Rinse. Repeat.

 Stop me if you've heard this before ...

The Indianapolis Colts handed the Pittsburgh Steelers their first ding of the season yesterday, and the backup quarterback was the guy who delivered it.

That's because the starting quarterback, and presumptive Future Of The Franchise, got hurt. Again.

Once more Anthony Richardson took off running, and when he got tackled he came up lame. Landed hard on his hip, it seems. Limped off the field. Later came running back onto the sideline looking as good as new, went back in the game ...

And the Colts brain trust (apparently missing the "brain" part) immediately dialed up another designed run for him.

At the end of which he got blown up by the Steelers' Minkah Fitzpatrick -- who, depending on one's perspective, is either a dirty-ass player or just a dude who hits really hard.

In any case, that was the end of Richardson's day. He got up hurt again, and now it remains to be seen if his hip is just your standard NFL owie, or something more serious.

And on we go, on we go, down this Yellow Nicked Road. Richardson has now started eight games in his young NFL career, and he's finished just half of them. He played five games last year and then was gone for the season with a shoulder injury. This year he made it all the way to game four before having to hobble off early. Seventy-five-year-old Joe Flacco, played by Gardner Minshew in the original version of this tale, brought the Colts home.

"Oh, come on! " you're saying now. "Joe Flacco's not 75! Why, he's not eligible for Social Security for a couple more years at least!"

OK, so I misspoke. Flacco is 75 only in NFL years; chronologically, he's a mere pup of 39. And that's aside from the point anyway.

The point being, maybe it's time now to start wondering if Anthony Richardson is a latter-day version of Robert Griffin III.

Griffin, you might recall, had a hell of a rookie season for the Washington Football Team, throwing for 3,200 yards and 20 touchdowns and completing 65.6 percent of his throws. Then he took off on a scamper one day and got hurt.

Then he got hurt again.

Then he got hurt again, and kept on getting hurt.

By the time he was 30, he was a walking trauma unit, and out of the league. After starting 28 games and throwing 36 touchdown passes in his first two seasons, he started just 14 and threw just seven sixes in the five years that followed.

Now, this is not to say AR is headed down a similar path, but the dreaded tag of "injury-prone" is waiting just offstage, and it has its lines ready. Maybe it's just bad luck, this early spate of injuries. Or maybe it just comes with the territory when your quarterback is built like a linebacker and enjoys delivering a blow like one.

Or how about this: Maybe, when he's no longer 22 with the aura of invincibility that comes with that, he'll learn to pick his spots, protect himself, and not try to throw the ball through a brick wall every time just because he has a cannon for an arm.

Maybe.

Then again, maybe he really is injury-prone. And what we're getting now is just what we'll get from him for as long as he lasts.

Rinse, repeat: Today in nightmare scenarios if you're the Colts.

Groundbreakers

 "We haven't been 5-0, evidently, for 57 years. That's a pretty long time, isn't it?"

-- IU football coach Curt Cignetti

Sure is, Coach Cig. Want to know how long?

Fifty-seven years ago, Vietnam wasn't a movie.

Fifty-seven years ago, lots of people had heard of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, but no one had heard of James Earl Ray or Sirhan Sirhan.

Fifty-seven years ago, National Guardsmen weren't yet shooting college students ... and the President of the United States was just starting to familiarize himself with "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" ... and in Bloomington, In., something weird and wonderful was going on.

Indiana University's football team was actually winning games.

A snowy-headed man named John Pont was the coach, and the stars were a trio of sophomores named Harry Gonso and Jade Butcher and John Isenbarger, and every week they managed beat someone they probably had no business beating. Isenbarger, the halfback and punter, kept running for it on fourth down and kept failing to make it. Gonso threw and Butcher caught. Guys named Terry Cole and Doug Crusan and Al Gage made occasional appearances.

The Hoosiers went 9-2 that year and played in their only Rose Bowl game, and damned if anyone could figure out how. They squeaked by Kentucky 12-10 and Kansas 18-15 and Iowa 21-17. Survived 27-20 at Michigan and 14-13 at Michigan State, and held off Wisconsin at home, 14-9. Finally, they were ranked No. 4 and No. 3 Purdue came in to what was then called Seventeenth Street Stadium, and Indiana won the Old Oaken Bucket 19-14 because Purdue kept fumbling in the red zone.

Now?

Now it's 57 years later, and Curt Cignetti, who was six years old then, is 63 now. And the 5-0 team he's put together is by all available evidence a heck of a lot better than the 1967 team.

Yesterday they got Maryland down in Memorial Stadium and whipped the Terrapins 42-28 despite turning it over four times. Quarterback Kurtis Rourke threw for 359 yards and three scores, and the IU defense held  Maryland to one touchdown across the last quarter-and-a-half, and the Hoosiers went over 40 points for the fourth time in five games.

Previously, they paved Western Illinois 77-3 and ball-peened UCLA 42-13 and laminated Charlotte 52-14. And next week?

Next week they travel to Northwestern, which is 2-2 and 0-1 in the conference. Another winnable game, you would think, and a 6-0 start if so.

Shhhh. That sound you just heard, softly for now, is the ground breaking.

Milestoned

 The Chicago What Sox lost their 121st game yesterday, the Detroit Tigers beating them 4-1 to qualify for the playoffs for the first time in 10 years. The Tigers, unlike the Sox, have been tearing it up lately, going 31-11 since the 10th of August. They've also won six in a row and 10 of their last 11.

So there it is, boys and girls: Your yin and yang for today. Or perhaps more accurately, your yin and your yuck.

The yuck, of course, is the What Sox, who now have officially lost more games than anyone since 1899. That was the year the Cleveland Spiders went 20-134, a record for spectacularly crummy baseball that stands to this day.

No one has seen the like of it since, not even the 1962 New York Mets, who went 40-120. They were so legendarily wretched some of their players became household names simply for being, well, legendarily wretched. 

The names were Hot Rod Kanehl and Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Choo-Choo Coleman and Charlie Neal. They were Elio Chacon and Harry Chiti and Roger Craig -- who was the Mets winningest pitcher, even though he led the majors in losses (24) and was second in home runs given up (35).

Sixty-two years later, here are the What Sox. It's too soon to tell if any of their players will be as memorable as Hot Rod or Marvelous Marv, but they're even more memorably crummy. So they've got that not going for them.

This is a team, remember, that lost 20 straight games at one point. That's so bad they're not only 43 games out of next-to-last in their division, they're 21 games behind the next-worst team in the majors, the Miami Marlins. That's so bad if they lose today and tomorrow, they'll finish with 39 wins, which works out to six per month.

Six Ws per month! Now that is some epic fail right there.

If there's any justice in the world, or at least in baseball, it will be the CEO of this mess, Jerry Reinsdorf, who becomes the Hot Rod or Marvelous Marv of the '24 What Sox. In the same way Marvelous Marv is remembered for once being called out on a home-run trot because he failed to touch either first or second base, Reinsdorf should go down in history not only for presiding over the worst MLB team since the 1800s, but for trying to get the city of Chicago to build him a new ballpark at the same time.

Epic fail meets epic gall, in other words. Long may the infamy live.

A's minus

 Forty-six thousand and change saw the Oakland A's off to Sacramento/Las Vegas yesterday, and it was some wave goodbye. Kelly-green everywhere. Groundskeepers patiently scooping up the ballpark dirt and filling fans' empty pop bottles and plastic cups. Memories and more memories running loose on a sun-washed northern California day.

Heck, the A's even won their last game in Oakland, beating the Texas Rangers 3-2. How about that?

How about legendary A's Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson throwing out the first pitches, and Barry Zito singing the national anthem? How about fans sitting in traffic for five hours waiting to get into the Oakland Coliseum one last time? How about one last shot at carpetbagging owner John Fisher -- a banner beyond the left-field wall that read "It's Not Us, It's You"?

Because it's not them, understand. It almost never is.

You can argue that a franchise -- Connie Mack's franchise -- that moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland is just doing what it does again. But that's ignoring a lot.

 It's ignoring the 57 years the A's played in Oakland. It's ignoring 57 years of fathers passing on their A's fandom to their sons, and their sons passing it on to their sons.

It's ignoring Reggie and Catfish and Sal Bando and Joe Rudi. Rollie Fingers and his Snidely Whiplash 'stache. Vida Blue and Bert Campaneris and Fingers, A's manager Dick Williams and catcher Gene Tenace suckering Johnny Bench into a strikeout in Game 3 of the 1972 World Series.

That was the first of three straight World Series titles for the A's, and then Charlie Finley all but liquidated the club. A half-century later Fisher essentially liquidated Oakland, deciding to move the A's (after a layover in poor Sacramento) to a city so unenthused by their coming even the mayor of Vegas begged Fisher to find a way to keep the team in Oakland.

He didn't, of course. He let the Coliseum rot, he let the team go to hell, and finally, in this last week of the Oakland A's existence, he sent out a  letter that was a masterwork of disingenuousness, thanking the fans he crapped on for their support and shedding crocodile tears over having to leave Oakland.

Rarely has there been such a load of sheer horse pucky. Or gall.

Rarely has baseball been more tone-deaf to the history it clings to so tenaciously, nor to its own longstanding principles.

Once upon a time, remember, baseball banned eight Chicago White Sox for life for consorting with gamblers, even though some of the eight really didn't. And once upon a time it banned Pete Rose for life for betting on his own team when he was managing the Reds.

Now there are online betting kiosks outside major-league ballparks, and MLB is a couple seasons away from officially  welcoming the capital of American wagering into the family.

Somewhere Joe Jackson and Connie Mack weep.

Co-opted

 The Indiana Fever lost to the Connecticut Sun again last night, which means the Fever's season is over, which means Caitlin Clark's season is over. Now maybe everyone can stop using her as a fulcrum for their various agendas/theories/twisted worldviews.

Clark never asked to be co-opted like that, never asked to be held up as some sort of persecuted martyr to reverse racism. That this was a construct as phony as a three-dollar bill didn't matter. The goal was to absolve those who advanced it, even as they engaged in their usual look-at-those-black-animals-picking-on-our-Caitlin narrative. 

All of that got out in the open again after the first playoff game between the Sun and the Fever, when the Sun's Dijonai Carrington, who is black, lunged to block a Clark pass and poked her in the eye on the follow-through. The not-racist racists immediately swore Carrington did it on purpose ("Look at that black animal deliberately poking Clark in the eye!") and flooded social media with the usual gusher of vileness. Some of them even showed up for Game 2 to mock Carrington in person.

This despite the fact Clark herself, once again the only grownup in the room, said the eye-poke was not intentional and frankly no big deal.

