrate, too.

A few other observations from the not-very-Mad first day of the Madness:

* Apparently the 13-4 matchup is the new 12-5.

Which is to say, it's the matchup where ruinous bracket events lurk, or at least they did yesterday. There was Buffalo over Arizona. There was Texas Tech (4) having to come from behind to beat Stephen F. Austin (13) by 10. There was Gonzaga (4) having to gasp to the last to beat UNC-Greensboro (13) by four.

* Apparently the Pac-12 is the new MAC.

Which is to say, it's now a mid-major. UCLA didn't even get past St. Bonaventure in a play-in game. Ditto Arizona State vs. Syracuse. And, of course, Arizona, the league champion, got strip-mined by a MAC school.

This eliminated the entire Pac-12 contingent in one day. It's the first time since the creation of the Big 12 21 years ago that one of the major conferences failed to get a team to the second round of Da Tournament.

The good news is, perhaps the Summit League will extend an invitation to play a challenge series with its new fellow mid-major, the Pac-12.

The bad news: The Pac-12 would probably lose.

* All hail Davidson, South Dakota State, San Diego State, the aforementioned UNC-Greensboro.

Who put up great and noble fights as double-digit seeds before falling to higher seeds yesterday, lending at least a breath of madness to what was generally a numbingly chalk day.

* All hail Donte Ingram of Loyola.

Whose buzzer-beating 3-pointer from a long way off lifted the 11-seed Ramblers -- in the tournament for the first time in 33 years -- to a first-round win over 6-seed Miami (Fla.) in the only other real upset of the day.

Thursday's One Shining Moment moment. Every day has to have at least one, right?

That Cousins guy

Sometimes there is this disconnect between the Blob and the wider world. I sense it most when I'm in my car, the miles unspooling across the emptied-out winter landscape of Indiana. The radio is dialed down to a low mutter. The usual yammering heads are yammering away ...

And suddenly I enter the Don't Get It Zone.

The yammering, see, is all about Kirk Cousins.

Whose signing with the Vikings as a free agent is imminent, apparently, and apparently for ridiculous piles of money ($84 million). It's a signature deal, because Cousins is going to get every dime of it guaranteed. Turmoil is going to ensue from this, allegedly. His new teammates are going to wonder how he got this deal and none of them did. Especially when you consider he's not Drew Brees or Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers, but just Kirk Cousins.

And the Blob doesn't get it. Just doesn't get it.

I've looked up Cousins numbers, see. And what I've seen is this:

In the last three seasons, respectively, he's thrown for 4,166 yards, 4,917 yards and 4,093 yards.

In the last three seasons, he's thrown for 29, 25 and 27 touchdowns.

In the last three seasons, his completion percentage is 69.8, 67 and 64.3.

For his career, he's completed 65 percent of his passes. For his career, his QBR is 93.7.

There aren't half a dozen quarterbacks in the NFL with numbers like that. And he's done it largely without weapons for a dumpster fire franchise in Washington. In Minnesota, he'll have all the weapons he needs and more.

So why is he Just Kirk Cousins? Why does everyone say he's no better than a second-tier quarterback and barely an upgrade from Case Keenum?

I don't get it. Just don't get it.

Look, if Cousins is a second-tier QB ... well, second-tier is not only good in this era's NFL, it's great. Because once you get past Brady and Brees and Rodgers and Russell Wilson and probably Ben Roethlisberger, there are no top-tier quarterbacks in the NFL. There probably are no more than five or six second-tier quarterbacks. I mean, have you seen who's starting at quarterback in the league these days?

So, yeah, Cousins is more than Just Kirk Cousins. And if $84 million fully-guaranteed for his services seems outlandish, it doesn't when you consider the market for QBs in 2018.

Which is why I can't see it causing grumbling in the locker room, especially if his deal resets the market. You don't think Cousins getting fully guaranteed money opens the door for other guys to get fully guaranteed money?  Because that's how these things tend to work. And if that happens, do you honestly think Cousins' teammates are going to resent him for that?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe today's players aren't as savvy about these things as I think. But I think they'll see the bigger picture here.

And if not?

Well, then I truly don't get it. So be it.

Bracketed

So I'm on the phone with my sister the other day, and she's trying to pull me back in. It never fails. March rolls around, and I'm Michael Corleone in "Godfather III."

"Come on, just for fun," she says.

