Spellin' bee time!

 And now exciting news from the Blob's favorite kinda-sorta sporting event, the National Spellin' Bee (OK, so it's "Spelling", but the Blob likes "Spellin'" better): The odds-on favorite did not lose, tie with eight other people or finish second the way he did last year.

No, this time 13-year-old Faizan Zaki from Allen, Texas, stuck the landing, taking home the big trophy that so narrowly eluded him in 2024. He sealed the deal by correctly spelling  "eclaircissement", which the Blob as usual claims is a totally made-up word the National Spellin' Bee people threw in there just to narrow the field.

"Hey, I know!" I can hear them saying. "Let's stick a bunch of extra letters on the end of 'eclair.' That's sure to throw the little goobers off."

Same goes for "commelina," which Faizan botched in a fit of overconfidence after the other two finalists had missed their words. That prolonged the Bee a couple more words before Faizan finally nailed "eclairwhatever."

Commelina. I mean, come on, people. If you're gonna make up words, at least don't have them sound like Disney characters.

If I'm running the show, that would never happen. No, I'd throw in a few Klingon words, like "bat'leth" or "gagh." Or some Chaucerian English, like "unnethe" or "Ynogh." Or maybe a couple of words with 12 consonants, one vowel and a random parentheses or two.

Then, in the final round, I'd hit them with the biggie: "cannolipar'laszmenta'arianism."

Which I'll decide means "The Klingon study of the ethical dilemma of leaving the gun and taking the cannoli."

That'll learn the little goobers.

Power play

 OK, O-kay, Greg Sankey. So it was a damn shame -- an almighty travesty of justice, not to put too fine a point on it -- that the College Football Playoff bouncers didn't let a three-loss Alabama team into the show last season.

Happy now?

Because, listen, all this chatter about an expanded 16-team CFP format tracks right back to that, and don't let Sankey, the commissioner of the SEC, smooth-talk you into thinking otherwise. This is about the big dogs, the SEC and Big Ten, rigging the system in their favor. It's about ensuring an Alabama -- even a three-loss Alabama -- will never again be excluded for the likes of, say, Boise State or any similar poor relation.

Set aside for a moment the obvious question here, which is why the CFP suits didn't just start out with a 16-team playoff if it was going to dump the 12-team setup so quickly. Right now we're looking at 2026 for the prospective rollout, which means the 12-team format will be gone after two seasons. Mayflies have a longer life span.

But back to the SEC and Big Ten, and their power play.

At the moment, see, the most favored proposed format is a 5-11 plan, meaning the champions of the top five conferences would get automatic bids and 11 at-large bids would fill out the field. The SEC and Big Ten each want four of those at-large bids for themselves. Which means every year eight of the 11 at-larges would be either SEC or Big Ten teams.

Move over and let the big dogs eat, in other words.

In the SEC's case, the deal-maker (or deal-breaker) is a nine-game conference schedule. The SEC teams currently play eight conference games. Given the conference's traditional strength, adding a ninth game would automatically make everyone's schedule tougher. Fewer cupcakes; more 'Bamas or Georgias or LSUs or Tennessees.

Does the SEC want this? No, the SEC does not.

Several of the conference's ADs, in fact, have said they would only favor a nine-game schedule if the SEC was guaranteed those four playoff spots. That's their asking price.

In other words: Look, if we have to drop Furman to pick up, say, Ole Miss or Auburn, we want some assurances that if we wind up 9-3 or something, we'll still get in. And too bad for those 12-0 or 11-1 hoboes from Utah or Boise.

Some people would say that suggests the SEC is a tad on the lily-livered side. I mean, not me, necessarily, but some people.

Me, I'm just wondering how the SEC is still getting away with playing an eight-game  slate when the conference now encompasses, like, eleventy-gazillion schools. The SEC stretches all the way from Austin, Texas, to Columbia, South Carolina, these days, and, if not eleventy-gazillion schools, it does include 16. That big a crowd should be playing at least nine conference games, if not more.

Of course, that big a crowd gets to make the rules for everyone else. Or so the 16-team SEC and the 18-team Big Ten seem to think.

Might makes right, or some such thing. Distasteful as it is.

A name game

 The big news out of Bloomington, In., this week is Indiana University is bringing back the bison as the school's official mascot, which it hasn't been for going on 60 years.

This is all well and good and appropriate, considering the bison is on the Indiana state seal, and also considering Indiana has always struggled to latch onto an appropriate mascot. When your nickname is "Hoosiers," after all, you pretty much got nothin' in the mascot department.  That's because not even a Hoosier can tell you for sure what a Hoosier is.

So, sure, bring on the bison. It would be cool if IU could make it a live bison, but Ralphie the Buffalo at Colorado might sue for copyright infringement. So Indiana's bison will be a human wearing a bison head.

The problem here is not that. The problem is what Indiana has decided to call its mascot: Hoosier The Bison.

And, yes, I get it, the original Bison mascot from the '60s was also called Hoosier The Bison, so this is an homage of sorts. But come on, people. You couldn't put your thinking caps on and come up with something original? Something more, I don't know, fun? 

For instance, would it have killed someone in the IU brain trust to have piped up and said something like, "Hey, what about Bernie? Bernie The Bison?"

Bernie The Bison! Now we're talkin'.

I mean, think of the possibilities: Bernie hats and Bernie T-shirts and Bernie  beanies, even. Bernie could make personal appearances at elementary schools and nursing homes and bake sales and the like. He could ride a Big Wheel in the Little 500. IU could change 'Burning Down The House' to 'Bernie-ing Down The House' and make it the football team's official entrance music.

Heck. Coach Cig could even award Bernie stickers to players who make big plays, like Ohio State does with those buckeye stickers. Opponents would take one look at all the Bernie stickers on those helmets and think, "Dee-yam, these guys must be good."

"Well, that's just the silliest thing ever," you're saying now.

OK, fine. Be that way. But what would you call the Bison? Brad?

Brad The Bison.

Now that's really silly.

Ode to a journalist

 (In which the Blob strays from Sportsball World -- again! -- to indulge in a little self-indulgence. Standard disclaimer applies)

Ed Breen and I had this kind of relationship:

One day in the newsroom of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette I walked past him noshing on some vile thing from the vending machine downstairs (which I long ago christened the Carousel of Death), and Ed piped up and said "Well, hello, garbage gut!"

One other day I saw a picture of Ed from 1968, when he was a kid photographer trailing Martin Luther King Jr. during the latter's visit to Manchester University. And I mentioned it to Ed and said "Gee, Ed, you were actually young once. Who knew?"

He laughed, of course. We laughed a lot together, having similar cockeyed views of a world that -- to us, anyway -- seemed to be getting more cockeyed every day.