This despite the fact you have to slow the video waaay down to even halfway make it look intentional.

In any event, here Clark was again, a lightning rod for knuckle-dragging lowlifes indulging all the worst instincts in American society. For someone who's only ever wanted to play basketball -- and who did it amazingly, even stunningly, well in her record-shattering rookie season in the WNBA -- it was a disgusting way for her season to end.

And when the evening was done, pretty much everyone said as much.

"In my 11-year career, I've never experienced the racial comments from the Indiana Fever fan base. It's unacceptable, honestly," the Sun's Alyssa Thomas said. "There's no place for it. We've been professional throughout the whole entire thing, but I've never been called the things I've been called on social media.

"Basketball is headed in a great direction, but we don't want fans that are just going to degrade us and call us racial names ... We don't want to go to work every day and have social media blown up over things like that. It's uncalled for."

Amen, said Fever coach Christy Sides.

"It's a lot of hurtful, hateful speech out there that's happening, and it's unacceptable," she said.

Indeed.

What's been wrought

Watched an old ESPN doc called "Pony Excess" the other day, and, man, it was refreshing. It was about the Wild West days at SMU in the 1980s, when the good ol' boy alums bought themselves a juggernaut football team with cars and cash and what-not, and even a Texas governor (Bill Clements) was complicit in the deal.

Eventually, because SMU wouldn't stop paying its players, the NCAA slapped the school with the only death penalty it's ever handed down. 

So what was refreshing about all that?

Even the cheaters had lines they wouldn't cross then.

One of 'em was, if you promised to pay a kid, you paid the kid -- which was how SMU wound up getting the death penalty, because when the NCAA told them to stop paying kids, they still felt duty-bound to honor their existing contracts. So they kept paying 'em, and the NCAA dropped Thor's hammer on 'em.

The other thing was, if you bought a kid, the kid tended to stay bought.

Well ... not anymore, apparently.

See, buying players is perfectly above-board now -- and let's face it, that's what the NIL structure amounts to -- but because the NCAA completely botched the NIL rollout, the Wild West is even Wilder than it was in the under-the-table days. Which is to say, there are no rules whatsoever, and therefore no lines that can't be crossed.

Enter Matthew Sluka, who's quarterbacking UNLV so well the Rebels are off to a 3-0 start.

Make that, was quarterbacking UNLV so well.

Sluka, see, announced this week he won't play another down for UNLV this season. A fifth-year senior, he's going to redshirt instead and then (presumably) transfer portal himself to another sucker, er, school to play next year. And it's apparently because UNLV didn't come through with the NIL money it promised when Sluka transferred there from his last school.

Which was FCS school Holy Cross, where in four years he finished first in career pass efficiency, second in career rushing yards (3,583), second in career rushing touchdowns (38), fifth in career passing yards (5,916) and fifth in career touchdown passes (59).

The kid's damn good, in other words. Good enough that in UNLV's 3-0 start, he's thrown for 318 yards and six TDs and run for 286 yards and another score.

But now he's quitting, right in the middle of the season. And if want to ask "What kind of person quits on his teammates in the middle of a season because he thinks he's not getting his?", you'd be absolutely correct to do so.

Except.

Except the unregulated transfer portal and NIL has turned young men like Matthew Sluka into nothing but studs for hire, and studs for hire by definition are loyal only to themselves. No pay; no play. That's how the marketplace works, and college football is nothing but a marketplace now.

And as for teammates ... 

Really? Does a kid who jumps from one school to the next two or three times even think in those terms? Does he even stick around long enough to learn all his "teammates'" names?

I'd bet cash money right now there are players on the UNLV roster Sluka doesn't know from Adam, and never will. And I rarely bet cash money on anything.

Understand, this is not to single out Sluka in particular or any kid looking for the main chance these days. True, college athletics are a purely mercenary enterprise for them, but they've been a mercenary enterprise for a long time. You can't very well ding Matthew Sluka, after all, if you're not also willing to ding Brian Kelly or Lincoln Riley or virtually any other marquee coach these days.

Like Sluka, they, too, are mercenaries. They, too, prioritize their own interests. And, yes, they, too, quit on their teams in pursuit of greener pastures for themselves.

Young people learn from their elders, surprise, surprise. And now they're utterly free to follow their lead and sell themselves to the highest bidder.

Pardon me if I miss the days when they had to do that on the sly. Seemed cleaner, somehow.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 3

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the stroll-down-memory-lane Blob feature of which critics have said "I wish this was a memory," and also "Remember when the internet was a force for good and crap like this?":

1. "Remember when we were supposed to be good?" (Joe Burrow, after his Bengals fell to 0-3 with a loss to Jayden Daniels and the Washington Commanders -- aka, "Yet another home loss that shouldn't have have been a home loss.")

2. "Remember when people said Caleb Williams was the best quarterback in the 2024 draft?" (Jayden Daniels)

3. In other news, the Saints!

4. Put their Super Bowl reservations on hold after the Eagles held them to 12 points and beat them in New Orleans, 15-12.

5. "Remember when we scored, like, nine gazillion points against the Panthers and Cowboys? Good times, man. Gooood times." (The Saints)

6. "Remember when this was OUR year? Again?" (The Cowboys after losing at home to the Ravens to drop to 1-2)

7. "Remember when I played defense and gave up 36 points to the crummy Panthers?" (Raiders QB Gardner Minshew, whom head coach Antonio Pierce hinted might be benched because the Raiders defense gave up 36 points to the Panthers in a 36-22 loss.)

8. "Remember when everyone said I was terrible and the Bears had to move on from me? Good times, man. Gooood times." (Justin Fields, after quarterbacking the 3-0 Steelers to another win)

9. "Remember when everyone said I was a-maaaazing?" (Texans QB C.J. Stroud, after the Vikings warped the Texans 34-7)

10. "Remember when everyone said I was NOT a-maaaazing?" (Vikings QB Sam Darnold, who threw four touchdown passes as Minnesota stayed unbeaten) 

True believer

 (This appeared yesterday in my old newspaper home, The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. If you haven't already, or are one of those who think local journalism is a part of the dead past, please subscribe. Because it damn well shouldn't be a part of the dead past, and woe to us if it ever becomes so.)

So the news comes down now that Rich Coffey has passed, and here come names upon names. A man makes a certain mark on a place, and in your mind the floodgates open.

Damon Bailey and Evric Gray and Jimmy Carruth. These are the names.

Jay Edwards and Lloyd “Sweet Pea” Daniels and Brook Steppe and Torgeir Bryn.

Mo McHone, and Gerald Oliver, and Kent Davison, and Rich Huff. The Fort Wayne Fury; the Fort Wayne Freedom; the CBA; the National Indoor Football Association.

Rich Coffey was around for all those names, and for all those entities. He saw their rise, and he saw their demise.  If he was a man whose eyes were sometimes bigger than his stomach in terms of vision vs. reality, it never stopped him from thinking this city could fulfill that vision.

It drove him, and the Fury’s owners, to bet professional basketball could work in a place where high school and college buckets owned the stage. And though indoor football never really caught on here through two, three, four incarnations, it didn’t stop Coffey from introducing it.

The man believed, in other words. Whatever else you want to say about the man, he believed.

And even if things didn’t always work out, it was a hell of a ride.

 The Fury, whom Coffey ran from its inception in 1991 until Isiah Thomas killed the CBA in 2001, was fun and entertaining. And, as the CBA tended to be, charmingly eccentric.

There was G.O. (Oliver) and Memor’awl Magic, and Steppe carrying on conversations with the fans while he was actually playing. The mascot fell while rappelling from the ceiling once. The team hired Rick Barry as coach, and later fired him; another head coach (McHone) was fired the day after the head of a plastic golf club (swung by the aforementioned mascot) snapped off and nailed him in the place no male wants to get nailed.

And the Freedom?

It was football on speed dial, and those fans who showed up loved it.  There were never enough of them, though, and both the team and league were critically undercapitalized, and eventually Coffey sold.

By then, his best moment already had happened. It came the day Thomas pulled the plug on the CBA, and, in his office, Coffey spoke from the heart in a way he perhaps never had before.

“You find out, when you do this long enough, there’s a kind of CBA culture out there,” he said, in between some extremely choice words for Isiah. “People tend to stick around for some reason.

“I’ve had other opportunities. We all have. But we really love this.”

Could never say otherwise.

Resistible forces

 The Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts played a football game or something like it Sunday down in Lucas Oil Stadium, and when it was done it was hard to say which young quarterback you felt more sorry for.

Was it Anthony Richardson, who occasionally throws such atrociously off-target balls you wonder if he's aiming for Raymond Berry or John Mackey or some other ghost of Colts receivers past?

Or was it Caleb Williams, who occasionally plays like the rookie he wasn't supposed to be, and is also hampered by the fact the Bears have no offensive line, no running game and an offensive coordinator who dials up plays straight out of Millard Fillmore Middle School?

Hard to say after yesterday's display, which was not so much a display as a warning label: Do Not Use After Sell-By Date. Unfortunately, the sell-by date for Bears-Colts yesterday was, I don't know, Labor Day or something.

In the end the Colts won 21-16, their first W of the season, but they couldn't possibly have felt good about it. Richardson was again dazzling or at least serviceable on one snap, son-where-were-you-going-with-that-throw on the next. The defense stuffed the Bears run game and sacked Williams four times, but mostly because the Bears run game is so eminently stuff-able and Williams committed the usual rookie sin of holding onto the ball too long.

In the end, it was Jonathan Taylor who bailed out the Horsies, running for 110 yards and two scores. That was one less touchdown than the Bears would have had if Shane Waldron, the aforementioned OC, hadn't been calling the plays.

Against a defense that got paved by the Packers running game last week, Waldron chose to have Williams throw 52 times. He completed 33 of them for 353 yards and two touchdowns, but also threw two picks that were pure rookie: One when he threw late on an out pattern, the other when he went deep into double coverage on Rome Odunze.

Very little of the rest was on him. And that's especially true when the Bears had first-and-goal at the Colts 5 in the second quarter and got nothing for it.

Instead of letting Williams try to make a play, Waldron instead dialed up three inside running plays even though the Bears O-line wasn't getting any kind of push up front. Nonetheless, they got down to the one-foot line on the first two plays, and then ...

And then, instead of running a quarterback sneak with Williams, they ran almost the same play for the third straight time. Predictably, the O-line leaked and the Colts blew up the play at the 1.

And on fourth down?

Nah, let's not let Caleb make something happen. Let's go all middle school and run a dopey option play instead, because, you know, that always works in the NFL.