"Nope," I reply. "One, I don't care that much. Two, I'm too lazy. I don't want to put that much effort into it."

"You don't have to," she says. "You always say you overthink it. Just don't overthink it this time."

"No," I say. "'Cause you'll beat me."

"Oh, I will not," she says.

"Yes, you will. So, no way," I say. 

And that's the end of it. Once again I've successfully fended off the Bracket Temptress.

I don't tell her that I don't fill out NCAA brackets anymore  because I know she will beat me, and then she'll never let me forget it, no matter what she says. Not only that, but the people who fill out brackets according to mascots, their favorite animals or school colors will beat me. I'll do all this research and make rational, considered picks, and I'll get beat by someone who picks Virginia because he likes the way Tony Bennett dresses, or Villanova because Villanova's in Philadelphia and he'd been to Philadelphia once.

"Hey, look, all these people are picking Michigan State!" Random Guy says. "They must be good. I'm pickin' them."

And then of course Michigan State will win it all and Random Guy will beat me, because I picked the Spartans to get knocked out by Duke. Or he'll pick Virginia and beat me because I don't think the Cavaliers can win with their sixth man out injured, and, besides, Virginia always craps out in Da Tournament.

I know this is how it will go. And I know this because it's gone this way so many times before.

One year I picked Iowa State into the Final Four because all the smart people were picking Iowa State to go deep, and I thought of myself as one of the smart people. And then of course the Cyclones lost in the first round and blew up my entire bracket.

I think that was about the time I stopped filling out a bracket.

Although if I had to pick a Final Four, I'd probably pick--

No. No. 

Employer prerogative

So, you still think the relationship between high-end college athletics and those who make all the dough it rakes in isn't strictly employer/employee, except for the fact the employees don't get paid?

The Blog would like to enter this into evidence.

To summarize, the employees (Louisville's players) said they didn't want to play in the NIT, reasonably noting they were worn to a frazzle by all the turmoil swirling around the program this winter. The employers (UL's administrators) essentially said, "Sorry, we already accepted a bid conditionally (without considering your wishes, of course). So, because you're going to school on our dime -- and because, let's face it, we could make a little more jing off the postseason exposure, meager as it is in the NIT  -- you're playing."

Question: If this were truly about education and not commerce, and the workforce at places like Louisville were truly more students than athletes, would it have gone down this way?

Methinks not.

We don't need no stinkin' bracketology

Or: Filling all your NCAA Tournament bracket needs.

Like, for instance, solving the grammatical riddle of Bison/Bisons.

Yes, that's right, boys and girls, the highlight of this year's bracket is that we have both a Bison (Bucknell) and a Bisons (Lipscomb) in the field. I believe Bison is correct (No soup for you, Lipscomb!) I also believe this likely will not be a worry for very long, seeing how Bucknell opens against  Michigan State and Lipscomb drew North Carolina in the first round.

Anyway, if you expected to come here and get sober analysis of which regional is strongest (West? Midwest?) or who has the best shot at breaking up an all-No. 1 seed Final Four (Michigan, Michigan State, Cincinnati, Kentucky, Purdue with a seemingly cushy path?), you've come to the wrong place. The Blob doesn't care. The Blob couldn't tell you who had the most wins in what Quadrant if its life depended on it, on account of the Blob doesn't understand the Quadrant system of evaluating teams any better than all those bracketologists who pretend they understand the Quadrant system of evaluating teams.

(Although "Quadrant" sounds like a term that should be used liberally in a "Star Trek" film. "Captain, we're entering the Clown Quadrant." "Captain, the Klingons have occupied Outpost 39 of Quadrant Alpha Charlie BeBop, ZeBop Boom-chicka-boom." Or something like that.)

No, the Blob is much more astute at predicting the outcome according to who has the scariest mascot. That would put Wichita State right up there with that scary Shocker dude. Also Purdue because Purdue Pete has lifeless eyes. Also Providence because, I'm sorry, that Friar is the stuff of nightmares.

Otherwise, it's an interesting field, mascot-wise. Not only is there a Bison and a Bisons, there are Blackbirds (LIU-Brooklyn) and Retrievers (Maryland-Baltimore County) and Grizzlies (Montana). There are Gaels (Iona) and Titans (Cal State-Fullerton) and Quakers (Penn). There are Highlanders (Radford). There are Jackrabbits (South Dakota State). There are Racers (Murray State) and Bonnies (St. Bonaventure) and Ramblers (Loyola).