It was the journalist's naturally sardonic way of looking at things, which sometimes sideswipes jaded but generally avoids direct contact. You spend your life in newsrooms breathing newsprint and loudly wondering who the hell made off with your pica pole, it's how you are. Journalists are always gonna journalist.

And Ed Breen was a journalist, above all else. In a lot of ways he was the journalist, at least if you worked the gig in Indiana.

When word came from Marion the other day that he'd passed at the age of 82, my initial reaction was "Dammit!", and I was hardly alone. Everyone who ever worked with him in Marion or Fort Wayne immediately jumped on the Magic Face Thingy to post tributes, talking about his biting wit but mostly about what a debt they owed him for showing them how to commit journalism. 

It's probably too much to say a generation of Hoosier journos learned their craft from Ed, but not by, you know, much. You work three decades at a paper in your adopted hometown of Marion, then spend the last 14 years of your career at the Journal in Fort Wayne, your influence gets felt. And that's especially true when you worked as many parts of the profession as Ed did.

At various times he was a reporter and a photographer and a photo editor and an assistant managing editor, and at the Chronicle-Tribune in Marion he even served a stint as the editor of the whole shebang. Accumulated a pile of honors for doing all that, too.

He's in the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, for starters. Twice was named a Sagamore of the Wabash. And as an incorrigible history nerd, he was a co-founder of the Mississinewa Battlefield Society, helping launch Mississinewa 1812, one of the largest War of 1812 re-enactments/festivals practically anywhere.. He also was a trustee for the Indiana Historical Society and was on the board of the Lincoln Collection of Indiana.

I suppose all of the latter is how Ed and I bonded, as I'm an incorrigible history nerd myself. But it wasn't just that; like every other journo at the JG, I was drawn to a man who'd seen and done so much in the biz, and who always had something wise (or wisecrack-y) to say about it.

In my memory he was always wandering around the JG newsroom with a cup of coffee in his hand -- I always figured it was surgically attached -- and some razor observation. I suppose you could have called him the newsroom curmudgeon, but that doesn't quite get it. Ed was more like a curmudgeon who'd somehow acquired the ability to laugh -- because if the job could be a grind sometimes, when you did it right it was also so damn much fun.

Which I guess brings me to one last story.

It happened down at Mississinewa 1812 one October, where I've become a semi-regular visitor. As I walked in the first person I saw was Ed, all dressed up as some grungy mountain man. 

"You should wear that to the office sometime," I said, or words to that effect. "Show everyone the real Ed Breen."

Ed grinned.

"Probably be a dress code violation," he replied, or words to that effect.

And then we laughed, the two of us. Because of course we did.

One W away

 And now your Indiana Pacers head back to Madison Square Garden looking to close out the New York Knicks tomorrow night, and is the Blob worried? Of course the Blob is worried.

I wonder what will happen if the Knicks shake off last night's loss in Indy, locks down Tyrese Haliburton and Myles Turner and Aaron Nesmith and Pascal Siakam, and sends the series back to Indy.

Then I'm thinking Game 6 is a must win for the P's, because they don't want a Game 7 in the Garden, and what happens if the moment's too big for them and they wind up with exactly what they don't want?

Then I'm thinking what an epic collapse it would be, gagging away a 3-1 lead in the series, being one W away from their first NBA Finals in a quarter century and then ...

Ah, hell. My heart's just not in it, all this worrying.

My heart's not in it because I think the Pacers have made it clear they're the better team here, just as they made it clear they were the better team in taking out the East's top seed, Cleveland, in five games. Were it not for one bad half and a blown 20-point lead, this series would already be over.

Last night they put that bad half and blown lead behind them, and dispatched the Knicks again, 130-121. Haliburton was a monster: 32 points, five threes, 12 rebounds, 15 assists, four steals. Siakam was an emergency backup monster: 30 points, five boards, two assists, a steal and a block.

Nesmith?

Added 16.

Pacers as a team?

Shot 51.1 percent and 40.6 percent from Threeville, with 13 triples.

The Knicks?

Got their usual big game from Jalen Brunson, who dropped 31. Karl-Anthony Towns (24 points), OG Anunoby (22) and Mikal Bridges (17) backed his play. But except for Josh Hart's 12 off the bench, the Knicks got 15 points from everyone else.

A recurring theme, if you will. And a telling win for the Pacers, because until last night, the Knicks were 6-1 on the road in these playoffs.

Now it's back to the Garden, where they are unaccountably 3-5. Which means they'll probably win and send it back to Indiana for Game 6, the strange logic of the NBA playoffs being what it is.

Onward.

A few more racy thoughts

And just when you thought the 109th Indianapolis 500 couldn't get weirder ...

It gets weirder!

A day after Marcus Ericsson did what Marcus Ericsson does at Indy -- get to the front and damn near win the thing -- news came down that his car and those of teammate Kyle Kirkwood and Callum Ilot of Prema Racing were being relegated to the back of the field for failing post-race inspection. And for the second time this month, it was because of unapproved parts on their machines.

First Team Penske; now Andretti Global. You'd think two of the premier teams in IndyCar would be smart enough not to put unapproved parts on their racecars, but, noooo. You'd also wonder why they'd have unapproved parts lying around anyway. Benefit of the doubt suggests maybe the offending parts weren't unapproved at one time, or were in the process of being approved by IndyCar, or ...

Oh, hell. Benefit of the doubt runs out of road pretty quickly on this one.

In any event, the penalty means Marcus Ericsson did not finish second to Alex Palou Sunday, at least officially. It means Kirkwood did not finish sixth, either. It means they finished 31st and 32nd.

Consequently, A.J. Foyt's team had even a better day than it had already; with David Malukas moving up to second in the revised official finish and Santino Ferrucci moving up to fifth, it meant A.J.'s boys put two entries in the top five. No other team in the field could say that.

But (to once again paraphrase Mac Davis in "North Dallas Forty"), we haven't even gotten to the weird part yet.

The weird part is this: The penalties meant Scott McLaughlin, who never even made it to the start after crunching his ride on the pace lap, did not finish last.

Or next-to-last, for that matter. Or even next-to-next-to-last.

No, sir. In the official record, McLaughlin will go down as having finished 30th. Never started the race, but still finished 30th.

So he's got that going for him.

Or not going for him. Or ... something.

