Unspeakable tragedy

 Maybe we never hear about this, if they aren't athletes of some renown. Maybe I'm not writing about it on a morning when I'd literally rather be writing about anything else.

But Johnny Gaudreau, 31, was a professional hockey star with the Columbus Blue Jackets of the National Hockey League.

And he and his younger brother Matthew, 29, were legends on the ice at Boston College before that.

And today they are both dead, run down by an alleged drunk, and we all know about it precisely because of the aforementioned. And I don't know if that says something about America, something about our shallowness or our fascination with shiny objects or the way the athletic arena has become a cultural touchstone all out of round with its place in a healthy society.

Then again, I could overthinking this. Wouldn't be the first time.

Maybe, upon further review, what happened to the Gaudreau brothers was so awful, so unspeakably tragic, it transcends the arena or culture or the superficiality of celebrity. Maybe it was just a simple human thing.

Simple: As in two brothers coming home to New Jersey to stand up with their sister at her wedding, and going off to ride bikes the day before the nuptials. And then having the bad luck to cross paths with a 43-year-old man in a Jeep Grand Cherokee who told the cops he was five or six beers into his day, and who swerved to pass another vehicle on the right that had moved over to clear the Gaudreaus on their bikes, and ...

Well. We know what came after the "and."

According to the police, the 43-year-old man failed a field sobriety test, and said he passed the other motorist on the right because he thought the other motorist was just trying to block him. As if this were NASCAR and he was, I don't know, Joey Logano or someone. As if the other guy was Denny Hamlin or someone, and he was just trying to take the air off Denny Hamlin's spoiler.

And now two brothers who loved their sister are dead.

And the 43-year-old man who's been charged with running them down allegedly got miffed when he was told he'd have to sit in jail until his court appearance next Thursday.

And I am all out of words. I am all out of words for all of it.

Geezer glory

 So there was this guy in Boston last night who came on to pitch with two out and a man on second in the seventh inning against the Toronto Blue Jays, and struck out the next batter to end the inning.

Just another mundane baseball moment in baseball's most mundane month, right? Happens every day, right?

Except the guy got an ovation from the Fenway Park crowd as he walked off the mound.

Except Red Sox manager Alex Cora greeted him with a handshake when he reached the dugout steps.

And why was this?

Because the guy's name is Rich Hill.

Rich Hill, see, is 44 years old. And when Cora called him in from the pen in the seventh, 2024 officially became his 20th consecutive season pitching in the bigs.

A native of Milton, Mass., he's a local boy who threw his first major-league pitch for the Chicago Cubs in 2005. George W. Bush was in the White House. The White Sox were actually a real major-league team. No one, or hardly anyone, had heard of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram or a pile of other sites in the social media dung heap, so no one got on the Great Interwhatsis to make fun of this new guy for the Bearcubs.

Oh, yeah: And the Toronto Blue Jay he struck out to end the seventh last night, Daulton Varsho, was nine years old.

Across the next 20 summers, Hill didn't actually pitch for every team in the majors, but that was probably just luck. He did pitch for 13 of them, after all. 

He pitched for the Cubs and the Orioles and the Indians and the Angels. Pitched for the Yankees and the A's and the Dodgers and the Twins. Pitched for the Rays, and the Mets, and the Pirates, and the Padres.

And for the Red Sox, of course. This is his fourth go-around with them.

Last night, he became the oldest player to appear in an MLB game in five years. And the seventh inning was just an hors d'oeuvre. In the eighth, Cora sent him back to the bump again, and all Hill did was retire the side in order on a couple of ground balls and another  K. 

"He's like a baseball version of Tom Brady right now in New England," said Blue Jays manager John Schneider, who, an eon or so ago, was Hill's catcher in the Cape Cod League.

Something like that.

Your Indiana Who-siers

 College football's big opening weekend rolls out tonight, and right away, at least in these parts, everyone's wondering if Notre Dame is overrated, and if Purdue's going to be any good, and (at least in the Blob's precinct) if the old alma mater, Ball State, can pick up a win against Missouri State before getting crushed by The U next week in Miami.

And  then, of course, there are your Indiana Hoosiers. Or Who-siers, perhaps more accurately.

They've made a lot of noise in the offseason, most of it coming from the vicinity of new head coach Curt Cignetti's mouth. He's won everywhere he's been, he says. He's going to win at IU, he says. Gonna put the "Boom!" back in B-town, at least to the extent he can in a place where the football decibels have mostly been considerably lower.

Well, forget that, um, noise. Cignetti's brought a whole new attitude to Indiana football, and a whole pile of new faces, too. Some of them came from James Madison, where Cignetti was extremely successful. Some of them came from elsewhere. None of us really knows them yet -- hence, Who-siers -- or what they're going to look like when Cignetti sends 'em out against Florida International two days from now.

Here's what we do know: The Big Ten is not the Sun Belt Conference, where Cignetti and those JMU transfers made their bones.

Here's what else we know: Nonetheless, it's not crazy to think Coach Cig could stroll into the Big Ten and win seven or eight games this fall.

"Well, look who's drinkin' the Kool-Aid now," you're saying now.

Nah, not really. I saw someone picked the Hoosiers to go 9-4 including a bowl win, and scoffed just as hard as everyone else.

Until.

Until, that is, I got a look at the schedule.

The schedule informs me Indiana has eight home games this year, including five of their first seven. The Hoosiers open with two home games against some French pastry -- Florida International and Western Illinois -- then head west to UCLA, which was a "meh" 7-5 last year and is breaking in a new head coach after Chip Kelly left to run Ryan Day's offense at Ohio State. 

Then it's back home for more French pastry, Charlotte from the American Conference. Then the Hoosiers are home to Maryland, which went 8-5 last season -- including a 44-17 rump-roasting of Indiana -- but has a new quarterback running the show. 

After that, it's a roadie at Northwestern, a 7-5 team that's picked to scrape the nether regions of the barrel in 2024. Then it's back home to welcome Nebraska, which hasn't reached a bowl game in this decade and, according to head coach Matt Rhule, will throw heralded freshman quarterback Dylan Raiola into the deep end right from the jump.

Best case, I've got Indiana 6-1, maybe 5-2 after that week. Worst case they lose at UCLA, lose at Northwestern, lose at home to Maryland, and sit 4-3. 

Factor in losses to Michigan, Ohio State and (maybe) Washington or Michigan State, and you're looking at 7-5 or 6-6 and a bowl berth.

This assumes, of course, that the product matches the hype and the preparation. 

Cignetti is banking on a transfer quarterback (Kurtis Rourke) who was the MAC Offensive Player of the Year at Ohio in 2022. At 6-5 and 223 pounds, he has classic size. He also has an extremely educated arm. In his POY season, he passed for more than 3,200 yards, had a 69 percent completion rate, and threw 25 touchdown passes and just four interceptions.

So, he's solid. But, again, the MAC is not the Big Ten.  

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, the part of the Big Ten he'll be asked to take on this season, with a couple of exceptions, is not nearly as rough as it could be. So he's got that going for him.

And the Who-siers?

Same deal.

The world according to Jerry

 Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones went off on a toot the other day, scattering f-bombs like rose petals along his merry way, and it was hard to tell if this was Jerry slipping a cog in his dotage or going full Your Crazy Uncle Merle.

The Blob splits the difference and thinks it was a bit of both.

On the one hand, Jerry is 81 now, and cogs will slip when a man gets that far up in years. On the other, he hasn't started raving about fluoride poisoning our drinking water or jet contrails turning us all into zombies, so Uncle Merle seems a ways off yet.

What he did say was no one -- no one -- could general manage the Cowboys the way he general manages the Cowboys. And so he's not going to stop general managing the Cowboys unless he's in a car crash and has to turn everything over to his kids, whom he says he trusts but, you know, not as much as he trusts himself.

That was the gist, anyway, and far be it from the Blob to say Jerry's straight-up delusional. What I will say his ego certainly hasn't shrunk over the years, in the sense that he still thinks it's Jerry's world and we're all just living in it.

It's why he's never liked it when the spotlight strays away from him, which some people say is why he ran off Jimmy Johnson, and just recently agreed to add him to the Cowboys' Ring of Honor. Johnson, these same people say, got too much credit for the Cowboys' initial rebuild under Jones's ownership, and Jerry didn't like that. So Jerry whirled him like a Frisbee into outer darkness.

Maybe Jerry really is that insecure and petty. Maybe he isn't. I really can't say one way or the other.

What I can say is Jerry the GM hasn't done a hell of a lot since Jimmy and then Barry Switzer left.

It was Switzer who delivered the Cowboys' last Super Bowl win, in 1995, and a succession of coaches with less-than-dynamic personalities have followed: Chan Gailey, Dave Campo, Wade Phillips, Jason Garrett and now Mike McCarthy. Bill Parcells and his Hall of Fame stature was the exception to tht rule, but even he was required to stand in Jerry's shadow.

In the meantime, Jerry the GM continued to deliver mediocrity, year after year after year.

In the 29 years since that last Super Bowl win in '95, the Cowboys have never advanced beyond the divisional round of the playoffs. In almost half of those 29 years -- 13 of  'em -- they haven't made the playoffs at all.

Now you could, and Jerry perhaps would, blame that on the coaching. But to do that, you'd have to forget about Parcells, and also McCarthy, who won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers in 2011.

But, yeah, no one could do the job Jerry's done as GM of America's Team. Which in an odd sort of way might actually be true.

Nothing beyond the divisional round in 29 years? Thirteen seasons missing the playoffs? For an organization with the resources of the Dallas Cowboys?

Yeah, boy. Let's see some other GM match that.

Denial is ...

 ... not just a river in Egypt, as they say.

No, it's also what Conor Stalions did when the NCAA put him on the griddle back in April, the details of which now are out thanks to a new Netflix doc. Stalions, it seems, didn't know nothin' about no illegal sign-stealing on behalf of Jim Harbaugh and Michigan Wolverines football. Didn't know nothin' ... didn't see nothin' ... never did any illegal in-person scouting.

He also wasn't on the Central Michigan sideline in disguise one Saturday, even though he apparently told someone he was. And he for sure didn't purchase any tickets to send a network of scouts out to do any illegal in-person scouting, nuh-uh, no, sir. 

See, according to Stalions, what happened was he would frequently purchase tickets for friends, and, golly, it was just a coincidence they were tickets to the games of future Michigan opponents. And sometimes the friends would record parts of those games totally on their own. Then those friends would send him the film totally on their own.

