That one time I was right

"Keep your eye on this kid from Slovenia," I said to the guy. "He's gonna be special."

This was a couple of years ago and the guy was a bartender who'd played basketball at a local high school (and whom I'd actually covered during my sportswriter days), and we were talking about the upcoming NBA draft. And here's the part where you can leave the room if you don't like hearing someone blow his own trumpet, because that's kinda what I'm gonna do here.

That's a rare thing for me, by the way. I don't often blow my own trumpet because you only do that sort of thing when you were right about something. And I'm hardly ever right about anything.

This time I was. Because the kid from Slovenia?

His name was Luka Doncic.

I'd heard his name because he was expected to go in the top five in the NBA draft that year, and he was, like, 19 years old or something. And he'd been playing in the top European pro league since he was, like, 16.

That got my attention. So I dialed up a clip of his YouTube highlights and ...

"A young Larry Bird," I told the bartender. "That's what I was looking at."

Well, it's a couple years later now, and everyone knows who Luka Doncic is. And he seems more like a young Larry Bird than ever.

That's because he hit the NBA as a rookie like he'd been playing there forever, and this year he took it up about six more notches. His Dallas Mavericks were just eliminated by the heavily favored Clippers in the NBA's Weird Thrown-Together Summer Thing playoffs, but not before Doncic did some things. Like, you know, Larry Bird things.

In the first playoff game of his career, for instance, he dropped 42 points on the Clips, the highest-scoring playoff debut in NBA history.

Then he put on a show out of legend in Game 4, going for 43 points, 17 rebounds and 13 assists and flushing a buzzer-beating triple to win the game in overtime. And did it all on a sprained ankle that had put his availability in question.

Finally he went for 38 points, nine assists and nine boards trying to keep the Mavs alive in the closeout game.

Now everyone knows who Luka Doncic is. Now they're calling him the NBA's next great star and a future Hall of Famer and lord knows what else in this age of hyperbole. One scribbler even said we'd witnessed the beginning of the Age of Luka.

I don't know about that. But it's a safe bet he's now entered the First-Name Basis Zone.

Larry. Michael. Shaq. Kobe. LeBron. Giannis.

Luka.

Keep your eye on him. Keep your eye on this kid from Slovenia.

A fine mess

So, now the Big Ten's plan (to use a term with which it is only nominally familiar) is to start the football season sometime around Thanksgiving. I guess.

And meanwhile the SEC us starting its season Sept. 26.

And the ACC is starting its season Sept. 10, and the Big 12 is starting Sept. 26.

And all of that is contingent on whether or not a whole pile of college kids act like adults and not college kids, which early returns indicate hovers somewhere between Not Bloody Likely and Yeah, Right.

So we'll see. Maybe the Big Ten starts Thanksgiving weekend, and maybe it won't. Maybe the SEC, ACC and Big 12 get through October without half their rosters being in quarantine, and maybe they won't. And who the heck knows how the College Football Playoff works out, if there is one.

How do you include the Big Ten, two months behind everyone else? So that leaves, um, Clemson and Alabama and maybe Georgia and Oklahoma vying for the "national championship."

What a great larruping mess this all is.

You'd think, having had months to think about it, the pashas of the Power 5 conferences could have gotten together and hammered out a coordinated plan. But, nah. The Bastard Plague came and hung around and got worse and worse because Americans are, well, idiots, and it apparently never occurred to the pashas that maybe they ought to get on the same page to deal with it.

But again, nah. The only plan in place was, essentially, "You be you." So the Big Ten and the Pac-12 went one way and the rest of 'em went another and here we are.

It is my considered opinion that the Big Ten and the Pac-12 went the right way in delaying -- not canceling, just delaying -- their seasons. Playing football in the middle of a pandemic did not seem wise to them. I don't think this is a Chicken Little position, as Our Only Available Impeached President and the We Want Football And We Want It Now crowd seem to. I think it's simple common sense.

But, hey. As someone who loves college football about as much as breathing air, I get it. Back when some off-brand cable network used to air an Ivy League game of the week late on Saturday mornings, I used to watch it. Yale-Cornell or Dartmouth-Penn or Harvard-Princeton were just as enjoyable to me as Texas-Oklahoma or Michigan-Ohio State or USC-Notre Dame -- and maybe more so, considering there were actual college students playing in the former and not, as in the latter, university employees.

Last night there was a college football game played, the first of the season. Sure, it was only an FCS game between Austin Peay and Central Arkansas, but it was glorious. Central Arkansas won 24-17 on a touchdown pass with 34 seconds to play, and, damn, weren't we starved for this?

And, damn, don't you wish we weren't in the middle of a pandemic?

But we are.

And so maybe there's a lot more of last night, and maybe there won't be.

That's not the-sky-is-falling hysteria or panic porn. That's just reality.

A glimpse of the rare

He died on Jackie Robinson Day in the major leagues, and maybe that was as right as this sort of thing can ever be. Not that there actually is anything right about a man dying of colon cancer at the age of 43, of course.

But there is a certain symmetry to it, baseball celebrating Jackie Robinson on the same day the man who brought Jackie Robinson to life on the big screen departed his own. "42" was the film that put Chadwick Boseman in front of us, and then he went on to portray James Brown and Thurgood Marshall and of course King T'Challa in "Black Panther" and a handful of other films in the Marvel franchise.

He was a star. His talent, his gift, was going to make him an even bigger star. And so we are entitled to feel not just sad but a little cheated this morning, as selfish as the latter clearly is.

Boseman is the one who really got cheated, after all. But in the process of being cheated, he left us with a glimpse of something exceedingly rare in America in this age of lunatics and charlatans.

He showed us dignity. Imagine that.

The flat-footed shock blowing through social media at the news of Boseman's death, see, happened because Boseman kept his illness to himself. He was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, and he never said a word. Underwent chemo and several surgeries and all the while kept making movies, including Black Panther and the Thurgood Marshall film and three Avengers films and the Spike Lee Netflix film Da 5 Bloods.

I have no idea how he managed to do all that. I have no idea how anyone could.

But he did, and while he was at it, he helped raise $4 million for protective equipment for Black communities hit hard by the Bastard Plague. And never once used his personal illness as some sort of hey-look-I'm-sick-too attempt to divert the focus from the crisis at hand.

He could have, of course. He could have gone public with his own struggle and made the talk-show rounds and inevitably made it about him instead of a nation being overtaken by a pandemic. But like the man he portrayed in "42," he kept his mouth shut.

Such a rare thing in a country infested with so many folks who can't keep their own mouths shut. Even when they demonstrably should.

You lead by example, everyone says, and right now we're being led by some exceedingly bad ones. Many of those were on display this week. On the national stage, we saw acts celebrated which should never be celebrated; saw people held up as icons of American life who are anything but; saw dignity conferred on that which cannot and should never be dignified.

And then Chadwick Boseman dies without uttering a peep for four years as he fought for his life. And that is so breathtaking and astonishing and, yes, dignified, it's as if we rummaged through this nation of fakes and discovered the Hope Diamond glittering in their midst.

And, lord, did Chadwick Boseman glitter. Does glitter. Will.

Legitimized voices

So this is how it is in America, as if it weren't before. It's just out there showing its face to us now at long last.

In America, if you're white, you can be a high school dropout who crosses state lines lugging ordinance it was illegal for you to carry, violate curfew in someone else's city and kill a couple of people while playing cop. And some folks will think you're a hero who was only defending himself from Dangerous Commie Radical Anarchists.

In America, if you're black and fed up with being shot by the police in situations where you shouldn't be getting shot, you can take to the streets to protest. And because some of that gets out of hand, the police and the President of the United States and the Vice-President will call you a mob and say you're going to burn down all our cities and hint that it's your own fault the white kid with the AR-15 shot you in the head because, after all, you were out after curfew, too.

And in America, if your name is LeBron James or Doc Rivers or the names of a hundred other professional athletes and coaches, you get sneered at as entitled circus performers who should shut up and dribble, or swing a bat, or do something useful instead of depriving us of our games for a night or two.

One of those doing the sneering the other day -- or the next thing to it -- was Jared Kushner, and ain't that rich. Kushner is the son-of-law of Our Only Available Impeached President, and his middle name is Entitled. He came from crooked money and then married crooked money, and he hasn't had to do an honest day's work in his life as a result. Guys like him are born on third and get walked home and think they're Babe Ruth hitting No. 60.