The quiet and the loss

 I wrote this three years ago on Memorial Day, shortly after feeding my Civil War nerd with yet another trip to Gettysburg. It says everything that should be said about this day, when we haul out the grill and pop open a cold one and hit the lake and enjoy our lives, and forget too often who paid the price for those lives. Now the day has come 'round again, and I'm re-posting what I wrote then, because a reminder of the debt we owe is never out of fashion:

GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- The Run wears its Sunday best now, here in these last bursting days of May. Down the way, a few steps from this footbridge, a mop of lilypads sprawls across the narrow reach from bank to bank; bushes and trees crowd close; tiny marsh flowers so cover the dark water that, even swollen with recent rains, you can hardly see its modest trickle.

Late spring at Gettysburg National Military Park, and there is new life everywhere. Everything is one shade of green or another, and the air is soft, and the only sound is the sound of birdsong.

I hear it now, standing on this footbridge watching the Run lollygag beneath my feet. That's shorthand for Plum Run, and along its banks, years and years ago, human beings shot and stabbed and murdered one another. 

Men bled and fell and gasped away their lives. Their bodies swelled and stiffened in grotesque postures in the July heat. And this lovely trickle became an obscene thing, its very name a synonym for the worst we can do to each other.

A few insignificant yards behind me, I know, a squad of desperate soldiers drew a bead in the fading light on a man with flowing white hair on horseback. This was Confederate general William Barksdale, and he died later that night with five bullets in him, and the Mississippians he led ran out of steam right about where he fell. 

They fled back through the fields they'd come howling across an hour or so before, the air thick with dusk and smoke now.  And their bodies would carpet the ground they crossed to mark the way.

Somewhere in front of me and to my left, meanwhile, a man named Freeman McGilvery would place a line of cannon and blast away at other advancing Mississippians, and more men and pieces of men would fall. And way down there to the south and east, where Plum Run meanders sluggishly at the foot of a pile of rock the locals called Devil's Den, yet more lives would violently end.

Later a lot of the mortal remains would be collected and buried atop Cemetery Hill, and today that is a green place, too, and quiet. White headstones spread out in a neat geometry that belies the chaos that placed them here, and tourists walk among them with a reverence generally reserved for cathedrals and holy shrines.

That's because everything that happened along Plum Run, and in places with names like Belleau Wood and Iwo Jima and the Ia Drang Valley, is about both madness and sacrifice, and this weekend we honor the latter. It's Memorial Day, and it's reserved for all those headstones, all the men and women who came to places of which most had never heard, and who never left -- men and women who, yes, died to preserve what we have and often take for granted, but who mostly died for the human beings to the right or left of them.

Me?

I prefer to think about that footbridge across Plum Run, and the life and peace there now, and the death that paid for it. Those three days in July all those years ago preserved the Union,  ultimately. And if it remains a sometimes tragically imperfect union, it's up to us to make it less so -- if not for our sakes, then for the sake of  Bayard Wilkeson and Samuel Zook and Edward Cross and Strong Vincent, and all the others who died here. 

Died so I could find it almost impossible to imagine that, on the late afternoon of July 2, 1863, I would have had a life expectancy of about two minutes standing where I stand on this day. 

Died, so everything around me is now one shade of green or another, and the air is soft, and the only sound is the sound of birdsong.

A few racy thoughts

 Late Sunday afternoon in the shadows along the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's front stretch, and here was Alex Palou, in the extremity of his joy: Goin' all Misty Mae from the Kitty Kat Gentleman's Club And Lounge.

First the helmet came off.

Then one driving glove.

Then the other driving glove.

Burlesque music started up in your head.

And then ...

And then Alex Palou was Alex Palou again -- your freshly-minted winner of the 109th Indianapolis 500, ready to celebrate the culmination of a single-minded pursuit. 

He shed the gloves and then he was sprinting along the pavement, arms spread wide, heading for his pit crew down the way. They vaulted the low wall and swallowed him up in a group embrace, and then they all were literally jumping for joy, dancing on that fabled stretch of roadway as if it were the grandest of ballrooms.

This is how it looks when a 28-year-old man cements his still-young legacy.

It's how it looks when the undisputed king of IndyCar achieves his final validation.

He's won five of the first six races on the schedule so far this season, and unless some bolt of lightning strikes, by the end he'll have won his third IndyCar title in a row and fourth in the last five years. You just can't beat the guy right now, as Graham Rahal observed earlier this month. You can't even beat him at Indy anymore.

Put him in that Chip Ganassi Racing seat and he becomes one with the machine, cool and unruffle-able and forever calculating. His drive Sunday was typically masterful; he started sixth, hung around the top five all day, rode the draft when he needed to and attacked when it was time to. 

At the end, stalking Marcus Ericsson as the laps ticked down, he surprised everyone but himself and his bean-counters on the pitbox when he surged past Ericsson for the lead with 15 laps to run. Conventional wisdom said it was way too soon; Palou knew it wasn't.

He'd been riding Ericsson's wake because, unlike the leader, he needed to save as much fuel as possible to mount one last charge. But the longer he waited, the less fuel he would have. And up ahead of Ericsson were two back markers he could use as a tow just as he'd been using Ericsson.

So he went. And he rode the back markers' draft. And Ericsson couldn't catch him  as a result.

It was an impeccable finish to a day that was all kinds of anything but, and the nuttiness began early. A piddling drizzle delayed the start for an hour; cool temps reminded old heads of 1992, when cold rubber on cold pavement created such mayhem 85 of the 200 laps were run under caution. The polesitter, Roberto Guerrero, goosed the throttle a scoche too much trying to warm his tires and crashed on the parade lap.

Thirty-three years later, cold rubber on cold pavement again, and, hey, look at this, deja vu all over again: Scott McLaughlin goosed the throttle a scoche too much trying to warm the tires, and, bang, into the wall he went. On the pace lap.

Two years. Two drivers who didn't even make it to the start.

And a start, as result, that happened under caution, and wasn't that a trifle weird. Then, four laps in, bang, there went Marco Andretti into the wall. Then more laps behind the pace car as another piddling drizzle passed. Then ...

On and on. Weirdness square, and then cubed.

Rinus Veekay locked up the brakes, spun and crashed in the pits. Rookie polesitter Robert Swartzman locked up his brakes and crashed into his pitbox, scattering crewmen like tenpins. Oh, and Alexander Rossi's day ended when his car caught fire in the pits, prompting the irreverent to imagine this notation in the official record: Alexander Rossi, 73 laps. Reason out: Unscheduled barbecue.

Sheer craziness. Made you wonder, as the afternoon went on, if there maybe wasn't an exchange between a crew chief and a driver that began with the crew chief saying "Pit, pit, pit," and the driver replying "Aw, HELL, no. I'm not comin' in there."

At any rate, as it always does, Indy kept randomly taking contenders out of the running. Scott Dixon had brake issues. Pato O'Ward, the Vegas favorite, got shuffled back early, climbed back to fourth, but didn't have the car to run down the leaders in the end and finished fourth.