You know what happened next: The Colts were all over it from the snap, and the pitch to poor D'Andre Swift lost 11 yards.

That was the whole day wrapped up in a poorly-tied ribbon -- a day when one supremely resistible force met an even more supremely resistible force, and the less resistible force managed to avoid an 0-3 start.

Now they're both 1-2, and no one is very happy about it.

Which might also be said of anyone who skipped a house payment to buy tickets to Sunday's show. Sorry for your loss, enthusiasts.

Cruds alert!

 Wait, where are you all going?

"You say 'cruds', we hit the road. Because NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR STUPID PIRATES," you're saying now.

Yeah, but ... this is kind of an interesting little tidbit. And I'll keep it short.

"Nothing is interesting about your stupid Pirates. But, OK, just this once. IF you keep it short like you promise."

I promise.

See, yesterday my Cruds lost to the Reds, which means they're now 3 1/2 games out of next-to-last in the NL Central. This means they're virtually a lock to again finish in the cellar -- aka, their ancestral home -- yet again.

Also, yesterday's loss ensured 2024 would be another losing season for the Cruds. They're once more guaranteed to finish under .500, which is notable for this reason: It will be their 28th losing season in the last 32.

Twenty-eight seasons out of 32! I defy anyone to match that for sustained, even generational, Cruddiness.

It takes real determination to fail like this again and again and again, or maybe just mule-headed incompetence. Losers for all but five of the last 32 summers? Man, you have to want to be Cruddy to achieve that.  You have to taste it. You have to be utterly committed to trading your handful of studs for "prospects", and to filling your roster, year after year, with journeymen, gurney-men and guys whose baseball cards always wind up in the spokes of some kid's bicycle. 

Guys like Elmer Dessens and Kevin Polcovich and Steve Bieser. Guys like Brian Meadows and Humberto Cota and Tony Alvarez.

Guys you never heard of. Guys nobody ever heard of.

And so, raise a glass of flat, warm Carling Black Label to the Cruds. Because three decades of mind-numbing, mind-boggling losing is worth at least that, if not much else.

Boiler up, or Boiler down?

 The most interesting football game in these parts today will not be Notre Dame taking on (cue the spooky organ music) another MAC school, Miami (O.) ... or undefeated and freshly-ranked Indiana welcoming in some more baked goods, Charlotte ... or even Ball State's rivalry game at Central Michigan a week after The U made a paper wad out of the Cardinals in Miami.

No, sir. The most interesting game in these parts happens clear across the country tonight in Corvallis, Ore.

That's where Purdue lands, awash in a sea of Oregon State orange.

What makes Purdue-Oregon State worth watching is it's always intriguing to see how a team reacts to utter evisceration, which is what happened to the Purdues a week ago. In case you missed it, or are just trying to forget, the Boilermakers were humiliated at home by one of their oldest presumed rivals, Notre Dame. The final score was 66-7, and it might not have been that close.

It was at once Notre Dame's largest margin of victory in the 88-game series, and the worst defeat in the history of Purdue football, which goes back to 1893. And it was inexplicable. Although Notre Dame was favored by double digits and coming off its own humiliating home loss to Northern Illinois, Purdue was coming off a 49-0 win over Indiana State followed by a bye week to prepare for the Irish.

And yet it was no contest almost from the last bars of the national anthem. And while Notre Dame played more like the team it was supposed to be, most of the reason it was no contest is Purdue simply didn't show up.

How that happens against Notre Dame is ... well, inexplicable. What lingering effects it will have is what makes tonight so interesting.

Does Purdue show some fight tonight?

Will the residue of 66-7 immediately deflate the Boilers the first time Oregon State revs up a scoring drive?

Will they block? Will they (unlike a week ago) tackle? Will Hudson Card be spooked by the ghosts of all those thundering Notre Dame footsteps the first time the Beavers bring someone off the edge?

Psychology sometimes gets way too prominent a seat at the table when sports is the subject, but tonight it will be truly fascinating to see what effect 66-7 has on Purdue. Maybe the Boilers have put it behind them, which is no doubt what they've been saying all week in West Lafayette. Maybe they say they have, and believe it, until something goes wrong tonight. 

Maybe they should have scheduled Directional Hyphen Tech State this week instead of a cross-country roadie to a major-conference school that, oh, by way, got spin-cycled in its own in-state rivalry game last week.

No. 9 Oregon 49, Oregon State 14. And that also happened on the loser's home field.

I'm thinking the Beavers are looking at Purdue tonight, and seeing an excellent opportunity to rinse last week's bitter from their mouths. I'm thinking Purdue might be seeing the same thing, if somewhat less capable of making it happen because ...

Well. Because even though we're still five weeks out from Halloween, hauntings happen.

For the ages

Maybe you think you saw something, Mr. I-Was-There-For-Wilt's-100-Point-Game. Maybe you can still feel the cold sting of the rain the afternoon a rookie named Gale Sayers seemed to glide over the slop for one, two, three, six touchdowns. 

Maybe, even, you can still recall where you were when Reggie Jackson swatted three homers in Game 6 to clinch the World Series for the Yankees on Oct. 18, 1977.

Ladies and gents, may I submit another date for your consideration: Sept. 19, 2024.

On that night, in Miami, Fla., America saw a man do something no baseball player in history -- not even, I don't know, Slugger McGillicuddy back in 1872 or something -- had ever done.

He hit his 50th home run of the season and stole his 50th base. No one's ever done that before. No. one.

And actually, Shohei Ohtani did more than that. Like, a lot more.

He went 6-for-6 at the plate, for one thing.

Hit three home runs and two doubles.

Drove in 10 runs -- yes, you read that right -- as his Los Angeles Dodgers floor-waxed the impoverished Miami Marlins 20-4.

So, to review: 6-for-6, three homers, two doubles, 10 RBI. And, by the time he was done, 51 home runs and 51 stolen bases on the season.

I don't know how that stacks up with Wilt's 100 points or Gale's six sixes or Reggie's three taters in a World Series clincher, but I can venture one guess: The official attendance of 15,584 will grow exponentially with every passing year.

Before long, as with the multitudes who magically crammed the Hershey, Pa., bandbox the night Wilt got his 100, there will have been 100,000 people in LoanDepot Park last night. The place has a standing-room capacity of just 37,442, but no matter. Every man and woman in south Florida will swear he/she was there.

You know who actually was there, though?

Marlins manager Skip Schumacher. 

Who distinguished himself as a man of honor and respect for the moment, not to say respect for his game and its long, long history. He did this by refusing to intentionally walk Ohtani, thereby choosing not to be lily-livered about the whole deal.

Then he defended his decision postgame by basically saying, "What are you, nuts?"

"I think that's a bad move -- baseball-wise, karma-wise, baseball-gods-wise," Schumacher maintained of not walking Ohtani. "You go after him and see if you can get him out. I think out of respect for the game we were going to go after him ... He's doing things I've never seen done in the game before, and if he has another couple more of these peak years, he might be the best ever to play the game."

On a night for the ages, a comment for the ages.

Today in cognitive dissonance

 There may be more bizarre doings in our world right now than Brett Favre testifying before Congress on welfare reform, but the Blob is hard-pressed to think of any. And this is acknowledging the current presidential campaign, with Batman and Robin running around telling us what a craphole America is, and how commies and transgenders and degenerate brown savages are destroying the country.

Forget all that for a moment, if you can. Let's talk about the cognitive dissonance of Brett Favre wringing his hands over the state of the welfare state.

He's scheduled to do so next Tuesday, and it oughta be some show. This is because Favre is the guy who, after doing all that gunslinging for the Green Bay Packers, got himself mixed up in a Mississippi welfare scam in which $77 million in funds for poor families were instead funneled to, surprise, surprise, a bunch of country-club types. 

Favre's part in this, allegedly, involved putting the arm on public officials to find money for a new volleyball facility at his alma mater, Southern Mississippi. His daughter, (again, surprise, surprise) was on the team at the time. The university subsequently received $5 million in illicit monies from the welfare fund.

That's how Favre, who's not been criminally charged, wound up being named in a civil lawsuit attempting to recoup the misappropriated funds. Which I suppose does make him an expert witness about welfare fraud, if in a weirdly backassward way.

"Favre Tells Committee Welfare Fraud Is Bad, Really Bad." That's the headline that leaps into my head.

To be followed, because I never met a point I couldn't belabor, by several similar examples:

"Capone Calls Tax Evasion 'A Serious Problem'."

"Bonnie, Clyde Say Cars, Firearms Have Become 'Far Too Easy To Steal' For Criminals."

"Arnold Rothstein Claims Gambling On Sports Has Gotten Completely Out Of Hand; 'Why, A Guy Could Fix The World Series If He Wanted To.'"

And of course:

"Fox Bemoans Lax Henhouse Security."

Yeesh. What a world, what a world.

Head games

 You always hurt the ones you love, or so they say, but there's no instruction manual for what to do when the ones you love hurt you back. And there's for damn sure no chapter on how to stop loving them.

Tua Tagovailoa could sure use that chapter about now.

The Miami Dolphins quarterback's brain got shaken and stirred again the other day, and now he's on injured reserve for at least the next four weeks. When he comes back after that -- if he comes back after that -- remains to be seen.

This is, after all, the third concussion of Tua's career, and they haven't been minor ones. At least one left him twitching grotesquely on the field. Little wonder, then, that this latest hit to the head has a whole lot of folks on the internet and in sports media suggesting maybe it's time Tua began looking for another line of work.

He only has one brain, after all. And what we know about concussions, despite the NFL's once-fervent efforts to deny it, is that concussions have a cumulative effect. The more you sustain, the more susceptible you are to sustaining them, and the greater likelihood that you wind up a mumbling wreck tortured by demons only you can see.

It's an immeasurably sad way to go, and we've seen it too many times. And no one wants to see it happen again down the line with Tua.

The sticking point, of course, is football itself, and how hard a thing it is to walk away from once it sinks its claws in you. Among the ones you love, it's the one you love more intensely than any other, and it's also the one that just as intensely doesn't love you back. 

Football is glory and brotherhood and the sort of shared sacrifice that makes that brotherhood impenetrably insular. If you're a part of it, it's impossible not to understand it; if you aren't a part of it, it's impossible to explain.

And yet always it will demand explanation.

Because, see, the other part of football is it hurts you. Hurts you every day. Hurts you really bad sometimes. Hurts you when you get out of bed in the morning, and when, if you're lucky, you sink down into sleep at night.

And still you play. And still you want to play, even when it's beyond reason you should.

Once upon a time, for instance, 49ers defensive back Ronnie Lott had part of his mangled pinkie finger amputated so he could stay on the field. Rams defensive end Jack Youngblood once hobbled through the playoffs on a broken leg. And Steelers DB Rod Woodson once suffered a season-ending knee injury he refused to acknowledge was season-ending, because he rehabbed so ferociously he made it back to play in the Super Bowl that season.

Normal people, outsiders, can only shake their heads at such things. I used to shake my head every time I heard a collision that sounded like two semis hitting head-on, or walked into a postgame locker room strewn with discarded tape and whatever else held the players together.  

Field hospital post-Gettysburg is what it was. Minus the amputated limbs, of course.

And now, here's Tua Tagovailoa, facing not amputation but possibly truncated cognitive function. Corporate prerogatives being what they are in the modern NFL, you want the Dolphins to declare him a sunk cost. You also want them, out of simple compassion, to tell him to consider what his life will be like when he's 50 or 55. 

But right now he's only 26 years old, and 55 is light years away. And football is still what football is to 26-years-olds who are mega-skilled at it: A game that makes you love it even as it takes a piece of you here and a piece of you there, and maybe your future just for the hell of it.

Plays head games with you, in other words.

In this case, quite literally.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 2

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, aka The Blob Feature That Never Overreacts, of which critics have said "Oh, my God! It's the extinction event of Blob features! We're DOOMED! Doomed, I tell you!", and also "What he said! Aieee!!":

1. "We're DOOMED! Doomed, I tell you!" (Cowboys fans, after the Pokes were spin-cycled 44-19 by the New Orleans Saints, whom everyone said weren't supposed to be that good)

2. "Woo-hoo! We're 2-0! Super Bowl, baby!' " (Saints fans)

3. In other news, the Bengals, the Ravens and the Rams, hardy perennials all, remained winless after two weeks.

4. "Great, we'll never make the playoffs NOW. There's only 3 1/2 months left in the season!" (Fans of the Bengals, Ravens and Rams)

5. "That was the worst call in the entire history of football going back to before football was invented!" (Also Bengals fans, after a pass interference call on 4th-and-16 bailed out the stupid Chiefs and handed them a stupid walkoff field goal and a stupid 26-25 win and we hope you choke on it, losers!)

6. "Well, so much for this season. Looks like it's time to bench everyone and let the backups play." (The Colts, the Giants, the Panthers and several other 0-2 teams)

7. "Some people just talk about it. Some people do it." (The Panthers, who unlike the others, actually did bench bonus baby quarterback Bryce Young and will make journeyman Andy Dalton their QB1)

8. "Wait, what?" (Andy Dalton)

9. Meanwhile, the J-E-T-S Jets-Jets-Jets rallied to beat the Titans on the road, renewing the fan base's belief that Aaron Rodgers really is not 40 years old, but is actually 30 and in the prime of his career and therefore will lead the Jets to the Super Bowl that is, after all, THEIR SACRED DESTINY.

10. "Wait, what?" (Aaron Rodgers)

Another stupid analogy

 The Indianapolis Colts went up to Green Bay yesterday and managed to cough out 10 entire points, which meant Packers backup quarterback Malik Willis, signed like an hour before gametime or something, only had to cough out 16 to get the W in Lambeau Field.

The good news is the Colts defense allowed only 16 points, and quasi-rookie quarterback Anthony Richardson (come on, he is a quasi-rookie) actually completed 50 percent of his 34 passes for 204 yards, which was better than last week against the Texans.

The bad news was the Colts defense also got paved like an interstate highway by the Packers run game, which gashed its front seven for 261 yards on a staggering 53 attempts, right at five yards a carry. This means it generally took the Packers just two handoffs to either move the sticks or put them right on the doorstep of moving the sticks.

Which likely explains why they were successful on third down 10 times in 17 tries. Third-and-short does make life easier on NFL Sundays.

And Richardson?

The bad news is he completed just 50 percent of his passes in a league whose rules so favor the offense even the journey-est of journeymen routinely complete 60 percent of their throws. AR, with his skill set, is anything but a journeyman, and his arm is a bazooka. Unfortunately, right now it's a bazooka all the damn time.

Which means he can uncork the 65-yard-on-a-dime throw that makes you grab your head in amazement, but then makes you grab your head in dismay by missing the open 10-yard slant. He also occasionally thinks, like Uncle Rico, that he can throw a football over those mountains -- or, in this case, right through mail slots and louvered windows.

This means he  makes really bad decisions with the football on occasion.

Which in the NFL tends to lead to interceptions, like the three he threw yesterday.

The Blob last week noted all this, and also noted AR's ability to tuck it and run over people because he's bigger, faster and more athletic than the people he runs over. This led me to compare him to Bobby Douglass from the late-'60s Bears -- who also had an ungovernable bazooka for an arm, and who was also big and strong occasionally ran over people.

Anthony Richardson, I concluded, was Bobby Douglass 2.0. right now. Kinda like Robert Patrick was Arnold 2.0 in the second "Terminator" flick.

"What a stupid analogy!" you're saying now.

Maybe so. But it's what I've got right now.

What the Colts have got, right now, is an 0-2 start and a dazzling physical specimen who's yet to become a dazzling quarterback. And of course the Blob's possibly harebrained analogy.

In other words: Stay tuned.

Orange horror, Part Deux

 So remember last week, when the Blob instructed all you eager fresh-faced learners out there ("Eager fresh-faced what?" you're saying) about the bad juju that comes with ill-conceived color schemes?

That was in response to the Cincinnati Bengals rolling out head-to-toe screaming orange for their season opener, then proceeding to lose at home to the expected-to-be-blech New England Patriots. The obvious lesson is when you dress not for success but to sear people's retinas, the football gods gonna come slap you around.

Fast forward to last night, when the Chicago Bears opted to go all-orange themselves in Houston against the Texans.

It wasn't quite as in-your-face as the Bengals a week ago, but somewhere in the Great Beyond it no doubt made the restless spirit of George Halas throw things and snarl "We look like a bunch of god**** clowns." This turned out to be especially true of Chicago's offensive line, which played like the Seven Blocks Of Sunkist as the Texans rinsed the Clockwork Orange Bears 19-13.

The O-line's job was to protect rookie quarterback/valuable acquisition Caleb Williams, and it protected him the way a screen door protects you from a hot summer breeze. While Williams generally was much sharper than last week in getting the ball out of his hand, he still got sacked seven times. 

Of course, the kid also threw two picks when he remained upright, and averaged just 4.7 yards per attempt on 23-of-37 passes. That added up to 174 yards -- better than last week's anemic 96 yards and sub-50 percent completion rate, but not by much.

In other words: The education of Caleb Williams continues.

In further other words: But nor for long if the O-line continues to specialize in the Lookout Block (as in, "Look out, Caleb!").

Also, the orange horror has to go. I realize alternate unis are yet another hefty money grab for NFL teams, but sometimes practical considerations must outweigh the impulse to vacuum up every stray dollar on the sidewalk. And this is one of those times.

Bad juju, all that orange. Tellin' ya.

Proof of life, or something

 The good news from California this morning is the boys of '67 can finally stand down. They no longer can lord it over all who came after them in the football desert that is Bloomington, In., and odds are they're pretty happy about it.

This is because the Hoosiers finally made it back to the Rose Bowl again. And, unlike the boys of '67, they won there.

Did I say won? I mean, won.

Whipped UCLA 42-13 in Pasadena last night, confirming for now everything Curt Cignetti has been telling us: That on his watch, these were not going to be the same old Indiana Hoosiers. They were going to attack on both sides of the football, and hit you in the mouth when necessary, and beat ... your ... ass. The old days of the reflexive inferiority complex were over. Football was no longer going to be a diversion to keep the alumni occupied until basketball season.

It's true the Hoosiers came into last night 2-0, but it was a Monopoly money 2-0. In Florida International and Western Illinois, Indiana beat up on Millard Fillmore Elementary and We're Even More Elementary Than Millard Fillmore Elementary. Western Illinois, after all, has lost 27 straight games, and has lost all three games this season by a combined 182-52 score.

Indiana strapped a ridiculous 77-3 beatdown on the hapless Leathernecks, and thus went west with much still to prove. A 2-0 record is better than an 0-2 record, sure, but what would the Hoosiers do when they faced a real football team?

Played like a real football team is all they did.

The defense swarmed and attacked and made UCLA quarterback Ethan Garbers run for his life, sacking him twice, picking him once and limiting him to 137 yards on 14-of-23 passing. It held the Bruins to 3.7 yards per rush, 238 total yards and stopped them six of eight times on third down.

And the offense?

Well, quarterback Kurtis Rourke was a real boy, too, throwing for 307 yards and four touchdowns on 25-of-33 passing. Six Indiana receivers caught at least three balls. Three caught touchdowns, with Ke'Shawn Williams snagging two.  The Hoosiers stacked 25 first downs, went 9-for-12 on third down, and piled up 430 total yards.

These were not, in other words, your usual counterfeit Hoosiers. Significantly so on defense, where the Hoosiers looked nothing like the welcome-mat Hoosiers of years past. Instead of waiting for the game to come to them, they took the game to Garbers and Co.

Now, let's be honest here: This was not a particularly strong UCLA team. They're not great. They may not even be good. But they're a major-conference school with resources, and they're in L.A.

Which means you can get athletes to come there if you even halfway try.

Which means Indiana winning 42-13 after a cross-country trip at least signals proof of life in B-town, and that times have changed. How much, as always, remains to be seen.

But for once, that looks to be the fun part.

Boiler down

 Welp. Notre Dame covered, at least.

Favored by 10, won by 59. A little dicey there, at least until they played the national anthem. 

After that, it was ... hell, I don't know what it was. What can you say, really, about Notre Dame 66, Purdue 7?

Maybe this: It's Sunday morning, and Notre Dame just scored again.

Maybe this: It's Sunday morning, and Purdue just missed another tackle.

Or maybe this: It's Sunday morning, and Angelo Bertelli is now playing quarterback for Notre Dame.

What the heck, everyone else had played quarterback by the time the clock mercifully ran out in Ross-Ade Stadium yesterday. I say "by the time the clock ran out" rather than "by the time the game ended," because the game had already ended a couple of hours before.

It ended the first time Jeremiyah Love broke a tackle and the first time Jadarian Price broke a tackle and the first time, I don't know, Ara Parseghian broke a tackle. It ended when Riley Leonard -- Riley Leonard! -- ran around end and juked -- juked! -- Dillon Thieneman to the ground and broke a tackle and finally stiff-armed -- stiff-armed! -- one last Boilermaker on the way to Six City.