And he's invoking working people to call out LeBron James? The hell would he know about working people?

Or men like LeBron James, for that matter?

Listen. If you're a successful professional athlete in this country, you didn't get there by marrying into it. You did it by taking the gifts God gave you and then working like a fiend to maximize those gifts. You came up from nothing or next to nothing in a lot of cases, and you got where you are because you put oceans of sweat equity into it. And you got where you are because, unlike the world in which Jared Kushner moves, your world is the meritocracy of all meritocracies.

Never has been more apparent than this week, when the Indiana Pacers fired head coach Nate McMillan two weeks after giving him a contract extension.

They didn't fire him because he did a bad job. Indeed, in four seasons as the Pacers' coach, McMillan's teams never won fewer than 42 games. And this season he got an injury-riddled team minus its two All-Stars (Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis) to 45 wins and the No. 4 seed in the playoffs.

But then the Pacers got run out in four straight by the Heat. It was the second straight year they'd been swept in the first round, and they've now lost their last nine playoff games.

That's what got McMillan fired, more than likely. Not because his team didn't perform, but because it didn't perform when it counted.

This is the world in which all those entitled professional athletes live. And it's a platform they are using to do more than just symbolically walk out of their ballparks and stadiums and arenas. They're investing whole chunks of that big money they make in causes that advance social justice. And they're continuing to speak out, and will.

They're doing that because, as highly visible individuals in our society, they know they have a bully pulpit. And they're using it.

And unlike some others we could name, they've actually earned that pulpit.

Pleading with their feet

All they want is for someone to listen. That's what this comes down to, really.

They want the President of the United States to take his fingers out of his ears, quit playing footsie with racists and criminals, quit babbling about "law and order" long enough to understand that law and order doesn't spring from brute force but from listening to one another.

They want America to slip into their shoes and walk around for awhile. To feel that bolt of fear that jitters up their spines when the red lights flash in their rearview. To wonder if this is the night when Driving While Black turns into Dead While Black.

I'm a 65-year-old white man, and because of that I'll never experience those things. I'll never have to bury my son because he reached for his license and registration the wrong way -- the wrong way being a way that somehow made a police officer hinky enough to yank his piece and go all Dirty Harry.

I'll never know any of that. Neither will the president or the vice-president or any of the president's gangster family or Nitwit Bonnie and Clyde, the two St. Louis vigilantes who became Republican heroes this week for waving guns at Those Scary Black People.

I don't know what they'll do with the 17-year-old white vigilante who drove to Kenosha, Wis., from Illinois to play army with an AR-15, and wound up charged with killing two protesters and wounding another. Probably make him the keynote speaker at the 2024 Republican convention or something.

Hell. If he'd killed a couple more he'd probably be looking at a cabinet post in this administration.

And, yeah, OK, so that's the cheapest of cheap shots. Or is it?

After all, the vice-president of this administration didn't utter a word of condemnation last night about the 17-year-old shooter and his fellow GI Jethros who were allowed to wander around all geared up in an extremely volatile situation. Didn't utter a word of regret about the Kenosha police officer who chased an unarmed black man back to his car and ventilated him in front of his children, which is what sparked the protests to begin with.

Instead he condemned the protesters' violence, while ignoring the only violence that's resulted in two dead, one wounded and one likely paralyzed for life. Gee, why is that?

We know why.

And so people took to the streets again and there were more clashes with police, and the fringe element that's only there to create mayhem created mayhem. And across America, NBA players and WNBA players and MLB players and NFL players sat out their games or practices yesterday, because all the Black Lives Matter T-shirts and all the signage and all the symbolic kneeling haven't gotten people to listen yet.

So they took America's games away for a night. And maybe for more than a night.

It's the only card they have left to play at this point, and, yes, because America isn't listening, we'll get the usual bloviation from the usual suspects. We'll get "shut up and dribble." We'll get how dare these entitled (black) rich (uppity) athletes inject themselves into this, even though they weren't always rich and the color of their skin injected them into this a long time ago.

"What good will boycotting the games do?" some people will ask.

I don't know. Maybe it is, like the kneeling, just symbolic. But symbolism has its uses. It focuses attention on an issue and gets it in front of people who would ordinarily pay it no mind. And maybe it gets those people to start listening -- or at the very least to start being appalled by what decent people should be.

The first part is easy. The second, especially in a nation so poisoned by lies and case-hardened worldviews, is the Everest in this equation.

"It's just so sad," Clippers head coach Doc Rivers told the Los Angeles Times the other night. "What stands out to me is just watching the Republican convention, viewing the fear. All you hear is Donald Trump and all of them talking about fear.

"We're the ones getting killed. We're the ones getting shot. We're the ones that were denied to live in certain communities. We've been hung. We've been shot. All you do is keep hearing about fear. It's really so sad ...

"We've got to do better. But we've got to demand better."

A better country. Better human beings in charge of it. But most of all, better listening.

Commodity exchange

Maybe part of it was spite. You'd like to think otherwise, but humans are humans, and sometimes they are not their best selves when there's money to be made and they're told, for very good reasons, that they can't make it just now.

And so maybe at least one eyebrow ought to be raised over the timing out there at the University of Iowa, where, as chronicled here by Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated, some 100 athletes were ushered into the practice gym in Carver-Hawkeye Arena not long ago and told their sports were being eliminated. Athletic director Gary Barta marched in, told the men and women swimmers and male tennis players and gymnasts they were no longer Iowa athletes, and marched out.

Boom. Done. And all of three days before classes were to begin.

More to the point, it was also a week or so after the Big Ten announced it was postponing the 2020 football season because of the Bastard Plague.

Not canceling, mind you. Not eliminating football the way Iowa eliminated men's and women's swimming, men's tennis and men's gymnastics. Just postponing it for awhile.

Iowa was one of the schools -- robust football schools all, naturally -- that bellyached the most about that. And a week or so later, Iowa pulled the plug on four sports.

Maybe it wasn't the intended message. But that sure sounded an awful lot like "See? You took football away from us, and now we're going to have to get rid of four sports and screw up the lives of almost 100 athletes because without football we can't afford them. See what you did?"

Even though football, mighty engine of commerce that it is, isn't going away. Even though it's just being pushed back a bit because of the crazy notion that maybe playing football isn't such a hot idea in the middle of a pandemic that's forcing schools all over the country to shut down their campuses.

Continuing to prepare for football on an empty campus, after all, sort of ruins the illusion that football isn't a bidness and the athletes who play it aren't university employees. Just for one thing.

In any event, Iowa's just latest school that's paring down its so-called non-revenue sports. Stanford, for instance, cut 11 recently -- even though, as Forde points out, most of those sports are only partially schollied and have miniscule budgets compared to football, which both produces revenue and consumes it in equally gargantuan measure.

And that's the problem, see. Football giveth, but it also taketh away.

It's why Iowa felt compelled to eliminate four sports whose budgets don't breach the low six figures, mere weeks after Iowa collected a $55.6 million conference revenue share. Where did all that money go?

Well, to pay head football coach Kirk Ferentz, who earns north of $5 million a year.

And to pay for eleventy hundred assistant coaches.

And to pay for 85 full rides in a sport that fields only 22 players at a time.

And, lastly, to pay for ridiculously lavish football complexes that -- at national champ Clemson, for instance -- include a movie theater, a state-of-the-art arcade and a laser tag facility.

There is absolutely no earthly reason any of the above is necessary. There is absolutely no earthly reason any successful football program in the country can't along with 75 or so schollies instead of 85, or without the 33 assistant coaches and staff Iowa's football program supports.

The assistants alone raked north of $5 million a year total, as of 2018.

To Iowa's credit, Ferentz, men's basketball coach Fran McCaffrey, women's basketball coach Lisa Bluder and wrestling coach Tom Brands are all taking 15 percent pay cuts, and Barta is cutting his own compensation package as well.

But still. Still, you've gotta wonder about the priorities here.

Or maybe you don't.

One final thought

You never want to begin a discourse by saying "back in the day." Especially if you're of a certain age.

Partly this is because it reveals to you to be, yes, of a certain age, and thus instantly discredits you for those who are not of a certain age. And partly it's because, by the very nature of "back in the day," back in the day is about as relevant to this day as aerodynamics are to an earthworm.

So of course the Blob is going to begin one last thought about the 104th Indianapolis 500 with, you guessed it, "back in the day."