So it went.

Forty-eight-year-old two-time winner Takuma Sato led more laps than anyone -- 51 -- but got shuffled back, too.

 Josef Newgarden barged up through the field from 32nd to sixth in 137 laps, an astounding run, but his day died in the pits when his fuel pressure crapped out. 

Conor Daly, who played what looked like a winning hand for the longest time, dropped back when his tires suddenly went away; Ryan Hunter-Reay, driving a pit-crew challenge car because his primary burned to cinders on Carb Day, stalled it on his last stop after a superb fuel-window strategy put him in front for 48 laps.

In the end, it came down to Ericsson and Palou.  And then just Palou.

Who's gonna beat this guy? Who?

More than just Graham Rahal are wondering now.

And your winner is ...

 ... oh, sure. Like I would know.

But down in Indy today, 33 rocket ships come to the green for the Greatest Spectacle In Racing, and there'll be a flyover and "Back Home Again In Indiana" and "Taps", and, listen, if you don't think I'll feel a little empty inside because I'm not there, then you didn't cover the Big Five for 40 years. Came in with A.J.'s fourth win as a 22-year-old who knew nothin' about nothin'; signed off with Takuma Sato's first win as a 62-year-old who wasn't much smarter, but was better at hiding it.

That's a run, if I do say so myself.

And speaking of not being much smarter ...

In all those years covering the 500, I correctly picked the winner, um, five times. Or maybe four. Still a little fuzzy on 2008, when Scott Dixon won and I seem to remember picking the Iceman. Or not.

Anyway, on to the traditional Indianapolis 500 Predictions Sure To Be Wrong:

1. People Will Crash, Ray. People Most Definitely Will Crash.

It's supposed to be cool-ish and overcast at the Speedway today -- 62 is the forecast temp at race time -- and that means cold tires, and that in turn likely means a few losing arguments with the wall. I'm guessing this because I still remember 1992, another overcast day when the mercury struggled to clear the mid-50s, the windchill at race time was in the 30s, and people crashed like they were inventing a new sport.

Mario Andretti crashed. Rick Mears crashed. Emerson Fittipaldi crashed and Tom Sneva crashed and Arie Luyendyk crashed, and the polesitter, Roberto Guerrero, crashed on the parade lap. The parade lap.

Before cold tires stopped spinning on cold pavement that day, 85 laps were run under caution. Sixty-eight of the first 122 were. I think the pace car driver won bonus money that day for leading the most laps.

Nothing like that will happen today, I'm guessing. But people will crash, and yellows will fly, and it will muck up fuel windows and deface carefully laid plans. This means your winner could be some outlier who leads just five laps but the right five laps, because it's happened before.

2. That said, it won't happen today.

And if you think this means I'm not picking rookie polesitter Robert Swartzman, you've got your mind right.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Swartzman win this thing. When you're a deadline grunt covering an event as big as the 500 -- and there's none bigger in Sportsball World -- you root for storylines, and Swartzman's is a storyline from the gods. A rookie from Tel Aviv by way of St. Petersburg, Russia, driving for a rookie team, wins the 500 from the pole? Are you kidding me?

Aesop couldn't make up that fable. Add to that the kid is winsomely likable, and that the 500 has seen just three rookie winners since Graham Hill 59 years ago, and the story writes itself. 

(OK, so it doesn't. None of them do. But it would come damn close.)

Anyway ...

Anyway, Swartzman won't win this. Given everything, this might be a year when an old head takes the milk bath. Dixon, perhaps, who goes from the middle of Row 2 and whose only 500 win came on that aforementioned day 17 years ago. Or two-time winner Sato, who's starting from the middle of the front row for Rahal Letterman Lanigan and who, at 48, would be the oldest 500 winner ever. 

Or how about Helio Castroneves, who's driving for Meyer Shank his time around and somehow always gets to the front in this thing? He's shooting for a record fifth win and will have to come from the inside of Row 8 to do it, but a yellow-heavy race and scrambled pit strategies might make it easier.

Shoot. Maybe Josef Newgarden comes all the way from middle of the last row to become the only three-peat winner in 109 runnings. He'd also be the first winner in 109 runnings to come out of the last row.

3. That said, Josef Newgarden will not win.

Chances are he gets caught up in someone else's deal as he charges toward the front, just like 2022 winner Marcus Ericsson did last year when he started from the last row. Ericsson never even made it through turn one on the first lap before getting tangled up with rookie Tom Blomqvist and biting the wall. His day was over before it began.

Ericsson starts on the outside of Row 3 today for Andretti Global. Tom Blomqvist will not be anywhere near him. So he's got that going for him.

4. That said ...

I'm not picking Marcus Ericsson, either. Though I'm sorely tempted to.

He knows how to win thing thing, obviously, and he came thisclose to winning two in a row before Newgarden passed him on the last lap in 2023. He has the sort of unflappable demeanor not even this haunted ancient place can flap. And winning today would be Indy giving back what it so cruelly took away last year. The haunted ancient place has been known to do that.

Of course, it's also been known not to do that.

It's the most capricious, random place on earth, truly it is, which is why the most delusional phrase around Indy tends to be "He's due." People said it about Ted Horn back in the day, and he never won even though you could make book on him finishing in the top four every year. They said it about Andretti, the greatest American racing driver unless it's A.J. Foyt, and somehow Mario won only once in 29 starts.

And then of course there's the Dixon, the best IndyCar driver of his generation, coming up empty since 2008.

This year's Due Boys?

The smart guys in Vegas like Pato O'Ward, because Pato starts on the outside of Row 1 and came two turns from winning last year. In five starts, he's finished sixth or better four times, including second two of the last three years. He burns to win this, and he's never had a better starting position.

So, yeah. He's due.

Starting right behind him on the outside of Row 2, meanwhile, is Alex Palou, the most dominant driver in IndyCar. He's won four of the five races so far this season, including the Indy Grand Prix two weeks ago. He's the two-time defending series champ, and, at 28, he's already won the title three times.

He's not bad on Memorial Day weekend, either. Though he's never won an IndyCar race on an oval, in five starts in the 500, he's finished in the top 10 four times and the top five three times. He was fifth and fourth the last two years.

So, yeah. He's due, too.

That said ...

That said -- all of the that-saids -- I'm going with my gut. And my gut feels this is  O'Ward's year, same as my gut felt it was Simon Pagenaud's year in 2019. 

"But what about all that 'He's due' stuff, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now. "What about Ted Horn and Mario and Dixie? What about the randomness, the caprice, all that junk about haunted places and cruel fate and, I don't know, ancient runes, maybe?"