"It's kind of like when your aunt gets you a Christmas gift you already have," Stalions said. "You're not going to be rude and be like 'Oh, I already have this. I don't need that.' It's 'Oh, thanks, appreciate it.'"

Ummm ... OK.

And, look, don't infer from that I think Stalions lied like a mafia boss to the NCAAs. Don't do it even when I point out Stalions left a paper trail of travel and hotel receipts. And don't do it even when I reiterate he admitted to someone (OK, so it was only Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports, not the most reliable of sources) it was him in that ballcap on the Central Michigan sideline that one time.

Stalions told the NCAAs that, gosh, he didn't remember attending that particular game. Or any other particular game anyone might be inclined to bring up.

Ummm ... OK.

But enough about that. The best part of Stalions' testimony before the NCAA happened when his attorney, Brad Beckworth, said his client's personal information was illegally obtained, and he was fairly certain who the culprit was.

Can you guess? Come on, guess.

It was Ohio State University, of course!

"If it's true that came from someone associated with or tied to The Ohio State University -- and we think it was -- that's where if I was going to try to do right I might be focusing," Beckworth said/suggested.

In other words: You NCAAs really need to leave my boy here alone (my boy and, ahem, Michigan) and start investigating those crooked-ass people down in Columbus. The Ohio State University, in other words. See, I even included that snooty "The" to make it easier for you to identify 'em.

Beautiful. I mean, is there anything more quintessentially college football than accusing your most bitter rival of playing dirty? It's a tradition that goes back to Fielding Yost at UM and Knute Rockne at Notre Dame breaking off their football series because each said the other was a lousy no-good cheater.

And so Beckworth, on behalf of Stalions and Michigan, pointed the finger at Ohio State, because of course he did. Because Michigan is Michigan and Ohio State is Ohio State, and never the twain shall meet except to throw hands. In the back of my head, in fact, I wonder if Beckworth didn't accuse the Buckeyes because everyone in Ann Arbor is still steamed about the way Woody Hayes ran up the score on 'em back in '68, and then gloated about it.

Remember? His famous line when asked why he went for two after the final touchdown in a 50-14 rout?

"Because they wouldn't let me go for three," Woody replied.

Now all these years later, Michigan's saying Woody's Buckeyes are at it again, framing the poor Wolverines because that's just the kind of low-rent SOBs they are.

Ah, tradition. There's no denyin' that, ever.

Winners and ... not losers

 The Little League World Series ended Sunday on a bunt and a wild throw into right field, and as always it was the kid who made the wild throw, and all his teammates, I felt for.

And, no, I can't tell you for sure why that is.

Maybe it's because they're all still kids, and the cynicism of adulthood hasn't worn the shine off 'em yet. They still think the world is a fair place, and that everything will work out in the end. None of them spends a nanosecond considering what it will feel like if they lose, because of course they're not going to lose.

Except someone always does.

And they're 10, 11, 12 years old.

And unless their parents are complete jackwagons (or maybe the knuckle-draggers who mocked Tim Walz' teenage son for crying with pride last week), no one's shamed them yet for shedding tears when the ball sails into right field and it all goes to heck.

When that happened yesterday, and a kid named Lathan Norton from Lake Mary, Fla., wheeled around third and stomped on homeplate with the winning run, it wasn't the smiles and laughter and jumping up and down of the winners that hit different for me. It hardly ever is.

It was the catcher from Chinese Taipei, still geared up, his face contorted. 

It was second baseman crumpled in the infield dust, inconsolable.

It was all of them turning on the waterworks because it had been RIGHT THERE, it had been SO CLOSE, and how could it have eluded their grasp?

So the tears came, and that was a good thing, a natural thing. Because Chinese Taipei had been right there. It had been so close. 

Those kids, they led the championship game 1-0 after an inning. They led 1-0 after two, three, four, five innings. They led even though Florida had a runner on third in three different innings, and the Taipei kids wouldn't let him come home three times.

And then it was the sixth inning, Taipei one out away -- one out! -- and NFlorida kid named DeMarcos Mieses, who had struck out twice already, stroked one into shallow left, and a kid named Chase Anderson raced home, and it was on to extra innings.

Bottom of the eighth, Lathan Norton on second, the bunt rolling, rolling ...

Well. Already told you what happened next.

We all know how it works in sports: There are winners, and there are losers. Except when there's not.

Those young men from Lake Mary, smiling and shouting and living the best moment of their just-getting-started lives?

They were your winners Sunday, 2-1 in eight innings.

And the young men from Chinese Taipei, scrubbing away the tears that came because, well, tears were entirely appropriate to the occasion?

They weren't losers. Call 'em something else, if you have to, but never that.

Baseball stuff

Baseball holds fast to its history the way a dog holds fast to a T-bone, so here in the dog days there must be a fierce joy in its two-seamed heart. The former Pastime is getting a two-pack of past times just now.

Over the weekend, to start with, the enfeebled Chicago What Sox lost again, which is hardly news except for the number attached to this particular L. It was the 100th loss of the season for these major league imposters, with a full month yet to go before they can mercifully quit playing. It came in their 131st game.

That 31-100 record, it turns out, is the worst through as many games in 108 years, when the 1916 Philadelphia A's reached 100 losses in 130 games. The What Sox have to go 12-19 the rest of the way to avoid eclipsing the famously wretched 1962 New York Mets, who set the modern record for futility by going 40-120.

So it's the ghosts of Marv Throneberry, Hot Rod Kanehl and Choo-Choo Coleman the What Sox are chasing, as the season bends toward September. Vinegar Bend Mizell is on the mound. Casey Stengel is piloting the Titanic from the dugout, wondering what the hell he'd done to deserve this after managing the Yankees to all those World Series titles in the '50s.

Now it's Grady Sizemore in the dugout for the What Sox, and, I don't know, Chris Flexen or someone out there on the bump. At this point, it's better than even money they catch the ghosts. 

At least there are ghosts to chase. The other archival moment has no ghosts to chase, because it's never happened before.

Here's the deal: According to a post on the Boston Red Sox Fan Club site, Danny Jansen will sub in at catcher today for the Sox, as they resume a suspended June 26 game against the Toronto Blue Jays. Jansen, at that time, was playing for the Jays. This means he'll be the only player in MLB history to play for both teams in the same game.

But, wait, there's more!

When the game was suspended back in June, Jansen was batting for the Jays. In other words, he'll now be catching the at-bat he began. A pinch-hitter, of course, will finish the at-bat for him.

This sets up a hilarious scenario (OK, so maybe it only sets it up for me) in which Jansen winds up talking to himself.

"Come on! Strike this bum out!"

"Shut up, Danny, this is my at-bat!"

"No, you shut up, Danny!"

"No, YOU shut up, Danny ..."

And you wonder why some of us still love baseball.

Eye opener

 High school football started up again Friday in a whole lot of places, and I think we can all agree that is a good thing. Because high school football is awesome, and the only people who think otherwise are either Flat Earthers, moon-landing deniers or lint brains who think schoolkids are being forced to use litter boxes and pronouns.

However.

However, get a load of this. But you might want to don a welder's mask first.

Now, I know school pride is school pride, and it's a big part of what makes high school football great. But there is pride, and then there is SHEER FREAKING MADNESS. And, I'm sorry, this much orange just hurts my 69-year-old eyes.

It's like staring directly into the sun without wearing your trusty Ray-Bans. Or staring too long at the Orange One himself, Donald Trump. Or ...

Heck, I don't know. All I know is I'm getting a headache.

Now, I'm sure more modern folk, not to mention the good inhabitants of Paris, Ky., think this is the height of gridiron fashion. Maybe the more entrepreneurial among them look at all that orange and think there's a sweet Cheetos sponsorship in it. Who knows, for the right price they might even change the name of the place from Blanton Collier Field to Cheetos Dust Field.

(Blanton Collier, by the way, coached the Cleveland Browns to their last NFL championship, 60 years. The Brownies' colors, of course, are brown and -- yes! -- orange. There does seem to be a theme here.)

Anyway, they can rename the field, and then hand out bags of puffs to every fan who comes through the gates. Then, at the appropriate moment, every fan can wave his or her orange-stained fingers while the P.A. man bellows "Come on, fans! SHOW 'EM YOUR DUST!"

OK. So maybe not.

Look. I know I'm old, and old school. I know, consequently, I have an increasing tendency to shake my bony liver-spotted fist at Newfangled Stuff. So maybe you can take all this with the grain of salt it deserves.

However.

However, when Boise State unveiled its blue field, I got used to it. I even kinda got used to Eastern Washington's blood-red field. But Screaming Day-Glo Orange is a bridge too far for me. If I wanted to see Screaming Day-Glo Orange, I'd go to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's Hall of Fame Museum and stare at the Parnelli Jones STP turbine for awhile.

But an orange football field? 

Next thing you know, someone will roll out green turf. You just watch.

Welcome back

 Outlined against a blue-gray Gaelic sky, or something like that, the Rambling Wreck rode again. That is not how Grantland Rice wrote it, back in 1924. But it's 2024 now, so Granny will have to get used to the alteration in his purplish prose.

Over in Dublin, Ireland, see, No. 10 Florida State and Georgia Tech launched the college football season Saturday, and it was only perfect. Tech jumped up and beat the Seminoles, 24-21, its first win over a top-10 team in nine years. A kid named Haynes King drove the 'Noles crazy, passing for 146 yards and legging it for 54 more. Another kid named Jamal Haynes ran for 75 yards and two touchdowns. That was two Hayneses too many for the 'Noles, who lumped up Tech 41-16 in their last meeting two autumns ago.

Well, not yesterday, boys and girls.

Yesterday, Tech tossed the 'Noles around up front, grinding out 190 rushing yards at 5.3 yards per clip. This especially might have been pleasing to watch for all those ACC fans who had to listen to State whine obsessively last season that it was too good for the ACC, and how the ACC held the Seminoles back because, even though they romped unbeaten through their 2023 schedule, they got passed over for the College Football Playoff by Alabama, a member in good standing of the ACC.

Well, take that, Florida Snooty U. 

But you know the best part about yesterday?

The best part is the game came down to a walk-off 44-yard field goal. And the guy who kicked it, the hero of the hour in Dublin and back home in Atlanta, was named Aidan Birr.

Aidan. Fine old Irish name, that.

It was, again, only perfect, and the sort of wonderfulness that reminded us once more why college football is yea better than the gray monolith that is the National Football League. The scholars have it all over the pros when it comes to lore and tradition and ghosts in leather helmets gamboling across decades of blazing Octobers every time the old alma mater laces 'em up. 

Now, it's true Power Five football (Or is it four now? Three?) is every bit as corporate and money-grubbing these days as the National Fiduciary League, what with the players and their NIL dough and the coaches with their eight-figure salaries, and the mega-conferences with their billions-with-a-B television deals. All that does is make it hard to tell Saturdays and Sundays apart anymore, unless you're watching the Ivies or some other quaint throwback that still plays actual scholars.

But.

But then a day like Saturday comes along, and you wonder if some celestial hand was at work in a way you never do when the Jaguars take on the Titans. You knock off a top-10 team for the first time in a decade, and it's a guy named Aidan who wins it for you? In Dublin?

They don't write scripts like in the corporeal world. Not even Granny would have believed it.

But you know who would, without a doubt?

John Heisman.

The guy for whom they named the Heisman trophy. Also the guy who coached football at Georgia Tech for 18 years, and who won a national title there in 1917, and who also coached baseball and basketball and was the school's athletic director.

Somewhere in the great beyond, you know he's still cheering today. And saying what college football fans everywhere were saying yesterday.

Welcome back, gentlemen. Welcome back.

Freon Deion

 They grow 'em thin-skinned out there in the mountain West, or so one could conclude from what happened in Boulder, Colo., the other day. What happened was, the University of Colorado got all huffy because a lowly newspaper grunt wrote insufficiently fawning stuff about its football coach, Deion Sanders.

The lowly grunt's name is Sean Keeler, who's a sports columnist for the Denver Post. This means he has opinions about things, and writes them for everyone to read. Occasionally those opinions make people mad, as opinions tend to do.

I know this because for 25 of the 38 years I was a newspaper grunt myself, I was a sports columnist. Every so often I wrote opinions people didn't like. Once I wrote something  uncomplimentary about Notre Dame's football team, and I got a note from a Fighting Irish fan that told me in fairly graphic terms what I could with my opinion.

It was, I have to say, a proud moment. In fact I hung up the note in my cubicle at work so every morning I could be reminded of what some anonymous Domer thought of my parentage.

But enough about me.

("Finally!" you're saying)

Anyway, back to Sean Keeler,  who wrote some similarly uncomplimentary stuff about Deion Sanders. According to the Post, Deion and the athletic department were particularly wounded by his references to Sanders as "Deposition Deion," a "false prophet" and the "Bruce Lee of B.S." (OK, so that one's pretty lame). They also didn't like his use of words such as "Planet Prime" and "circus."

Therefore, the Colorado athletic department has hereby banned Keeler from asking questions at Colorado football functions. He can still come to the games, but he has to keep his mouth shut. Coach Prime ain't down with not being hero worshipped, it seems.

(And, yes, the official press release actually referred to Sanders as "Coach Prime." Which makes you wonder if Keeler wasn't square on the button when he called Colorado "Planet Prime.")

In any case, Neon Deion had already become Freon Deion where Keeler was concerned, freezing him out at a recent news conference when Keeler asked if he could ask a football question. Several times he asked if he could, and Sanders ignored him. Then he moved on to another reporter, who wanted to know how Sanders was going to celebrate his birthday.

Finally, his kind of question!

He also responded to a reporter who asked how important it was for someone to have Aflac in their life, Sanders being a paid Aflac mouthpiece. Presumably, Prime told him it was very important.

And here is where I wonder if Keeler wasn't also on the button with his use of the word "circus" to describe Sanders program.

I mean, if the school itself is referring to its football coach by some quasi-superhero nickname, and if reporters are asking questions you'd ask not of a football coach but some famous-for-being-famous celebrity, it's fair to ask when the big top is going up. It's fair to ask --

Oh, look. Here's a letter from the Colorado athletic department.

Dear Mr. Smith:

Read your so-called blog in which you referred to our Coach Prime as "Freon Deion." This is extremely flippant and extremely disrespectful of a man who coached our Buffaloes to a fine 4-8 record last season. Therefore, you are hereby banned indefinitely from asking Coach Prime questions at any Colorado football function.

(Unless you ask him about Aflac. That is one damn fine company.)

Whither AR

 Anthony Richardson did not sow a whole lot of anything in the five series he played against the Bengals last night. Unless you count question marks.

Man planted a whole row of those. Maybe two.

What are we to make, after all, of what Richardson showed us, even if it was just a lousy preseason game?

First off, he was the AR of every Colts fan's hopes and dreams, completing seven of his first eight throws for 65 yards and a six. 

Then he was AR-rrgh, missing on five of his last six throws including a pick-six.

So there was Good Anthony and then there was Bad Anthony, and now we're left to wonder what the regular season will bring with him. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a horror story, after all. And God knows the True Blue Crew has seen enough of those.

Here's what I think, as if it matters:

1. I think Richardson has a phenomenal skill set but he's still, in all but name, a rookie. Which means he will look like a million bucks sometimes, and other times he'll look like Monopoly money. I loathe the chic word "process", but it really is a process.

2. Given that, I think it's way, waaaaay too early to broach the subject Kirk Herbstreit broached on last night's telecast.

What Herbstreit wondered, right out loud, if the Colts would reach a point where they'd bench Richardson for 98-year-old Joe Flacco.

(OK, so he's not 98 years old. He's also not yet drawing Social Security. But 40 is crowding him like Dale Earnhardt used to crowd some poor schlub's rear bumper, and 40 in the NFL is when they start wheeling in the tapioca at the training table.)

Anyway, Herbie's observation was, ahem, ridiculous. Maybe he should stick to college football, where the unfettered transfer portal means coaches now change quarterbacks the  way most people change socks.

And Anthony Richardson?

 Three words no one in Horsie Nation wanted to hear, heading into the regular season: We shall see.

Star power

So, turns out Andy Warhol was as wrong as an artichoke Danish. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

In the future, that elfin painter of soup cans once said, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

Wrong.

In the America of 2024, you can be famous for 15 minutes, and then go right on being famous.

This upon the news that one of the unlikely stars of the recent Paris Olympics, Pommel Horse Millhouse From The Simpsons, is getting a prime-time gig. Stephen Nedoroscik, Pommel Horse Millhouse's square name, has been selected as one of the contestants on the upcoming season of "Dancing With The Stars." And so fame goes into extra time for the nerdy guy with the glasses and the savant skill at Rubik's Cube who just happens to be one of the best pommel horse specialists in the world.

In Paris, he nailed down a bronze for the U.S. in the team competition with a clutch routine, then went on and won a bronze on the horse as an individual. Along the way, America fell in love with maybe the least gymnast-looking gymnast ever.

Now "Dancing With The Stars" is going to, well, make him a star all over again.

"I've never danced," he said upon being introduced. "I don't really do it at the club, either."

The Blob's response to that: Wait, you mean Millhouse goes clubbing?

My other response is he ought to do very well regardless, given that gymnastics and dancing both require control of the body in space. I mean, what the hell, Helio Castroneves once won DWTS, and James Hinchcliffe finished second. And they're race-car drivers.

So, yeah, Nedoroscik should do very well in this. And he'll fit right in with DWTS's tradition of  employing athletes as competitors.

Football players (Hines Ward and Emmitt Smith) have done this, after all. Figure skaters (Kristi Yamaguchi) and speed skaters (Apolo Ohno). And a former NBA player (Iman Shumpert) won the whole schmear not long ago.

A basketball player! And after all those years of not moving his pivot foot.

Shumpert clearly got past that. And I'm sure Nedoroscik will get past moving without feeling the urge to start swinging back and forth on an imaginary pommel horse.

Although that would be a slick dance move, come to think of it.

The larger world

 Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr spoke at the Democratic National Convention the other night, and of course that got the Stick To Sports crowd all in a lather. The usual suspects trotted out all the usual words, a lot of them beginning and ending with "woke" and "left-wing extremist."

Well, yes, Steve Kerr is woke, which the usual suspects regard as some dark thing, but which the Blob has always considered better than the alternative, which is being asleep. Also, it's not as if Kerr has ever been shy about speaking on matters that didn't involve where Klay Thompson's shooting touch went and why Draymond Green is such an incorrigible butthead.

But a sports guy is supposed to be a sports guy always, and so if Kerr's political allegiances have always been an open book, having him declare those allegiances at a political party's convention made some people queasy. That's because some people think sports guys shouldn't color outside the lines, those lines being the ones that proscribe a basketball floor or baseball diamond or football field.

Which I've always thought was sort of odd.

No one, so far as I know, thinks it's out of bounds for anyone in any profession other than sports or entertainment to weigh in on political matters. It's a free country, first of all, and second of all it's a country in which everyone has a say, at least ideally. But when a Steve Kerr or LeBron James or George Clooney does it, the pushback is immediate: "What does a basketball coach/player/actor know about (fill in the blank)?"

As if a basketball coach/player/actor were incapable of knowing about anything but the pick-and-roll and learning his or her lines. If Joe Plumber or Mildred Bank Clerk is allowed to have an opinion about immigration or gun control or the price of bubble gum in Addis Ababa, why shouldn't they?

(Of course, where the usual suspects are concerned, this only applies to coaches/athletes/entertainers who take political positions to the left of Vlad the Impaler. If you're right-wingers like hooper Enos Kanter, nominal swimmer Riley Gaines or nominal rock star Kid Rock, you can spout all the political opinions you like and the usual suspects won't say boo about it.)

Anyway ...

Anyway, it's a curious thing, this notion that athletes and entertainers exist in a sort of vacuum untethered to the larger world. And it's especially curious when it's Steve Kerr, who found out all he ever wanted to know about the larger world on the day his diplomat father was murdered by the PLO when Steve was in college.

And then there's Magic Johnson -- who's been a businessman and entrepreneur far longer than he was a basketball player, but who was subjected to the same old "What does a basketball player know?" claptrap when he praised Michelle and Barack Obama's DNC speeches on the Magic Formerly Twitter Machine.

The culprit this time was Jason Whitlock, once a decent journalist but now just another crotchety Trump Moonie shouting at clouds on the interwhatsis.

"We should ask not what a basketball player can do for politics, but ask what politics can do for basketball," he snarked on his own Magic Formerly Twitter account.

Or maybe ask why a man who hasn't played basketball in 30 years is still being invalidated for it. By, hello, a former sportswriter.

As if we know anything about anything.

The rookies have it ...

 ... or, you know, they don't.

It's August 22 now and we've arrived at last on the outskirts of that place where belief and reality collide, often in a rending screech of accordioned metal and shattered glass. But, hey, maybe not!

Maybe it's just a fender bender and you swap insurance info, and that's it. Or maybe it's not a collision at all, but merely a close call on the way to Victory and Joy and Subway Ads, and headlines like "Meet Football's Caitlin Clark."

Which is to say, the Denver Broncos announced the other day they'll be starting a rookie at quarterback for the first time since John Elway showed up 41 years ago. His name is Bo Nix, the former Auburn and Oregon star (because hardly anyone stars in just one place anymore, now that college football has become a home for itinerants), and hopes are higher than the Rockies at the base of the Front Range.

Ditto in Chicago, where the locals have seen enough of Caleb Williams to recycle a hardy perennial, This Guy Is Gonna Be The Guy.

Ditto in Washington, where 2023 Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels has done Heisman-y things in the preseason, and thus will be the Commanders starting quarterback when the regular season begins a week from now.

Three rookies starting at maybe the toughest position in sports isn't particularly ground-breaking these days, but it does separate These Days from Back In The Day. This is either an expression of how much more pro-ready college quarterbacks are here in the 2020s, or  an indictment of the quality of NFL backups these days.

In Chicago, the Bears drafted Caleb Williams to be QB1 from day one, so maybe he's a different case. But in Denver, Sean Payton is going with Nix partly because all he had in the larder otherwise were a couple of retreads, Jarrett Stidham and Zach Wilson. If Nix couldn't beat out those two jimmies, then the Broncos wasted a first-round pick on him.

And in Washington?

Daniels, the No. 2 pick in the draft,  has drawn praise for his work ethic and how quickly he's picked up the nuances of the Washington system. But again, his competition consisted of another retread, Marcus Mariota. And it was pretty much oracle that Mariota's role was  to shepherd the kid along.

Nonetheless, it's a new day in three NFL cities, and like all new days it looks brighter than it might turn out to be. But maybe not!

Maybe all those Chicagoans who've convinced themselves Williams is the franchise quarterback they haven't had since Sid Luckman -- Sid Luckman, for pity's sake! -- will finally be right and snap their 80-year being-wrong streak. Maybe Bo Nix will be the next Elway, and not the next (choose one) Steve Tensi, Brock Osweiler or Paxton Lynch.

Maybe Jayden Daniels will be a bigger Lamar Jackson, and not, you know, a bigger Janet Jackson.

They've all played well in the preseason, which means they've all played well in the preseason. Which means, ultimately, not a hell of a lot.

In any event, the live fire is a week away now. And in three NFL cities, the votive candles have been duly lit.

Please, God. Don't let this guy be all those other guys.

The man in charge

 Bill York passed on yesterday, and if you don't know who that is, you were never an ink-stained wretch pounding the sports beat in Indiana. If you were, you raised a glass to his memory.

That's because Bill was the man who politely told everyone to pipe down when you and your brethren were bent over your Tandy 200s, trying to make the words sing or at least hum softly.

It's because he was the hall monitor extraordinaire for the Pacers and Colts since the day they arrived in Indy, and for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May for as long as most of us can remember.

It's because Bill York, who ran the press rooms for all three and presided over the best, most professional and most efficient stat crews pretty much anywhere, made our jobs easier more times than we can count. OK, so he made my job easier more times than I can count.

Most repeated line in the pressroom to a newbie at a Pacers game, a Colts game or the Indy 500: "Go ask Bill York."

He was a good man with an easy way about him, an invaluable asset when you're riding herd on a bunch of sportswriter types. Lost your 500 media guide and need another one? Sure, here you go. Halftime stats? Here comes one of his staffers, dropping them in front of you. Need a quote from some driver you couldn't get to during the race?

Here comes another staffer with a whole sheet of them.

The man was simply the best, and never more so than when the game or race was done and everyone was settling in to go hand-to-hand with their game stories. There were always those who didn't have to file right away or already had or were just hanging around, and when their chatter got too loud Hall Monitor Bill would jump on the P.A.

"Just a reminder this is a working pressbox and people are trying to work," he'd say, or something very similar. "If you need to talk, please take your conversations outside."

Is there a sportswriter who ever worked a Pacers or Colts game, or the 500, who can't recite that word-for-word? And who today isn't hearing it in his head as the news comes down that Bill York is gone?

You're damn right we can. And are. 

Rest easy, Mr. York. After all those years dealing with us, heaven'll be cake.

Waning summer

 Went for a walk today around the neighborhood, and not long into it something both seen and unseen fell into step beside me.

It was the slow fade of summer, keeping its dwindling time.

You saw it first in the autumnal blue sky, and felt it in the sun on your neck, more like a warm hand than the blowtorch sear of a few short weeks ago. A shirt-ruffling breeze kicked up, and if it was  mostly benign you could smell a hint of September on its breath.

Pretty soon I started to notice other things, too -- small hints, if you will, that the season was almost imperceptibly loosening its grip.

The quiet, for starters, now that all the kids are back in the slammer -- oops, back in school -- again.

Bright orange peaking through the vines of a pumpkin patch, fat ripe jack-o-lanterns-to-be mixed in with four or five laggards that stubbornly clung to their August green.

Splashes of color in potted plants on people's decks and porches, summer flora hanging tight to the last of its glory.

Underneath the trees, your feet crunched the shells of nuts stripped of their meat by industrious squirrels. The breeze kicked up again, and the leaves made an elderly dry-bones clatter markedly different from the whispering rustle of June's adolescents.

A bit farther along, the community pool was deserted, and down by the elementary school so were the two Wildcat baseball diamonds. Clumps of grass were beginning to reclaim the beige infield where, two months ago, pint-sized fielders sent their keening battle cry -- Hey-battah, hey-battah, hey-battah SWING! -- up to the warm summer sky.

Now it was as silent, and empty, as everywhere else.  Though I walked for more than an hour, I never saw another soul.

But I did see something else at one point.

Down past the golf course, around a bend, and I was back under the trees again, where something briefly brought me up short. Here in the path lays a renegade branch, leaves all wither-y, presumably separated from its brethren by a rogue gust of wind. Attached to it was a single acorn, the only one I've seen -- or at least noticed -- on this lovely morning

What I noticed about this one was it wasn't  brown, like the acorns to come in September and October. It was still green.

Summer, God love it. Still hangin' on.

Best-laid plans?

 Look, I like Patrick Mahomes. He's the best quarterback in football and an apparently decent human on top of it, and I don't really care if that combination means every time you turn on your TV these days you see him selling something.

You get your face out there too much, people get sick of your face. Fact of life.

Anyway, I like Mahomes despite all that. But ... I have to say, I think the man's shining us on this time.

By now you've seen the slick little behind-the-back pass to Travis Kelce for eight yards and a first down the other day, in a preseason game against Detroit. Mahomes claimed afterward he did it because Kelce ran the wrong route, and Mahomes was pissed at him. So he did something he considered equally flippant.

"Now it's going to be a highlight," Mahomes all but sighed, all but rolling his eyes.

Funny line. But I think a line might have been all it was.

See, I've watched the play at least half-a-dozen times now, and I'm not sure it was all that spontaneous. I've particularly focused on Kelce, who, despite what Mahomes says, looks to be running a designed route. At the very least, he wound up exactly where he needed to be to grab Mahomes' showy little trick. In which case it worked exactly the way it was designed to work.

Or, not. Mahomes being the master of improvisation that he is, it could well have been a spur-of-the-moment deal. It could well have been a "Here, dumbass" bit of cavalier-ness by Patrick to spite Kelce. It might not actually have been something the two of them had been working on in practice.

However ...

However, I suspect it was.

It is Mahomes, after all. And these are the Chiefs of Andy Reid, who's rather fond of trickeration himself. And it was a preseason game, so who cared if it didn't work?

Because it did, Mahomes had to address it. He played it for laughs, of course. It was exactly the sort of thing a guy would say if he didn't want anyone to know the play was anything but spontaneous goofing around in a meaningless game.

Then again, I've always been a suspicious sort prone to conspiracy theories, like why packages of hot dogs and hot dog buns don't match up. So there's that.

Friday night redux

Ran into an old acquaintance a few weeks back while waiting for the tire guys to slap a fresh shoe on my bucket of bolts, and it reminded me that another old acquaintance -- nah, old friend -- was about to re-introduce itself.

The acquaintance was Paul Fluegge, who back in my sportswriting days was the head football coach at Concordia Lutheran High School. Like me, he's retired now, but not entirely; he's still an assistant coach, high school football being that aforementioned old friend who's not willing to let you go.

I told him I knew exactly how he feels. Because retirement or not, high school football season is about the only thing that still has its hooks in me, too.

I bring this up because it all starts up again at the end of the week, when those familiar oases of Friday lights will bloom again. Beneath them cheerleaders will cheer and school bands will strut and young men will block and tackle, and footballs will arc across the illuminated dark toward either sure hands or buttered fingers.

I wrote about this, in pretty much the same words, a year ago this week. So at the risk of repeating myself, here's what I said then in only slightly revised form, because I couldn't write it again any better:

 The weather boys and girls are telling us we could sideswipe the 40s tonight in these parts, and what you can say about that is either summer's over or fall's sneaking in on a fake ID. It is, after all, still August, and that industrial heat we all know and loathe here in Indiana is lingering just off stage, waiting to come back with a vengeance.

What I say is to hell with that noise.

What I say is the schoolbuses are running and the air conditioning's off and fall begins Friday night, because the lights are coming up again. They'll be flanked by cornfields out in the country where you can see 'em for miles, and they'll be beacons among the thousand lights of the cities and 'burbs. And beneath them there'll be glory and heartache and everything else that comes with fall, and with high school football.

A decade out from a 38-year run as a working sportswriter, it's the night, and the season, I miss the most. For the most part I don't miss it at all after ten years, much as I loved it. But when those lights come up and  high school football returns,  I still think I should be in a pressbox somewhere, still think there's some lede I should be writing in my head as Snider or North Side or one of the Bishops, Luers and Dwenger, have at it. 

Or maybe Leo or East Noble or my alma mater, New Haven.

One opening night it was Carroll vs. Snider out at Carroll, and I was sitting in the parking lot knocking out my gamer as I waited for the traffic to clear. Other years it was Bishop Dwenger or Concordia at Zollner, Homestead out in Aboite, or Heritage down by Monroeville and Hoagland -- where one night I was inadvertently locked in the stadium and had to scale an eight-foot fence to get out.

It's not just a job, as the recruiters say. It's an adventure.

Across the decades I  covered games when it was so cold you could literally see the field turning white with frost, and when it was so foggy you couldn't see the far sideline even from the near sideline. Once I covered a playoff game at Eastbrook High School when wind-driven sheets of rain turned 100 yards of pristine grass into a churn of liquid mud within minutes. 

And then there was that opening night, years ago, when the lights came up at Madison Heights High School in Anderson and fall commenced on the hottest day of the year.

It was 95 degrees that night at game time, and a pile of openers in central Indiana were postponed. But the Pirates of Madison Heights forged on, with frequent official timeouts for water breaks. 

Time has erased who won the game or even who Heights was playing; my only memories of  that night are visceral ones. Rivulets of sweat stinging my eyes. Pints of it soaking my shirt. Looking to my right at the local radio announcer -- an Anderson legend named Sam Roberts -- and seeing his shirt unbuttoned to his navel as he barked out the play-by-play.

No offense to Sam, who's been gone almost 20 years. But that was not the prettiest thing I ever saw.

Know what, though?

It was opening night of high school football. It was the first whisper of autumn, nuclear heat or not. It was the lights coming up all over Indiana, and me feeling lucky to see 'em from my privileged spot.

All that begins again Friday night.

Light 'em up, fellas. Light 'em up.

Answer man

 The New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers came to Williamsport, Pa., Sunday to show the Little Leaguers how it's done -- or, as the Blob prefers to think of it, to pick up some pointers from the kids about hitting the cutoff man, moving the runner along, all that fundamental junk.

(It being the Blob's long-held opinion that the kids in the Little League World Series are better at the fundamental junk than the pros. This is because the pros are all about strikeouts and home runs and launch angles and such.)

Anyway, the Little League Classic is always a fun deal, a huge nostalgia rush for the big-leaguers and a way for the generations to commune over their shared touchstone for one sweet throwback weekend. It's a day when the grownups are reminded that theirs is still a kid's game at heart, and the kids are reminded that what they love about it will stay with them long after they're no longer kids.

As for the Little League Classic, the Tigers beat the Yanks 3-2 on a walk-off hit. Not bad. But even better was what Beau Brieske of the Tigers said on the LLC broadcast.

It was a taped bit in which the big-leaguers were submitted questions about non-baseball topics, like their favorite foods and what-not. One of the questions was who they'd like to meet if they could meet anyone, and Brieske gave this answer:

One person I would love to meet: Abraham Lincoln. I'd just like to pick his brain, to be quite honest.

And then: That sounds bad now that I say it.

Judging by the social media posts about this, more than a few people thought that was cringe. The Blob, however, gives Brieske high marks for trying to be educational for all those impressionable young minds; Lincoln did die from a bullet to the brain, after all, and Brieske sort of acknowledged that. So thumbs up.

Also, not being over-served with the offended virus, I thought it was hilarious in an endearing sort of way.

Oh, come on. It was.

The age of ridicule

 There's a different one every day now, or maybe every hour. To be honest it's hard to keep up.

You know what I'm talking about: Memes featuring that Australian break dancer who was so bad at the Paris Olympics the clever set on the interwhatsis started photoshopping her into every familiar scenario under the sun.

Here she is taking Uma Thurman's place opposite John Travolta in the iconic "Pulp Fiction" dance scene. Here she is as the tyrannosaurus rex terrorizing Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern in "Jurassic Park." Here she is as William Zabka (Johnny) facing off against Ralph Macchio (Daniel) in "The Karate Kid."

Blink once, and she's the street-lit silhouette in "The Exorcist" movie poster. Blink again, and she's onstage with Napoleon Dynamite, dancing with Elaine from "Seinfeld", on and on and on.

A week after the Olympic torch was extinguished, and still the performer known as B-Girl Raygun remains the Queen of Memes. It's a backhanded tribute to her spectacular awfulness at the Games, where she lost all three of her round-robin matches without scoring a single point. Zeroes across the board.

However.

However, Raygun has a real name: Rachael Gunn. She's 36 years old and a college professor with a PhD in cultural studies. And if the memes have made her a celebrity in the most 2024 of ways, other online reaction has not been nearly so lighthearted.

Gunn, in fact, says some of it has been "devastating." The Australian Olympic Committee was even compelled to speak out about a petition on Change.org demanding an investigation of how Gunn was chosen, and an apology from both Gunn and Australian chief de mission Anna Meares for alleged "unethical conduct" in Gunn's selection.

Naturally, the petition was anonymous. Naturally, the "unethical conduct" charge was made without a scrap of supporting detail or evidence.

"It is disgraceful that these falsehoods concocted by an anonymous person can be published in this way," Australian Olympic Committee CEO Matt Carroll said in a statement. "It amounts to bullying and harassment and is defamatory."

To which the Blob would add: And isn't bullying and harassing and defaming just how the world works these days?

Look, there has always been a hefty portion of nastiness in human beings, we know this, but our veneer of civilization has kept an equally hefty portion of it out of the public purview. You might spout all sorts of ugly in private about certain individuals, but you'd never say it to their faces. It wasn't considered proper -- and also, it carried with it the distinct possibility you'd eat a knuckle hoagie or two. 

Social media, of course, has removed that threat. It's the firewall behind which cowards and shite-talkers can safely take cover while firing slings and arrows at the target du jour. A force field for asshats, you might call it -- and what you also might call the Age of Ridicule is the result.

Because of it, or so it seems, we've become a meaner and coarser and less compassionate species, here in 2024. And as proof, I take you back to 1988, when a young man from Cheltenham, England, became the Raygun of the Calgary Winter Olympics.

His name was Michael Edwards, but he became known, like Rachael Gunn and "Raygun", as "Eddie the Eagle." Eddie the Eagle was Great Britain's best ski jumper, which merely meant he was the world's worst. In the Calgary games he bombed every bit as spectacularly as Raygun 36 years later, finishing dead last in both the 70- and 90-meter events.

The difference was, he became beloved for it. A celebrity, even.

His cheerful demeanor and winning personality made him a hit on the talk shows, and in 2016, they made a movie about him. And at the closing ceremonies in Calgary, the president of the organizing committee, Frank King, even gave him a shout-out.

"You have broken world records and you have established personal bests," King said, addressing the assembled athletes. 

And then: "Some of you have even soared like an eagle."

Know what's most significant about all that, looking back from this darker time?

No one ever circulated a petition demanding to know how Eddie the Eagle made the Olympic team, or accused Great Britain's Olympic committee of "unethical conduct" in his selection.

Amazing, right?

Gamblin', freestyle division

 I am reasonably up on my lore, so there are some things I know about the University of Notre Dame, aka the World Capital of Lore.

For instance, I'm fairly certain there's no line in the Notre Dame fight song that goes "Shake down the over-under from the sky." And I'm 100 percent sure it's "Raise a volley cheer on high," not "Raise a parlay cheer on high."

This does not mean they're immune to doing a little illicit wagerin' in the kingdom Knute 'n' Leahy 'n' them, unfortunately.

You might have missed it because N.D. tried to keep it quiet, but the other day it got out that the Irish men's swimming program was running its own private sportsbook, kinda like the one that slicked Robert Shaw in "The Sting" only real. According to a knowledgeable source, team members transformed themselves from butterflyers to bookies, taking bets from teammates on their times in swim meets.

Roughly 60 percent of the 25-man team laid down wagers, according to the same source. 

As usually happens, Notre Dame eventually got wind of this little DraftSwims (FinDuel?) deal. The university responded by suspending the entire men's swimming program for a year. 

And this is where the Blob says what it always says, and what it said when similar gambling rings got busted at Iowa and Iowa State: What do we expect?

Look, the NCAA may not pal around with various online sportsbooks the way MLB, the NFL and the NBA do, but those same sportsbooks are all over the groves of academe. Google "ncaa official sportsbooks", and out tumbles a tsunami of online sites with betting odds on NCAA basketball and football, all of them crowing about how popular it is to bet on the scholars. And ESPN, which has an expansive presence in college football (including a partnership with the SEC Network) even has its own sportsbook, ESPN Bet, where you can lay your money down on the very games ESPN telecasts on Saturday afternoons.

The relationship between college sports and gambling, in other words, is damn near incestuous. It's an entire ecosystem, and it pervades everything -- and by "everything" I mean dorm rooms and locker rooms and, as with the N.D. swimmers, entire programs.

They cruise Google, too, after all. Like everyone else in America, they see the ads for the various sportsbooks during NFL games on Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings and Thursday evenings. Like you or me or Carl the Action Junkie down the street, they're just as enticed by how simple it seems, how exciting, how much doggone fun.

And so allow the Blob to be the bearer of bad news, in light of all that.

What happened at Notre Dame this week? What's happened at Iowa and Iowa State and who knows where else?

Strap in. 'Cause it won't be the last time.

Ghosts of NASCAR

 Was reading yesterday about the latest kerfuffle in NASCAR, so I dialed up YouTube to see what the 3 car did that was so terrible Sunday night in Richmond. And, yeah, sure enough, there was the 3 getting a quarter panel into the car in front of it, punting it sideways and clearing the way for the 3 to take the checkers.

Some dirty drivin', that's for sure. And now I understood why NASCAR announced yesterday it was going to let the driver of the 3 car, Austin Dillon, keep his ill-gotten win, but denied him the automatic entry into the playoffs the W would have ordinarily afforded him.

Sorry, son, the NASCAR honchos seemed to say. You wreck Joey Logano on the last lap, then veer over to door-ding Denny Hamlin, that's not the way we do things here in NASCAR. No playoff spot for you!

Except ...

Except the vid I dialed up of the 3 playin' dirty wasn't from Sunday night. 

And it wasn't from Richmond.

And the man wheeling the 3 wasn't Austin Dillon.

No, the man wheeling the 3 was the man who made it famous, Dale Earnhardt, and the clip was from the Bristol night race in 1999. And it wasn't Joey Logano he rooted out of the groove, it was Terry Labonte.

NASCAR hadn't cooked up its playoff system yet -- it hadn't needed to, because its star hadn't yet begun to fade -- so Earnhardt didn't lose his seat at that table. But he also wasn't penalized in any other way. Shoot, he'd pulled the same stunt on the same Terry Labonte four years before during the night race at Bristol, only this time all he did was send Labonte into the fence and then sideways under the checkers with his front end all wadded up.

Limped into victory lane like a man looking to file an insurance claim. Most NASCAR thing ever back when NASCAR was still NASCAR.

And what is it now?

Well, let's just say it's a whole lot slicker.

It's more corporate, certainly, a consequence of the palmy days. It's richer, a consequence of being more corporate. And these days it's a lot younger demographically, and along with that perhaps more impulsive out there on the racetrack.

Which is to say, the boys have a tendency to play rough at times. Like Sunday night at Richmond.

Thing is, the boys have always had a tendency to play rough, which is what made NASCAR a huge deal to begin with. When you trace your roots to runnin' likker through the hills and pineys of the Deep South, you wind up with a sport that was rougher than a cob back at the start. And it didn't get more genteel until they all had to comb their hair, put on a tie and go begging in boardrooms for money.

That's how we got from Back Then to Right Now. It's how we got from NASCAR saying "That's racin', son" when the Intimidator intimidated, to "That's not how we do things in NASCAR" when his latest successor channels the Intimidator's ghost in that same haunted ride.

"'Haunted ride'?" you're saying now. "Aren't you getting a trifle melodramatic, Mr. Blob?"

Yeah, maybe. But my imagination always has had an alarming tendency to slip the leash. Character flaw, I guess.

 And so I can't help thinking the Intimidator was riding shotgun with Austin Dillon the other night. And I can't help seeing him, when NASCAR brought down the hammer yesterday, snickering away somewhere in the celestial void. 

Eyes bright with mischief. Trademark smirk on his mug. Earnhardt being Earnhardt.

Pre-cursed

 And now today's episode of "Why The NFL Preseason Is Stupid," brought to you this morning by the Minnesota Vikings, aka That Team God Doesn't Ever Want To Win A Super Bowl.

It seems the Vikings prize rookie, quarterback J.J. McCarthy from Michigan, was having a terrific training camp, and hope was springing eternal in the land of lutefisk and you-betcha. And then ...

And then he went down during a preseason game against the Raiders the other night. The verdict: Meniscus tear in his right knee, for which he will undergo surgery this week. The prognosis is he ain't gonna be playing for awhile.

However, this does give the Blob another opportunity to climb aboard its latest hobby horse. 

Which is, again, that NFL preseason games are stupid and unnecessary here in the year of our Lord 2024. They're the residue of a time before minicamps and OTAs and inter-team scrimmages, and the gigabyte world of analytics. A time when training camp lasted six weeks and teams played half-a-dozen preseason games because the veterans needed to play themselves into shape, and the rookies were a blank space on the canvas.

Preseason games, in those prehistoric days, were where those rookies filled in the blanks, and either played themselves onto or off the roster. It still happens today, but not as often as you think. That's because teams know everything about a rook but his underwear preference before he shows up for that first OTA -- and the odds are good they've sussed out the boxers-or-briefs thing, too. 

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "If you got rid of the preseason, wouldn't that hurt the underprivileged? And by 'underprivileged' I mean those starving NFL owners who, as they like to say, 'aren't made of money'?"

Well ... yes. I suppose that's true.

They'd take a hit on their season-ticket revenue, because they soak season-ticketholders for the worthless preseason games, too. And I suppose the league wouldn't like it either, seeing how it barely scraped by on the $13 billion in revenue it generated last year.

Apparently that's why they bumped up the regular season to 17 games a couple of years ago, and now are agitating to bump it to 18. I suppose eventually they'll be playing a 20-game season, and the only players left by the end of it will be a third-string tackle and backup punter Buddy Bill McCracken -- a seventh-round pick from Country Fried Tech pressed into service at quarterback because "I played it some in high school."

Of course, they'll likely still be playing three preseason games even then. Because without 'em, you know, teams might look a little sloppy in that first regular season game.

 Couldn't have that. Might hurt the bottom line. And how on earth could the league get by if it only raked in $12.8 billion some year?

Double cruds alert!

Or: The yin and yang of summer's dog days.

In this corner we have my Pittsburgh Cruds, who just yesterday (or so it seemed) were almost behaving like an almost real baseball team. Why, they were cruising along a couple of games above .500, and they had the wondrous Paul Skenes, and they were nipping at the heels of the St. Louis Cardinals for -- I can barely type this -- second place in the NL Central. 

Second place! What a magical, mystical rainbow-y land. Root beer rivers and cotton-candy clouds; lollipops and ice cream and summers that stretch on forever. Oh, how we love thee, glorious second pl-

Wait, what?

What do you mean the ancestral home is on the line, wondering where the hell the Cruds are?

Ah, geez. Mid-August now, and I sneak a peek at the MLB standings, and second place is gone. Also third place, and also fourth place.

Now my Cruds, like the swallows of San Juan Capistrano but not really, have returned to the NL Central cellar  -- aka the ancestral home. They've lost eight in a row, they're 1-9 over their last ten games, and Oneal Cruz, their once-marvelous shortstop, is kicking the ball around like Lionel Messi. And the Cincinnati Redlegs are a game-and-a-half clear of them in next-to-last.

But, hey: At least they're not those awful, laughable, lousy-prank Chicago What Sox. 

Who, over in this other corner, continue to slouch toward Birmingham or some other  suitably minor-league locale. As of this morning, the What Sox are 62 games below .500, or 29-91. They're 41 1/2 games out of first in the AL Central and 27 1/2 out of next-to-last. Last week, finally, they fired manager Pedro Grifol and brought in retread Grady Sizemore to skipper the Titanic.

But you know what?

Yesterday, for one day, they were still way better than my Cruds.

That's because, while the Cruds were losing their eighth straight, the What Sox, who had lost 24 of the previous 25 games, hauled off and -- say what? -- beat the New York Yankees. And not just beat them, but beat them.

The final was 12-2. Gavin Sheets had four hits and four RBI for the Palest Of Hose. Korey Lee and Brooks Baldwin went yard. All told they strafed Yankees pitching for 18 hits in battering a team with 41 more victories.

Today, of course, they'll probably lose again. But for one magical, mystical, rainbow-y day, they were better than the lordly Yankees -- and, of course, my distinctly un-lordly Cruds.

No matter what happens from here on out, they'll always have that. They'll always have August 12.

On the other hand, I don't know what my Cruds will have. On"E"al Cruz, I suppose.

The best parts

 So now the Paris Games are officially over, and it's time to say goodbye to Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky and Steph Curry; Cole Hocker and Leon Marchand and bump-draftin' kayakers. 

The USWNT. The U.S. men's and women's basketball teams. The boxers, the break dancers, the rock-wall climbers, the rowers, the rugby 7s; the filthy Seine, the headless singing Marie Antoinettes and that strange Feast of Dionysius bit that got some Christians  in a lather because they thought it was something else.

Hell of a summer Olympics, all that was. And the best parts were, as always, the quirky parts.

Pretty much the entire Opening Ceremonies, for starters.

"Snoop Dogg" and "dressage" in the same sentence.

Recliner Dad Jason Bourne (Turkish pistoleer Yusuf Dikec) and Pommel Horse Millhouse From The Simpsons (American gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik). Irish Sprinter Who Probably Got Beat Up In School A Lot (Mark English). And of course the French pole vaulter who might possibly have been one of the wild and crazy Festrunk brothers from SNL, because he missed a vault when his, um, bulge knocked the crossbar off.

Somewhere the Festrunks and their bulges must have been cheering wildly.

Also, it made you wish ABC's Wide World of Sports was still airing, because it would have had a new candidate for the agony of defeat.

In any case, the Paris Games wouldn't have been the same without all of the above, and not nearly as much fun. It added a dash of frivolity to two weeks of incredible competition, beginning with rugby and swimming and ending with the nail-biting women's soccer and basketball finals.

It was the Olympics, in track and field, of Hocker and Quincy Hall coming out of nowhere to win the 1500 and 400, respectively. Of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone destroying everyone in the women's 400 hurdles and the 4x400 relay. Of Grant Fisher medaling in both the men's 10,000 meters and 5,000 meters ... and Noah Lyles winning the 100, then getting the bronze in the 200 while running a 102-degree Covid fever ... and Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands attempting the suicidal 5,000/10,000/marathon trifecta.

Incredibly, she medaled in all three, and won the marathon. That gets the Blob's vote for greatest athletic feat of the Paris Games.

Bravest feat belonged to all the swimmers who splashed without reservation down E-Coli Alley, aka the grossly polluted Seine.

Biggest injustice of the Games: American gymnast Jordan Chiles being stripped of her bronze in floor exercise because the Romanians protested and the U.S. appealed four seconds too late. 

Biggest vindication of the Games: Maligned Algerian boxer Imane Khelif winning a boxing gold while defending herself against accusations she was a man. She's not, she never has been, and she'd been boxing for years without controversy until a bunch of transphobic hysterics (including Indiana's dopey attorney general, Performance Art Todd Rokita) decided to create one.

Apparently things got so bad her attorney is filing a complaint with the Paris prosecutor's office over "aggravated online harassment" of his client. To which the Blob says, "Good."

And Jordan Chiles?

I think if I were her, and Olympic officials asked her to return the bronze medal, my response would be "Come take it."

She won't do that, of course. Which is why Jordan Chiles is better than I am, and why all of the Olympians are, and why the Games are always so sublime.

An outbreak of exuberance

 Glad tidings out of Buffalo, N.Y., this a.m., and, no, it's not that Buffaloians (Buffaloites?) are still a month or so away from the first blizzard of the season. It's about the Chicago Bears, silly!

Who beat the Bills 33-6 the other night in one of those entirely superfluous NFL preseason games. And guess what?

Their presumptive new franchise quarterback, Caleb Williams, played 20 snaps. And did not remind Bears fans of Bob Avellini, Peter Tom Willis or any other quarterback in the numbingly beige history of Bears quarterbacks.

No, sir. Why, he looked like an actual quarterback!

According to the game story by ESPN's Courtney Cronin, in 20 snaps, Williams completed 4-of-7 passes for 95 yards, a 101.8 passer rating. Two of the three incompletions were drops. He took off on a 13-yard scramble at one point. He hit tight end Cole Kmet with a 26-yard pass that Kmet pronounced "second to none." Wide receiver DJ Moore declared Williams' performance "outstanding," and head coach Matt Eberflus, displaying the requisite head coach's caution, said there was "certainly positivity there," but said there was also a lot of work to do.

This of course will not stop the more exuberant precincts of Bears Nation from declaring "Finally! We've found the next Sid Luckman!"

Weeeelll ...

Allow the Blob, at this point, to remind everyone there've been a lot more Sid Caesars than Sid Luckmans playing quarterback in Chicago across the decades.

Allow me to bring up, say, Justin Fields, who was thought to be the quarterback of the future until he turned out to be the halfback option passer of the future. Or the aforementioned Slo-Mo Bob and Peter Tom. Or even Jay Cutler -- the best Bears quarterback of my lifetime, but also a one-man tropical depression with the leadership qualities of a garden slug.

In other words: Tap the brakes, Chicago. Williams might indeed be all that, and he did indeed look good the other night against whatever warm bodies the Bills had on the field. But let's see what he does against, say, the Packers in November.

Even Williams seemed to be telling everyone to slow the roll after his unveiling.

"There's an understanding that it is preseason, that everybody's not going to show their looks and what they would do versus us and vice versa," he said. "(Now) we take a step back, we go through the tape and then on ... you take it from there and you keep growing, keep growing, keep growing."

And whatever happens, happens.

Wise old heads

 The U.S. men's basketball team won the Olympic gold medal for the fifth straight time Saturday, and in other news, Donald Trump is an odd duck. Which is to say, even though France had a lineup stuffed with NBA players, the U.S. had better NBA players, and therefore did what everyone from here to Alpha Centauri knew it would do.

Even less surprising was who led the way.

LeBron James. Steph Curry. Kevin Durant. You know, the senior citizens.

The Golden Years Three thoroughly tapioca-ed Victor Wembayama, Rudy Gobert and the rest of the French, or some other tortured metaphor. LeBron finished with 14 points, six rebounds,10 assists, two steals and a block, playing ten years younger than his 39 years and like a man who simply was not going to let the Americans lose. KD, meanwhile, got the start after coming off the bench for much of the Games, and scored 15 points including a triplet of 3-pointers.

And Curry?

After a slow start he went incandescent down the stretch, hitting eight threes in 13 attempts including one back-breaker over a double team that kept half the country awake trying to figure out how he did it. He was, in other words, Steph Curry doing Steph Curry things, and how he wasn't named the tournament MVP over LeBron also kept half the country awake trying to figure it.

Some numbers: In the last two games of the tournament, when first Serbia and then France threatened to upend the Americans, Curry scored 60 points. He made 17 threes in 27 attempts. He more than anyone dug the U.S. out of a 17-point hole against Serbia; he more than anyone helped stave off the French in the gold medal game, 98-87.

It was Curry's first Olympic gold medal, LeBron's third, a record fourth for KD. That's a 36-year-old, a 39-year-old and another about-to-be 36-year-old if you're keeping score at home.

The wise old heads can still bring it, in other words. Who's got next?

Instant renaissance

 I don't know if Emma Hayes is a miracle worker, but right  now she's playing one on TV. Or maybe you didn't see what the USWNT did on the soccer pitch yesterday.

Won the Olympic gold medal. That's what it did.

Barely two months after Hayes became the team's head coach, the U.S. women beat Brazil, 1-0, with a lineup of fresh faces and bodacious young talent. Remember the names: Mallory Swanson, Sophia Smith, Alyssa Naeher, Lindsey Horan, Trinity Rodman. You're going to hear them a lot in the coming years.

Yesterday they delivered the gold for the first time in 12 years, and just a year after crashing out of the World Cup in the quarterfinals. And they did it with guile and grit and heads-up smarts beyond their years.

Consider the winning goal, for instance: Swanson scored it in the 57th minute on a perfect lead from Korbin Albert, while Smith alertly veered off to keep the play from being offside.

It was a veteran move from a less-than-seasoned veteran, and the sort of play the American women unfurled from the moment they dispatched Zambia 4-0 in their Olympic opener. And, of course, it was a testament to the coaching chops of Hayes, the Englishwoman who built a women's Premier League powerhouse at Chelsea. In fewer than eights weeks, she transformed a group of talented young Americans into an absolute razor, a tough-minded group with dazzling firepower and level heads who never blinked when things got tense.

Maybe that does make Hayes a miracle worker, on second thought. Or just proof that all those little girls playing soccer out there in America are going to keep the USWNT well-fed for years to come.

In their faces

 Well, isn't this a fat ol' raspberry.

Also a big, honkin' "neener-neener-neener."

Also the University of Michigan, a prestigious university of long repute, deciding to go lowbrow in a scruffy, Randy-Quaid-at-the-end-of-"Independence Day" way.

Remember that? Quaid's character's last words as he flew his jet right up the mother ship's poop chute?

Up ... yours, you alien a**holes!

Now comes U of M, saying "Up ... yours, you NCAA a**holes!"

This after Michigan invited Harbaugh back to serve as honorary captain for UM's home opener against Fresno State -- almost immediately after the NCAAs handed Harbaugh a four-year show-cause penalty for essentially being a shady ne'er-do-well.

More specifically, the NCAA charged that Harbaugh "engaged in unethical conduct, failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance and violated head coach responsibility obligations."

Michigan's reaction: "Pffft."

And also, "Man delivered us a national title. Who cares if he broke a few of your dumb rules?"

And also, "Face it, you NCAA guys are just mad he escaped to the NFL, with whom have no extradition treaty."

The latter of which, frankly, has some weight behind it.

No other explanation for the NCAA's edict makes as much sense, given that it's largely pointless, baldly vindictive and more than a little silly. It's like telling a guy who's left Podunkville for the big city, "You'll never work in this town again!"  Or, "Fine! Go! But you'll be in BIG TROUBLE if you ever come back, mister!"

Yeah, boy. I'm sure that four-year show-cause penalty will cause Harbaugh many sleepless nights as he sends his Chargers out to battle Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs on Sunday afternoons. Darn, I miss those September warmups against Central Michigan and Appalachian State. Takin' on Mahomes and Andy Reid just doesn't measure up.

Rrrright.

Of course, Michigan sticking its finger in the NCAA's eye has its elements of farce, too, considering on August 31 they'll be honoring the man who's largely responsible for putting the Wolverines in the NCAA's sights. The threat of sanctions still hovers over the program as the Sherrone Moore era begins, and that threat is the residue of shenanigans that happened on Jim Harbaugh's watch. But, oh, that national title!

And so: Welcome back, Coach. We forgive you for getting us in hot water by strategically looking the other way at all the right times. Heck, looking the other way is the secret to success in big-boy college football! Everyone knows that! So way to go! 

Yeesh. Almost sounds as if Michigan was willing to sacrifice a piece of its integrity for a national championship. But some might say that's unfair, and it probably is.

Or, you know, maybe.

Not killin' it

 People who know me well frequently ask me "Do you ever get tired of being wrong?" And now I have my answer.

No. No, I do not.

In fact, I love being wrong. Being wrong is a FREAKING DAY AT THE BEACH IN ARUBA. It's ALL THE ICE CREAM YOU CAN EAT FOREVER AND EVER. It's ...

Well. You get the idea.

I bring this up because just yesterday I Blobbed about how wrong I was about the U.S. men's basketball team, which was crumpling everyone like a paper towel after I'd said the Olympic tournament was going to be no moonlight stroll for the Yanks. I noted that the Americans' closest game was a 17-point saunter against South Sudan, and that they next took on Serbia and Nikola Jokic in the semifinals.

Then I wrote this: I expect another romp, because the Americans already played Joker and the Jokettes in pool play, and beat them by 26. By 26.

So what happened in the rematch?

Thaaaat's right. LeBron 'n' Steph 'n' them jacked around and almost lost.

They fiddled and farted and trailed by 17 points at one juncture, before they mounted a furious rally in the fourth quarter to pull it out by four, 95-91. LeBron decided "Hell with this" and took matters into his own hands, delivering a triple-double. Steph did Steph things, dropping 36 on the Serbs and splashing 9 of 14 threes. Kevin Durant hit two big buckets down the stretch.

 "That's impressive," you're saying now. "But not as impressive as you being as wrong as can be about one basketball team for an entire Olympics."

Well, hey. It is the Olympics. A man has to step up his game.

Killin' it

 And now comes the part where the Blob accepts responsibility for its dumbness, and where I go to the dumbness penalty box and, you know, feel shame.

(To quote Denis Lemieux from "Slapshot")

In other words, I was wrong about the U.S. men's basketball team. So far, anyway

I was as wrong as ham on plywood, as wrong as Roy "Wrong Way" Riegels, as wrong as a guy would be if he said nude hopscotch would be the next Olympic sport. I was wrong.

(And if this is where you're asking "Who the hell is Roy 'Wrong Way' Riegels?", go look it up. I can't do all the work around here.)

Anyway, I was wrong, because I predicted the Olympic hoops tournament would not be a stroll in a park-like setting for the Americans. This was on account of there are great players scattered all over the globe now, and also on account of the narrow escapes the U.S. had against South Sudan and Germany in the run-up to the Paris Games.

Well. Don't I look like a big stupid now.

I say this because the U.S. has rampaged through the field with scarcely a labored breath so far, and the other day it beat Brazil in the quarterfinals by 35 points. By 35 points. In the quarterfinals.

Now it's on to the semis against Serbia, who has two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic at its disposal, and who some people seem to think could be a threat to the Americans.

Not me, boys and girls. I'm not making that mistake again.

No, I expect another romp, because the Americans have already played Joker the Jokettes in pool play, and beat them by 26. By 26.

This almost constituted a competitive game, given the way the U.S. has tap-danced through this thing. Aforementioned South Sudan came the closest to making its heart skip a beat, but it wasn't like the last time, when a LeBron James layup with eight seconds left staved off an upset. This time the Yanks scraped past by 17 points.

In other words, forget what I said.

I was wrong (so far). Twenty lashes with a wet noodle, or something.

That guy from Indy

 Somewhere in Indiana today there's a kid or two -- 8, 9 years old maybe  -- who's begging his or her parents for a pair of running shoes.

Somewhere there's another kid, or several, stepping outside under a gray lid of morning sky and running 100 yards, then 200, then all around the neighborhood.

Somewhere in Indiana, a journey began. And it's all because another Indiana guy looked up yesterday and saw a sliver of daylight, and began to sprint through it.

By now you've seen the replay a hundred times, if you're not making your home under a chunk of limestone: There at the head of the stretch were the two bitter rivals in the Olympic men's 1500 meters, Jakob Ingebrigsten of Norway and Josh Kerr from Great Britain, joining their anticipated battle at last as the final meters whirled away.

Just behind, like an afterthought, was the Indiana guy, 23-year-old Cole Hocker, Indianapolis native and Cathedral High School grad.

He looked tiny and frail next to the two rivals, and he'd already tried to slip by Ingebrigsten along the rail and failed. It looked as if he might medal, but only might.

And then ...

And then, of course, we know what happened.

Ingebrigsten drifted over toward Kerr. Daylight beckoned. And suddenly, with just 50 meters to the tape, the Indiana guy summoned a finishing kick out of legend, sprinting past the Norwegian, then sprinting past Kerr in the final five strides, then flinging his arms toward heaven as back in Indiana people grabbed their heads and screamed HOLY CRAP HE ACTUALLY WON!

It was the upset of the Paris Games, at least in track and field.

It was an Olympic record, 3:27.65 -- equivalent to a 3:44 mile, and more than three seconds faster than Hocker's previous best in the 1500.

It was the first time since 2016 an American had won gold in the 1500. And when Yared Nuguse summoned his own blazing stretch run to nab the bronze, it marked the first time since 1912 two Americans had reached the podium in the event.

Nuguse, in fact, closed so fast that, had the race been half a stride longer, the U.S. would have finished 1-2. Kerr beat him to the line by an eyelash.

It was a 1500 final for the ages, and doubtless now will be part of the Olympics montage the networks will roll out every four years from here to eternity. That's what happens when a man closes with a guts stretch run that will ring down the decades, literally shocking the world and maybe even himself.

Hocker said later he knew he had it in him, but what neither he nor anyone else could predict was how the race would spin out. As it happened, it spun out exactly the way it had to for the guy from Indy -- with Ingebrigsten going out too fast, and he and Kerr focusing solely on one another across the final 200 yards. As they turned for home, incredibly, both seemed to have forgotten Hocker was even there.

And now?

Now kids doing what kids do, across Indiana.

Now Cole Hocker's sprint doing what sprints with the world watching inevitably do, which is fire the imaginations of a whole bunch of future Cole Hockers.

Somewhere in Indiana this morning, they all stepped outside and began running. Who knows where they'll end up?

Shadowed

 Jim Harbaugh is safe in Los Angeles now, but his ghost continues to hang out in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Connor Stalions Spygate scandal that got him suspended for half the 2023 season continues to darken the horizon for the Michigan football program, and now it's Sherrone Moore who has to deal with whatever storm it presages.

In case you missed it, the NCAAs are not letting this thing go, and Moore is up to his neck in it. The other day a draft of the NCAA's notice of allegations (NOA) got out on ESPN, and Moore was one of seven members of the UM program accused of violating NCAA rules in the Stalions affair.

Specifically, Moore could face a show-cause penalty and suspension because the NCAA says he deleted a 52-text thread with Stalions on the day the news broke about the latter's illegal scouting scheme. Not exactly a good look if you're trying to claim your hands were clean in the whole deal.

Michigan, of course, went on to win the national title, and would have with or without all the shady stuff. This gave Harbaugh the perfect escape hatch, and he used it posthaste, teleporting back to the NFL.

Where he continues to Sgt. Schultz the entire Stalions affair -- as in: I know nothing, NOOOOTH-ing.

"Today, I do not apologize," the new head coach of the Chargers told local media the other day. "I did not participate, was not aware nor complicit in those said allegations. So, it's back to work and attacking with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind."

Which is just the sort of bizarre thing you'd expect an oddball like Harbaugh to say. And which apparently also applies to his denials, which he attacks not only with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind, but also a lack of credulity unknown to mankind.

Here, after all, is the rough translation of what he said and continues to say, rendered in the appropriate idiom: Hey, I didn't know nothin' 'bout no "Connor Stalions," whoever he is. It was all them other guys. They was the ones who dreamed up the scheme, see. I never knew about any of it even though I was with those mugs pretty much 24/7. Heck, when this "Connor Stalions" appeared on the sidelines at my elbow and started whisperin' the other team's plays in my ear, I just thought it was part of some Make-A-Wish deal or somethin'.

Okey-dokey, Smokey. 

Meanwhile, in Ann Arbor, the shadow lingers, as another season beckons for the defending national champs. Not that Harbaugh has to worry himself about that.

I mean, it's always sunny in L.A., right?

Those moments

 Here is the reason we watch, and it has nothing to do with glory or world records or the lean at the tape that separates gold from silver. 

We watch to see Scottie Scheffler up there on the top step of the podium, bawling like a little kid.

The man has won two green jackets, and trophies named for Byron Nelson and Harry Vardon, and truckloads of money. He's already won six tournaments this year, and he's been the best golfer on the planet for 99 straight weeks now. No one's been as dominant for as long since Tiger Woods was donning red on Sundays and sending everyone into cringe mode.

But they hung that gold medal around his neck yesterday, and played the Star-Spangled Banner, and here came the waterworks. When you win not for yourself or your sponsor logos but for your country, it just hits different.

And that's why we watch the Olympic Games every four years, bloated and corporate and corrupt to the core though they may be.

We watch for the Scottie Scheffler moments, and because always, always, it's the athletes who redeem everything. We watch to see a bundle of pure guts named Bobby Finke hang on and hang on in the 1,500 freestyle and keep a 124-year streak alive for the U.S. We watch to see a former gymnast named Kristen Faulkner hop on a bike and come out of nowhere to win gold in the women's road race -- the first American to medal in the event in 40 years.

We watch to see Jamaica's Oblique Seville finish last in the men's 100-meter dash, and still achieve something remarkable: His last-place time of 9.915 actually was a tick faster than Carl Lewis' gold medal time (9.925) in 1988. 

Maybe that was because at the tape you could have thrown a blanket over the entire field in a photo finish for the ages. Noah Lyles of the U.S. won by toenail -- the first time an American had won the 100 in 20 years, and just like he predicted he would, 

Finke, meanwhile, won the only individual men's gold medal for the U.S. in the last swimming event of these Games, leading from the front and holding off an Italian and an Irishman who were squarely in his wake for most of the 14-plus minute race. In the end it took a world record for Finke to win gold; had he faltered, it would have marked the first time since 1900 that the U.S. men had failed to win an individual gold in swimming.

And Scottie Scheffler?

All he did was set fire to the Olympic course with a final-round 62, reeling in a pile of guys in front of him -- including the Spaniard Jon Rahm, who led by four strokes with eight holes to play and then utterly collapsed, failing in the end to even medal.

Scheffler, meanwhile, shot a 29 on the back side as Rahm, Rory McIlroy and defending gold medalist Xander Schauffle all faltered. And then sobbed on the medal podium when the American flag went up and the national anthem played.

"I still think that the Ryder Cup is the best tournament we have in our game, pure competition, and I think this has the potential to be right up there with it," McIlroy said when it was done. "... you think about the two tournaments that might be the purest form of competition in our sport, we don't play for money in it.

"It speaks volumes for what's important in sports."

Sure does. With a megaphone.

Meanwhile, in Chicago ...

 Ran into my friend the White Sox fan again last night, and I don't think he's stopped shaking his head since the last time we talked. When you grew up in Chicago and remember going to Comiskey as a kid to watch Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox play, it's beyond stomach-turning to watch Jerry Reinsdorf vandalize his own team out of pure spite.

The What Sox, see, have now lost 19 straight games. Nineteen. Dead last in the AL Central (not to mention all of baseball), they're 59 games below .500, 41 1/2 games out of first in the AL Central and 26 1/2 out of next-to-last. Their 27 wins are 14 fewer than anyone else in MLB.

It's an utter abomination, and my friend thinks he has a solution.

"The ownership group should get together and force Reinsdorf to sell the team," he said.

He's dead-on right. I also think something else.

I think the What Sox are the best argument yet for relegation in baseball.

Relegation is a thing they do in British Premier League soccer, and it would give the owners of chronically awful teams some incentive to do more than just sit on their pile of revenue-sharing dough. In the Premier League, the three teams that finish at the bottom of the standings every season get booted down ("relegated") to a lower league. If they want back in, they have to win their way back in.

Baseball needs to institute this. If for no other reason than to keep the Jerry Reinsdorfs of the world from embarrassing the game.

Instead, send the What Sox and a couple of other tail-end Charlies (looking at you, John Fisher in Oakland) down to Triple A for a season or two. Shut off the MLB money tap. If they want to plead phony poverty to justify their skinflinting, give 'em a taste of actual poverty. 

You might be surprised how quickly they'd get real interested in putting an actual MLB product on the field. 

Or not. But it's a thought.

Here come Da Judge

 This is not a precinct where the New York Yankees are held in great esteem. Let's begin there this morning.

Let's begin with the Blob's general disdain for the pinstriped little darlings, which is not a reflection on any of the current Yankees but mostly the residue of a time when everyone from the owner (George Steinbrenner) to the manager (Billy Martin) to the resident superstar (Reggie Jackson) was a thoroughly unlikeable human. Plus they won all the time in those days, and their fans were world champion frontrunners.

It was easy to be a Yankees fan then. They had all the money, and so generally you never had to worry about heartbreak -- which of course is an essential component of true baseball fandom.

However ...

However, attention must be paid today.

That's because yesterday Aaron Judge mashed his 41st home run in the first inning at Yankee Stadium. This came a day after he'd mashed his 40th home run, a 477-foot moonshot, also in the first inning.

The victim in both these instances were the sadsack Toronto Blue Jays, who just held a yard sale at the trade deadline because they're 14 1/2 games out of first in the AL East and aren't inclined to get much closer. Accordingly, Blue Jays manager John Schneider decided to commit some quasi-history.

Having seen Judge greet his pitching with first-inning homers two days in a row, Schneider decided to walk Big Aaron with two outs and the bases clean when he came up again in the second.

It marked the first time in 50 years a player was intentionally walked with the bases empty in the first two innings of a game. And the last time it happened with two outs in the first two innings was Aug. 10, 1972, when Minnesota Twins catcher Glenn Borgmann, a career .229 hitter, was walked to get to the pitcher.

(Yeah, I know. It's completely bizarre that baseball apparently keeps track of such things.  No other sport I know of is such a total nerdfest.)

(By the way, I looked it up. Glenn Borgmann is still alive. He's 74 years old now. And so in my mind's eye I see him reading about what happened in Yankee Stadium yesterday and saying "Dammit! My completely obscure baseball feat has finally been matched!")

But I digress.

What matters here is not just Schneider making quasi-history, but Aaron Judge -- by all accounts a thoroughly likeable human -- sitting at 41 dingers on August 3. That means he has two more months to hit 22 more and eclipse his own club record of 62, which he did just two seasons ago.

So Aaron Judge is chasing Aaron Judge. Something to spice up the dog days, and what's wrong with that?