Back in the day, the Indianapolis 500 began at 11 o'clock in the morning.

On Sunday, the green didn't drop until 2:30 p.m.

This made zero sense, especially when you consider there were no traffic snarls to wade through to get into the place. No fans meant no atmosphere, but it also meant no waiting. Yet everyone hung around until 2:30 to get the show on the road.

I'm sure it was a programming thing with NBC, and I get that. The day when the people running a sporting event dictated to the networks what time the event was going to start has been dirt-napping for a good long while now. It is, shall we say, way back in the day.

No, these days the network tail wags the sporting event dog, because the networks are the ones shoveling out the dough for the broadcast rights. You pays your money, you sets the rules.

And yet.

And yet, delaying the start until 2:30 meant the race didn't wrap until after 5:30 p.m., and it left no time for a red-flag restart after Spencer Pigot opened an auto-and-safety-parts store with five laps to run. IndyCar doesn't go in for those sorts of manufactured finishes anyway, but cleaning up Pigot's mess -- especially repairing the pit wall attenuator he atomized-- would have taken a good hour or more.

That puts the finish at 7 p.m. or after and then you're getting into evening programming, and no way was NBC going to stick with the race that long. Likely the big network would have bailed and shuffled the finish to one of its subsidiary entities. And that would not have gone over well with those tuning in, either.

Bottom line: Drop the flag at noon or slightly after, and you buy yourself more time in case what happened at the end happens. And maybe the 500 gets the ending it deserves in a year that desperately needed it.

 Not like you had to wait for the fans to arrive, after all.

Leavin' 'em flat

And now we have the answer to the question we've all been asking, the question that has been on the lips of every reasonably sentient being for, oh, eight months or so now: "Does 2020 have to ruin EVERYTHING?"

Why, yes. Yes it does.

And so to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway yesterday, five laps to run, late afternoon shadows pooling deep along the main straightaway. Takuma Sato in front; Scott Dixon, who owned this thing for virtually the entirety of the day, trying desperately to muster one last run at him. And then ...

And then the back end steps out on Spencer Pigot in the middle of turn four, and he slaps the outside wall and pinwheels back across the track to score a direct hit on the attenuator at the end of the pit wall.

The attenuator disintegrates as if a bomb hit it. Pigot's car, too, scattering debris across the entire width of the frontstretch. Out comes the yellow.

And out it stays, as Sato putters under the checkers and Dixon, deprived of his last shot, putters across the yard of brick behind him -- all the while wondering loudly on his radio why the hell they didn't red-flag the race and give the Indianapolis 500 the finish an Indianapolis 500 deserved.

And 2020?

Well, you know what it was doing. Chortling away somewhere in the eternal, having 2020-ed everything up once more.

Bad enough it threw a pandemic at us that pushed the 500 to the unnatural confines of late August and forced race officials to run it in front of empty grandstands. Oh, no. 2020 had to 2020 it to the very end, depriving Dixon of one last chance to win a race he'd led for 111 laps, and Sato the joy of  legitimate run beneath the checkers.

So unfair both to Dixon and Sato in that regard, but especially so to Sato. You win the Indianapolis 500, you should do it by holding off a five-time series champion beneath the full-throated bellow of the usual Indy Mass O' Humanity. But to do it under yellow, before all that yawning emptiness ...

Yeah, it's still the 500. Yeah, it was still the second 500 victory for a driver who perhaps has never gotten his due outside his Japanese homeland. But what a lack of proper tribute.

And here you can ask, and should ask, what Scott Dixon was asking as the yellow fluttered and everyone puttered around this ancient place: Why no red flag?

For the answer, you have to go back to that pit entrance attenuator, which Pigot shredded. Race officials say it would have taken too long to repair it. And to be sure, you can reasonably figure the race would have been stopped for a good hour or hour-and-a-half, maybe longer.

But there would have been plenty of light left to finish five laps at speed. And Dixon would have gotten his shot on the restart. And if there was a broadcast window issue ... come on. You're not gonna push back other programming to air the end of the Indianapolis 500?

Look. I understand the issues. I understand Pigot left a hell of a mess to clean up. I understand IndyCar doesn't do red flags to set up artificial finishes. I also understand Dixon probably wasn't going to get it done anyway; tires go away fast at Indy, he'd been out there on his awhile, and Sato actually was running faster than Dixon when Pigot did his deal.

But finishing under caution at Iowa or Kentucky or Texas is one thing. Doing it in the 500 is entirely another.

And, yeah, sure, it wasn't like it was the first time it's happened. It's happened, in fact, 16 times since 1940. Yesterday was the third time it's finished under caution in the last nine years.

But it felt different this time, somehow. Likely that was because this 500 already had been cheated of so much, and already was strange in a way no 500 had ever been on 104 runnings. So the whole business felt even more flat than it would have anyway, and you felt bad for Sato and Dixon and the whole lot of them.

You can blame race officials or Spencer Pigot or whomever you want for that. Me, I just blame 2020.

You suck, 2020. You really, really suck.

And the winner is ...

 I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's yet another chance for me to throw in a plea for all good Blobophiles to subscribe to the JG, on account of local journalism is a vital public service and we'll never know how much we miss something until it's gone.Here's the link. Sign up today.

History is yelling at me, from up there in the nosebleeds. It has a voice like an air-raid siren and it's laughing and hooting and calling me a softhearted sap with a head to match.

That's because it knows what I want to do.

What I want to do, what all of America wants to do, is pick Marco Andretti to win the Indianapolis 500 today.

He's the first Andretti to sit on the pole for the 500 since his granddad, the great Mario, did it 33 years ago, and he almost always runs well here. He's finished in the top ten eight times in 15 starts, and at some point during the day, no matter where he starts, he almost always clambers into the mix up front.

So he's got that going for him.

"Ha!" history responds.

Then it says the guy starting from the pole in the Greatest Spectacle In Racing has little more than a one-in-five chance to finish the day pouring milk over his head in Victory Lane. It says only three times in 104 runnings has the pole winner won the 500 in consecutive years -- and because Simon Pagenaud won from the pole last year, Marco Andretti therefore has a 2.8 percent chance of winning this afternoon.

Two point eight percent. And that's not even getting into the family history, which of course tells us there's nothing Indy enjoys more than slapping around an Andretti.

More numbers: Across three generations, an Andretti has raced in the 500 a total of 72 times. An Andretti has won it ... once.

Grandpa Mario. 1969. And then the so-called Curse and everyone knows that story.

It bit Michael in '92 when he led 160 of the first 188 laps and had a 30-second lead until his fuel pump let go with 11 laps to run. And it bit Marco in his very first start, when he was 200 or so yards  from the checkers and then Sam Hornish Jr. came from next door to nowhere to snatch it away.

So there are all sorts of reasons, concrete and less so, not to pick Marco to win. The smart money goes elsewhere today.

Mostly it goes to the man sitting next to him in the front row, Scott Dixon, who's dominated all season and won the Indy Grand Prix in a walk on the infield road course July 4 weekend. The most dominant IndyCar driver of his generation, he hasn't won the 500 in a dozen years. Logic says he's too good not to win it again.

It's why I keep picking him periodically, and am always wrong when I do. This year I won't, which of course means you should put every dime you have on him.

I don't care. I still won't pick him -- and I won't pick Ryan Hunter-Reay or Alexander Rossi, two former winners who also start in the first three rows and who also seem likely to win again at some point. I won't go rogue and pick Rinus VeeKay, the 19-year-old Dutch wunderkind who starts his first 500 on the inside of Row 2, or Alex Palou, the 23-year-old Spaniard who starts his first on the inside of Row 3.

I won't pick Graham Rahal, even though I'd like to because Graham Rahal is a cool guy. And I won't pick Helio or Josef Newgarden or Will Power or James Hinchcliffe -- even though Hinch has an Andretti Autosport horse under him this time, and Indy owes him big for nearly killing him a few years back.

No, no and no. And no Colton Herta, Felix Roseqvist or Marcus Ericsson, either.

This time, this year, I go with the flow, and against history. This year I pick who I really want to pick, and who America wants to pick.

This year I pick the Andretti.

Go ahead and laugh, history. Go ahead and laugh.

Non-revelation for today

Well. So now we know, as if we didn't already.

Three schools in the ACC -- Notre Dame, North Carolina and North Carolina State -- have sent their student bodies home and will revert to remote classes because college kids will be college kids and a whole bunch of  'em have already showed red for the Bastard Plague.

The student bodies, however, do not include the football players, who remain on campus to prepare for the upcoming season.

At least one of the three coaches involved has intimated the students leaving is actually a good thing, because it enables the football team to operate in (and here's your operative word) a "bubble."

So essentially they're admitting what's long been obvious about football at Power Five schools. which is it's entirely disassociated from the universities it purports to represent. It operates in a de facto bubble that operates by its own parameters, its own prerogatives and its own mission, which is wholly separate from the mission of the university.

The "bubble" is just actual now instead of conceptual.

Or as a friend of a friend put it most succinctly the other day: Power Five universities are just side hustles for the football and basketball programs.

Yup.

View from the bottom

... in which the Blob again brings up his Cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates* (* -- a registered trademark), just to warn all y'all.

("Thanks! I'm outta here!" you're saying)

Anyway, these are strange times in baseball, and not just because the St. Louis Cardinals are all driving to away games in separate cars because half of them are toxic. They're strange times because of who my Cruddy Pirates find themselves bunking with these days.

Sure, no one's surprised that my Cruds are the worst team in the National League by, like, five games as of this morning. They're now 4-15 and nine-and-a-half games behind the first-place Cubs in the NL Central, which is pretty impressive considering the season is barely 20 games old.

But you know who's right down there with them in Dumpsterville?

That's right, America. The lordly Boston Red Sox, one of the richest kids on the MLB block.

The Red Sox are 6-18 right now, 3-10 in Fenway, and they're dead last in the American League. Even the horrific Baltimore Orioles are 6 1/2 games ahead of them. They've played 24 games and they're already 10 1/2 games behind the frontrunning Yankees in the AL East.

So welcome aboard, Scarlet Hose. No, there's no room service here. No mini-bar, either. And my Cruddy Pirates snore like the field of 33 coming to the green at Indianapolis.

What's that you say? Can you get an extra pillow, then?

No you cannot. Where do you think you are, the Four Seasons?

Your moment of foreboding, Day 2

Aaaaand ... now it's Notre Dame shutting it down and sending everyone home.

Or: College Kids Doing What They Do, take two.

All points made yesterday about college football players and their role in academia, rinse and repeat.

Your moment of foreboding

And, yeah, I hear you: Here he goes again, HATING SPORTS.

Well, fine. If you think a former sportswriter who made his living covering sports did it because he hates sports and not because, you know, he actually loves sports, maybe ...

Well. Vaya con dios. May your illogic sustain you.

Because, listen, it's a downer being Davey Downer all the time. It's no fun being That Guy, the one who's always calling timeout on magical thinking and pointing out that unicorns are not real. I'd much rather believe college football is going to happen this fall -- that the season will go off strangely but without a hitch, and that the SEC and ACC are gonna pull this off and make the Big Ten and Pac-12 look like a bunch of trembling fainthearts.

If that happens, I'll be leading the cheers. I will.

However ...

("Oh, here he goes with the 'however,'" you all just said)

However ... did you see what happened at the University of North Carolina this week?

Students have barely been back on campus a week and already UNC administrators are shutting everything down and going to remote learning again. That's because 177 students already are in isolation and 349 in quarantine, in a week. And that's because, well, they're college kids.

They're gonna do what they do, restrictions or no restrictions. And that includes -- to a lesser extent, perhaps -- college football players.

You can keep 'em in a bubble, until you can't. Sooner or later they're gonna have to go to class, if for no other reason than to maintain the fiction they're actually part of the university they represent. If you're gonna call them "student-athletes", then you've got to have them at least act the student part.

And that's where the wicket gets sticky. Because what happens when more North Carolinas happen, as it's damn near inevitable they will?

I don't know how this all works, because we're in undiscovered country here, obviously. But if your school won't allow the student body on campus, does that mean the football players, too?  Or do they do everything remotely but football?

Because if that's the case, you're admitting what everyone already knows: College football players are there to play football, period. The rules that apply to actual students don't apply to them. They are a wholly separate entity governed by a wholly separate set of prerogatives within the university framework.

I'm not saying this is bad, understand. College football at the Power 5 level has been Alabama Football Inc. and Ohio State Football Inc. for a long time now. It's a profitable business. It's terrific entertainment. It's just not what it's been sold to us as being.

Allowing college football to continue without the college part, or least the college part's essence, just confirms all of that. And what are merely rumbles now of a nascent players' collective will become more than just rumbles as a result.

If you're gonna treat 'em like a workforce, they're gonna act like a workforce. And they'll want some concessions if the university is going to expose them to a virulent pathogen in a way it won't expose its non-revenue-producing student body.

In any event, this is Rubicon moment for the sport. The façade will be gone, and there'll be no rebuilding it. The only alternative is to decree college football can't happen without the physical presence of what makes the college, the college: The students.

And that means more North Carolinas. Which means football players winding up in quarantine, too, unless you give up the charade entirely and seal them off from the rest of the campus. If not ...

Well. You know. It's not like I have to say it.

Or want to.

A family crests

So here's what I was thinking, as Marco Andretti dropped the hammer on that beast of a final lap: Thirty-three years are a long time.

And here's what I was also thinking: But so are 14.

Because, listen, if you're gonna tell the unabridged story of the Andrettis at their very own Snakebite Palace, you can't just go back to 1969 or '92 or, yes, '87. You gotta go back to 2006, too.

You gotta go back to when Marco, Michael's son and Mario's grandson, had the Indianapolis 500 in his pocket as a 19-year-old kid, and then the Snakebite Palace bit him as hard as it ever bit dad or granddad. Sam Hornish Jr. caught him a handful of yards from the yard of brick when he couldn't possibly have caught him, and that was the Andrettis at Indy in a nutshell. What the hell else could happen?

Well ... Sunday happened.

Sunday the numbers weren't there for Andretti Autosport the way they'd been all week, and here it came again, Snakebite Palace chomping down hard. Scott Dixon was on the pole when Marco rolled away as the last guy who could catch him, and Dixon was still on the pole by a fingernail as Marco came to the white flag.

The kid-who's-no-longer-a-kid needed an absolutely flawless lap in a devilish wind to catch him. He needed a Mario lap, or maybe a Michael lap.

Damned if he didn't give us one.

There is no greater pressure at Indianapolis than qualifying, and no greater pressure within that to need a perfect final lap to beat someone out. The last lap is usually a taper in a typical qualifying run. It's a a hang-on lap, a maintain lap.

Marco needed it to be a haul-ass lap. And he delivered.

You'll not see a better one at Indy for a goodly stretch, and that's without all the subtext that attended it. Everyone said it was a defining moment in a mostly bleak career, and maybe it was. Maybe at 33 winning the pole for the Indy 500 is the start of Marco Andretti's own legacy, and no one would want to see anything else. The Andrettis are motorsports royalty, and we've got a soft spot for royals despite the hard time we gave them back in 1776.

So an Andretti on the pole for the first time since Mario sat there in 1987 is a big moment, and maybe some comfort food for the soul in this bizarre funhouse-mirror year. The world has gone entirely off its meds in 2020, which is why we were watching Marco do what he did in front of ghosts and echoes in August instead of live humans in May. So it was weird, yesterday was -- but, hey, check it out: An Andretti's on the pole.

And because an Andretti is, you can't help thinking dark thoughts. You can't help thinking this is Indy, the old Snakebite Palace, and so maybe this is just a come-on. Maybe it's just, a setup for yet another kick in the jewels from a place that is as sublimely cruel as it is sublimely wonderful.

Thirty-three years ago, for instance?

Mario won the pole. Mario led 170 of the first 177 laps. And then ...

And then his engine gave it up with 23 laps to run.  And it was just another DNF, just another hobnail boot to the tender bits.

You hope that's not what awaits Marco next Sunday. You hope Indy leaves an Andretti the hell alone for once.

Because yesterday was too magnificent. And, dammit, 2020 needs some magnificence.

The tyranny of the now

Look, I get it. Or at least I think I do.

Some folks just can't wait.

They want what they want now, because they've worked hard for it or no one's adequately explained why they can't have it or What About The Children. And those are all legitimate reasons.

So I understand why parents at Iowa, Ohio State and Penn State are all up in arms about the Big Ten's decision not to play football (or any other fall sports) in the middle of a pandemic. Common sense should tell you that's just a common sense decision, but common sense tends to get crowded out of the team picture when emotions get involved.

This is not to say the parents don't have a point. They do. The Big Ten's decision was arbitrary. It did not adequately explain itself. And it did not adequately let those most affected by the decision -- the players -- in on the process.

But. But.

But the players are always going to want to play. They're always going to be wholly focused on the short term at the expense of the long term. So of course they think it's going to be perfectly OK to go kiting around half the country to breathe for three-plus hours on other kids three or four states away.

Yes, their protocols are working now, with no one else on campus. But what happens when 40,000 other kids show up who aren't observing those protocols? How long before half your team is in quarantine because they, you know, went to class the way they're supposed to? How long before the season becomes a mere parody of a season, and the conference is compelled to shut it down anyway?

Because that's what's going to happen, you know. The Big Ten parents can point to the SEC and the ACC and say "See, they're playing," but what are they going to say in October when it falls apart?

And it will. It will because the Bastard Plague isn't going anywhere. It doesn't care about college football, and it doesn't care how badly your son wants to play.

And all this attendant chatter now that Iowa and  Nebraska might jump ship and go to the Big 12, or Ohio State might join the ACC?

It's just that, chatter. Because it's August 16 and the start of the season, if there is one, is less than three weeks away, and you can't just join another conference in that short a time. Schedules, presumably, are already set.  So even if Nebraska or Iowa or Ohio State wanted to play this fall, who would they play?

And if these other conferences could just throw something together for this fall to accommodate them, where would that leave them after this fall? What if the Big 12 or ACC or SEC decided expansion wasn't feasible at the moment? Where would a Nebraska or Iowa or Ohio State go then?

Because it's pretty damn certain the Big Ten wouldn't take them back. Not without plenty of heavy lifting to rebuild all the bridges they'd burned.

But, again, people want what they want, and they want it now. And so they're not thinking that college football isn't going away for good just because it won't happen this fall.

Maybe they play in the spring. Maybe they don't play until next fall. But they're going to play.

Patience. It's just not a thing in this crazy world anymore, apparently.

A brief flash of the normal

And then, Friday came.

The Cardinals were all traveling to Chicago in separate cars because the Bastard Plague had taken over their team.

The NBA, secure in its bubble, was getting ready for the playoffs, midway through August.

The NHL Stanley Cup playoffs, same deal.

America had become a carnival funhouse ruled by a mad king openly violating his Constitutional oath to openly rig an election in his favor.

And then ... Friday came.

And suddenly down in Indianapolis you could hear the angry whine of steroidal engines again, starting as a muttering rumor way up there in turn four and then building to a full-on howl down that long famous straightaway. And as the sun went down, all across the state, high school football players were lugging leather into the crush and fleeing down sidelines and generally gettin' after it.

It was a mid-August Friday night in Indiana, and you could almost imagine it was a normal mid-August Friday night.  It was a mid-August Friday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and you could almost imagine it was May and normal, too, and that all was right with this crazy world.

You heard the usual chatter coming out of Indy, and everything was regular, suddenly. People were jawing about boost and tows and Marco Andretti's 233.491 lap, and what a nerve-jangling thing qualifying is. And it could have been Tom Sneva busting 200 in 1977 or little Teo Fabi in 1983, or Arie Luyendyk's 236-plus record run in 1996.

And on those football fields?

The lights were up. Coaches were hollering. Watching a video clip, you could see a play coming toward you and almost hear the thud-thud-thud of all those pounding feet -- the rumble and stomp of teenage boys in buffalo pursuit of the football, a sound unique to Friday nights everywhere in August/September/October.

Regular. Yeah. That's what it almost was.

It's not, of course. The leadfoots tearing around Indy put up all those 230s in a vacuum, in front of no witnesses but their crews and fellow drivers. Those teenagers pounding after the football in all those scrimmages did so in a vacuum, too; there were no fans, and even the newsfolk allowed in to chronicle it were confined to a corner of the field, well away from the players and coaches.

And yet. And ... yet.

For a moment, you could pretend it wasn't 2020. You could pretend there was no Bastard Plague, no masks or social distancing, no mad king taking advantage of it all to do his damnedest to dismantle American democracy.

 It was just a moment. But it was glorious.

Couldas and shouldas

And now they're all saying this: America needs college football.

Coaches are saying it and players are saying it and Congress critters are saying it, and even Our Only Available President and his store mannequin Vice-President are saying it. Apparently Ohio State-Michigan is as vital to the national interest as food, water and shelter from the storm. Who knew.

But now the Big Ten and the Pac-12 are pushing football to next spring, which may or may not just be kicking a particularly disagreeable can down the road. And people are acting as if some inalienable constitutional right has been, well, alienable-d.

Again, who knew.

What I know is this: No college football this fall, at least in this part of the country, sucks pond water. I hate it. We all hate it. No argument there.

But America will not crumble to dust because we don't get it. None of us will die a grisly death if we don't get our three-plus hours of college kids breathing on each other in the middle of a pandemic for the greater glory of their athletic departments' apparel deals.

Those athletic departments are going to be hurtin' puppies because that won't happen this fall. But maybe if they stopped paying even their assistant football coaches like NFL royalty they wouldn't be hurtin' quite so bad. It's a thought.

Alabama just handed offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian a new $2.5-million-a-year deal. Head coach Nick Saban, meanwhile,  has 13 special consultants on his payroll in addition to Sarkisian and the rest of his staff. And over at Clemson, head coach Dabo Swinney pulls down nine mill a year.

 All to coach college kids. College kids.

So there's that.

There's also this: If America needed college football so badly, it should have taken the Bastard Plague more seriously.

Our national leaders, such as they are, should have listened when they were warned about this as far back as the end of last year. Our Only Available Impeached President should have treated it as the public health crisis it was instead of trafficking in silly conspiracy theories and voodoo remedies, and practicing political spin.

Maybe if he'd taken it seriously, America would have. And we'd still have Big Ten football this fall. Instead, inspired by OOAIP's example, America spent the summer throwing massive sandbar hoedowns, caterwauling about wearing masks and staging armed takeovers of statehouses over the imagined tyranny of public health initiatives.

America needed college football?

Well. It should have acted like it did, then.

But we're halfway through August now and we're up to 164,000 dead and more than 5 million infected -- probably considerably more -- with no end in sight. And we're still acting like it's no big deal.

A quarter-million mask-less motorcycle enthusiasts cramming Sturgis, S.D., for ten days? Bringing 40,000 students back to campus, expecting them to be totally responsible and, you know, not act like college kids?

Sure. What could happen?

Besides no college football, that is. Darn the luck.

Not that luck has had anything to do with it.

The epicness of Stanley

Sure, OK, it's the middle of August. And there are no fans in the arenas. And there's only two arenas  anyway, one in Edmonton and one in Toronto.

These are not your father's Stanley Cup playoffs, in other words. They're not even yours, come to think of it.

But some truths remain truths, even if all else around them gets next-level weird. And the truth is, even as un-Stanley Cup playoffs as these are in the age of the Bastard Plague, they're still the best playoffs of any of 'em.

Case in point: Did you see what happened in Toronto last night?

The Tampa Bay Lightning and the Columbus Blue Jackets played hockey for more than six hours.

That's five overtimes to you and me, kids. Brayden Point finally ended it for Tampa Bay, 3-2, at the 150-minute, 27-second mark of gametime.

You know what else happened?

The guy who finally surrendered the winning goal, the Blue Jackets' Joonas Korpisalo, made 85 saves before it happened.

Eighty-five saves! Heck, his opposite number, Tampa Bay goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, only kicked out 61, the piker.

Imagine how hard Korpisalo will be to beat in the next round of Barstool Can You Top This.

JACK CRABB (from "Little Big Man"): I can break three bottles throwed in the air.

JOONAS KORPISALO: Oh, yeah? Well, I once made 85 saves in one game.

JACK CRABB: You win.

You get the picture.

You also get to say this, in your next round of Can You Top This: "Oh, yeah? Well, I once sat through a six-hour hockey game."

You'll win, too.

Brotherhood of convenience

They're all union men, now that the message lines up. The players wanted to play, so it's OK if they said so in a single voice. After all, the CEO coaches and administrators eager to forge ahead with their cash cow couldn't do so without the workforce.

Oops, sorry. I meant, "the student-athletes."