Hey. I never claimed to be consistent.

Or, you know, right most of the time. So pick accordingly.

Budget crunched

 Listen, I know all about the money squeeze in higher ed these days. That's because I got caught up in one.

Six years ago my position as a marketing writer at Manchester University was eliminated in a university-wide austerity push, and I understood completely. Unless you lived under a rock in the Mojave or something, it was almost impossible to work at a small liberal arts school like MU and not know that, as at almost every other liberal arts school these days, the money was getting tight. I have been known to be oblivious on occasion, but I wasn't that oblivious.

So when they called me in and gave me the news, I was surprised but not shocked. I got the math: In my department I was by far the most expendable worker bee, and (if I want to be honest) probably an overpaid worker bee to boot. Manchester was like that; it was both good for me at that time in my life, and incredibly good to me.

So, yeah, the budget cuts announced by Purdue-Fort Wayne this week didn't exactly make my jaw drop. And, yes, that includes the school's decision to eliminate its baseball and softball programs.

See, because that rock in the Mojave is not my home address, I know this is happening everywhere, not just at PFW. Aside from the revenue-drivers -- football and men's basketball -- every Division I athletic program is in the crosshairs these days. Tennis, track-and-field, cross-country ... you name it, they're disappearing somewhere virtually every week.

This week, it's baseball and softball at PFW. And 45 jobs elsewhere, because when the pot is $6 million light (as PFW claims), something's gotta go. And, frankly, PFW carrying 16 varsity sports was probably a bridge too far for a regional campus with its resources.

This doesn't make it any easier for the players and coaches who poured their hearts and souls into those programs. It sucks, that part of it. And it uproots the lives of young people at a time when, in a very real sense, they're just beginning those lives.

It also doesn't help when their university breaks the news to them as clumsily as PFW did.

It takes an Olympian feat of non-communication, after all, when you suddenly announce you're dropping two varsity sports and even your athletic director is blindsided. Or so said PFW AD Kelley Hartley Hutton, who admitted to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette the news came "pretty much out of the blue."

What the hell, people? Seriously, what the hell?

And as to those 45 job cuts ...

None of those, apparently, were high-dollar positions; those axed were worker bees, mostly, with families to support and household budgets of their own to meet. A fair number also were apparently involved in the university's diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which the Regime in Washington (and its subsidiary Regime in Indianapolis) has declared verboten because, I don't know, diversity, equity and inclusion are un-American and somehow racist.

At any rate, it makes you wonder just how much of a dent eliminating those jobs will make in the $6-million shortfall. It also makes you wonder (though not really) why PFW Chancellor Ron Elsenbaumer chose to make the announcements via official statements instead of out in the open where local media could ask questions about them.

Questions like, oh, say ...

So, Chancellor, if making up this shortfall is so critical you have to eliminate two varsity sports and 45 jobs, may we ask how much of a pay cut you'll be taking to help out?

Also, can we infer from the cuts that PFW has decided diversity, equity and inclusion are no longer priority values? Or are you just letting yourselves get knuckled by Fearless Leader and the Regime like so many others these days?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Again??

 (In which your Indiana Pacers continue their Oh, Come ON! tour through the NBA playoffs, beating the New York Knicks 114-109 in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals.)

(This sends the Pacers back to Indianapolis with a 2-0 lead in the series, which doesn't mean they're a lock to make the NBA Finals for the first time in 25 years, but perhaps means a lock has moved in just down the street from them.)

(And why am I using all these parentheses?)

Anyway ...

Anyway, the Pacers rode yet another big night from yet another different guy, of which they seem to have an inexhaustible supply these days. Two nights ago it was Aaron Nesmith, who dropped 30 on the Knicks including a record six threes in the fourth quarter; last night, it was Pascal Siakam, who went off for 39 points on 15-of-23 shooting after a relatively quiet 17-point evening in Game 1.

Not so in Game 2. Siakam opened by scoring the Pacers' first 11 points, matched his Game 1 total in the first quarter and went on from there. All five Indiana starters scored in double figures, with Myles Turner going for 16 points, Tyrese Haliburton 14 and 11 assists, and Nesmith and Andrew Nembhard a dozen apiece.

The Pacers shot a tick under 52 percent and a tick over 43 percent from the arc, bottoming 13 threes. Siakam was 3-for-5 from there.

Jalen Brunson (36 points, 11 assists), Mikal Bridges (20 and seven rebounds) and Karl-Anthony Towns (20 and seven) all had big nights for the Knicks again, but again playing three-on-five didn't work. The Knicks got 27 points from everyone else, including just 11 off a bench that suddenly looks desperately thin.

And now a trip to the wilds of Indiana awaits them, where they will surely be greeted with an abundance of warmth and hail-fellow-well-met from the local citizenry.

Not.

Hot doggery

 They ran a motor race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway yesterday, and, friends, it was nothing Ray Harroun would have recognized. Or Dario Resta or Dario Franchitti or ol' A.J. or ol' Mario, or any other 500 winners who came after ol' Ray.

None of them, see, ever put an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile in Victory Lane.

That happened yesterday, when a Wienermobile named Slaw Dog pulled a Sam Hornish, or perhaps a Sam Relish. Passed Chicago Dog for the win mere yards away from the yard of brick, just like Hornish/Relish passed Marco Andretti for the win in 2006. Well, sort of.

This happened not in the Big Five but the inaugural Wienie 500, in which Wienermobiles came from all over the country to vie for, I don't know, the Borg-Wiener Trophy or something. And, OK, so there were only six of them, and they only ran two laps. But, still.

Still, they circled the ancient old place at the blinding speed of 60 mph or so, and all sorts of high drama ensued. A Wienermobile named Sonora Dog looked like your winner after taking a big lead on the last lap, but it overheated in turn two and Chicago Dog assumed the lead with Slaw Dog in hot pursuit.

That set up the nail-biting finish. Or the dog-biting finish. Or, you know, something.

"But who was the winning driver, Mr. Blob?" you're asking now, pretending to be interested.

Well, that would be Dario Frank-Eatee, of course. Or perhaps Bun-dy Lazier.

OK. I'll stop now.

Coach D

And now the memories, as word comes down that Kevin Donley is stepping away from what he created at the University of Saint Francis. Now the memories, popping up as memories will, because when you know a man for going on 50 years, there is an almighty lot of them to pop up ...

... sitting in a spartan pressbox on a blue-sky autumn day in Anderson, In., kid sportswriter watching a kid football coach send the Anderson College Ravens against Defiance or Findlay or Hanover or Bluffton ...