By that time it was 21-0, and halftime was still a ways off. Later, Leonard would break a couple more tackles and run for another score, and Purdue quarterback Hudson Card, running for his life, would try to throw a pass with his left hand and Irish defender Boubacar Traore would walk in with the easiest pick-six in human history.

Then Price slalomed 70 yards through a collection of turnstiles, and it was 42-0 and over. That happened at the tail end of the first half, when the Irish were only trying to run out the clock.  And the Purdues still couldn't tackle 'em.

Anyway, after that, Leonard, who ran for 100 yards and three scores and threw for 112 yards in the first half, sat down for good. Steve Angeli came on to throw two touchdown passes, and then Kenny Minchey came on to run for another score, and then Bertelli, er, C.J. Carr came on to finish the game.

It was the biggest blowout in the 88 meetings of this quasi-rivalry, which goes back to the last months of the second Grover Cleveland administration (1896). It was also the worst loss, period, in the history of Purdue football, which goes back to the middle of the first Cleveland administration (1887). 

So perhaps yesterday was A Tribute to Grover Cleveland Day in West Lafayette, and Purdue just didn't tell anyone. Or perhaps it just the zeitgeist of a day when Tennessee played with its food, leading poor Kent State 65-0 at halftime on the way to a 71-0 win, and The U mauled defenseless Ball State in Miami, 62-0.

Two MAC schools, a combined 133-0 loss. Karma for fellow MAC school Northern Illinois having the temerity to knock off Notre Dame last week? Could be.

Other than that, I'm fresh out of explanations, and so are you. How Purdue can wallop Indiana State 49-0, have two weeks to rest up/prepare and then absolutely fail to show up for a game that's supposed to mean something to it defies comprehension. It also won't quell any suspicions among the Boiler Up crowd (who, like every fan base, is always ready to suspect the worst) that Ryan Walters might be Danny Hope 2.0, or even Darrell Hazell 2.0.

And Notre Dame?

Well, the "Bench Riley Leonard!" cries are apt to get a bit softer, although maybe not. Also, the internet dopes floating the Urban Meyer-for-Marcus Freeman speculation might stifle themselves for the moment.

Or maybe not.

In any case, Leonard, Freeman and Notre Dame have one week to blow raspberries and say "Neener-neener-neener, told ya we were good." Because next Saturday another MAC school, Miami (O.), comes into South Bend.

Buckle up.

(And you Boilermakers, make a tackle. Come on, you can do it. The Blob has faith in you.)

Rebound time

 Notre Dame heads to West Lafayette to play an ancient foe this afternoon, and, I don't know, maybe I'm crazy, but I think Notre Dame somehow will pull out the W over the always dangerous Purdue Boilermakers.

Bold statement, I know, considering the Irish own a narrow 59-26-1 lead in the 88-meeting series, and haven't lost to the Boilermakers in 16 years. But every decade or so Purdue jumps up and beats them, and that's nothing to sneeze a-

Sorry. Not even I can be snide forever.

Truth is, this game has always been more of a rivalry for Purdue than for Notre Dame, and that's coming from a guy whose mom was a Purdue grad and who grew up listening to Bob Griese and Leroy Keyes on Saturday afternoons. And, sure, the Boilers almost always lost to Notre Dame, but as a Purdue kid, it was the times they didn't lose to Notre Dame I most remember.

Like Keyes and them whipping Hanratty and Seymour and them in 1967. Like a backup quarterback named Mike Terrizzi going up to South Bend as a four-touchdown underdog in '74 and beating the Irish a year after Notre Dame won the national title. Like Billy Dicken, defensive back turned quarterback, going up to South Bend in '97 and beating the Irish in Joe Tiller's first year at Purdue. Like the years Purdue ended Notre Dame win streaks of 39 games (1950) and 13 games (1954).

Today will not be one of those days, it says here. And Purdue will have Northern Illinois to blame.

That's because Northern, a MAC school paid $1.4 million to come to Notre Dame lose, refused to cooperate last weekend. In a stunning upset, the Huskies beat the flatter-than-roadkill Irish 16-14 on a field goal with 30 seconds to play. Touchdown Jesus covered his eyes and Fair Catch Corby said "Ah, to hell with it, Imma let the ball roll dead at the 1-yard line."

This was not good news for the Boilermakers, who were off last week after laminating Indiana State 49-0 in their opener.

It's not good news because Marcus Freeman's teams have a pattern, and the pattern says they rebound robustly after losing games they shouldn't oughta lose.

 In Freeman's first season, 2022, they lost at home to Marshall, then beat Cal, North Carolina and No.  16 BYU. Last year, they gave one away to Ohio State, then beat No. 17 Duke on the road the next week. 

Then they lost to Louisville. Then they beat the dog out of No. 10 USC, 48-20. Then they won four of their last five games by a combined score of 199-45, including a 40-8 hammering of poor Oregon State in the Sun Bowl.

Precedent being what it is, therefore, the Irish should beat Purdue today. By 10, the oddsmakers say, although don't be surprised if it's closer than that. Or more lopsided.

After all, it's Purdue-Notre Dame. You never know.

OK. So most of the time you do. But whatever.

The duality of blame

 By now, presumably, everyone in America who cares has seen the bodycam footage of Miami Dolphins wideout Tyreek Hill's arrest Sunday after he was pulled over for speeding before the Dolphins game with the Jacksonville Jaguars. And, predictably, everyone's formed an opinion.

On one side are the people who reflexively say "He should have just complied" when the police escalate a situation. They demand accountability -- unless of course it involves certain politicians, who are elevated to martyrdom when they break the law or fail to comply with court orders.

And on the other side?

On the other side are the people who reflexively (and let's face it, with more than a little justification) say, "Here we go, another black man getting abused by the po-po". They, too, demand accountability, but only from law enforcement and those aforementioned certain politicians.

In between, meanwhile, is Tyreek Hill. Who yesterday steered the middle course the whole deal required.

He admitted, first of all, that he could have handled the situation better. Rolled down his window quicker. Exited his vehicle quicker. Dialed down the attitude. 

"At the end of the day," he said, "I'm human. I've got to follow the rules. I got to do what everyone else would do."

Then he said this didn't mean the arresting officers -- one in particular -- didn't escalate the situation by yanking him out of the car, throwing him to the ground and "literally beat(ing) the dog out of me." 

In other words: He was wrong. But the officer in question was wrong, too. 

And that is absolutely right.

It's sometimes a hard concept to absorb in our polarized, knee-jerk society, but two things can be true at the same time. In fact, they frequently are. The duality of truth, and therefore blame, is about as close to straight gospel as there is in the secular world.

So we can talk all day about the increasing tendency for law enforcement to play the escalator instead of the de-escalator, and that's a talk worth having. The Blob's theory is it springs from the increasing scrutiny in our plugged-in, cellphone video world, and from the proliferation of concealed carry laws in America. Police literally don't know what they're rolling up on half the time now, so they tend to overreact at the slightest deviation from the routine.

Price we pay, I guess, for our cultish worship of the Second Amendment.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, the aforementioned was not really in play in the Tyreek Hill detaining. The officers in question knew who he was because you can see him handing them his license on the bodycam. And, let's face it, they probably knew anyway.

So yanking him from the car, throwing him down and cuffing him for not immediately rolling down his window on a routine traffic stop was way over the top. Simply put, one officer just got pissed off. Police presumably are trained not to do this, but there you go.

Yes, Tyreek Hill should have complied faster.

And, yes, the officer who yanked him out of the car should have kept his cool.

Two things. Both true.

A radio wave goodbye

 I guess this is the part where I go Full Geezer.

I guess this is the part where I put down my morning coffee, set aside my morning gruel, and snarl like Ebenezer Scrooge at what a hellscape the world has become. How Time has eroded the eternal verities, and what the hell, Time? You couldn't just stay in one place? You couldn't wave your magic Rolex and make it so stuff didn't keep happening, and progress was stopped in its tracks, and change was made illegal in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands?

Dammit, Time. Why do you have to keep on keepin' on?

I say this because the announcement everyone knew was coming came down yesterday, and there went another piece of my childhood/adulthood. After 71 winters, the Fort Wayne Komets and WOWO are parting company. If you want to listen to the K's, you don't tune in 1190 AM anymore. You tune in something called WXKE, wherever that is on your radio dial.

Everyone called it a simple business decision yesterday, and it is. In every way conceivable, leaving WOWO for XKE makes perfect sense, because it's 2024, not 1955 or '65 or '75. Even in Full Geezer mode, I get that.

But there are simple business decisions, and then there are simple business decisions. And this one isn't simple at all, no matter how blithely it's presented as such.

You air certain programming for the better part of a century, see, you become synonymous with that programming. And 71 years of the Komets on WOWO -- 71 years of them droppin' the gloves and raggin' the puck all the way into the zone and shoot/rebound/SCORE! -- makes them blood kin. 

Play word association across the greater part of those 71 years, after all, and a whole swatch of America knew what "Fort Wayne" meant. It meant WOWO and Komet hockey and Bob Chase. If you knew nothing else about the Fort anywhere in the eastern part of the U.S., you knew that.

I've told this story a million times before, but it bears repeating: One night I was sitting in a hotel lounge in Gettysburg, Pa., and I got to talking to some of the locals, and someone asked where I was from. And when I said "Fort Wayne, Indiana," one woman immediately brightened.

"WOWO! Komet hockey! Bob Chase!" she exclaimed.

Of course, Bob's been gone eight years now, and years before that WOWO's mighty 50,000 watts got powered down. And so WOWO and the Fort Wayne Komets are not conjoined twins anymore in the American mind. If WOWO is known for anything these days, it's for the same endlessly aggrieved babble of right-wing talk radio you can hear in a million other places.

And yet ...

And yet. And yet.

That day. Some thoughts.

 Again, now, the day comes around, and if it remains incomprehensible part of that is because we're now almost a quarter century removed from it. Twenty-three years now, and still it happened yesterday.

And still it remains a dividing line streaked with the blood of innocents, a line between the America before and the America after.

Or so we like to say.

In truth, of course, the America after -- an America fearful and angry and bent on retribution for grievances both real and imagined -- is also the America before, just more atrociously mannered. All September 11 did was make it OK, for those withered souls so inclined, to be ugly right out loud. And the further we get from that blue-sky morning, the uglier they seem to get.

Or maybe you didn't hear a certain angry, addled old man ranting last night about vicious Haitian savages coming to America to eat poor Fido, while an unsettling number of his countrymen complacently nodded along.

Sheer madness. And the exact species of madness, it might be noted, that compelled the 9/11 murderers to fly airliners full of human beings into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and an empty field in Pennsylvania.

But enough of that.

A few years back, see, I wrote something about that day, and the week that followed. And it didn't have anything to do with madness or anger or fear of some shadowy Other, because none of that mattered then. It had to do with shared grief, and how we all tried to process it.

Twenty-three years later, I offer it again:

There's a gleaming new building filling the sky there now, reaching up and up with a singular brassy defiance. There's a museum and a pair of reflecting pools and names etched in polished metal, because that's what you do with days that have become history, days so momentous and awful you remember them in spite of how much you'd rather forget.

September 11 was all about emptiness: Blue sky empty of clouds, a skyline empty of two iconic towers, a city suddenly empty of two thousand-plus souls. And so the way we memorialize it is by trying to fill that emptiness, obsessively and endlessly.

That process started almost before the towers collapsed in a jackstraw heap, and went on all that numbed week. I remember, that aching day, sitting in a hardware store in Auburn listening to a man try to fill the emptiness by telling me about another catastrophe, a fire that had destroyed the store 90 or more years before. And I remember going to a football game on Friday night and again the next day, while debate raged as to whether or not it was appropriate..

That debate goes on to this day. I suppose it always will.

What I've come to believe, however, is that week was all about making the empty go away, and if going to a football game did that for some people, then I'm not going to quibble about whether or not it dishonored the dead. All I can say is it didn't feel like dishonor.

All I can say, going to a football game down in Monroe Friday night and then to another the next day at Saint Francis, is that it felt more like catharsis, and commonality, and the stitching together of  a social fabric torn asunder. That it was a football game that provided the vehicle for this was immaterial; in the end, it was about family, our American family, reaching for each other at a time when we desperately needed to do so. We all could have been at a quilting bee for all the scoreboard at one end of the field mattered.

Could there have been a better remembrance, I think now, than to stand as one as the taped voice of Lee Ann Rimes floated out across the farm fields around Adams Central, "Amazing Grace" spinning out and out into the September twilight?

  Could there have been any dishonor in what happened the next day, when Saint Francis and some team from Wisconsin played a football game that was of no consequence, except for the simple fact that by playing it we had an excuse to come together?

I saw no dishonor in that. I saw none at the tables that greeted you as you came in the gate that day, where donations for the victims were being taken. I saw none in the silver American flag stickers on the back of every Saint Francis helmet. I saw none, at the end of the afternoon, in two young boys throwing a football around down at the south end of the field.

One kid scooted for the end zone, football tucked beneath his arm like a loaf of pumpernickel. The other kid gave chase, catching up with him in the end zone and wrestling him to the ground. And then they rolled around for awhile down there, two American boys doing what American boys do on a sunlit American afternoon.

And, for a moment, anyway, filling up the empty.

Voice of our age

 So now the news comes down that James Earl Jones has died at the full-to-the-top age of 93, and it takes me right back. Takes me back to a particular gray morning in a particular minor-league ballpark, James Earl Jones sitting in a chair and the children sitting around him on cushions because the grass is still wet from the previous night's rains.

Now James Earl Jones opens a book, and he begins to read.

The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day ...

And here again is the voice, that rumbling, sonorous, familiar instrument. It spans years, that voice. It echoes down through time itself, through epochs and dynasties and civilizations long gone to dust -- a voice as ancient as the pharaohs, and as fresh as yesterday.

On this particular day, the voice is not so much reading as tolling Ernest Lawrence Thayer's great evocation of baseball's past, "Casey at the Bat," to 22 children in Memorial Stadium in Fort Wayne. They're the winners of a reading contest sponsored by Verizon, on whose behalf Jones is in town. Now they listen, fidgeting a bit as kids will, and presently a couple of the Class A Fort Wayne Wizards -- not much more than kids themselves -- drift into the dugout to listen, too.

Because here's the thing, people: James Earl Jones was the voice of our age more than any other, the soundtrack to an entire nation's shared cultural experience. He was, after all, the voice of Darth Vader and Simba's father and Terrance Mann in another great baseball anthem, "Field of Dreams." He was the voice of an entire news network (CNN), and of a communications giant (Verizon).

He played Muhammad Ali's spiritual descendant Jack Johnson on Broadway. Played the blind former Negro Leagues player Mr. Mertle in "The Sandlot." Played Conan the Barbarian's nemesis Thulsa Doom, a worse baddie than Darth Vader,.

When he came to Fort Wayne in 2001, though, it was Terrance Mann you heard in your head, because it was a ballpark and it was baseball he came to celebrate. "Field of Dreams" was Kevin Costner's film, but it was Jones who defined it in that soliloquy "Field" devotees can recite by heart:

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time ... 

Well, sure. And James Earl Jones?

All he did was mark our time.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 1

 And now the hardly-awaited return of The NFL In So Many Words, the fashion-forward Blob feature of which critics have said "I don't care what it wears, it needs to go away forever", and also "What the hell are you wearing?":

1. "What the hell are the Giants wearing?" (America, upon seeing the Giants bizarre throwbacks that looked like the Montreal Canadiens and Michigan Wolverines got drunk one night and conceived a child)

2. "Hey! They stole our the unis!" (The Montreal Canadiens)

3. "Hey! They stole our helmets!" (The Michigan Wolverines)

4. In other news ... GOOD LORD WHAT ARE THE BENGALS WEARING?

5. "Aieee! My eyes!" (Everyone watching the Bengals in their screaming head-to-toe orange threads)

6. "Aieee! My eyes!" (Everyone watching the Bengals lose at home to the Patriots)

7. "Woo-hoo! We're goin' to the Super Bowl!" (Patriots fans)

8. "Remember when we guaranteed Deshaun Watson $230 million and a $45 mill signing bonus? Yah, good times. Goooood times." (Cleveland Browns management, after Watson put up a 51.1 passer rating in a 33-17 loss to Dallas, then was hit with another sexual-assault suit)

9. "Hey, Brownies, it could be worse." (Giants, Carolina, Falcons, J-E-T-S Jets-Jets-Jets)

10. "I'm 40 years old and I'm playing for the Jets. Nobody has it worse than me." (Aaron Rodgers)

Of QBs and such

 We begin this morning with two quarterbacks, to whom much was given and of whom much is expected. One of them reminds you of someone, though not the someone you probably think; the other is supposed to remind you of someone, but so far only reminds you that playing quarterback in the NFL, and doing it well, is a hard thing.

One of them is a rookie who played his first real NFL game yesterday. The other might as well be a rookie who was playing just his fifth NFL game in two years. One of them won; the other lost.

The rookie is named Caleb Williams, and he carries all of Chicago on his shoulders. The might-as-well-be-a-rookie is Anthony Richardson, and he plays in Indianapolis -- although the guy he reminds you of played in Chicago 50-some years ago.

Anthony Richardson, you see, can throw the ball a country mile, and he runs like a fullback, knocking defenders over like tenpins. What he can't do, seemingly, is throw the ball less than a country mile.

Maybe it's my advanced years, but to me that sounds a lot like Bobby Douglass, who was a Chicago Bear back when the world was young.

Bobby Douglass: Who could throw a football through the side of a barn but sometimes missed the barn entirely, on account of he had no touch whatsoever. And who frequently ran like the aforementioned fullback, once rushing for 900-plus yards in a single season.

Anthony Richardson is what Bobby Douglass would have been if they'd created him in a lab, like the Six Million Dollar Man. He is bigger, faster, stronger and more ridiculously gifted, by a factor of at least ten, than Bobby D -- or any other quarterback who played in Bobby D's time.

Yesterday, for instance, he tucked it and ran on a fourth-and-goal play, and got the six by just flat cheese-grating a defender at the goal line. And earlier, in the first quarter, he uncorked a throw mortals simply can't make: He dropped back, slipped, then whirled the football at least 65 yards off his back foot and hitting Alec Pierce with an absolute dime for another six.

Sixty-five yards, give or take. Off his back foot. Get out your crayons and draw an "S" on the man's chest.

Then again ...

Then again, Richardson's Colts lost. And one of the reasons they lost is AR could throw a 65-yard dime but couldn't hit an open receiver in the flat, or in various other places. In a league whose rules have handcuffed the defense, and therefore made it almost impossible for even Taxi-Squad Steve not to complete 50 percent of his passes, Richardson ... failed to complete 50 percent of his passes. 

On the day, he was 9-of-19 for 212 yards, two touchdowns and one pick. And the Colts lost 29-27 at home to the division rival Houston Texans, whom they'll now likely have to beat in Houston to have a shot at winning the AFC South.

Meanwhile, in Chicago ...

Well, the Bears beat the Tennessee Titans 24-17, a fairly beige W over a fairly beige opponent. And Caleb Williams had a less-than-beige day: 14-of-29 for 64 yards and no touchdowns. He was sacked twice for 29 yards and averaged 3.2 yards per completion.

Needless to say, this was slightly less than what Chicago expected from the man hyped as the Bears first franchise quarterback since Sid Luckman was handing off to Bronko Nagurski.

To his credit, Williams seems to understand this, which is why he apologized to Chicago Sunday for his underwhelming-ness. Privately, he probably understands how ridiculous it all is as well.  These sorts of expectations always are, especially in Chicago, where Bears fans grew up on a steady diet of Douglass and Bob Avellini and the immortal Peter Tom Willis. Williams is supposed to be the reward for all that suffering, Chicago's very own Patrick Mahomes.

Maybe he will be, eventually. Maybe, these being the Bears, he never will. In the meantime, he's just Caleb Williams, rookie, with as much to work on as any other rookie.

Ditto Anthony Richardson, the almost-rookie. Two quarterbacks; two works in progress.

Trapped

 All of which is to say these Irish are going to be a lot more blue-jeans-and-tees than tuxedos most of the time, and that sometime this fall someone likely will beat them ... 

-- Me, six days ago

Well, sure. But I didn't mean this someone.

I didn't mean a guy from a Catholic high school in Fort Wayne (Bishop Luers) bringing a MAC school (Northern Illinois) to the most prominent Catholic university in the nation,  and stunning the No. 5 Irish, 16-14 -- a score that will live in infamy in South Bend, but will be bronzed forever in DeKalb, Ill.

I didn't mean a placekicker whose name (Kanon Woodill) now will also live in infamy in South Bend, just as David Gordon's name lives in infamy. The former drilled the field goal that iced the Irish yesterday with 31 seconds to play; the latter drilled the field goal for Boston College that iced the Irish in Rockne's house 30 years ago. 

Northern Illinois 16, Notre Dame 14.