Across the country they pushed back hard, shoulder to shoulder, when it got around Monday that another couple of dominoes were teetering. When it got out that the Big Ten presidents supposedly voted 12-2 to pull the plug on football this fall (and before they did just that today) suddenly both the workforce -- sorry, "student-athletes" -- and the bosses were on the same side of the fence.

The players coalesced around a hashtag, #WeWantToPlay. The coaches hauled out statistics to bolster the absurd notion that their players would be safer from the Bastard Plague on a college campus than at home. Scott Frost, Nebraska's head coach, said the Cornhuskers would go ahead and play even if the Big Ten pulled the plug -- maybe rejoin the Big 12 for a year if the Big 12 itself didn't move off football in the fall.

How they could do this without Big Ten approval is a separate question, of course. As is how Jim Harbaugh or Nick Saban or Ryan Day could keep their workforce -- er, student-athletes -- safer than at home once their student-athletes weren't the only kids on campus.

Easy to keep things hermetically sealed when it's just you and your players. Not so easy with 40,000 or so actual college students barging around campus with you, sharing classrooms and hangouts and the parties that just sort of spring up out of nowhere on every college campus everywhere.

I suppose you could still keep your workf-, um, student-athletes, sequestered, if you were of a mind to. But that would blow the whole illusion, revealing once and for all that big-ticket college athletics really are an entity wholly separate from the universities they supposedly represent, and that the student-athletes really are just a workforce hired to do a job.

In any event, the workforce is acquiescent for now, so the bosses are down with solidarity. What's going to be interesting is what happens when these newly empowered student-athletes decide to start demanding answers the bosses aren't prepared to give -- like, I don't know, "What are you going to do if we start getting sick?"

Or, even more horrific: "You guys made x-billion dollars last year. Where's our cut?"

In some places they're already asking these questions, and the bosses have not been nearly as inclined to brotherhood. In fact, one player at Washington State essentially got fired for being part of the Pac-12 player coalition. That reaction likely will not be an outlier.

See, here's the thing. However many Power-5 conferences follow the Big Ten's lead and decide to defer football to next spring, the health and well-being of the student-athletes will not be the determining factor, and anyone with a lick of sense knows it. Money will be.

That's because as much money as big-top college athletics brings in every fall, the people who run it spend it like drunken sailors. Fiscal responsibility is an utterly foreign concept to these folks. Theirs is the worst-run bidness in the history of bidness.

And the players who generate all the revenue, these hashtag warriors, are starting to figure that out.

They're one with you on this one, Coach. But just wait.

Rushmored

So Our Only Available Impeached President apparently inquired of South Dakota's governor what it would take to get his mug on Mt. Rushmore, and I hope he was joking. I suspect he was -- though it's hard to tell sometimes with OOAIP, who has no sense of humor that doesn't involve juvenile putdowns of anyone who dares point out the invisibility of the emperor's clothes.

It's just as likely, therefore, that he wasn't joking, malignant narcissist that he is. The punchlines write themselves, if so.

Something involving God and lightning. Just a guess.

In any event, if Donny can shoulder his way onto the mountain with Teddy, Abe, George and Tom, it gets one wondering what comparable folks could wind up on various athletic Mt. Rushmores.

I have some thoughts:

BASEBALL: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and ... Willie Mays Hayes from "Major League." (First alternate: Tanner Boyle from "Bad News Bears.)

FOOTBALL: Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Jim Brown, Walter Payton and ... Uncle Rico from "Napoleon Dynamite." (First alternate: Billy Bob from "Varsity Blues.")

BASKETBALL: Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, LeBron James, Larry Bird and ... Salami from "The White Shadow." (First alternate: Ollie from "Hoosiers.")

HOCKEY: Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Mario Lemieux and ... Ogie Oglethorpe from "Slapshot." (First alternate: Bleep Eddie Shore, also from "Slapshot.")

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "None of your additions is a real athlete. They just play one on TV."

Well ... yeah.

But remember who we're spoofing.

The fall of fall, continued

And now we come to the weird part, to once more paraphrase Seth Maxwell in "North Dallas Forty."

Now we look ahead to autumn, and we can see what more and more seems unlikely to await us.  James Street will not be leading Texas back against Sooey Pig Arkansas in that creaky old stadium in Fayetteville. Johnny Rodgers will not be twisting and turning and breaking free for the Cornhuskers in the big showdown with Greg Pruitt, Jack Mildren and Oklahoma.

There will be no Indiana and Purdue fighting over a battered bucket, no Bo and Woody running it off-tackle 562 times in one afternoon, no Lindsey Nelson moving ahead to further action in the third quarter because Pittsburgh failed to move the ball and punted to Notre Dame.

I cannot fathom an autumn Saturday afternoon without all that. But the dominoes are tipping now, softly, and you can see where this is going, just as surely as we saw it in the early days of March.

That's when the Ivy League canceled its conference basketball tournament in advance of the Bastard Plague, just as it did its football season a few weeks back. And, just as in March, everyone thought the Ivies were being a tad dramatic, instead of  being what they really were.

Which was ahead of the curve.

Because now UConn has pulled the plug on its football season and the Missouri Valley Conference has and, yesterday, the Mid-American Conference, the first FBS conference to do so. Everyone's moving to the spring, and pretty soon the Power 5s will also. It's just a matter of time now.

College football will happen again, but it will happen in an alien landscape. Like so much else in these shaken-and-stirred times, it will feel weird and out-of-place, as if someone had set the table for a formal dinner with Chinet and red Solo cups.

That's because, like so many other sports, college football and the fall are a perfect weld, inextricably soldered together in all the senses. The former is as much a part of the latter as shortening days and lengthening nights and September heat slowly relaxing its grip as October comes on, and winter becomes a reality you can see just a ways off.

I hate this, as an old sportswriter. I take no pleasure in seeing what I suspected would happen start to happen, no matter what fools like Danny Kanell tweet about sportswriters taking satisfaction in being able to say "I told you so."

No sportswriter I know wants to see a fall without football, whether or not he or she saw it coming.  That's absurd. But then Kanell has never been the sharpest tool in the shed, so I suppose allowances must be made.

No, those of us who spent our Saturday afternoons watching fall come on and Lou's Notre Dame legions take on the University of Navy are going to feel an emptiness that can't be filled, if what seems to be happening happens. Tumbleweeds will blow through our Saturday afternoons, and the only sound will be the banging of shutters in vacant windows.

Perhaps that's a tad dramatic, too. So maybe I'll just tell you what's in my mind's eye right now, as I watch the dominoes start to tumble.

What I see is an October afternoon in Ross-Ade Stadium, Purdue taking on someone. It doesn't really matter who, or what October afternoon. They all look the same to me, whether it's Drew Brees or Jim Everett or Kyle Orton down there throwing the football, and Illinois or Iowa or Ohio State trying to stop them.

You can see all that from the old Robert Woodworth pressbox, and more besides. If you lift your eyes, you can see a vast expanse of trees stretching out beyond the far side of the stadium and the dome of Mackey Arena. They are every color October offers: Reds and yellows and oranges and russet browns, the perfect backdrop to what's happening down on the field.

That's college football to me. They can move it to spring -- the prudent move -- but that backdrop won't be there. And something will go out of it all because of that.

This makes me a sentimental coot, I suppose. But then, Chris Schenkel never rhapsodized about those beautiful Saturday afternoons in the spring.

Only in the fall.

Plague math

So another St. Louis Cardinal has showed red for the Bastard Plague, and their weekend series with the Cubs has been scrubbed. This summons an interesting mathematics exercise, so pick up your Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils, children.

Problem: After Sunday, there will be 49 days left in this pandemic-truncated, fun-size baseball season. The Cardinals will still have 55 games left on their schedule. What does this mean?

A. The Cardinals must play six more games than there are days left in the season.

B. The Cardinals must play a game every day for the next 49 days, including six doubleheaders.

C. By the time the 49 days are over, the Cardinals pitching staff will be down to the clubhouse guy, two batboys and one lucky fan in Section 16, Row D, Seat 11.

D. Also the rotted corpse of Old Hoss Radbourn, who in 1884 started 75 games, winning 59, and took the mound on 25 of the last 50 days of the season. And who no doubt would say "55 games in 49 days? NO PROBLEM, you buncha nancy boys."

The correct answer?

"E," for "All of the above." Also "F," for "This is insane, why are they still trying to do this?"

Class dismissed.

Today's cautionary tale

So, did you hear the one about the social gathering that resulted in 29 University of Louisville athletes showing red for the Bastard Plague, and which got four sports temporarily shut down?

I'd be miffed, too, if I were Lullville's athletic director, who vented his ire by kicking three soccer players out of the program. One of those three later said, gosh, they never intended for the aforementioned social gathering to turn into a gigantic party. It just kind of did.

You can read about it here.

But, hey. You know what?

It's not as if  this is likely to happen anywhere else this fall. Because, gosh, a handful of college athletes getting together to drink a few beers hardly ever turns into a gigantic party. I mean, really, where have you ever heard of that happening?

Aside from pretty much everywhere, that is.

The thinning etc., etc.

Well, now. That didn't take long.

A day after a USA Today report alleging Texas Tech women's basketball coach Marlene Stollings was, essentially, a nutjob presiding over a reign of terror, Texas Tech showed her the road. Athletic director Kirby Hocutt announced the firing in one sentence and said he would have more to say today.

And once again I'll say it: Organized labor is having a hell of a week in big-top college athletics.

Stollings, of course, was apparently Exhibit A for mismanaging the workforce, and finally the workforce rebelled. A dozen players had left the program since she was named head coach in 2018, seven of them players Stollings recruited. And season-ending exit interviews indicated the ones who left weren't the only ones fed up with Coach's alleged abuse and general battiness.

Texas Tech so swiftly moving on all this is yet more evidence that the hired hands now command a growing clout in a landscape where they've traditionally had almost none.  And now you've got Pac-12 athletes and Big Ten athletes banding together to demand answers to a fairly basic question -- Why should we put our health on the line in the midst of a pandemic, and what are you going to do about it? -- and some athletes are already opting out of the fall season, having not heard what they needed to hear.

That includes standout Purdue receiver Rondale Moore, who's decided his time this fall would be best served preparing for the 2021 NFL draft. Because clearly he and others realize there's no way the 2020 college football season will happen anyway, at least in its entirety.

The revolution continues apace.

The thinning veneer, Part Deux

They don't want us using the term, because that would end the Kabuki show once and for all. But the Blob has never been much for following rules when the rules are so clearly self-serving.

So I'll say it: Organized labor is having a hell of a week in big-top college athletics.

The student-athlete coalition in the Pac-12 is stronger than ever, it seems, and now 1,000 Big Ten athletes have joined in. It's nothing less than a blossoming labor movement, just as surely as the ghosts of Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood and John L. Lewis still walk among us. And it's the inevitable result of decades of running college athletics like a bidness while pretending it's all part of the academic mission.

Well, that veneer is gone now, scrubbed away by the tidal wave of cash generated by all those "student-athletes." And now the "student-athletes" want some accountability for their labor.

So the Pac-12 union is demanding answers and the Big Ten union is demanding answers, and down in Lubbock, Texas, other "student-athletes" are demanding answers, too. They want to know when that university is going to do something about Texas Tech women's basketball coach Marlene Stollings, whom a whole pile of parents, former players and assistants claim is basically crazier than a s***house rat.

In a USA Today report that cites interviews with 10 players, two former assistant coaches and two parents, as well as exit interviews from departing players, Stollings is accused of fostering a "toxic environment" since taking the Texas Tech job in 2018. Among her more batty tactics, her accusers allege, is making players wear heart monitors to determine playing time. Those who maintained a heart rate of at least 90 percent capacity play; those who don't ride pine.

Stollings says, in so many words, that she's simply trying to change the program's culture, and that it's working. The team went from seven wins to 14 in her first season, and to 18 in her second.

Along the way, however, a dozen players left the program. You can say, and some will, that they're just a bunch of whiners who couldn't abide "discipline." Of course, it's even more possible they're simply saner than those who've stayed.

All depends on your perspective.

In any case, the days are over when coaches and the administrations who enabled them could do whatever they want to their "student-athletes" in the interests of revenue. The "student-athletes," it seems, are done taking it.

Now they're dishing it out.

The eloquence of the shrug

The Anthem/Flag/Troops Police, they'll be all over the man now. Also the Shut Up And Dribble contingent. Also the Ungrateful Spoiled Athlete crowd. Also the Society of All He Does Is Throw A Ball Through A Hoop, What Does He Know About Anything?

LeBron James knew all that as soon as he answered the question. He answered it anyway -- and in a way guaranteed to infuriate all of the aforementioned like nothing else.

After all, no one likes to be shrugged at. It's kind of the ultimate insult.

And LeBron did it to Our Only Available Impeached President.

Someone asked him what he thought of OOAIP saying he'd turn off the NBA if the players, coaches and officials kept up with the anthem kneeling, and LeBron ... shrugged. Said he was fine with it.  Said the NBA had plenty of fans without the guy who used to be the Leader of the Free World before Donald J. "Cognitive Ace" Trump landed in the White House.

Now he's just the dotty old uncle at whom LeBron James and pretty much everyone else in the free world shrugs. Or is appalled or embarrassed by. Only the Kool-Aid drinkers take him seriously anymore.

They're out in force now on social media, bashing LeBron with the usual slanders. It seems you can be a filthy rich B-list reality show star whose stunning ignorance about virtually everything is on display every day, and some people will still take you seriously because you happened to fall into the presidency. But if you're a filthy rich athlete who actually worked for what he or she got, it somehow disqualifies you from being a serious individual with serious thoughts on the state of the nation.

What a world.

Indy in a vacuum

I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's yet another chance for me to throw in a plea for all good Blobophiles to subscribe to the JG, on account of local journalism is a vital public service and we'll never know how much we miss something until it's gone.
Here's the link. Sign up today.

So now I am back to race morning again, in the place where my memories live.

Down in the pits, the shadows still pool deep. Across that famous ribbon of asphalt, the morning sun paints the massive grandstands gold. And in those grandstands?

People. Masses and masses of  people, more people than you ever see or could ever count in one place anywhere, all of them talking at once and sending down a sound like the rumble of a train or storm-riled surf or the mutter of thunder a long way off.

There is no sound quite like it. There is no morning quite like it. And there will be no morning like it on  August 23.

That's when the Indianapolis 500 goes off in this pandemic-ravaged year, except it will not really be the 500. The Speedway announced today the race will be run without fans after all, despite the elaborate plans otherwise, despite what Roger Penske said back in June.

What he said was there would be no 500 without fans, because the 500 without fans would not be the 500. It would just be 33 maniacs driving really fast in a circle for three hours, trying to stay alive and maybe pour a bottle of milk on their head at the end.

Penske was absolutely right then. And he and the rest of the Speedway honchos are absolutely right now.

They are right because the plan to put close to 90,000 fans in the place, as sprawling an open prairie as it is, looked more like the Titanic bearing down on the iceberg with every passing day. Covid-19 was not going away, it seemed. In fact its spread was accelerating with every sandbar hoedown and mindless act of who-cares that thundered down the pike.

And so Covid-19, which in turn doesn't care, either, kept right on keepin' on. And Indiana's numbers crept into the top nine nationally. And finally IU Health, the largest healthcare provider in the state, piped up and said putting 90,000 humans in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Indianapolis 500 probably was not a good idea.

The Speedway initially poohed-poohed that.

Tuesday it didn't.

Likely much of that had to do with the fact IU Health also is a major sponsor for the race, the bidness of professional sports being what it is.

And now I am back to race morning again. And I'm looking at a photo that hangs above the closet here in my den, a photo I have written about before on occasion.

It's a moment in time from some May afternoon in the late 1940s, not long after the war ended. Beneath a benevolent sky dotted with puffy white clouds, men in topcoats and fedoras walk toward a gate with a sign that reads "Indianapolis Motor Speedway Home of the 500 Mile Race."

To the right of the gate, two more men stand with their hands in their pockets, talking. Off to the left, a man on a motorcycle holds a spray of balloons. Two more vendors stand in the center foreground.

I can hear them calling out, as I look at that photo. And now I'm looking at it and trying to imagine it without those vendors, without the men in their topcoats and fedoras, without any human beings in the scene at all.

I can't do it.

And I'd hate it if I could.

And I'm going to hate it when I actually turn on the TV on August 23 and see all those grandstands stretching to the left and the right as far as the eye can see, filled with nothing but ghosts and echoes.

But you know what?

It can't be helped. Like so much else this strange dark summer, it just can't be helped.

The thinning veneer

Life gets headache-y in the executive wing when the workforce won't tote that barge. That's as sure a thing as rain on parades and coming up a penny short of exact change.

And so the other day a football coach named Nick Rolovich cashiered a wide receiver named Kassidy Woods out in Pullman, Wash., and not because the kid cheated on an exam or plagiarized a paper or anything else so trivial to the success of a corporate college football program. No, sir.

He told the kid to clean out his locker because, basically, he wasn't sufficiently grateful enough to Rolovich and Washington State University for the wonderful opportunity they were giving him to make money for them.

As detailed here by Chris Baud of Deadspin, it seems Woods was part of a coalition of Pac-12 athletes who announced in The Players' Tribune they would opt out of playing if the conference couldn't guarantee their safety in the midst of our current pandemic.

Woods went to Rolovich and said he was opting out of football this fall because he didn't think it was worth the risk to his health. Rolovich said that was fine, but then asked if he was part of the coalition.

When Woods said yes, Rolovich told him to clean out his locker.

History tells us how the rest of this could very well go. The football team will rally behind Woods, because that's what teammates are taught to do. Rolovich will thus have at worst a revolt on his hands, and at best a whole lot of grumpy players who might not be as disposed to toting the barge as usual.

The irony of this, if happens, will be that Rolovich told Woods he was being shown the road because Coach didn't want any "mixed messages" for his football team. He'll be right -- but probably not in the way he envisioned.

No, the message will be clear and unambiguous, and it's this: You are not here to run the show. We run the show. You can opt out if you feel at risk, but you'd better not do it in a single voice. Because you're here to do a job and you get a free education and the best of all our resources to do it, so get back in line.

Where this gets thorny is no one running the show can admit their "student-athletes" are there to do a job, even though they are. That would mean they're a workforce, and workforce rules would have to be applied. And that's the last thing the people running the show want, because they've got entirely too cushy a deal going and they don't want anything to jeopardize it.

But when the workforce starts acting like a workforce regardless ... well, the veneer sloughs right off, doesn't it? The bare wood shows through: If the workforce walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck.

Or a Washington State Cougar. Or a UCLA Bruin. Or a Washington Husky, an Arizona State Sun Devil, an Oregon ... Duck.

Touching base

So now we're a week into the Bastard Plague Mini Baseball Season, and it's time to check in with my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates to see just how delightful a start they've had.

("No, no, no! Not the Pirates thing again!" you're saying)

Yes, yes, yes. My Blob, my rules, remember?

Anyway ... we're a week into the Mini Baseball Season, and already my Pirates are living down to expectations. Today's standings reveal they're 2-7 and in last place in the entire National League, and already five games out of first in the NL Central.

Of course, there's always hope.

For instance, let's recap the first week of the Mini Season:

1. Half the Marlins showed red for the Plague three games in and now their season is suspended.

2. A bunch of the Cardinals showed red and now their season is on hold.

3. Thirty-three games have already been postponed because of positive tests, they're playing seven-inning doubleheaders to try to catch up, and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has warned the players' union if it doesn't get a handle on protocol efforts, the season could be shut down.

The season could be shut down!

See. Told you there was hope.

Meanwhile, in the NFL ...

It is a burden, seeing all this bleak around you. Reality sucks eggs sometimes -- especially when so many people wish you'd just go away already with your icky reality.

So let's start this look at the Nash-unal FOOT-ball League by saying not every player has taken a peek at this season and said "uh-uh."

Most of the hired hands in the Kingdom of Roger Goodell are still committed to playing,  even as the Hall of Fame game goes away and the preseason largely goes away and baseball, upon whose bubble-less model the NFL is building, unravels before our eyes. The season will go on, by God, because this is the NFL. No stinking killer virus would dare mess with it.

Well ... maybe.

But like the college football players who are questioning the wisdom of their elders, some of the Shield's hired hands have decided the game isn't worth the candle. They're opting out of the season. And even if it's just a relative handful so far, their absence will impact the outcome of the season.

Start with the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. Sure, Patrick Mahomes is still around, but he won't be handing the ball off to his leading rusher and one of the stars of the Chiefs' Super Bowl victory (Damian Williams). He'll also be without one of his starting guards (Laurent Duvernay Tardif).

The New England Patriots, meanwhile, will soldier on without a starting safety (Patrick Chung), their starting right tackle (Marcus Cannon), a starting inside linebacker (Dont'a Hightower) and one their key running backs and kick returners (Brandon Bolden).

Nate Solder will not be around to anchor the offensive line for the New York Giants. The Ravens will be without their lead returner, De'Anthony Thomas. The Bears' defense will be minus Eddie Goldman, expected to be a key component; the Broncos' D will be without Kyle Peko, starting nose tackle.

Michael Pierce, meanwhile, would have been the starting nose tackle for the Vikings. But, like all the others, he's opting out of the season.

All of them, and more, are doing so for a variety of reasons. Some have small children. Some have wives who are expecting. Some have had family members die from the Bastard Plague or are caring for family members who've contracted it. Pierce suffers from asthma; Solder is battling cancer.

In large ways and small, the absence of these players -- and of the players who have not yet opted out but surely will -- alters the landscape of the NFL this season. That's assuming there is a season once everyone starts jetting around the country breathing on one another.

The Blob is betting that won't last very long before it all comes undone, just like baseball.

But even if the Kingdom of Roger gets lucky, and we don't wind up with two third-string quarterbacks and a bunch of practice players squaring off in the Quarantine Bowl?

Well. The 2020 season will always wear an asterisk of sorts anyway.

If it doesn't already.

Higher education

You send your kids to college to learn how to think critically, so kudos to Texas A&M and Ole Miss. They're doin' their job, even if it occasionally makes a few folks squirm a bit.

Say hello to Keeath Magee II, a linebacker from A&M, and MoMo Sanogo, a linebacker from Ole Miss. They don't share a campus or an allegiance, but they do share an inquiring mind.

The other day both of them raised questions that ought to have answers but don't, as college football rushes headlong toward a season that smells increasingly like a pratfall waiting to happen. Magee and Sanogo were two of several student-athletes on a conference call with SEC officials, and essentially they wanted to know this: How are you gonna pull this off on college campuses full of, well, college kids?

Sanogo wanted to know why Ole Miss was planning on bringing thousands of students back to campus for fall classes, and wondered how on earth he was going to make it through a season without showing red and going into quarantine.

"How can y'all help us?" he asked.

Magee, meanwhile, wondered how the conference could start the season when so many questions had no answers.

"You guys have answered a lot of questions the best way you guys could, and we really appreciate it," Magee said. "But as much as you guys don't know ... it's just kind of not good enough.

"We want to play. We want to see football. We want to return to normal as much as possible. But it's just with all this uncertainty ... I feel like the college campus is the one thing that you can't control."

How the SEC officials answered this was revealing to say the least.

Basically they said, look, there's gonna be Bastard Plague positives on every team in the conference. That can't be helped. Everyone will just have to deal with it.

I don't know what you hear in that. But what I hear is: Look, if some of you get sick, some of you get sick. But we got us some apparel brands to pimp and some revenue to stream, so you'll just have to make the best of it. We'll keep you as safe as we can, but there are no guarantees.

Say this much for the Bastard Plague. It does strip away the veneer from a thing.

In this case what's behind the veneer is the obvious truth that college football on the SEC level is a bidness, as the Blob has pointed out umpteen times. The people who run it don't want that to get out, however, which is why college football can't do what the NBA and NHL are doing. It can't put its football players in a bubble, because that would be a glaring admission they're not just college kids like anyone else, but a major financial asset that must be protected.

Sometimes, though, the financial assets do learn to think critically. And maybe they learn a little history while they're at it.

Back in 1918, for instance, there was another Bastard Plague. It killed over half-a-million Americans at a time when America was much smaller -- and it messed up college football, which admittedly was not then an engine of commerce but the rugged diversion it was always intended to be.

And so there was no Army-Navy game that fall. The Missouri Valley Conference canceled its season entirely. So did LSU, that football hotbed. Notre Dame played only six games.

And, yes, fans wore masks to the games.

I don't know if that's what college football will look like this fall. But if they get much into October before the whole deal comes unstitched, I'll frankly be stunned.

At least two college kids I can think of won't be, however.