... sitting across the table from Coach in a Fort Wayne eatery 20 years later, neither of his kids anymore, the football coach's hair gone prematurely white but the words bursting out of him in that soft voice about the football program he'd been hired to build from the ground up at Saint Francis ...

... watching, a few months later on another blue-sky day, as he and his staff put a team together from raw freshmen, spare parts and a quarterback room that includes a 36-year-old who'll wind up a coaching assistant ...

... watching again while that football team goes 2-8 on a field that gets churned into mud lasagna every time it rains, and listening to him talk softly again about what an incremental process growing and learning can be ...

... watching, a year later on a football field in Canton, Ohio, as St. Francis finishes an 8-2 season with a win over Walsh that seals the conference title, and hearing sudden emotion tilt Kevin Donley's even-keel public persona and steal his voice for a moment ...

So many memories. So much to say about a man who came to town to start a football program at a tiny school that had never had one. So much to say about someone who was determined to do it what he always called "the right way," by bringing in kids who would go to class during the week and play you off your feet on Saturdays.

So much to say after 28 years at that tiny school, where his teams played so many people off their feet on Saturdays he became simply Coach D to his adopted city.

There's a stadium with an immaculate turf surface at that tiny school now, hard by the railroad tracks and Mirror Lake, where geese settle into the water in the fall and provide flyovers on game days. There's a training center and VIP seating behind one end zone,  and there's a name on that immaculate turf surface: Kevin Donley Field.

Like they'd name it anything else when it was Kevin Donley who brought all this to St. Francis, along with 240 wins, 14 conference titles, five NAIA championship game appearances and back-to-back NAIA titles in 2016 and 2017. In one astonishing nine-season stretch between 2000 and 2008, St. Francis won fewer than 10 games only once -- and that year they won nine.

In 2024, the Cougars won one last conference title, and Kevin Donley was named conference Coach of the Year. By that time, he was the winningest active coach at any level of college football, and he remains the fifth-winningest coach of all time.

The four names above his?

John Gagliardi, Joe Paterno, Eddie Robinson and Bobby Bowden. Some fast company there.

And only numbers, in the end. 

Only numbers, because all of my aforementioned memories have nothing to do with numbers. Or very little, at least.

No, the memories are of that first meeting with Coach D's first team at St. Francis, when he looked around the room and explained the concept of Donley Time, which ran five minutes faster than actual time. In other words, if you showed up on time, you were five minutes late.

The memories are of another meeting a month or so later, before the program's first game against St. Xavier in Chicago, and the expression on Donley's face when he told his players this was a business trip, and one kid raised his hand and asked if they could bring their bathing suits for the hotel pool.

They're of the news from Chicago a day later, where the Cougars won that first game 56-28 and that sound you heard was jaws all over the Fort hitting the floor.

They're of another Saturday in 2005, when the Cougars opened at D-I Indiana State and the Sycamores radio announcers were all solicitous, talking about what a fine NAIA program they had up here at Saint Francis. And then the Cougars tattooed the Trees 42-10, and that sound you heard was jaws all over Terre Haute hitting the floor.

They're of all the times Kevin Donley and I sat in his office and marveled at everything that had happened since the Anderson days. And of that aforementioned day at Walsh, 26 years ago now, when the Cougars rolled 40-23 to win the conference in just their second season, and all that emotion came barreling up from Donley's Irish heart.

"We won a lot of big ballgames ..." he choked out, and then his voice was gone for a bit.

You sure did, Coach. You sure as hell did.

Oh, come on!

 So now we have the official tagline for this Indiana Pacers basketball team, which apparently has cats beat all hollow in the lives game. Cats only have nine, after all. These Pacers have ...

Wait. Hold that thought. We're still counting.

Because didja see what happened in New York last night?

Yes, the Pacers won another road game, taking a 1-0 lead in the Eastern Conference finals with a 138-135 overtime W in Madison Square Garden. That ain't the half of it, however.

The Pacers, see, were deader than Jacob Marley in this one, down 14 to the homestanding Knicks with 2:51 to play in regulation. And they were still down a bucket when Tyrese Haliburton launched one from just inside the 3-point arc with the clock down to slivers.

The ball hit the back rim and kicked high in the air. Think Alan Shepard rising from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral in '61.

Then, instead of spinning away into orbit like its namesake, it fell straight back down through the nylon to send the game into overtime.

And here comes the official tagline for these Pacers: Oh, Come ON!

Oh, Come ON!, as the ball falls true and Haliburton, who initially thought it was a three to end the game, reached back to Reggie Miller and Hicks vs. Knicks and reprised Miller's throat grab. Oh, Come ON! as the Pacers, who twice clawed back from 20-point deficits to steal wins in these playoffs, stole another one from the shadow of death's door.

Oh, Come ON! as Haliburton finished with 31 points and 11 assists, and Aaron Nesmith, who averaged 12.5 points per during the regular season, dropped 30 -- including six threes in the fourth quarter to help the Pacers once again kick off the graveyard dirt.

Oh. Come. ON!

Because, listen, it's not like the Knicks failed to do what they do. Jalen Brunson had a 43-point night. Karl Anthony-Towns abused the Pacers with a 35-point, 12-rebound double-double. Myles Bridges and OG Anunoby added 16 points apiece as the Knicks starters combined for 118 points, 35 boards and 19 assists.

And yet. 

And yet, they lost.

Which now makes Game 2 a virtual must-win for New York. Judging by the strange eddies that seem to dictate the flow of the NBA playoffs, the Knicks likely not only win Game 2, but blow the Pacers right out of the building.

Then again, these are the Pacers, who these days seem to possess their own strange eddies. Or at least command of whatever dark physics caused a basketball to rise and fall exactly right as the seconds ran away on a Wednesday night in the Garden.

Moral imperative

 You can see it in one photograph, this unforgiving culture that demands much to deliver much. Punch up a graphic of the starting grid for Sunday's 109th running of the Indianapolis 500, and there they are, 33 drivers in the firesuits. Thirty-one of them are saying cheese for the camera.

The two who aren't?

Grim as death, both of them.

Josef Newgarden, your back-to-back 500 winner, looks at the camera from the middle of the last row, his lips a tight slash. Next to him, 2018 winner Will Power stares with wide, almost shocked eyes, as if he still can't quite believe he's starting dead last.

These are not happy men, clearly. They are men who've grown to expect more, to need more, than just making the field, or perhaps even finishing second.

They are Roger Penske's men.

Who are starting 32nd and 33rd because Roger Penske's demanding, well-oiled machine suddenly threw a rod Sunday afternoon, spewing gouts of smoke like some exhausted '82 Chevette. Penske's boys rolled the well-oiled rides of Newgarden and Power in for pre-Fast Six tech inspection -- and both cars failed.

Something about an illegal attenuator. Oops.

And just like that, Newgarden and Power were out of the pole chase. Just like that, they were sent to the last row, as if they were a couple of scruffy rooks trying to make the field for Lugnuts-N-More Racing and not, you know, Josef Newgarden and Will Power.

Beside their entries, this humiliating notation: No Time.

It was the second time in a year the Penske culture suffered the embarrassment of looking like Just Another Race Team; the first happened last year at St. Petersburg, where Scott McLaughlin and Newgarden were stripped of their 1-2 finish when it was discovered Team Penske had violated the race's push-to-pass protocols.

The motorsports world being the conspiracy hotbed it is, this got the Grassy Knoll Brigade all revved up, suspecting Roger Penske -- owner of the entire IndyCar series -- was trying to rig his own game. And now?

Now he gets caught cheating at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, for the Indianapolis 500, the biggest motorsports event in the world. And both of which Penske also owns.

Which meant a moral imperative didn't just beckon, it screamed from the rooftops. And Penske, the Captain of this rigidly tight ship, was merciless in his response.

At mid-afternoon yesterday Team Penske sent out a release announcing that it was cleaning its house at the very top, dismissing team president Tim Cindric, managing director Ron Ruzewski and general manager Kyle Moyer. Cindric was the big name of the three; he'd been with Penske for more than two decades and, as president, was almost as much the face of the organization as Penske himself.

Now he's gone, proving once again that everyone is expendable in corporate America. Especially when you work for a guy who runs not only a corporation, but virtually the entire industry.

"Nothing is more important than the integrity of our sport and our race teams," Penske said in the release, stating what the moral imperative compelled him to say. "We have had organizational failures during the last two years, and we had to make necessary changes. I apologize to our fans, our partners and our organization for letting them down."

Onto Sunday now, when the last Penske entry -- McLaughlin -- rolls off from the outside of Row 3. If he wins, it'll make for a hell of a story. And of course something more than that, all of this being what it is.

The conspiracy crowd, you figure, will have a field day. Oh, you bet.

Cruds alert!*

 (*Yes, again)

Good friend of mine posted an old Jim Leyland quote on my Face Thingy page the other day, and I don't think he was trying to be mean. First of all, he's not a mean person. Second of all, he knows I'm a Pittsburgh Pirates fan and Leyland managed the Buccos about a million years ago, when they were still the Buccos and not the incorrigible Cruds they are today.

Anyway, here's the quote: "I knew we were in for a long season when we lined up for the National Anthem on Opening Day, and one of my players said 'Every time I hear that song, I have a bad game.'"

Now that's a funny quote. And I think my friend knows me well enough to know I'd appreciate the humor in it, especially with the Cruds once again firmly ensconced in their ancestral home, the NL Central cellar.

The Cruds did manage to horse around and beat the Reds last night, but that's small beer. They're still just 16-33, 13 games behind the first-place Cubs in the Central. Heck, they're eight games out of next-to-last.

This makes my Cruds the third most horrific team in baseball behind their acknowledged betters in horrific-ness, the Chicago What Sox and Colorado Rockheads. But less than a week before Memorial Day, they're just a single W ahead of the What Sox, who set a record for Cruddiness last year unmatched not only in this century but also the last one. And the Cruds have already fired their manager, Derek Shelton.

As if he were the problem, doncha know.

Nah, every suffering yinzer in P-town knows who the problem is, and while the Blob is loathe to name names, his initials are Robert Nutting. He's the owner of the Cruds, piling up revenue sharing dough while the legacy of Roberto Clemente burns. He's also got one of the prettiest ballparks in the majors, even as he defaces it with one last-place team after another.

Couple of jokes: 

Who develops more talent than anyone else for the Yankees or Dodgers or every other high-rent club? Bob Nutting.

Who will look good in a couple years in a Yankees or Dodgers or Mets or similar uniform? Paul Skenes.

Ah, but enough bitterness and whining. There's always a bright side when you're a Cruds fan, and right now the bright side is this: At least we don't live in Denver.

Where the Rockheads are well on their way to not just a Cruddy season, but a transcendently Cruddy season. A season that will live for all eternity wherever baseball fans lift a glass and say, "Now THAT team really sucked."

As of this morning, see, the Rockheads are 8-40. They're two wins away from double figures, and it's almost Memorial Day. If they continue to lose at their current pace, they'll finish 26-132.

Twenty-six and 132! Heck, if my Cruds continue to lose at their current pace, they'll only finish 53-109. That means we Cruds fans will get to celebrate twice as many wins as those poor jamokes in Denver.

Suddenly I feel all warm inside.

I also wonder if, come October, a new banner will fly proudly in PNC Park alongside the ones celebrating the occupants' five World Series titles.

ONLY HALF AS CRUDDY AS COLORADO 2025, it will read.

And now, MAAGS

 (As in "Making America A Game Show")

(In which the Blob again strays, sort of, from Sportsball World. Standard disclaimer applies.)

Been thinking the last few days about Armband Barbie --  aka, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem -- and the rest of the Regime, whose latest bright idea is to pit the migrants being snatched by ICE banditos against one another in a reality show. The winners get to stay in the U.S. and work toward citizenship. The losers get, I don't know, shipped off to Devil's Island to hang out with Papillon or something.

(Actually, of course, they get shipped off to El Buchenwald down in El Salvador. Or perhaps to whatever Infidel Motel in Libya we're shipping folks to these days.)

Anyway, the producer of "Duck Dynasty" apparently is all on board with this proposed idea. I suppose this means the reality show will simply be named "Duck!", depending on the nature of the challenges contestants will be asked to perform.

Which could be myriad. Why, you can just see some of 'em ...

1. Stuff That Van.

In which contestants cram themselves into unmarked vans (just like in real life!). Whoever crams their van the fullest wins.

2.  Green Card Scramble.

In which a sackful of fake green cards is dumped inside a circle of contestants, who then crawl around on their hands and knees trying to grab as many as they can while the studio audience laughs and points and says stuff like, "Look at those silly buggers wallow around in the dirt." Maximum humiliation achieved!

Oh, and whoever collects the most fake green cards gets a real one.

3. Whose Kid Is It Anyway?

In which contestants with children are separated from them, blindfolded, and then have to locate their child by the sound of his or her sobbing. Whoever locates their child first wins a solemn vow from Armband Barbie that this will never be done to them for real.

They also can redeem that vow for whatever it's worth. I'm guessing $1.29 or so at Dollar Tree.

4. Kick The Can

A "Survivor" homage in which a group of contestants are stranded in the desert for days and then have cans full of water lined up a few yards away from them. The goal is to grab a can before a guy dressed in Border Patrol gear can kick it over. Whoever gets a drink without sustaining a concussion from a boot to the head wins.

And, OK, so that's enough. I was going to add something involving pugil sticks -- Pugil Sticks The Landing, I'd call it -- but I think the point has been made.

The point being, apparently it's not enough anymore for the Regime to simply snatch people off the street without due process. Not enough to essentially kidnap and disappear them in some third-world gulag.

No, sir. Why not make them perform like trained seals on national TV, too? Why not make them objects of low comedy for the ravening masses?

I struggle to grasp the lack of simple humanity it takes to come up with such a notion. I struggle to grasp the mindless contempt it takes -- and all for human beings who, in many cases, have done nothing to incite it except live and work in the U.S. without the proper paperwork.

Remember when the punishment fitting the crime was a thing?

Not anymore, apparently. Not in this America.

Where my Christian heart asks what these people ever did to deserve such depthless loathing, and gets no answer it remotely understands.

A predictable prediction

 So remember a couple days ago, when the top of the leaderboard at the PGA Championship looked more like the top of the leaderboard at the Greater Spudville Cheez Whiz Open?

Sitting quietly down there in fifth after 36 holes -- tied for fifth -- was Scottie Scheffler, the best golfer in the world right now. He was three strokes off the lead with two rounds to play. Therefore, the Blob made the daring prediction that if it were a betting man, it would be on Scheffler who'd be deadlifting the Wanamaker Trophy come Sunday afternoon.

Well ...

Yesterday afternoon, there he was, deadlifting the Wanamaker Trophy.

Piled a workmanlike 71 on top of a glittering 65 over the weekend to blow past the Jhonattan Vegases, Si Woo Kims and Alex Norens and win his third major by five strokes over Harris English, Bryson DeChambeau and Davis Riley. And the Blob could claim a rare prognostication W, and I don't care what snide remarks you want to make about that.

"You mean like 'Gee, Mr. Blob, picking Scottie Scheffler to win a golf tournament. What a daring prediction'?" you're saying now.

"You mean like, 'Congratulations on making the most predictable prediction ever'?" you're also saying.

"You mean like ..."

OK, OK. I get it.

But, hey, we take our victories where we can get them, here in the Blobosphere. Even the microscopic ones.

One of those days

 The Indianapolis  Motor Speedway in May is a loud, hectic, utterly ungovernable place, and Vegas must hate it something fierce. That's because when you put loud, hectic and unruly inside its vast and ancient acreage, weird, un-bet-able stuff tends to happen.

Or to put it another way: What the hell WAS that yesterday?

Scott McLaughlin crashed, Will Power and two-time 500 king Josef Newgarden failed tech -- failed tech -- and, poof, the lordly regime of Roger Penske removed itself from the chase for the pole.

Scott Dixon, Alex Palou and IndyCar's other lordly regime, Chip Ganassi Racing, failed to land on the front row despite not having to run against the Penskes.

And the guy who wound up on the pole?

A 25-year-old rookie who was born in Israel, grew up in Russia, and who was driving for a rookie team, PREMA out of Italy.

Who had that on his or her DraftKings bingo card?

Not even young Robert Swartzman or Prema, probably, but Indy follows its own path, and sometimes that path is crowded with unmarked switchbacks. And so, after Takuma Sato put his one-off Rahal Letterman Lanigan ride on the pole with the first Fast Six run, along came Swartzman to put four calm, perfect laps together to nudge Sato to second.

Then he sat and watched as first Pato O'Ward and then Felix Rosenqvist -- two veterans who understand the wiles of this treacherous place -- took their shots as the shadows lengthened. Both came up short.

And there was the kid from Tel Aviv, trying to get his head around the fact that in a week he'd be leading the field to the green in motorsports' most iconic event.

 He'll be the first rookie to do so in 42 years, when an Italian rookie named Teo Fabi -- who started out as an Olympic downhill skier, speaking of oddities -- put the Skoal Bandit on pole for the 1983 race. And Prema will be the first rookie team to start on the pole since 1984, when defending 500 champ Tom Sneva broke the track record and won the pole for fledgling Mayer Motor Racing.

At any rate, here's your front row for Sunday: A rookie from Israel; a one-off driver who's also won this race twice; and O'Ward, who was passed for the win by Newgarden with two turns to go last year.

That's PREMA, RLL and Arrow-McLaren, if you're keeping score at home. First time since 2013 neither Penske nor Ganassi has put a car on the front row.

The guy who won that year?

Tony Kanaan. Driving for KV Racing Technology, a team that had never won much of note in IndyCar until that day.

I'm not sayin'. I'm just sayin'.

Winnipegged

 Out there on the Canadian plains, the fair city of Winnipeg woke this morning with the taste of Jets fuel on its tongue, and, lord, wasn't that a familiar feeling. You drink Jets fuel the way people in other places drink Kool-Aid, you greet the inevitable day of disillusionment with the mother of all hangovers.

Which is to say, the city's hockey team got Winnipeg's hopes up again, and then dashed them again. Or Winnipegged them, if you prefer.

Stars 2, Jets 1 was the score from Dallas in Game 6 of the conference semis last night, which sent the Stars to the conference finals and the Jets into the offseason prematurely  again. And to make matters worse, they didn't even have the decency to get it over with in a hurry, playing into overtime before Thomas Harley extinguished their playoff run.

Which at least they didn't extend beyond the second round, sparing their fan base the agony of believing the Jets were finally going to reach a Stanley Cup Final (Look, we're only one step away! It's OUR YEAR AT LAST!) before inevitably cratering in the conference final.

Instead, they cratered a round before that. And once again the caprice of Lord Stanley was not mocked.

The Jets, see, won 56 games during the regular season, four more than anyone else. And now they're gone. So are the Washington Capitols (51 wins and the Metropolitan Division winners) and the Las Vegas Golden Knights (50 wins and the Pacific Division titleists). 

Another division champ, the 52-win Toronto Maple Leafs, play Game 7 at home against the Florida Panthers tonight. Wanna bet who wins that one?

Because Lord Stanley does not play favorites, and in fact seems to loathe them. That's why it's been 17 years since the NHL's regular-season champ has lifted the man's Cup. And he seems especially fond of torturing the Jets -- who, to reiterate, have never played in a Stanley Cup Final, not once in 53 seasons.

This at least gives their fans the balm of inevitability every spring, if such a balm can be regarded as one. And so if Winnipeg woke up this morning with a Jets fuel hangover, it likely also woke up saying this: "Typical."

Also, "Stupid Jets."

Also, "I'm NEVER believing in these guys again. I mean it this time."

And so on.

A W for journalism. Or, