Friday night slights

 They'll play a high school game at Luersfield tonight between the Bishop Luers Knights and Garrett Railroaders, just like there'll be high school football games in Mishawaka and Merrillville and Warsaw and a handful of other places.

It's semistate week in Indiana, see, and the 24 schools who are left will be playing for the chance to play for a state title next week. Moms and dads and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas will huddle in the cold bleachers and cheer for the best of their progeny's dreams to come true.

Also, Purdue will play Michigan State in a Big Ten football game in East Lansing, Mich.

This will be exactly one week after Purdue's basketball team knocked off No. 2 Alabama in Mackey Arena -- a marquee game that had no business being played on a Friday night in the middle of the Indiana high school football tournament.

So says the Blob, anyway, which tends toward the curmudgeonly but never more so than with this ancient gripe.

To wit: Friday nights should belong to the high schools. The colleges need to butt out.

Now, I know this is not a new phenomenon, college football and basketball on Friday nights. But that doesn't make it any less wrong. Especially in basketball, but increasingly in football, too, the colleges already play every other day of the week. They've gotta have Friday night, too?

No, they don't, the greedy bastids. No, they don't.

Look. I get how threadbare an argument this is, because a college game on a Friday night isn't going to keep anyone away from a high school game. There's almost literally no crossover. No one who tuned in Purdue-Alabama last week was going to a high school football game anyway; nor are any of those moms and pops and aunties and uncles venturing out to Luersfield tonight going to miss Purdue-Michigan State football, 'cause they likely wouldn't have watched it even if they'd stayed home.

But it's the principle of the thing, see. It's the optics, as people like to say, of the colleges horning in on the one night a week that should belong to the high schools, when they already have six other nights to choose from.

I covered a pile of college football and basketball in my almost 40 years as a working sportswriter, and a bunch of  Super Bowls and Final Fours and big-deal motorsports events, besides. But high school Friday nights always held a special place in my grubby scribe's heart. In fact I might have more scrapbook memories from those nights in Anderson's fabled Wigwam, or on football fields in Berne or Kendallville or Monroeville or Fort Wayne, than I do from what might be termed "the big stuff."

So, yeah. Friday nights are kinda sacrosanct to me. And so go ahead and call me an old man shouting at clouds if you like, because that's exactly what I am on this subject.

Dadgum it.

Burying Indiana

 The Blob is not a big conspiracy guy, so you won't get much from me about killer vaccines, 5G eating our brains and the public schools turning our kids gay and transgender. I leave those dark fantasies to the brainiacs who see nefarious plots in virtually everything, even when they're easily explainable by saner folk.

However.

However, there's a persistent notion buzzing around in my head right now, and I can't quite common-sense it away.

It involves Indiana University's football team, currently 10-0 and headed for a great big mega-humongous showdown against Ohio State two days from now.

It also involves what I've been hearing for the last week or so, and at a volume that seems to increase exponentially by the day.

It's that Indiana is a 10-0 poser who shouldn't be included in the 12-team College Football Playoff, even though the Hoosiers are ranked fifth and seeded seventh right now in the latest CFP mock bracket. This makes me suspect that the handful of people who are saying this are trying to influence whoever votes in the CFP poll, and might in fact be speaking in proxy for some of them.

This in turns makes me suspect something else: That the CFP voters can't wait for Indiana to lose Saturday so they can bury the Hoosiers without a funeral.

Now, the Hoosiers might not actually lose Saturday, because as the Blob has noted before, this is unlike any other Indiana team that's trundled down the pike. They're good. They're legit good, with an elite quarterback and an elite wide receiver corps and a bunch of good running backs, and interior lines that are everything IU's interior lines have rarely been, which is big and strong and physical.

So, yeah, the Hoosiers could win, and then go on to run the table against a godawful Purdue squad. They probably won't, because Saturday's game is in Columbus and Ohio State for once will be taking the Hoosiers very seriously. So let's say, I don't know, the Buckeyes win by a couple of scores.

Watch what happens in next week's CFP poll. Watch Indiana freefall from No. 5 to 13 or so in one mighty plummet, and miss out on the playoff of which a few talking heads say they're unworthy.

At issue for those folks is Indiana's strength of schedule, which isn't great. The Big Ten  indisputably is down this year, and the Hoosiers didn't exactly plow through a murderer's row in the run-up to conference play. It was a pinch of Charlotte and a dash of Florida International and a soupcon of Western Illinois, none of whom would ever be mistaken for Alabama or Georgia or Texas.

Here's the thing, though: They've beaten everyone who's been put in front of them, and usually by a lot. It's hardly their fault the teams that were put in front of them turned out not to be very good this fall. You play who you play, and that's all you can do.

Indiana has done that. So has Notre Dame, for that matter. So has, say, Boise State.

The Irish are 9-1 and ranked sixth right now. Boise State is also 9-1, and if the playoff began tomorrow, the Broncos would get a first-round bye. Hardly anyone is uttering a peep about that, even though both schools haven't exactly waded through a pile of 'Bamas and Georgias and Texases, either.

With the exception of 15th-ranked Texas A&M and then-unbeaten Navy, N.D.'s schedule has been six shades of beige, and of course the Irish lost to Northern Illinois, a middling MAC school. Boise State, meanwhile, has played all of two ranked teams since its only loss to No. 1 Oregon.

One is Washington State, currently ranked 25th. The other is 23rd-ranked UNLV.

Yet the Broncos are a shoo-in, and the Irish are too if they win out as expected. But if Indiana loses to Ohio State and then makes Crabby Patties out of Purdue, some say the Hoosiers should miss the show even though they'd be 11-1.

Let me say this about that, as Dick Nixon used to put it: A College Football Playoff that leaves out an 11-1 Big Ten school is a College Football Playoff unworthy of being taken seriously. It is, in fact, a damn joke.

Best get the laugh track warmed up, in that case.

Old guy rules

 It's been a tough go lately for those of us in the late autumn of our years, because our old-coot powers have been diminished by proxy. Sour 40-year-old coot Aaron Rodgers is playing like the sour 40-year-old coot he is. Fifty-eight-year-old Mike Tyson fought like a 58-year-old against Jake Paul (but raked some serious cabbage for that farce). And so, and so forth.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, we've still got Alex Ovechkin.

The Great 8 is 39 years old now but still schooling the kids out there in the National Hockey League, or at least he was until he banged knees with Jack McBain of Utah last night, and went down with a lower-leg injury that will keep him out of the lineup for a bit. So his pursuit of the uncatchable -- Wayne Gretzky's career total of 894 goals -- is on the shelf until further notice.

"Why do you say Gretzky's 894 career goals is uncatchable, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

Because until Ovie started playing like he was 19 again, it pretty much was.

Last season, see, he was playing like the literal graybeard he is, and Gretz's 894 was still in a galaxy far, far away. But something happened in the offseason. The Blob doesn't now what it was, exactly, except to speculate that somewhere Ovie got hold of some magic old-coot potion that, like spinach for Popeye, transformed him into Super Coot.

Until he went down last night, see, his Washington Capitals had played 18 games so far this season. Ovechkin had scored 15 goals in those 18 games -- the 14th and 15th coming last night, when he uncorked a pair of seeing-eye rockets that originated in 1997 or something. That gave him 868 career goals, just 26 adrift of Gretzky.

It also gave him his 100th career multi-goal road game, 17 more than anyone in history.

So raise your glass of Ensure to the man, fellow coots. I can't speak for any of you, but I feel an extra spring in my step this morning. 