Out of all those, the Blob has a soft spot for the latter. St. Bonaventure and Loyola are two schools out of the Before Time, when the NCAA Tournament was still a rather quaint gathering that UCLA won every year by beating, like, three teams. Remember the year the Bonnies got to the Final Four with Bob Lanier? Remember when Loyola won the national title in 1963, beating Cincinnati 60-58 in overtime in the championship game?

A Cincinnati-Loyola matchup could happen again this year in the Sweet Sixteen. Let's root for that, just for old time's sake.

Let's also root for Texas Southern, where Mike Davis, long freed from the purgatory of post-Bob Knight Bloomington, has his team in Da Tournament for the fourth time in five years. And for Lipscomb, which faces all those poser "students" from North Carolina in the first round. And for Iona, which plays Duke and the Incredibly Annoying Grayson Allen ... and for Buffalo, which plays Arizona and Sean "That Ain't My Voice On The Wiretap" Miller ... and San Diego State, which plays Houston, which is coached by virtuoso cheater Kelvin Sampson.

Any questions?

(And, no, "How do you think Purdue's going to do?" doesn't count. Or "How did Oklahoma get in this thing when every time I watched them for the last month they lost?" Or "What's your bracket look like?")

That's just silly. Of course I didn't fill out a bracket.

Still his game

The astounding thing, of course, is not that he came up shy of a playoff by 2 1/2 feet of manicured grass. Or that he shot four rounds under par for the first time since Old Tom Morris invented the term "You da man!" Or that his tie for second yesterday at the Valspar Championship was his best finish since tying for second at the Barclays 4 1/2 years ago.

No, sir. The astounding thing is that, at 42 years of age, with a surgical back and knees and lord knows what else, Tiger Woods is still the most important golfer on the planet.

Because he put four rounds together for the first time in eons, viewership went through the roof. Betting on the Masters suddenly spiked. And all over America, on Selection Sunday, people were watching golf in a way they never watch it outside of the majors.

Five years past his last PGA Tour victory, a good decade past his peak, Tiger Woods is still the man who moves the needle in golf. In a sport stuffed with more young talent than at any time in the last 30 or 40 years, it is the 42-year-old with the bad back who still gets people to watch.

Just the fact he was contending was enough to bury the aforementioned needle. Saturday's third round produced the best PGA Tour third-round overnights in nearly 12 years. They were 181 percent higher than last year's Valspar third round, and the highest third-round numbers on network TV since 2003.

These are not numbers that reflect mere popularity. These are numbers that reflect icon status. These are numbers that hint at a cult following unseen since the days when Arnie's Army was hooting and hollering and piercing golf's aura of privilege in pursuit of Arnold Palmer.

The difference being, Arnold Palmer oozed charisma. Tiger Woods oozes only Tigerness.

Which is to say, at least in the public eye, he has the personality of a yard rake. Except when he's screaming obscenities on the golf course, his every public utterance sounds scripted to the last syllable. And his reputation for blowing off fans is well-established and contains numerous examples.

He is not, in other words, an especially warm human being. Or at least he isn't in public. And yet golf fans love him anyway.

For that reason, he is golf. Still. Now. As his career edges toward twilight.

Astounding. Simply astounding.

Your March Madness warmup for today

And now, in honor of Selection Sunday, the coming Madness and the annual Grumpy McGrumplesteins at Challenger, Gray and Christmas who annually make the absurd and completely unverifiable claim that office bracket pools cost companies billions (Billions, I tell you!) in lost revenue ...

Here's a guy recreating 13 iconic NCAA Tournament shots, courtesy of Deadspin.

Bring on the Madness!

Drop the green

Time now for the Blob's annual spit into a hurricane, when it tries to convince an unappreciative America that the best sort of auto racing (if you're into that sort of thing) is not the auto racing Jeff Gordon and Darrell Waltrip 'n' them are hawking these days, or that ESPN pretty much insists is the only racing that matters.

After all, it has an exclusive link to NASCAR on its home page. But it doesn't have one to what starts up again this weekend down in St. Petersburg, Fla.

That would be IndyCar, a vastly superior if mostly ignored product, and if there's a clue to its lack of stature in these United States, it is this: Those of us who fell in love with it years ago, and who still revere it as the best form of American racing, always breathe a little sigh of relief when it does start up again.