First observation: Never sleep on a MAC school. Never, ever, ever.

Second observation: Good on Thomas Hammock, the guy from Bishop Luers, who got a career-defining W as a head coach and was overcome with emotion afterward because he knew it. Eons ago he was a truck of a running back for Luers, and later for Northern; now he's the most prominent branch in the Luers coaching tree, if in fact high schools have coaching trees.

Third observation: 

Hmmm.

Maybe it's that I should eat my words from six days ago, when, after Notre Dame gutted out a win at Texas A&M in the screeching sweat lodge of Kyle Field, I wrote that the Irish displayed an element of grit that has not always been in evidence. Of course, that was before they got beat at home by a quarterback with a '70s porn-stache (Ethan Hampton), and a running back (Antario Brown) who found the previously gritty Notre Dame defense most accommodating.

Ran 20 times for 99 yards, Brown did, which worked out to five yards a chunk. Caught two passes for 126 more yards, including the 83-yard score from which the Irish never fully recovered.

Third observation ...

Maybe it's this: Notre Dame paid Northern $1.4 million to come to South Bend to get toe-tagged. Instead, it was "We'll give you $1.4 million to punch us in the face. And no love-taps, either. Make it hurt."

Or maybe it's this: If you should never, ever, ever sleep on the MAC, then this was a classic trap game. Last week you're on the road against a team the wise guys said was the toughest on your schedule; next week you've got decades-old foe Purdue in Ross-Ade Stadium. And in between, the guarantee school.

So you get caught basking in the glow of that leather-tough win at A&M, and looking ahead to a traditional semi-rivalry game. And the guarantee school, which is better than you might have figured, comes in and gets you.

You can blame Marcus Freeman and his coaching staff for that, and certainly there's room to do so. After all, the Irish yesterday didn't look remotely like the outfit that took down A&M a week ago; the defense that was so stubborn in Kyle Field became 11 turnstiles through which Brown and his pals ran for 190 yards, and Northern piled up 388 total yards.

And the Irish offense?

As tough and resilient as Riley Leonard was against A&M, he was just as deer-in-the-headlights lost yesterday. His legs, which sustained Notre Dame a week ago, bought the Irish nothing yesterday; he ran 11 times for just 16 yards, a 1.5-yard average. Throw in the two picks he threw, one of them profoundly clueless, and he looked less like an accomplished field general than a field general who's about to get relieved of his command.

As went Leonard, so went the Irish. After Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price ground-and-pounded A&M, they got the call just 15 times between them yesterday -- even though Love averaged 7.2 yards per carry and Price 6.0.  The Irish wound up with 286 total yards, 102 fewer than Northern Illinois, and were just 3-for-10 on third down.

And now Freeman can look forward to a lovely week of howling from the garden of the aggrieved that is social media, and maybe questions about the status of Leonard as QB1. He'll be asked more than once why the Irish looked so woefully unready yesterday. And he'll be asked if Notre Dame will be ready for Purdue, whom history tells us has shocked the Irish a few times itself.

One thing's for sure: No one's going to be talking about the Irish running the table anymore, the way some of the over-reacting network dopes were a week ago.

That was a dose of unreality Freeman didn't need. And now, for better or worse, has taken care of.

Hey, look! Americans!

 Time now for the Blob to take a timeout from the important stuff, such as football, football and, um, football. 

(Sample topics: Why were the Eagles and Packers playing in Brazil? Where did Indiana find a team it could floor-wax 77-3? And why were the Eagles, Packers and Indiana playing on a Friday night anyway, because Friday night is sacred ground that should always, always, always belong solely to high school football?)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. Timeout. Change of subject. And, you know, a Patriotic Moment.

Anyone see what's happening in the U.S. Open this weekend?

"Didn't they play that in June?" you're saying.

No, not the U.S. Open in golf, silly. The U.S. Open in tennis, which is the last Grand Slam tournament of the year and has been going on in New York for the last two weeks.

What's happening there this weekend is the women's final, which is today, and the men's final, which is Sunday. And what's notable about that is there's an American playing in both of them.

In the women's final, it's Jessica Pegula of the U.S., whose parents own the Buffalo Bills and Sabres, playing in her first Grand Slam final against Aryna Sabalenka from Belarus. This means she's at least the second-best athletic entity in her family, the Sabres running a poor third in that hierarchy.

 And in the men's final?

It's Taylor Fritz against top-seed Jannik Sinner and his nuclear forehand. Fritz is the American; Sinner, the Italian. 

This is a big deal because the last time it happened was 22 years ago, which is is barely conceivable for those of us who can remember a time when Chrissie or one of the Williams sisters was always in the Grand Slam finals, and on the men's side it was always McEnroe or Connors or Andre Agassi or Pete Sampras or Jim Courier or blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda-yadda.

Well, not anymore. Except for Venus and Serena, American tennis pretty much vanished from the radar when Agassi quit and Sampras quit and Andy Roddick didn't turn out to be either one, although he did win a U.S. Open once. In fact, the last time an American man played in any Grand Slam final was 15 years ago, when Roddick lost to Roger Federer at Wimbledon in 2009.

This time, Fritz squared off against another American, Frances Tiafoe, in the semifinals. It was the first time two Americans had played one another in the U.S. Open semis in 19 years.

So, yeah, pretty historic stuff. Maybe this means U.S. tennis is experiencing a revival, or maybe this is just a cockeyed year for the U.S. Open. Both Pegula and Fritz, after all, will be heavy underdogs this weekend. But, hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?

And so: Go, USA.

Those darn zebras

 Now that was a finish. 

Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson running around out there in Kansas City ... last crumbs of the clock disappearing fast ... the back-to-back Super Bowl champion Chiefs hanging on by their fingernails to a W that had looked bank-vault safe not all that long before ...

And now Jackson stops and whirls the ball toward the end zone.

And Isaiah Lively goes up and catches it with a Chiefs linebacker draped across his back like Burberry overcoat, as time expires.

The official signals touchdown, which makes the score 27-26, Chiefs. The Ravens are already lining up to go for two and the dramatic comeback win. And then ...

And then, the touchdown is reviewed.

And it's waved off because Lively's big toe, and not much else (if even that), was out of bounds at the back of the end zone.

Chiefs 27, Ravens 20. Game of inches. All that.

It was a grand curtain raise to open the NFL season, and it showed us a couple of things: It's going to take a hell of an effort to keep the Chiefs' hands off the three-peat, and if someone does it's as likely to be the Ravens as anyone.

The two teams that played for the AFC title in January are even better now, the Chiefs maybe exponentially so. They've added speed to an offense that needed it in wideout Xavier Worthy, a crimson blur who scored one touchdown on an end-around and another on a pass from Patrick Mahomes, who was as magical as ever.

Completed 20-of-28 passes for 291 yards and a score. Even completed a pass to himself when one of his throws was batted back toward him and he out-jumped two Ravens to grab the rebound.

And speaking of the Ravens ...

They're better, too. Jackson threw for 267 yards and ran 16 times for 122 more. And he'll be able to that a lot more because the Ravens now have Derrick Henry in the backfield with him, the NFL's most load-y load and a guy who'll run right through you if you get distracted too much by Lamar.

Mr. Inside and Mr. All-Side. That's what opponents have to deal with now when they play the Ravens.

They're gonna be fun to watch this fall, and so will the Chiefs, who always are. Unfortunately, because this is the NFL, you're gonna have to watch the game officials, too.

As night follows day, the zebras were a big part of the proceedings again, because what would an NFL game be without people hollering "That wasn't holding!" and throwing stuff at their 86-inch TV screens? The Ravens disputed the overturned TD, of course, but the zebras also seemed inordinately concerned about the Ravens' offensive formations, which were deemed illegal on more than one occasion.

I'm not gonna say the zebras were wrong, mind you. I'm just saying the Chiefs were flagged six times for 45 yards and the Ravens seven times for 64 yards, with the usual number of big plays being called back. No one can defend a first-down completion/run better than Stripes.

So there was that. But there was also this: Even if it came down to an official's call, it was still a hell of a show.

Onward to tonight, and to the next 65 weeks or whatever it is.

Meh-meh

 The Chicago Cubs no-hit my Pittsburgh Cruds last night, the first no-no by the home team in Wrigley Field since 1972. And all I can say about that is, "Big whoop." 

This is not because my Cruds were the victims and, as a Cruds fan, I'm bitter and sour grapes-y about it.

It's because no-hitting my Cruds is not much of an accomplishment, on account of they're the Cruds.

Also, it's because it took three pitchers to do it, and my opinion of a combined no-hitter is it's more a nah-nah than a no-no. Or maybe a meh-meh.

I would have been much more impressed had Shota Imanaga, who started and went untouched for seven innings, been allowed to complete the game. But allowing starters to finish games went out with flannel unis. It's as dead as Walter Johnson in Today's Baseball.

In Today's Baseball, Imanaga was up to 95 pitches through seven, so Cubs manager Craig Counsell told him to grab some bench, as modern custom commands. Nate Pearson then came on to pitch the eighth and rookie Porter Hodge the ninth to finish off the meh-meh.

And, sure, it's been 54 years since it happened, so I guess it's a big deal. But the last time it happened, Milt Pappas went the distance to ring it up. Plus he came one walk away from a perfect game.

Last night, it took three arms to do what Pappas did. And unlike Milt and his one baserunner, the Cruds put four men on base, taking advantage of three errors by the Cubs third baseman, Isaac Paredes. So there's that.

Milt Pappas, by the way, died in 2016. And if I let my imagination run away from me, I can see Milt and Walter Johnson sitting together in the Great Celestial Ballpark, shaking their heads and uttering one word:

"Lightweights."

And now, the En Eff Ell

 The NFL season kicks off tonight in Kansas City -- Chiefs vs. Ravens! Patrick vs. Lamar! -- and, man, I am stoked. My fantasy team is jacked. I have Patrick. I have Lamar. I have Caleb Williams and CeeDee Lamb and Christian McCaffrey and Anthony Taylor and Taylor Swift's boyfriend and ...

Nah, I'm lying. I don't have any of those guys. I don't even have a fantasy team.

I got out of my league a few years back, even though it was a bunch of us who used to share a newsroom back in the 1990s and therefore was a lot of fun. Lots of inside jokes. Lots of team names only we got. I hung around for five years or so, which is a long time for me to stick with anything on account of I have the attention span of a gnat.

This does not mean Roger Goodell's magic kingdom won't hold my interest for, I don't know, a couple of series tonight at least.

For one thing, I want to see if I can figure out the league's new kickoff rules, which no one seems to understand. The way it works (I think) is the kicker tees it up at his own 35. The other 10 guys on his team line up at the receiving team's 40. Meanwhile, the receiving team must have at least nine players between their 30- and 35-yard lines.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "How will the kicking team know when they can go if their kicker's behind them and they can't see when the ball is kicked?"

I don't know.

"And how do teams execute an onside kick when everyone but the kicker is already 25 yards up-field?"

Beats me.

"And what's the point, anyway?"

Who do I look like, you friendly neighborhood back judge?

All I can say is, it's the En Eff Ell, where stuff doesn't have to make sense. Catches that used to be catches aren't catches anymore unless you make a "football play" while you're making them. And what's a "football play", exactly? 

A pirouette? Jazz hands? Who knows?

Also, if the ground can't cause a fumble, how can the ground cause an incompletion if the football touches it microscopically while a receiver has both hands securely wrapped around it?

I don't know that, either.

I also don't know what constitutes roughing the passer anymore, unless it's pretty much everything. I once saw an Atlanta Falcon get flagged for it because he landed on Tom Brady while tackling him, which is virtually impossible not to do while tackling someone. Of course, it was Tom Brady, whom the rules said you couldn't tackle unless you did it very gently and didn't leave any smudges. Still ...

Still, tackling in general in the NFL has become something of a lost art -- or, to put it another way, "illegal." Can't hit a guy high. Can't hit a guy low. Can't hit him too hard in between. And you absolutely, positively cannot touch his helmet with your helmet, even if the ballcarrier lowers his head a microsecond before you hit him and thereby makes helmet-to-helmet contact unavoidable. 

Before long, I figure, the league will dispense with defense entirely and just let Patrick and Lamar and Joe Burrow cavort up and down the field unencumbered.

Best jazz hands wins.

Culture shocked

 Curt Cignetti has an inkling now, what he's up against. At least you figure he does if he's smart, and there's no indication he's not.

What he's up against is culture. 

What he's up against began in 1967, and pretty much ended there. For one wacky, dazzling fall, Indiana University was a football school. For one dazzling, wacky fall, football got out from under the planet-sized shadow of basketball in Bloomington, and everyone knew who Harry Gonso was and John Isenbarger and Jade Butcher, and snowy-headed John Pont, too.

And then ...

And then Gonso and Isenbarger and Butcher graduated.

And John Pont moved on.

And Bob Knight came to B-town, and IU built him a swanky new lab (Assembly Hall) to work his magic, and Indiana became a basketball school again, forever and amen.

Well, to heck with that, Cignetti says.

He came to Bloomington pledging to remind everyone IU was once a football school, too, and could be again. He talked big and swaggered bigger and brought in a whole bunch of new, exciting players, and said the days when IU got pushed around in Memorial Stadium were done. And all the people said "Amen!"

And then ...

And then Cignetti rolled out his new team, and it was indeed exciting and aggressive and fearless, especially on defense. The Hoosiers plain knocked the slobber out of poor Florida International, and all the people ... um, all the people ...

Left at halftime. Same as ever.

Oh, not all the people left, but the student section -- the heart and soul of any college football crowd -- emptied out. Went back to tailgating, just like always. And Cignetti got his inkling that (as Clarence said in "It's A Wonderful Life") this wasn't gonna be so easy.

He acknowledged as much at the top of week, noting the halftime evacuation and saying there was still work to do to turn football Saturdays into a happening in B-town. Mind you, he surely understood this walking in the door; only a dope would believe Memorial Stadium instantly could become The Shoe in Columbus or the Big House in Ann Arbor or even Ross-Ade Stadium up at Purdue (whose fans did not bail at halftime Saturday as the Boilermakers laminated Indiana State 49-0). And Cignetti's no dope.

It takes time to build a culture. He knows that. 

What he might not have known, at least completely, is that to build a culture in Bloomington you first have to un-build a whole other culture. And it's a culture that's been calcifying for decades.

It's a culture in which everyone shows up on game days and flies their IU flags and wears their IU gear, and tailgates with the best of 'em. And then the game begins and they ... keep on tailgating with the best of 'em. 

Maybe they'll wander into the stadium, eventually. Maybe they'll still be sitting in the parking lot at halftime, chowing down and popping another cold one.

That's IU football.

IU football is everyone getting psyched about Ohio State coming to town, because half of Ohio will come with the Buckeyes, and they all wear red, too. So for once Memorial Stadium will be a sea of red just like, say, Nebraska is for every home game.

IU football is a particular Saturday a good space of years ago, when a decent Illinois team came to town and Indiana lost but, you know, not by a lot. A sportswriter colleague of mine was walking out next to some IU fans, and later he expressed amazement (and a bit of disgust) that they were all talking about how Indiana had put up a noble fight and didn't lose by that much, and that was pretty, pretty OK.

They were happy they only lost by 10 (or whatever it was), my colleague said, or something similar. That's IU football for ya.

And it's what Cignetti is up against. 

A bunch of Ws will help. Regular bowl game appearances will, too. When Indiana's good -- when it takes the Bucket from Purdue or beats a Penn State or scares the bejabbers out of a Michigan or an Ohio State -- the fans come and they stay and Memorial Stadium rocks with their sound, same as anywhere else. 

But it's going to take awhile for that to happen every Saturday. It's going to take awhile before the football becomes the attraction and not the socializing, and before the students stick around and turn Memorial Stadium into Thunderdome, and no one, at the end of the day, leaves happy that Ohio State helped turn the joint into a sea of red, but leaves pissed because Indiana didn't send the Buckeyes home on their shields.

That day will come, Cignetti promises.

And what a great shouting day will it be if it does?

The big chowdown

 I ate two hot dogs on Labor Day (with mustard and diced onion!), and, you know, that felt normal, that felt like America. So in a way I felt closer to the essence of our great nation, the very bedrock of its soul, than perhaps I ever have.

The bedrock of our soul, see, is two guys seeing how many hot dogs they can eat in 10 minutes. 

It's a Netflix live stream of the event on a national holiday.

It's hyping Joey Chestnut, one of the guys, vs. Takeru Kobayashi, the other guy, as if it were, I don't know, Ali vs. Frazier, Napoleon vs. Wellington, Burr vs. Hamilton.

It's stupid, it's awesome, it's traditional American values: Gluttony, conspicuous consumption, ginned-up drama to distract the masses. Chestnut-Kobayashi! The Super Bowl Of Stuffing Your Face! Showdown Of The Chowhounds! Munch Madness!

Oh, it was a hell of a show, all right, not to say the height of American silliness. In this corner, Chestnut, the world champion of that great contradiction in terms, competitive eating. In the other corner, Kobayashi, his longtime Japanese rival who's all but retired now.

It wasn't so much Ali taking on Frazier in Manila as Ali taking on Joe Louis in 1970 or so, when Joe Louis was pushing 60. The results, therefore, were entirely predictable: Joey smoked Takeru 83 dogs to 66, setting a new world record in the process.

And every American's heart swelled with pride.

Or acid reflux. Coulda been that, too.

Karma strikes back

 So, remember when you were a kid, and you started acting up in the grocery store, and your mom went Defcon 1 on you with words that would probably get her arrested today?

If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about.

Yeah, well. I think Football Karma is playing that one on your Florida State Seminoles right now.

The 'Noles, if you  recall, ran the table last season and then threw a grocery-store fit when the committee hosed them in the College Football Playoff? Jumped Alabama right over them, the committee did, and sentenced the 'Noles to the Orange Bowl.

All of Tallahassee cried and moaned and rent their garments. Complained their 'Noles were too good for the low-rent ACC. Complained, or at least implied, that their unbeaten, untied football team was too good for the sorry-ass Orange Bowl.

Guess we know how Football Karma dealt with that now, don't we?

If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about.

Boy, howdy did they.

First off, because they couldn't get over being left out of the CFP, half of Mike Norvell's team opted out of the Orange Bowl. And so Georgia obligingly hammered the remains like they were Mayberry Community College, 63-3. 

Then the new season rolled around, and there were the Seminoles sitting right up there in the top ten again in the preseason polls. Off they went to Ireland to kick off things off with a low-rent ACC game against low-rent  Georgia Tech, -- you know, one of those schools for which they were too good now -- and low-rent Tech jumped up and beat them, 24-21.

Ah, but no worries. The Seminoles were still ranked 10th, and coming up on Labor Day they had another crummy conference opponent, Boston College. Who worries about Boston College?

Heck, the Eagles were even less qualified to share a field with mighty Florida State than Georgia Tech. If Tech was low-rent, BC was a van down by the river. The Eagles were no-rent.

And then: Boston College 28, Florida State 13.

So now Florida State has lost its last three games, and the Seminoles are 0-2 in this new season. Not only that, but they're 0-2 in the conference they felt was holding them back when they missed out on the CFP last year.

If you don't quit crying, I'll give you something to cry about.

Apparently someone did.

An Italian job

 Maybe you missed it with everything else going on over the weekend, which is understandable. The attention span fills up fast when you've got people Labor Day-in' and college football college football-in' and the best golfer on the planet (Scottie Scheffler) winning the PGA Tour championship, and an American (Frances Tiafoe) reaching the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

Oh, yeah. And throw in Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic both losing early in the same tournament ... and Chase Briscoe winning one of the oldest prizes in NASCAR (the Southern 500 at Darlington) ... and Alex Palou all but wrapping up his third IndyCar title in four years despite having a car that wouldn't start at the start up in Milwaukee.

All of that happened over the weekend.

Meanwhile, half a world away, so did this: A Frenchman born in Monaco became the king of Italy.

His name is Charles Leclerc and he's been Ferrari's No. 1 driver in Formula One for awhile now, and yesterday, for the second time in five years, he did something for which they erect statuary in Italy: He won the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, out-strategizing the faster McLarens of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, who finished second and third.

Ferrari winning the Italian Grand Prix. 

If you're an Italian, you know what that means. And if you're not, you couldn't possibly.

Ferrari winning at Monza, that's Christmas morning in Italy. It's New Year's Eve and Mardi Gras and the Fourth of July and every blowout wedding at which you over-indulged. 

Leclerc did it this time by employing a one-pitstop strategy that jumped him in front of Piastri and Norris, who were on a two-stop schedule. The Ferrari camp was gambling Leclerc's tires would last long enough to keep him in front, and the wager paid off; although his 11-second lead shrunk to 2.6 seconds across the last seven laps, 2.6 seconds and seven laps were enough to light the national party lamp.

"Mamma mia!" Leclerc exclaimed on his radio as he took the checkers.

Ferrari wins in Italy, and the Frenchman gets his lines right. Now that's a day.