Although that could just be a touch of the rheumatiz.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 11

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the swaggeringly vindicated Blob feature of which critics have said "Not so fast with that 'vindicated' business, asshat", and also "Why don't you swagger on over here and let my fist vindicate your face?":

1. "Get rid of ME, will you? Ha! I'm as timeless as the three rivers!" (Mike Tomlin, whose Steelers are now 8-2 and first in the AFC North a year after people were ready to run him out of Pittsburgh)

2. "Get rid of ME, will you? Ha! Joe Flacco can sit his wrinkly old ass down because I'm back, baby!" (Demoted Colts quarterback Anthony Richardson, who returned to the Horsies' lineup and had his best game as a pro in a 28-27 win over the Jets)

3. "Get rid of ME, will you? H- Oh, wait ..." (Daniel Jones, after the Giants finally benched His Royal Cruddiness in favor of, um ... Tommy De Vito?)

4. "Hey, what's with the question mark? And enough with the Danny De Vito jokes, ya bums." (Tommy De Vito)

5. In other news, the Chiefs!

6. Lost to Josh Allen and the Bills, which means they won't go undefeated, which also means a bunch of old coots with walkers and such once again get to say they're still the only undefeated team in NFL history.

7. "Suck on that, Rozelle!" (The old coots, aka the 1972 Miami Dolphins)

8. "Wait, what?" (Also the coots, upon being reminded Roger Goodell, not Pete Rozelle, is now the commissioner of the NFL)

9. "Yes! No more Aints for us! We're movin' up to the big time!" (Various paper bags, excited at the prospect of being donned by fans of the Dallas Cowboys after America's Team pooped on the carpet in front of their home fans and the entire country in a 34-10 loss to the Texans on Monday Night Football)

10.  "See? We're not the only ones who suck!" (The Jaguars, the Browns, the Raiders et al)

Un-Bearable

 OK, so maybe it's not just Aaron Rodgers who owns the Bears. Maybe it's the entire Green Bay Packers franchise, for whom Rodgers was playing that time he beat the Bears and taunted the Ditkaheads with his infamous declaration of ownership.

I say this after the Bears blocked and tackled and ran and passed their ancient nemesis to a standoff in Chicago yesterday, only to lose 20-19 when the Packers swatted a last-second, game-winning field goal attempt into oblivion.

You could almost hear the late Dikembe Mutombo, the czar of blocked shots, cackling at the sight. You could also almost hear the Packer who blocked the kick, Karl Brooks,  snarling, "Get that weak s*** outta here!"

And you likely could hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth from Winnetka to Naperville because FOR GOD'S SAKE THE BLEEPITY-BLEEP BLEEPING PACKERS BEAT US AGAIN.

The hell do the Bears have to do to beat these cheese eaters? Raise Bronko Nagurski from the dead? 

After all, everything they had to do to win Sunday, they did. Caleb Williams, last seen being flattened like Wile E. Coyote run down by an Acme truck, completed 23-of-31 passes for 231 yards, ran nine times for 70 more yards and was sacked only three times. Four Bears receivers caught at least of four of Williams' throws, led by D.J. Moore (7 for 62 yards) and Rome Odunze (6 for 65). And the Bears led 19-14 with under five minutes to play.

Still, they lost. In the most Bears way possible.

First, Jordan Love led a desperate Packers drive that ended with him plunging one yard for the go-ahead score with 2:59 showing. Then Williams led the Bears right back down the field to set up Cairo Santos -- who'd already made a 53-yarder -- with a 46-yard kick to win it.

And then ...

A blocked field goal as time expired? Really?

"Aw, hell, he prolly woulda missed it anyway," disgusted Bears fans are likely saying this morning.

The fatalism is well-earned, certainly. The loss, after all, was the Bears 16th to the Packers in the last 17 meetings, and a record 11th straight. In a series that goes back 103 years, neither team had ever won 11 straight until Sunday; the last time the Bears beat the Packers was 2018, when Donald Trump was in the White House the first time.

Fun fact to know and tell: Packers head coach Matt LaFleur has never lost to the Bears. He's 11-0 lifetime.

Complementary fun fact to know and tell: That of course means Bears coach Matt Eberflus has never beaten the Packers. He's 0-for-5 in the closest thing the NFL has to an actual rivalry.

"Another reason to get rid of Eberflush," Bears Fan is likely saying now.

And also: "So if the Packers own us, does that mean the McCaskeys are finally out?"

At last a silver lining.

Of contracts and such

 One of my best friends grew up in the Detroit 'burbs, and, because Detroit is Hockeytown, his family has had Red Wings season tickets since goalies started wearing masks or something. A long time, in other words.

Anyway, for years, their seats were next to an odd duck named Bob, whose chief characteristic was a virtually impenetrable pessimism. No matter how bright the silver lining, Bob never lost sight of the cloud. He therefore became known as Black Cloud Bob.

Which is taking the long way around the barn to say I guess you could call me his spiritual kin today.

The other day, see, Indiana University handed first-year football coach Curt Cignetti $64 million (and potentially $72 mill) to continue coaching the Hoosiers through 2032. This is on account of the fact Cignetti is 10-0 right out of the box and has the Hoosiers ranked fifth in the country, their highest ranking since the Rose Bowl season 57 years ago.

All the reports on this development have said essentially the same thing: Indiana has "locked up" Cignetti with a long-term deal.

My take: This is great news. But locks can be picked.

This is not to say Cignetti, at 63, is going anywhere any time soon. But coaches' contracts aren't worth the paper they're printed on these days, which means the "locked up" part is only theoretical. Some high-gloss program comes calling with a bigger wad, Coach Locked-Up will become Coach Jailbreak before you can blink twice. 

It happened to Notre Dame three years ago, when Brian Kelly kicked out a window and escaped to LSU. And if it can happen to Notre Dame, it can surely happen to Indiana.

Of course, the whole idea of extending a coach's deal is to put a firewall between the coach's current school and any potential poachers. The longer and fatter the deal, the more a competing school (or pro team) would have to pay to buy out a coach's contract.

 That was undoubtedly Indiana's goal in making Cignetti not only one of the highest-paid coaches in the Big Ten, but the highest-paid employee in the school's history. That, plus Cignetti's age, should almost certainly keep even the wealthiest poachers at arm's length.

Still ...

Still, almost certainly is only almost certainly. So it could happen. Has before, after all.

In which case, I guess you can call me Black Cloud Ben now.

Or, you know, a few less printable names.

Bayou bungles

 Your LSU Tigers lost another football game yesterday, this time to a sub-.500 Florida team in The Swamp, and somewhere in America some Rudy undoubtedly said "Gee, that's a shame." And then chuckled a bit.

This is because if you're a Notre Dame alum or subway alum, betrayal is not to be tolerated. And when Brian Kelly, the winningest coach in the school's history, fled Domerville because LSU threw a wad of cash at him, he went from being plain old Brian Kelly to being Judas IsKellyot.

Nobody leaves Notre Dame for some other lame school, or so the thinking goes in South Bend. Nobody.

But that is calcified reasoning in these transactional times, when everyone and everything has its price. It may still be the halcyon days of yore for Domers of a certain age, but not out in the world. So LSU poached, Kelly agreed to be poached, and off to Baton Rouge he went.

Where his chances at a national title have not as appreciably improved as he perhaps thought.

Instead, Kelly went 10-4 in his first year and 10-3 in this second, and LSU wound up in the Citrus Bowl and something called the ReliaQuest Bowl. This was considerably more than a stone's throw from the College Football Playoff, let alone a national championship.

This year?

Well, the Tigers started 6-0, and now they're 6-3. And Kelly, who has a disagreeable tendency to throw his players under the bus when the going gets tough, is back at it again.

Yesterday, he laid into wide receiver Chris Hilton Jr. at one point, apparently using the word "uncoachable" in his tirade. Then another LSU wideout, Kyren Lacy, was caught on camera yelling at Kelly later on.

Good times there in Geaux Tigers country. Gooood times.

In South Bend, meanwhile, Marcus Freeman has the Irish rolling at 9-1, and yesterday they handled Virginia 35-14 on Senior Day. It was their eighth straight win since the increasingly inexplicable loss to Northern Illinois, and seven of those have been by 18 or more points.

Next up are unbeaten Army and then USC, and if the No. 8 Irish get past those two they'll be 11-1 and a CFP lock. In Baton Rouge, meanwhile, Kelly will presumably still be battling his own team and getting more and more heat from an LSU fan base that's wondering when, if ever, they'll get a return on their investment.

You might call that karma, if you're a loyal son of Notre Dame. And be sorely tempted by the sin of schadenfreude -- aka, gloating.

I'm thinking those loyal sons will risk it, though.

Fight of the Centur ... zzzzzz

 Well, now. If that wasn't exactly what the Blob told you it would be a couple of days ago:

... I think it's more likely they'll trade a few non-nuclear punches until (Mike) Tyson's 58-year-old legs go away, and then (Jake) Paul will hit him and Tyson will go down. Or they'll just wallow around to an ultimately unsatisfying end.

Remember that?

Yeah, that was me. So as much as I loathe saying "I told ya so" (an obvious lie), I told ya so.

Jake Paul jabbed.  Tyson threw a few punches that looked like ... well, the kind of punches a 58-year-old man would throw. And after three rounds his 58-year-old legs went away  and they wallowed around for five more unsatisfying two-minute rounds until Paul, 31 years Tyson's junior, was declared the winner by an easy unanimous decision.

If you watched this made-for-TV show on Netflix and came away feeling you'd been had, you can't say I didn't warn you. 

This was never going to be anything but another Netflix special, like "Formula 1: Drive to Survive" except waaaay slower. Only geezer/codgers like me thought it would be anything else, mainly because we've all too many action films in which 72-year-old Liam Neeson kicks the crap out of the bad guys. 

Alas, that only happens in the movies.

In real life, it was convenient Paul and Tyson didn't climb in the ring until almost 11 p.m., because what happened after that was the perfect bedtime story. Sent all us suckers who watched it right off to dreamland. You'd have thought Netflix could have at least thrown in a couple of dance numbers to liven things up, but, nah.

Dancing With The Scars this was not. Neither was it the Fight of the Century, unless it was the 11th century and everyone in it was long dead.

Fight of the Century?

More like Fight of the Centur ... zzzzzz. Hope you slept tight.

Timeless

 Some things will always be, and a few of them we know. The sun will rise in the east.  Batteries will die when it's most inconvenient. And the next time you hit the McDonald's drive-thru, the shake machine will be broken again.

Here's one more: We'll open a sports page or website on a given morning, and there will be LeBron James, putting up another triple-double.

He did it again the other night, compiling 35 points, 12 rebounds and 14 assists to carry the Los Angeles Lakers on his back again. It was his third triple-dub in a row. He's been playing in the NBA for 21 years, and next month he'll be 40 years old.

So, yes, he is timeless, or as close to it as mortals ever come. Man discovers fire; LeBron goes for 35, 12 and 14. The Roman empire falls; LeBron drops 28, 12 and 10 on the Alaric Avengers. Wars come and go; civilizations rise and fall; the Wright brothers fly ...

... and LeBron rings up another triple-dub. He just goes on and on, like that Buick Skylark you've had since 1978.

And I suppose this is the part where someone even dumber than me would stir up The Debate again, but I'm not goin' there. The old heads say Michael Jordan is the undisputed greatest basketball player in history, unless it's Kareem. I won't argue. I mean, I could, but it's as pointless as arguing with a Trumper. They know what they know, and what they don't know they don't want to know.

What I will say is this: Lebron James is the greatest basketball player in history who's in his 22nd NBA season and turns 40 next month.

Jordan played 15 years and turned 40 in his last season, too, but he'd become primarily a jumpshooter by then. In his last season, with the Washington Wizards, he averaged 20 points, 6.1 rebounds and 3.8 assists.

Kareem? He played 20 seasons and turned 42 in the last one, when he averaged 10.1 points, 4.5 rebounds and 1.0 assists. He was a shadow of his former self that last year, playing just 22 minutes per game.

As of this morning, LeBron James, 39 for another month, is still logging 40.8 minutes per game. And he's averaging 24.3 points, 8.1 rebounds and 9.4 assists -- the latter of which places him third in the league in the season's early stages.

Did someone say "timeless"?

Oh, you bet. Go back 15, 16 years and dial up footage of him, and he's virtually the same player he is now. Except for the slings and arrows of advancing age, he's still doing a lot of the same things on the floor he did as a 22- or 23- or 24-year-old.

And that, boys and girls, is damn remarkable. So here's to him.

That fight

 I know what I'm supposed to do here, as a card-carrying geezer/codger. I'm supposed to think Mike Tyson, also a geezer/codger, has mystical geezer/codger powers that will carry the day tomorrow in Arlington, Texas.

I'm supposed to think he's going to be the threshing machine of yore who had opponents reaching for the canvas before they even climbed in the ring with him. Or that at some point he'll bring a sledgehammer hook that starts in Corsicana and winds up knocking Jake Paul into the middle of December.

Love to see it, and not just because of geezer/codger bias. Don't think I will.

Don't think I will, because Jake Paul is 27 years old and is currently a pro fighter (of sorts), and Mike Tyson is 58 and hasn't been in a ring in almost 20 years. It's why I also think this whole thing is a made-for-Netflix reality show and not an actual athletic competition, and a farce reminiscent of that time Muhammad Ali fought a professional wrestler.

Now, I won't go so far as to say there's a script. But if you believe it's going to be over the first time Tyson hits Paul so hard his head detaches like the saucer section of the Enterprise, you're going to be sadly disappointed. There'll be no first-round knockout this time for Iron Mike.

No, I think it's more likely they'll trade a few non-nuclear punches until Tyson's 58-year-old legs go away, and then Paul will hit him and Tyson will go down. Or they'll just wallow around to an ultimately unsatisfying end.

After which everyone who should have known better will cry, "We should have known better!"

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, there is a chance I could be wrong. And that's why you'll watch. 

Wait ... what?

 Aaaand there it is, right on time: The calliope music.

Remember the other day, when the Blob reasoned (to stretch that word out of round) that Colts coach Shane Steichen was sticking with ancient turnover machine Joe Flacco because otherwise the calliope would start up and the dreaded quarterback carousel would begin to turn?

Well, hop on board, boys and girls. What'll it be, the seahorse or the giraffe?

Because  yesterday, two days after Steichen declared Flacco was still his guy and would start Sunday against the Jets, he abruptly course-corrected. Got up there in front of the Colts media cohort and said this: Oops, my bad, dudes. What I meant to say was ANTHONY RICHARDSON will start Sunday against the Jets, and furthermore he'll start EVERY GAME FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON.

Wait ... what?

So what happened between Monday and Wednesday?

Well, he's made great strides in learning how to be a pro.

In two days? 

Nah, in the last couple weeks.

OK, so, in two weeks, then?

Umm ... yes. I'll go with yes.

Aye-yi-yi. Things just get stranger and stranger out there on the west side of Indy.

Steichen swore yesterday the decision to reverse course was ultimately his, just as he swore less than 48 hours before that the decision to stick with Flacco was ultimately his. But the barn door is open now, and the speculation is running free.

Did Colts owner Jim Irsay call and say "Play the kid"? Was Steichen facing a locker room mutiny if he didn't play AR? All that stuff Kenny Moore said postgame Sunday about certain players not putting in the time to get better at their craft ... was that aimed at Joe Flacco?

I mean, you assumed he was talking about the younger players, because the demands of the pro game are naturally a learning process for them. But in retrospect ...

Ah, who knows, really. Maybe Steichen, general manager Chris Ballard and the rest of the Colts brain trust woke up the morning after deciding to ride with Flacco and thought "Oh, s***, we forgot! AR is the future of the franchise! Also we spent a buttload of money on him! Also-also, we're gonna look really stupid if we go with the ten-year-old Honda Civic and leave the brand-new Ferrari in the shed!"

Again, who knows. Only thing for sure is the Colts have jerked Richardson around about as badly as you can jerk a guy around, and God knows what the kid's confidence looks like right now as a result.

The Blob's crystal ball has always been notoriously murky, but here's what I see going forward: I see AR taking the reins again, and doing things that make you grab your head in amazement and other things that make you grab your head in dismay, and the Colts win some and lose some. Then, I don't know, sometime in December, when they're still miraculously in the playoff hunt and AR has been subpar in a crucial loss, Steichen changes his mind again and hands the keys back to Flacco, and never mind what he said before.

After which, having thoroughly ruined the future of their franchise, they trade him in the offseason to an organization that actually knows what the hell it's doing. And of course Richardson blossoms into the quarterback the Colts thought he would be when they made him the No. 4 pick in the 2023 draft.

Sound likely?

I mean, as likely as anything else right now?

The loyal son

Gerry Faust died the other day at the full-to-the-top age of 89, and suddenly it was a football Saturday at Notre Dame again. Out in the parking lot, latecomers weave around tables groaning with brunch and high-shelf booze, broken out just for the occasion; across the campus, gawkers wearing the colors of the day's opponent are taking in all the postcard sights they've heard so much about.

Look, Maude, there's the Golden Dome! And Fair Catch Corby! And, wow, Touchdown Jesus is REALLY TALL!

Up in the press box, meanwhile ...

It's about time for Gerry Faust to check in.

He passes through almost every game day, and in his wake bobs all manner of goodwill. The school never had a better ambassador of feel-good, truth be told; it never had a more hail-fellow-well-met fellow, nor one so many Domers were so happy to hail.

Which always amazed me, in a way, because this was the same Gerry Faust the Domers wanted gone once upon a time.

That was when Gerry Faust was the football coach at Notre Dame, though not a very good one. The school hired him straight out of Cincinnati Moeller High School, where Faust had built a national power. Still ...

Still, a lot of alums, subway and otherwise, immediately decided the administration had slipped a cog. A high school coach? Overseeing the most storied college program in America?

Confirmation on the cog-slipping came when Faust went 30-26-1 across five beige seasons before he resigned to spare Notre Dame from firing him. The Irish never won more than seven games in a season under Faust, lost four in a row to a school (Air Force) that had never before beaten them, and were humiliated 58-7 by Miami in Faust's last game.

In other words, he failed. Spectacularly.

But only as a football coach.

That's because something remarkable happened in the years after he resigned: Faust remained the most loyal of those loyal Notre Dame sons of song and lore, and the Domers loved him for it.

Even in his coaching days he'd had this unquenchable exuberance that drew people to him, with the consequence that even those who grew disgruntled with his coaching found it impossible to dislike him personally. He barged around campus like a one-man joy dispenser, and it was impossible to resist. Even if you were still pissed about the latest loss, you couldn't help walking away from him with a smile on your face.

 "I had only 26 miserable days at Notre Dame; that's when we lost," Faust said once. "Other than that, I was the happiest guy in the world. I loved walking on the campus, loved being there, loved being a part of Notre Dame."

And Notre Dame was a better place because he was.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 10

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the "Well, duh, Mr. Obvious" Blob of which critics have said, "It's obvious you're running out of ideas, if in fact you ever had any", and also "Oh, sure, now you're gonna drag Mr. Obvious into this":

1. "Omigod, they're gonna get Caleb Willams killed!" (Bears fans, after Williams was sacked nine times behind a decimated offensive line in a 19-3 home loss to the Patriots)

2. "Well, duh, Mr. Obvious." (The rest of America)

3. "Maybe the Bears should play someone else until the O-line heals, 'cause they're gonna get Caleb Williams killed." (Also Bears fans, and Chicago media, and a bunch of other folks in Chicago)

4. "See No. 2 above." (The rest of America)

5. "Omigod, we suck!" (Jets fans, after the Jets were embarrassed 31-6 by the Cardinals)

6. (Also Cowboys fans, after the Cowboys were embarrassed 34-6 at home by the Eagles)

7. "Again ... see No. 2." (The rest of America)

8. "Omigod, our owner's an idiot!" (Still Cowboys fans, after Jerry Jones blamed the loss partly on the sun, which apparently was blinding the Cowboys receivers)

9. "Omigod, Aaron Rodgers is old! Nobody told us he was old!" (Jets fans, again)

10. "For the last time, see No.- Oh, forget it." (The rest of America)

Meanwhile, in NASCAR ...

 For those still paying attention, NASCAR "(Nas-what?" you're saying now) wrapped up its season in Phoenix yesterday, and there was really nothin' to see here.

In other words, Joey Logano won his third Cup title in the winner-take-all finale, holding off defending champion Ryan Blaney's valiant late charge.

Logano drives for Roger Penske. Blaney also drives for Roger Penske.

This means Penske Racing finished 1-2 in the championship, and claimed its third straight NASCAR title. That's because Blaney won last year, and Logano won the year before that.

Also, back in May, Josef Newgarden, who also drives for Penske, became the first back-to-back winner of the Indianapolis 500 since Helio Castroneves, who also drove for Penske, did it in 2001 and 2002.

So, basically, Roger Penske dominated the American motorsports the way he's dominated them for a good chunk of the last 50 or so years.

Like I said: Nothin' to see here.

The trap game

 Quietly, now, you can hear the carousel warming up, as Shane Steichen tells us Joe Flacco is still his guy. The hum of the motor is faint, but it's there. Any second now the calliope music will start up, and damned if it won't fill the world.

Some pickle they're in, these Indianapolis Colts.

First they bench their once-and-perhaps-not-future future, Anthony Richardson, after just ten career starts.

Then they declare 86-year-old* (*39-year-old) Joe Flacco the future of the franchise, or at least of this season.

Now the Colts have lost three straight games, the last two with Flacco as QB1. In those games, Flacco has committed six turnovers. Yesterday, in a dispiriting 30-20 home loss to Buffalo, he coughed it up four times on three interceptions and a fumble.

The first pick was a pick six on Indy's first offensive snap that put the Colts down 7-0 not quite three minutes into the game. The Bills' Taron Johnson was the unintended receiver, and he basically strolled into the end zone with the gift.

And yet ...

And yet, there was Steichen postgame, stickin' with his guy. Because what choice does he have at this point?

If he benches Flacco and puts AR back in again, see, he cranks up the dreaded carousel.

AR comes in, plays awful in another Colts loss, and in comes Flacco again.

Flacco plays awful in another Colts loss, and in comes AR again.

And so on. And so forth.

It's a trap game Steichen and the braintrust have stumbled into, in the sense that they're trapped now by their own bad choices and indecision. It happened because they confused present with future and threw Richardson into the fire from the start, a horrendous decision. Then the AFC South turned into the AFC Sloth, so mediocre even a mediocre club like Indianapolis could sniff the playoffs. 

Patience in bringing Richardson along went poof, in the face of that. And now it is what it is, as everyone likes to say.

In other words, a s***show wrapped in a cluster(bleep).

Random thought: How differently would all of this have played out had the Houston Texans -- expected to dominate the AFC South -- not gotten off to a 1-3 start? Or if Tennessee and Jacksonville weren't so bad the Colts, at 4-6, are still the second-best team in the division? Would Joe Flacco have been throwing pick sixes yesterday?

Would the Colts be in such a fine mess, headed for an even finer mess?

Salutes all around

  I wrote the following several years back, and now I re-post it every other Veteran's Day or so. I suppose I could post something new about this day, but it would express all the same sentiments and likely wouldn't express them any better. So, I offer it again. 

And if you see a vet today, thank him or her for his or her service. It's the least you can do.

Every year on Veteran's Day I go back there, in my mind. It's been 18 years now since I toured the American sector of the Western Front in France, where the war that did not end all wars, but only ignited wars unending, was fought by American boys in the late summer and fall of 1918.

November 11, the day the guns fell silent, will always be Armistice Day as much as Veteran's Day to me because of that. It ended a war that is mostly forgotten to us now, even though some 54,000 Americans died in six months there and countless others brought nightmares home from it that would last a lifetime. There are neat green cemeteries from the Argonne to Thiaucourt  there now, row upon row of white crosses arrayed in the geometry of remembrance. And, amid the fields of wheat and crumbling old pillboxes and the scars of ancient trenches, there is an immense white dome of marble few Americans ever visit.

I always wonder why that is so, when I think of that place on Veteran's Day. And I always will.

It's an old bromide that we can never thank our veterans enough for their service, and yet somehow we always fall short. If we remember what they did for us in Normandy or Fallujah or on Iwo Jima or Okinawa, we just as readily forget sometimes what they did in Belleau Wood or Frozen Chosin or the killing fields of the Ia Drang Valley. And, more shamefully, we especially forget when they return home.

I met my share of veterans, in my four decades as a journalist. I met Korean veterans and Vietnam veterans and, once, almost 30 years ago now, a vet who survived both Tarawa and Okinawa in World War II. And I met a man who, when he was 23 years old, was shooting down Nazi jets over Europe in a P-51 Mustang.

That particular gentleman's name was Chuck Yeager. Perhaps you've heard about what he did later on, something involving the sound barrier.

In all cases, they were men who'd seen and done things no human being should ever see or do, and they will talk about those things only with the most extreme reluctance. It is not that they don't remember. It's that they are unfailingly polite, and don't wish to burden us with old fantastical tales. It feels too much like bragging about things no one should ever brag about.

Everyone who has ever experienced war in closeup knows that last. They leave the bragging to fools and charlatans who, when it was their turn to serve, hid under their beds. One of them, a vile gasbag of no particular merit, famously mocked a decorated Vietnam War POW for being captured. But of course the president-elect now has only the greatest of respect for our veterans.

I won't think about him today. I'll think instead about the no-big-deal humility of Chuck Yeager, and the quiet dignity of the Korean War vets I met almost 30 years ago, and of so many other men and women of so much more quality and consequence.

Thanks, all of you. Thank you for you service, and your example.

A W spelled "l-o-s-s"

 You can start up the jokes now, at South Bend Washington's expense. God knows the school's girls basketball coach and athletic director deserve every one of them.

So, who you gonna schedule next? Lebowski's Little Achievers?

What, Lollipop Acres Daycare wasn't available?

Only 100 points?

And so on. And so forth.

So on, so forth, and, man, what a spectacle, that girls basketball game between the Washington Panthers and Gary Lighthouse College Preparatory Academy the other day. The Panthers won 100-0, and, no, that's not a misprint. The final score really was 100-0.

How embarrassing.

For South Bend Washington, not Gary Lighthouse.

Washington, see, is a loaded outfit fueled by a senior class that won a 4A state championship as sophomores and a regional title as juniors. Lighthouse is a 2A school with an enrollment of 496 that has now lost 29 straight games. Last year the Lions played just nine games and lost them all by, shall we say, comfortable margins.

So, yeah, it was gonna be a slaughter.

And, yeah, Washington head coach Steve Reynolds has every reason to sound as defensive as he sounds about it.

"I get penalized when I go out of state, as far as rankings and the girls trying to make the Indiana All-Star teams and all those kinds of things," Reynolds told Austin Hough of the South Bend Tribune. "So, this year, I'm like 'OK, I'm going to try and stay in Indiana as much as I can.'

"But when we call teams, they don't want to play us, so then we have to go to that second tier of teams, and my (athletic director Garland Hudson) is trying to do the best he can."

That's how Gary Lighthouse, which scored just 80 points in their nine games last season, was scheduled less than a month before the season. It should never have happened. Hudson should have either tried harder, or not tried at all.

In other words, if he and Reynolds can't find someone to play, then you don't play. Or  you suck it up and schedule out-of-state anyway, because if there are girls on the Washington team good enough to be Indiana All-Stars, they're going to be Indiana All-Stars regardless.

Besides, you think that farce the other day helped their chances? Really?

Look, no one gets anything out of such a "game", least of all South Bend Washington. It doesn't help them get better; you can even argue it makes them worse because if you're opponent is that uncompetitive you can get away with ignoring the fundamentals that make you good. 

So, there's that. 

South Bend Washington 100, Gary Lighthouse 0?

Yeah, it'll show up as a W for the Panthers in the record book. But it'll look for all the world like it's spelled "l-o-s-s".

A hard life, well-lived

 Down in Mooresville, N.C. the other day, Bobby Allison went to his reward, and no one can say he didn't earn it. If you don't know who he was, stock car racing isn't your deal. If you do, you know it gave him everything, and took away damn near all of it.

Allison won 85 Cup races, three Daytona 500s and was the 1983 series champion. He was the paterfamilias, along with brother Donnie, of the Alabama Gang that came out of Hueytown to become one of the driving forces in NASCAR for the better part of two decades. It's why, when NASCAR launched its Hall of Fame, Bobby Allison was inducted in its second class in 2011.

By then, racing had cost him two sons, his marriage, and nearly his life. Hell of a tradeoff, that was.

The darkness descended in 1988, when Allison got up in the fence at Pocono and hurt himself so bad he was initially declared dead. Instead he emerged with severe brain damage that wiped out his memory for awhile, and forced him to re-learn virtually everything a healthy brain provides a human being.

Four years later, his son Clifford, a Busch Series (now Infiniti Series) driver, slapped the wall at Michigan and died. A year after that, son Davey, one of  NASCAR's brightest young lights, died in a helicopter crash while arriving at Talladega for a Cup race.

A year after that, another of the Alabama Gang, Neil Bonnett, was killed in a practice crash at Daytona. And two years after that, Bobby and his wife Judy divorced.

Racing gave him everything. Racing cost him everything.

And yet ...

And yet, he lived long enough to recoup some of the losses.

He and Judy remarried in 2000, and were together until her death in 2015. He recovered from his near-fatal crash and the deaths of his sons and his good friend, although the heartache of the latter never goes away and never would for him. And of course there was that Hall of Fame induction in 2011.

So when he died the other day at 86, he could at least say his scales had some balance to them. He could at least say racing gave back a small portion of what it had taken.

He could say, yes, it had been a hard life sometimes, rougher than a cob as they say in the country. But it was also a life well-lived.

Strange new world*

 (*Though not really)

Which is to say, Indiana won another football game yesterday, and now the Hoosiers are 10-0 for the first time in a history that goes back to Grover Cleveland, and the school is already trying to figure out how to keep everyone else's mitts off the architect of all this, first-year head coach Curt Cignetti.

What's strange about this, as the Blob observed last week, is that ten games into the Coach Cig Era, it's already ceased to become strange. Occasionally, however, vertigo does pay a visit. You close your eyes and the room swims, and for a second or two the world is upside-down and whopperjawed.

Yesterday, for instance, the Hoosiers were driving and night had come down and Memorial Stadium was a swaying, howling sea of red there in the dark, and Michigan was just two points adrift. Eventually Kurtis Rourke got them close enough for a field goal to push the lead to five, 20-15, and then Michigan ran out of downs shy of midfield with a minute-and-a-half left, and W No. 10 was secure.

That wasn't what turned everything upside-down, however.

It was what one of the guys in the CBS booth said.

"Michigan came here looking for the upset," he said.

Michigan. Looking for the upset. Against Indiana. 

When's the last time you heard that?

Because, listen, in all the long and mostly beige history of Indiana football, it's always been the Hoosiers looking to upset Michigan. And failing spectacularly, in most cases. 

Some numbers: With yesterday's win, has beaten Michigan exactly 11 times in 73 meetings dating back to the turn of the last century. Eleven times in 124 years. And the Hoosiers didn't beat the Wolverines for the first time until 1928 -- which means it took them nearly three decades just to beat them once. 

But yesterday?

Indiana came in 9-0 and ranked eighth. Michigan, the defending national champions, came in 5-4 and unranked. So, yeah, the Wolverines were the decided underdogs for once.

But the Hoosiers survived. Brought, I don't know, their B-minus game, and still won. Which says they're at least as good as their ranking, and certainly better than some national folks still regard them.

I mean, come on. It's Indiana. Surely they're not THAT good, right?

Well ... they are. Bizarrely so, simply because it no longer feels bizarre. Looking ahead to the big clash in Columbus against No. 2 Ohio State in two weeks -- which prompted my friend and former sportswriting colleague Jim Saturday to make the following observation: "Who woulda thunk that Michigan would be a trap game?"

Strange new world, indeed.

Stephen A. for WHAT?

 Look, I don't know much, and the people who know me best will back me up on this. But what I really don't know is how we got to a place in America where ESPN's lead blowhole (Stephen A. Smith) lands on a sports website (Awful Announcing) because he said on The View he'd consider running for President in 2028 it he thought he had a shot.

Oh, wait. I do know how we got to this place. 

We got this place when the once and future President, Donald J. Trump, ran for the White House in 2016 and somehow won. And then lost in 2020, and then won again Tuesday because a whole bunch of people who should have known better handed him a landslide victory.

So Stephen A. for President?

Why the hell not?

Granted, it's a preposterous notion, but is it really any more preposterous than Training Wheels Mussolini was in 2016? Like Stephen A., he'd never held public office of any sort. And he'd prepared for the job by hosting a reality show and running through his rich daddy's money (and his brother's piece of it) in one failed business venture/con after another. 

Not only was he a lousy businessman, he was a crooked one -- a man held in such contempt by a sizeable portion of America that, just four years before, racing fans raised holy hell when the Indianapolis Motor Speedway floated the idea of having him drive the pace car for the 500.

Still, he won. And then convinced a lot of people who should have known better that he was a really smart guy who, in his first term, ended crime, kept those damn Mexicans on the other side of the border, gave us cheap gas by making us energy independent and brought about world peace.

Or so the story goes.

As for Stephen A. ...

Yeah, he makes his coin yelling about sports on ESPN. But he also ventures into the political realm occasionally on Fox with his pal Sean Hannity. So you could say without it sounding too ridiculous that he's more familiar with that landscape than the president-elect was eight years ago.

"I dunno, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "That sounds pretty damn ridiculous if you ask me."

I get that. And if these were ordinary times, I'd agree with you. 

But these are anything but ordinary times. More than half the electorate apparently believes Venezuelan drug cartels are taking over whole cities, and Haitian immigrants are making filet mignon out of the family pooch. And more than half the electorate also apparently believes little Johnny's coming home from school as little Suzie ... and there's actually a "war on Christmas" simply because some people say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" ... and vaccines are killing Americans in droves.

The rest of us?

We're suddenly strangers in an exceedingly strange land. And so the idea of Stephen A. running for President in 2028 seems no more strange than anything else these days.

Although if he made his former sidekick/sparring partner Skip Bayless his running mate, that would really be weird.

The toll

 Saw a news item this morning about former Colts standout Darius Leonard, and you can cancel the all-points bulletin. His whereabouts are no longer unknown. 

It seems Darius Leonard is in Florida.

Coaching a high school football team.

At the still-tender age of 29.

And if you're thinking now, "Wow, he's only 29?", join the club. Because it seems like eons since you heard his name. 

Amazingly, though, it's only been three years since he was a wrecking-ball linebacker for the Horseshoes, blowing up plays and forcing fumbles and recovering same.  Man planned, and Darius Leonard laughed. It was the fall of 2021, and he was a four-time All-Pro, and he was all of 26 years old.

And then ...

And then Jerry Glanville's home truth -- the NFL means Not For Long -- fell on Leonard like the sky itself.

What happened was, he got hurt. Back. Nerve damage. Surgery.

Done.

 The injury, and the surgery, robbed him of the explosiveness that made him special. That made him a player, and not just another example of the awful toll pro football takes on its employees -- another example, if you will, of someone who's no longer invincible in the way every stickout player feels he is, and that allows him to do wondrous things.

Just five days ago, for instance, I saw Saquon Barkley of the Eagles execute an open-field spin and then hurdle an oncoming tackler backward. It was one of the most amazing things any of us ever saw, and we all grabbed our heads and yelped "Whaaaaat!" almost in unison. And I'll wager none of us (Saquon, too, I'm guessing) ever considered for a nanosecond how easily it could have landed him in traction.

And it could have. In a dozen, fifty, a hundred ways.

But in the NFL everything comes at you so fast and from so many angles it's instinct that enables you to thrive, and without it you're lucky to survive. Without it, you start to think too much. And if you think too much -- even if it's only for an eyeblink of an eyeblink --  the game becomes too fast. 

And then you're no longer a wrecking ball. You're just a wrecked one.

Saquon Barkley is still the former, because his amazing feat Sunday was clearly pure instinct. Darius Leonard, on the other hand, is now the latter, because injury robbed him of what made him great, and maybe robbed him of the instinct that was its meat and drink, too.

I can't say for sure if that was the case for him. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. Everyone's different, and outsiders like me know what we're talking about less often than we think.

All I know is, Leonard's 29 years old and coaching high school kids in Florida, and his cell ain't chirpin'. He's a free agent, but even though players drop like flies once the season gets into November, no one's calling.

 It's possible he didn't expect them to. It's possible, maybe even probable, that after three years he's moved on to whatever life has for him next.

If so, Godspeed to him.  

The Morning After

 I decided not to watch my country lose its collective mind last night. 

Instead, I cued up "National Treasure" on the streaming whatsis, and watched Nic Cage steal the Declaration of Independence again. Symmetry, you might call that.

And now?

Now it's Wednesday morning and there's a gloomy lid of November gray where I live in Indiana, which is appropriate considering Indiana resoundingly decided last night to continue its bid to be North Mississippi. This was not surprising. My home state has always had a thing for kooks, demagogues and zealots. Occasionally we elect all three.

Which is how we woke up this morning with a colorless ideologue (Mike Braun) as our governor, a Trumpist Moonie (Jim Banks) as our senator and a grandstanding attorney general (Todd Rokita) who'll remain in office to keep us safe from hard-working Haitians, transgender athletes and women who'd prefer not to bleed out when a pregnancy goes wrong.

And the rest of the country?

Well, right now, as goes Indiana, so goes the nation. The kooks, demagogues and zealots are about to control both houses of Congress. And we're going to return the keys to the White House to a half-mad felon whose grip on reality loosens by the hour, and whose limitless capacity for grievance is the sharpest knife left in his drawer.

To that I say: So be it.

To that I say, we get what's coming to us in a democratic republic, an old saw that still cuts true. If we've decided a half-mad felon is the solution to our problems -- even the problems he and his acolytes make up just to scare us -- then madness is what we'll get. 

The good news is, we won't get it forever.

We are a resilient nation, always have been, and our resilience springs from the fact that you can play us for rubes only so long. Eventually we figure out the kooks are indeed kooks, and we throw the bums out.

It may take longer this time for the light bulb to go on, because in a good chunk of us the light bulb has grown exceedingly dim. But sooner or later enough of us will realize we've been had, and we'll do something about it. 

In this case, I give it two years. Mid-terms in '26. The chickens come home to roost.

And, yes, I realize how Pollyanna-ish that sounds. Or naive, as some people like to tell me. But as a card-carrying history nerd I tend to take the long view of things, and my long view tells me if we survived a Civil War, the First Amendment assaults of John Adams and Woodrow Wilson and countless other crises both foreign and domestic, we'll survive the half-mad felon.

Bottom line, I refuse to believe a circus clown like Donald J. Trump and his collection of servile hammerheads can bring down the American republic. Not after everything else we've been through.

Can the hammerheads do significant damage to everything we hold dear? You're damn right they can, and will. Can they do everlasting damage? That's not nearly as inevitable, or so it seems to me.

Last week I cued up another film, mostly as a cautionary tale. It was the 2006 remake of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," starring Sean Penn as Willie Stark, the fictitious Louisiana politician Warren transparently modeled on Huey Long. Like Long, Stark got things done. He was also, like his real-life doppelganger, an increasingly ruthless dictator whose excesses eventually brought him to a violent end.

What was chilling about that was how much Sean Penn, in rhetoric and style, sounded like Donald J. Trump. And how much he also sounded like one of Stark/Long's contemporaries -- a ranting psychopath over in Germany whose name we all know.

Historical analogies, of course, are never exact. The aforementioned aren't, either. So there's no way I'll surrender to hysteria and say we're now about to become Germany in 1933, and that therefore we've seen our last election and have only persecution and mass murder in our future.

Not buyin' it.

Experience, see, tells us that in America the kooks and demagogues and zealots always overstep when handed total control of the tiller. It happened when the Drys pushed through Prohibition, and all it did was make America thirstier and Al Capone 'n' them rich. And it happened when the Klan took over Indiana during the same decade, only to go into decline when its leader -- a sick SOB named D.C. Stephenson -- thought he was so untouchable he could assault a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer with impunity.

Turned out he couldn't.

Just as it will turn out the crazy people we've put in charge won't be in charge forever. Because in America, the only constant is change.

Your PSA for today

Thinking this morning of Arnold Horshack from "Welcome Back Kotter", but not because my mind is a strange place cluttered with non sequiturs and random bits of esoterica.

(OK, so not totally because of that).

No, I'm thinking of Arnold Horshack because I'm thinking of NASCAR, which right now is playing the Horshack role in our grand cavalcade of sports.  Remember the way Arnold used to wildly wave his hand and yelp "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!" to get Mr. Kotter's attention?

That's kinda NASCAR right now.

It's waving its hand and "Oh-oh-oh-oh"-ing because Sunday in Martinsville the last spots were filled in its playoff Final Four, and it wants someone to notice. The four drivers racing for the Nextel Cup crown are defending champion Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano, Tyler Reddick and William Byron.

Byron got in because Christopher Bell, with whom he was tied, did the Ross Chastain thing to pass him late in the race. The Ross Chastain thing, to refresh your memory, is smacking the wall intentionally and then riding around it to build momentum. NASCAR banned that stunt after Chastain did it two years.

So Bell was docked for an illegal pass, and Byron squeaked into the Final Four. Which of course got everyone arguing because it's NASCAR and arguing is its meat and drink.

Bell claimed he only rode the wall to avoid hitting Bubba Wallace, and it was pure coincidence it enabled him to pass Byron. Other folks, including NASCAR officials, said that was a lot of horse pucky. And so on, and so forth.

Anyway ...

Anyway, it's Byron, Blaney, Logano and Reddick for the marbles next Sunday in Phoenix. I have no idea who the favorite might be, because as with most of the country, NASCAR disappears from my radar when the NFL swaggers onto the stage.

I will say this, though: If Reddick wins, it would be a hell of a story.

Not only is he competing in the winner-take-all final race for the first time, he drives for 23XI Racing. That's Michael Jordan's team. So there's a 1-in-4 chance MJ could become the first man ever to win six NBA titles and a NASCAR championship.

Which, you know, would be sorta cool. It would make MJ and Joe Gibbs a sorta cool matched set, Gibbs having won both Super Bowl and NASCAR rings as Washington's head coach and Joe Gibbs Racing's owner.

Your Public Service Announcement for today, Blobophiles.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 9

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the master-of-illusion Blob feature of which critics have said "Look! First it's there and then it's not! How wondrous!", and also, "Wondrous my a**, the only illusion is how he gets away with this garbage every week":

1. "Woo-hoo! Jameis Winston is the Man!" (Browns fans, after Winston threw for 334 yards and three touchdowns in the Browns' 29-24 upset of the Ravens last week)

2. "Crap! Jameis Winston is still Jameis Winston!" (Also Browns fans, after Winston threw three picks in the Browns' 27-10 loss Sunday to the Chargers)

3. Meanwhile, the Bears!

4. Lost to the Cardinals, 29-9, as the Greatest Rookie Quarterback In History, Caleb Williams, was sacked six times and couldn't generate a touchdown for the Bears offense)

5. "Hey, where's my offensive line? I was told there would be an offensive line." (Caleb Williams)

6. "But ... but ... we were 2-0 once!" (The New Orleans Saints who lost their seventh straight game -- to the Panthers, for heaven's sake! -- to fall to 2-7, costing head coach Dennis Allen his job)

7. "But ... but ... I had 'em 2-0!" (Dennis Allen)

8. In other news, the Patriots, Dolphins, Cowboys, Giants, and Raiders all lost again. But the J-E-T-S Jets-Jets-Jets beat the Texans, prompting Jets fans to once again declare "We're goin' to the Super Bowl!"

9. "Dude, we're 3-6." (The J-E-T-S Jets-Jets-Jets)

10. "OK, so we're goin' to second place in the AFC East, then!" (Jets fans)

One Average Joe, with questions

 Wait, so ... what was the point of this again?

The Indianapolis Colts use their Great Big Quarterback Pick on a 21-year-old with limited college experience and "project" screaming from every pore, and then they make the horrendous decision to throw him into the deep end right off the jump.

Then the GBQP, Anthony Richardson, gets hurt, and hurt again, and winds up sitting out most of his rookie season. Which means his second season is actually an RSE (Rookie Season Extended).

Then the Colts pull the plug on him after just 10 starts (which makes you think they're already giving up on him even though they say they aren't), and decide 86-year-old Joe Flacco (OK, 39-year-old Joe Flacco) is their best option going forward.

Then Joe Flacco puts up zero touchdowns, one interception and a "meh" quarterback rating of 63.7 in a 21-13 loss to the Vikings.

So again: What was the point of all this?

And by that I don't just mean benching the alleged future of your franchise for Average Joe, who at 86 (39) is not even the present of anything, let alone the future.

I mean, what was the point of drafting a project like AR and deciding he was QB1-ready when he clearly was not, then benching him after 10 starts because ...

Well, what? Because you're a .500 football team that stands a better chance of making the playoffs with Average Joe at quarterback? And what then?

Then you lose a wild-card game and exit stage right. That's what then.

This is not intended as a swipe at Flacco, who after all does have a Super Bowl ring. But he's not going to save your season. He's not going to take you to another Super Bowl even if he might still be good enough to get you into the playoffs. 

What. Is. The point? 

Because, listen, now the Colts are in a limboland of their own making. Now they've made the future the past, and the past, the future. Now head coach Shane Steichen stands up there after last night's loss and says Flacco is still his starting quarterback "right now". 

The heck does that mean?

I'll tell you what it means.

It means Chris Ballard 'n' them blew the draft pick you absolutely cannot blow, and they can't bring themselves to admit it.  Eventually they will. Eventually they'll find some way to spin this ... this ... whatever this is.

And the point?

The point is, there is no point. Or at least right now, to quote Shane Steichen.

Family matters

 I wouldn't know sports columnist Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Inquirer if he smacked me in the gob with a dangling participle. But I like to think I know a thing or two about sports columnizing, having done it for the better part of 38 years.

What I know is it's your job to occasionally criticize athletes, coaches, administrators and front-office knuckleheads in print. Especially if they've got it coming.

But dragging their family members into it?

Not the job at all. 

This is true no matter how glancing is the mention, especially when one of the family members is no longer with us. It's the surest way to get shoved around by an athlete/coach/administrator/front-office knucklehead, which is apparently what happened to Hayes the other night.

See, Hayes wrote a column, not for the first time, taking 76ers center Joel Embiid to task for his seemingly endless stints on the injury list. And that's OK. It's absolutely in-bounds for a columnist to do that, and it's up to everyone else to decide if he's being fair or not.

Problem is, Hayes mentioned Embiid's brother, who's deceased, and Embiid's son. And that is not OK. 

Now, I don't know in what context Hayes mentioned Embiid's brother and son. But, again, it doesn't matter. You inject a man's (or woman's) family into a piece, you're going to lose the point you're trying to make. And you're going to lose, period.

In Embiid's case, you make him the injured party. You give him carte blanche to ream you out in the locker room (which Embiid did), and you make him a hero for doing so. And if you don't believe me, check out the public reaction when the Sixers duly punish Embiid for putting his hands on Hayes.

Guarantee Embiid gets all the love. And not just because it was one of those bleepity-bleep sportswriters he shoved, speaking as a bleepity-bleep sportswriter myself.

It'll be because Hayes touched that third rail.

Look. I've written about my subjects' family members before. There is a time and place for it. But the time and place is when they're the story in some form or fashion, and when the subject of your piece acknowledges that and willingly talks about them.

But to inject them into a column willy-nilly? Especially one that's expressing a critical point of view?

Bad form. And bad judgment, too, because, again, you make the story about something other than what it was supposed be about. In Hayes' case, about a locker room confrontation with Joel Embiid, and about Embiid's righteous anger.

And the column itself?

Sorry, man. What were you saying again?

Another day, another W

 And now it's a Twilight Zone episode, this Indiana football season.

No, not because the Hoosiers went up to East Lansing yesterday and floor-waxed Michigan State 47-10 in the Old Brass Spittoon game, which most of America and even a healthy chunk of the Hoosier state itself probably didn't know existed. But it does, and now Indiana has the thing, and the more irreverent among us (OK, so me, then) are thinking that between the Old Brass Spittoon and the Old Oaken Bucket, Indiana could use some spiffier trophies.

Anyway, it's not the Hoosiers winning again that turns this into a Twilight Zone episode. Nor is it even that they're 9-0 for the first time in program history.

What makes it a Twilight Zone episode is how ordinary it's become.

As in; "Oh, look, Indiana won again."

As in: "Oh, look, Kurtis Rourke threw four touchdown passes two weeks after having his thumbnail torn off."

As in: "Oh, look, the Hoosiers fell behind for the first time all season and then scored 47 freaking unanswered points, and isn't that the sun rising in the East again?"

Because now Indiana winning football games is every bit as natural an occurrence.

Now the Hoosiers are expected to win. Now everyone has gotten used to the fact they're a real boy, and they win because they have real players, and their No. 13 ranking isn't Monopoly money after all.

What Curt Cignetti has wrought, in just nine games, is an Indiana program that expects to go up to East Lansing and strap 47 on Michigan State, and is in turn expected to, if not exactly do that, at least expected to win.

And, yes, that's a hell of a Twilight Zone episode for a football program with so much beige in its palette.

Fun fact, now that the Hoosiers are 9-0 for the first time ever: Across 137 years of playing football, Indiana is 200 games under .500 (512-712-44). It has lost 58 percent of the games it's played. It has won two conference titles and three bowl games in 137 years.

No wonder its fans and alums became notorious for never making it inside Memorial Stadium from the pre-game tailgate. No wonder the ones who did make it inside became notorious for expressing the following post-game sentiment: "Hey, Illinois only beat us by two touchdowns. That's pretty good."

Now the Hoosiers have Michigan coming next week, and those same fans and alumni fully expect to lay a sheep-shearin' on last season's national champs.

Now the IU alum sitting next to me at the bar last night is seeing the 47-10 score go final, and -- thinking about a certain game in Columbus, Ohio, in three weeks -- saying, "You know, Ohio State is beatable."

An Indiana guy is saying that.

Same sort of IU guy who used to be satisfied with losing by only a couple scores.

And now here comes Rod Serling, cigarette smoldering between his fingers, regarding us solemnly from beneath those sinister eyebrows.

Meet the Indiana Hoosiers, a football team for whom losing has always been as instinctive as breathing. But now a man named Curt Cignetti has arrived on campus from a tiny school in Virginia, and something remarkable is about to happen: The Hoosiers are not only going to win, but everyone will soon start EXPECTING them to win. Tonight's sojourn into the gridiron section of the Twilight Zone ...

Right?

Casualties

 North Side High School will play another football game tonight -- maybe the last of its season against undefeated Concord in Class 5A sectional play -- and that is normal, that is everyday, that is Friday night lights and American autumn at its most elemental.

The Legends, however, will be missing one of their own. And that, too, regrettably, is as normal as those Friday night lights, and an America not just for autumn but for all seasons.

The missing Legend, see, died of a gunshot wound to the chest 13 days ago.

It happened at a Halloween party.

The deceased was a North Side athlete who arrived packing a gun, forced his way into the suburban home where the party was being held, and began blazing away until another partygoer pulled out his gun and shot the shooter.

This according to the police report. This from the officers who arrived that night to find a war zone, with one North Side student dead and nine others wounded.

And how many times have we seen this?

How many shootouts at the OK Corral or a Halloween party or a supermarket or an elementary school does it take before we become numb to it, before it becomes just part of the day-to-day American tapestry?

Before, in other words, it becomes normal?

I've got news for you, or perhaps not news.

We passed that mile marker a ways back.

Normal in America now is children shooting children at a Halloween party, and grief counselors at high schools, and looking up at Walmart and seeing some GI Jethro with an AR-15 on his back. 

It's form-letter thoughts and prayers from politicians who apparently think this should  be normal, and from at least one vice-presidential candidate who says, well, yeah, that's just America now, and we just need to get used to it.

It's road rage that turns into a shooting gallery because of course both the principals are carrying  ... and hysterical cries of "They're comin' for our guns!" whenever someone suggests maybe we ought to make it a little harder for children to turn a party into the Earps vs. the Clantons ... and more thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers.

And body counts, body counts, body counts.

The Blob doesn't have a lot of articles of faith, but one of them has always been that we get the country we deserve in a democratic republic. And so, yes, this is apparently the country we deserve, because we keep electing representatives who at the very least are comfortable with it. And who think it's perfectly normal for GI Jethros to patrol the frozen food aisle with military-grade weaponry, and for the average Joe or Josephine to stockpile enough firepower to outfit a battalion of Marines.

And why do they think it's normal?

Because it is.

Because tonight there will be a high school football game, and maybe there'll be a moment of silence and maybe not, and someone will win and someone will lose. And in another town and another place, children will shoot children again, and God bless America.

Because someone sure needs to.