This is because aside from the Indianapolis 500 -- still the biggest one-day sporting event in the world, and still the single most significant motorsports event in the world -- IndyCar is the Amelia Earhart of sports entities, disappearing from the national radar for most of the rest of the summer. While NASCAR relentlessly pushes its personalities and its product, IndyCar never quite has gotten the hang of it, even though it has numerous personalities to sell (Paging Graham Rahal! Paging James Hinchcliffe! Paging Josef Newgarden!) and its product is better.

Yet every year, post-Indy, three teams -- Penske, Ganassi and Andretti Autosport -- provide an unhealthy chunk of the starting fields, with the consequence that it's a scramble to send out much more than 20 cars most weekends. The number of teams, and drivers, who run Indy-only deals is disquietingly long. Even the series title sponsor (Verizon) is bailing after this season.

And yet we are hardy lot, we IndyCar fans. And so when the curtain rises every year at St. Pete, we're as optimistic as the fans of every sad-sack baseball team in the majors on opening day.

Here's the good news about that, this time around: There's actually foundation for our optimism.

Start with Newgarden, the defending series champion. IndyCar couldn't have produced a more saleable face for its product if it cooked him up in a test tube: He's outgoing, he's photogenic, he's young and he's an American, a definite plus given the provincial nature of American racing fans.  If IndyCar can't sell Newgarden to America, it couldn't sell space heaters to a stranded polar expedition.

Of course, there's still Hinchcliffe and Rahal and Ryan Hunter-Reay and a host of others for IndyCar to sell. And in the case of Rahal -- another engaging, photogenic talent, carrying one of the great American racing names -- it won't be just him against the world for Rahal Letterman Lanigan this year.

Joining him as a second driver will be last year's Indy 500 winner, Takuma Sato, a huge get for RLL. Without a second driver to bounce ideas and data off of, Rahal finished sixth in the points last season, with two wins and six top fives. Now he has Sato, one of the savviest and most accomplished veterans on the circuit. It's fair to say the expectations are high.

And while Penske has scaled back his full-season effort to three drivers (Newgarden, Will Power and Simon Pagenaud), and Ganassi is down to two (Scott Dixon and Ed Jones), two new full-time teams and two new part-time teams will be joining the series this year. That's a huge get, too.

So, to sum up: new teams, a shiny new champion, plus a sexier new aero package. An infusion of fresh young talent that includes nine rookies from five countries -- including Pietro Fittipaldi, grandson of racing legend Emerson Fittipaldi. And, of course, the return, one last time, of Danica Patrick, whose auld lang syne racing moment will come in May at Indianapolis, when she'll try to put one of Ed Carpenter's entries in the 500 before hanging up the helmet for good.

Conclusion: It's gonna be a good year.

Maybe. Hopefully. We'll see.

A Madness for all seasons

Give NBA commissioner Adam Silver this much: Maybe he's proving the Blob wrong when it said the NBA didn't care what its silly you-have-to-be-19-to-play-in-our-league rule was doing to college basketball.

The League is now trying to come up with ways to kill the one-and-done monster it created, and then turned loose on the NCAA. Silver and Co. haven't arrived at the obvious solution yet, but they are getting closer.

(The obvious solution: Let a kid enter the draft straight out of high school, the way the NBA used to. But stipulate that, if he's drafted, he has to spend a year in the G-League learning how to be a pro. Re-structure the G-League to facilitate that process, making it the developmental league it was allegedly intended to be. The kid gets his signing bonus as a draft pick and pulls down a minor-league salary in the interim, same as baseball. Simple.)

And the NCAA?

For all the talk about how the one-and-dones have hurt it -- and have ushered in a supposedly unprecedented level of corruption -- they haven't hurt it that much.

This just in: For the first time, the NCAA cleared the $1 billion mark in revenue in 2016-17. The workforce that generated that, of course, still gets no cut of it aside from a full-ride scholarship that isn't guaranteed (i.e., it must be renewed each year.)  The workforce also gets no cut of his or her school's chunky apparel deals, serving as unpaid billboards every time they trot out there bearing the apparel company's logos on their uniforms.

Ostensibly this is because they're amateurs serving an amateur athletic entity. One that pulled in a billion dollars in 2016-17 and is indistinguishable in every way from the NBA, NFL or any other professional sports entity, but, you know, still.

And yet here the NCAA honchos are, wringing their hands over what they themselves have created.  The NCAA is an incredibly successful profit-driven business; the kids are therefore approaching college basketball and football as a business opportunity, cutting deals and exploiting college athletics just as college athletics have always exploited them.

No one should be shocked by this. No one should be scandalized by what's coming out on those FBI wiretaps, because it's merely commerce, and it's been going on for a long time. And that's because commerce is what a $1-billion-in-revenues entity is all about.

They've made their well-feathered bed, in other words. Complaining about having to lie in it now is simply bad form.

Questioning the questioners

Remember a few days back, when the Blob talked about what a bizarre alternate universe the NFL combine is, with draft prospects getting asked weird questions about their mothers and whether or not they like boys?

Well. Apparently NFL GMs still have their homophobia/mommy issues.

This upon the news that Derrius Guice, a running back out of LSU, said he was asked those very same questions during his interview process, almost word-for-word. "Do you like boys?" was one question. "We hear your mother sells herself. How do you feel about that?" was another.

The Blob not being a candidate to make millions as an NFL player, its suggested response to the latter question would be "I don't know. How would you feel about it if I leaped over this table and punched you in the face?" Or, maybe, "Well, I feel better about it knowing your mom is out there with her."

Personally, I'd have marked it as a point in the kid's favor if he had said either of those things. Shows, you know, spunk.

Presumably neither Guice nor any other prospect responded in that manner, because the combine is all about seeing how you handle stressful situations, and asking deliberately provocative questions is part of that process. They want to see if you'll react. If you don't even bat an eye, this is presumably a point in your favor.

(Which I find curious, considering they're applying for a job in one of the most violent occupations in the world. Passiveness in the face of extreme provocation would not seem to be an upside. But what do I know. I'm fairly normal on most days.)

NFL GMs get away with this sort of thing because they know they hold these young men's futures in their hands, and so they know the young men can't fight back. But the Blob wonders exactly how they get away with it in spite of that.

Here's the thing: I may be completely wrong about this, but I believe there are some strict legal guidelines that govern job interviews (and that's what these are, essentially.) Among the things they would prohibit, it would seem, are questions about a candidate's sexual orientation, or ones that constitute personal insults -- the very sort of questions NFL GMs are asking. Assuming I'm correct, does the NFL have some sort of exemption from the law?

Or maybe it's just no one has sued them yet, given that anyone who does would be blowing up his NFL career before it even started. But maybe that needs to happen.

Because this is wrong. It's just flat outright wrong.

The right man for the job

Look. I know Steve Kerr's a busy man, what with coaching the best basketball team on the planet (for now) and all.

But college athletics need help. College athletics need a massive reality check, considering what they think they are is so far removed from the exploitative oligarchy they actually are.

I think the solution is right here, having listened to Kerr make such inordinate sense on the matter of kids who enter the NBA draft but don't get drafted.

Do what's best for the kid. Why, what a novel concept.

Can we just make Kerr the head of the NCAA right now?

A pioneer passes

Quietly, in the way he did everything, one of the signature athletes of the 20th century passed the other day. Maybe you heard about it, even though he was English and we are a devoutly provincial society here in America. Likely you didn't.

After all, it's been 64 years since Sir Roger Bannister did what many believed could never be done.

The four-minute mile is such a routine milepost anymore that it almost doesn't count as one, so it's hard to understand, here in 2018, what a man-walking-on-the-moon aura it once possessed. Serious people with serious credentials believed it couldn't be done without a man's heart bursting in his chest. There are limits to human achievement, those people believed, and a human being running a mile in four minutes was one of them.

And then, on a damp, breezy May afternoon on a cinder track off Iffley Road in Oxford, England, a gangly young medical student blew that notion to shards.

Paced by two of his friends and teammates, Christopher Chataway and Chris Brasher, Bannister, all elbows and knees, unspooled his devastating kick across the last 200 meters and flew through the tape in 3:59.4, emptying his tank so completely that he immediately collapsed in the arms of his coaches. He was 25 years old, and he would not get much older before he would walk away from competitive running. Not long after beating John Landy in an epic duel three months after making history -- and two months after Landy became the second man to break four minutes in the mile -- Bannister retired from athletics to pursue his medical career.

That, too, seems quaint here in 2018, when athletes  make their sport a profession. True amateurs are a rarity in the Olympic sports these days; in Bannister's day, they were the rule. It makes what he did even more astounding.

Consider: He achieved one of the iconic milestones in athletic history while training part-time, on a cinder track, wearing spikes that resembled today's running shoes the way an oxcart resembles a Tesla. And he did it only by pushing himself literally to the edge of consciousness.

Again, it's hard to fathom in 2018 how this made headlines all over the world. It was, it seems, of a piece with the times, when almost daily those old assumptions about human limits were being swept away.

Roger Bannister's time, after all, saw Chuck Yeager break the sound barrier. It saw Dr. Jonas Salk discover a polio vaccine. Seven years after Bannister's feat, first the Russians and then the Americans launched a human being into space and brought him back safely; 15 years after that breezy day along Iffley Road, human beings walked on the moon.

A man running a mile in less than four minutes?

Just another piece of all that.

A little Dakota fanning

And, no, not the actress.

This would be "fanning" as a verb the Blob just made up, on account of it made for a clever headline. Turns out U.S. News and World Report is doing all sorts of fanning for Dakota -- North Dakota in particular -- which it's named the best state in the union for quality of life.

(Which is just salt in an open Hoosier wound, coming a day after North Dakota State knocked Indiana's lone Summit League representative, IPFW, out of the conference tournament. This after IPFW had beaten North Dakota State twice already this year. This after the Mastodons, who are a five-hour bus ride east of the next easternmost Summit League school, had to fly out to Sioux Falls, S.D. to play one game.)

(And you know what's even worse? Not only did North Dakota's rep bounce Indiana's rep, it beat Indiana by 47 places in the U.S. News ranking. Yes, that's right. Indiana came in 48th out of 50 states in Quality of Life.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. North Dakota No. 1 with a bullet in qualify of life.

Or to punctuate it another way: North Dakota?!

You mean the state whose motto is Come For The Windchills, Stay For The Numbing Isolation? The state where Steve Buscemi got stuffed in a woodchipper? The state where the four seasons are Winter, Winter, Winter and the Fourth of July?

That North Dakota?

At least South Dakota has Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills and the Corn Palace. (A whole palace! Made out of corn! You should see it!). And Minnesota, which somehow ranks second -- apparently frostbite is a major quality-of-life thing for U.S. News -- has 10,000 lakes and the Boundary Waters and the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. But North Dakota?

Remember that scene in "Fargo" where Buscemi buries the money before his unfortunate meeting with the woodchipper?

Yeah. That's North Dakota.

On the other hand, the taxes are low, you can breathe the air and drink the water and people don't tend to shoot each other in droves because they'd have to travel miles by dogsled to do it.

Also, Roger Maris was from North Dakota.

So there's that.

March blandness

And now, on the morning after Kobe Bryant won an Oscar (for Short Animated Film) and then dunked over right-wing harpy/sports illiterate Laura Ingraham with a cutting reference to her "shut up and dribble" dismissal of basketball players ...

The Blob again refuses to offer a dismissal of its own.

In other words, I still believe Purdue has the ingredients to be a Final Four team, despite losing badly to Michigan in the Big Ten Tournament finale, an outcome virtually everyone should have seen coming.

But I also believe this: It has no chance if it continues to play the way it has for the last month.

In what's become a recurring theme, big man Isaac Haas carried the load again for the Boilermakers, scoring 23 points and taking eight rebounds. And once again he got little help from the rest of a lineup that's gone mostly dark after lighting it up for the first three months of the season.

While Michigan sophomore Zavier Simpson -- the best perimeter player on the floor by miles and miles Sunday -- zipped over, around and through them at will, the Boilermakers' previously impeccable perimeter players came up empty again. The Edwards duo, Carsen and Vince, combined for just 16 points on 6-of-22 shooting. Carsen Edwards, who'd scored 53 points in the tournament's first two games, was shut down by Simpson and Co., going for just 12 on 4-of-16 misfiring. As a team, the Boilers, once perhaps the best 3-point shooting team in the country, missed 13 of 17 from the arc.

That is not going to get the Purdues anywhere a week-and-a-half from now. It might not even get them out of the first weekend of the Madness.

They're a devastating inside-out team when right, as they pretty much were all through November, December and January. But when the Edwardses and Dakota Mathias can't throw it in the ocean from a rowboat, they're easily defendable. Teams can collapse on Haas with impunity, knowing Purdue's shooters aren't going to make them pay on the kick-out. Or they can let Haas get his and simply take away everything else, as has been alarmingly easy the last month.

At the opposite end of that spectrum is Michigan, which was playing the best basketball in the Big Ten coming into New York and thus shocked no one by winding up the last man standing. They beat the Big Ten's presumptive Big Two, Michigan State and Purdue, back-to-back by 11 and nine points, respectively. Don't be stunned if the Wolverines duplicate last year, when they reached the Sweet Sixteen after again catching fire late.

As they say, timing is everything. Purdue was the best team in the Big Ten two months ago. Michigan and Michigan State are the best teams in the conference now. And a week-and-a-half from now?

Maybe Purdue can give us January in March. And maybe it will only give us Purdue in March.

History doesn't have much good to say about the latter.

Timeout for the Big O

No, not Oscar Robertson. We're talkin' Oscars here, that little gold statue that looks like Michael Rennie's robot in "The Day The Earth Stood Still." Because tonight, boys and girls, is Oscar Night.

And so the Blob will put aside childish things (sports) for other childish things (movies), and give you a quick synopsis of the five films up for Best Picture. If you're a sports guy who thinks "Ugh! Movies! What about the Big Ten Tournament?", go do something else for awhile. Also no one in New York cares about the Big Ten Tournament, so why should the Blob?

Anyway ... here's the Blob's snarky summary of the Best Pictures, a totally original idea no one's ever done before:

1. Lady Bird

Teenage girl has issues with her mom, boyfriends, the world in general. A totally original idea no one's ever done before.

2. Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan messes with time. Also, planes, boats, a bunch of guys sitting forlornly on a beach.

3. Darkest Hour

"Hey, I was involved in that Dunkirk thing, too!" -- Winston Churchill

4.  Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Woody Harrelson kills himself rather than live in a town full of a**holes.

5. Get Out

(Bleeping) racists, anyway.

6. The Post

Hey, look! Journalism!

7. Phantom Thread

Daniel Day-Lewis plays an obsessed dressmaker with detachment issues. Alternate title: There Will Be Cross-Stitching.

8. Call Me By Your Name

A child and an adult fall in love. But it's not creepy at all because, damn, Italy is beautiful.

9. The Shape of Water

The Creature From the Black Lagoon gets the girl.

And there you have it. Tomorrow, the Big Ten Tournament. Promise.

That river in Egypt

Which would be Denial, of course.

Which is what Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller did splendidly the other day, denying he had ever, ever, ever offered a recruit (or his agent) money, or violated NCAA rules in any way to his knowledge, never, ever, ever.

In recognition of this performance, the school's president, Robert Robbins, and the board of regents backed him with the ever-popular vote of confidence. Hey, don't laugh. It happens to have been a really good vote of confidence.

 "At this time we have no reason to believe Coach Miller violated NCAA rules or any laws regarding the allegations reported in the media," Robbins said. "Additionally, he has a record of compliance with NCAA rules, and he has been cooperative with this process."

Except ...

Except what about those FBI wiretaps that have Miller negotiating for the services of Arizona star freshman Deandre Ayton on multiple phone calls?

Was that not Miller on the tape?

Was it some other random guy from Arizona?

Or did the media report it wrong, as Miller claims?

And if the media did report it wrong, how come no one but Miller has come out and said so?

There the Blob goes again, messing up a perfectly good denial.

Bucking the over-analysts

And now more from the NFL combine, which the Blob explained in all its psychotic glory yesterday.

It seems the paralysis-by-analysis crowd has determined that Louisville's 2016 Heisman Trophy winner Lamar Jackson does not have what it takes to be an effective quarterback in the NFL, or at least one you would want to throw a pile of money at in the upcoming draft.

They say he's too small. They say he doesn't have the arm strength or the accuracy. They say he can't do what he does with his legs, he'll get killed out there.

Oh, wait. That's what they said about Drew Brees, Russell Wilson, Cam Newton, Dak Prescott. You know, all those complete busts.

Jackson?

Well, they're saying a lot of the same thing about him, too -- including that he's too small, even though he's 6-3. That's 3-to-4 inches taller than Brees and Wilson, but, you know, never mind.

As to the rest ... well, it's true he's stunningly athletic, which apparently is not a metric the paralysis-by-analysis crowd prizes in their prospective NFL quarterbacks, even though there is significant evidence the ideal model is moving in that direction. The better quarterbacks in the league, particularly the younger ones, all have a certain amount of mobility these days. They all can do things with their legs. And there are abundant examples of that type who have succeeded to one degree or another going all the way back to Michael Vick -- or, if you really want to get old school, Fran Tarkenton.

And here's something else: Jackson is no shrinking violet.

To those at the combine who are convinced he's no NFL quarterback, and who had designs on working him out at wide receiver, Jackson had one response: Hell, no. He is, he said, a quarterback. He's not a wide receiver. He's a quarterback.

He's certainly got the quantitative evidence of that. In 2016, the year the won the Heisman, he the for 3,543 yards and 30 touchdowns and ran for 1,571 yards and 21 more touchdowns. Last season, he threw for 3,660 yards and 27 TDs and ran 1,601 yards and 18 scores.

If you're keeping score at home, that's better than 7,000 yards passing, 3,172 yards rushing and 96 touchdowns accounted for in two seasons.

I think someone in the NFL could find a way to make a guy like that work as a quarterback. Especially when you look at some of the sad sacks currently drawing NFL paychecks at the position.

I mean, Nathan Peterman and Christian Hackenberg can play in this league, but Lamar Jackson can't?

Okey-dokey.

Combine this

It's Combine Week in the National Football League, one of the highlights of the NFL season by the Blob's lights, because it raises the Shield's obsession with minutiae and nonsense to levels even more hysterically absurd than usual.

Here's the key thing to remember about the combine, for instance: It's not about determining who can play football  among the latest crop of potential draft picks/future head trauma victims. It's about Big Guys In Shorts Running Sprints And Answering A Bunch Of Dumb Questions To See Who Cracks Under The Pressure.

In pure football terms, see, the NFL teams already know everything they need to know about these guys, especially the potential first-rounders. They've watched tape on them until their eyeballs fell out. They've analyzed them for all manner of arcane metrics: linemen for Waist Bending, running backs for Burst, defensive backs for (in at least one famous instance) Tight Skin.

No, really. One year, an analyst actually said one of the upsides about former Colts DB Marlin Jackson was that he had "tight skin." I have no idea what the man was talking about, or even if he was entirely sober.

And as for quarterbacks ...

Well. They've been scrutinized more than any other position, because more than any other position a quarterback can make or break your franchise. Which is why, when USC's Sam Darnold was criticized for opting out of throwing at the combine, it wasn't because teams wouldn't get to see if he could throw the 20-yard sideline route. It was because it was taken as a sign he didn't want the challenge of throwing in less-than-optimum conditions, thereby (theoretically, anyway) calling into question his competitiveness.

No one at the combine wants to see if Darnold and the other high-end QBs can play, see. They already know they can play. It's not a Can He Make All The Throws test; it's a Jesus, Please Don't Let Him Be Another Ryan Leaf Or Johnny Manziel test.

(The Blob's leader in the clubhouse in the latter: Baker Mayfield. Grabbing your crotch and screaming F-bombs at Kansas, for God's sake? That's some vintage Leaf right there.)

And so it's all about getting them in a room and asking them weird questions,. The NFL being the Kremlin-esque construct it is, we get only fleeting reports on just how weird the questions are. But we do know prospects have been asked in the past if they liked boys, or if they thought their mothers were attractive. And then there was the famous time Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland asked Dez Bryant if his mom was a hooker.

Presumably the intent of the question was to see if Bryant would get angry. He didn't take the bait, which (again, presumably) was a point in his favor.

Me?  I would have counted it as a point in his favor if he'd leaped over the desk and grabbed Ireland by the throat. 

"Displays great aggressiveness!" I would have scribbled.

Anyway ... the Blob has noted before that the nature of the questions reveals far more about the people asking them than it does about the prospects. Judging from what we know, for instance, there are apparently a few GMs in the league who have serious mommy issues.

But, again, it's not about football here. It's about how you handle yourself. In that regard, the NFL combine is remindful of those scenes in "The Right Stuff" where they're putting the astronaut candidates through a bunch of goofy physical tests that are really psychological tests.

Remember that dour nurse, always taking notes?

Don't even try to tell me her doppelganger isn't at the combine this week. Don't even.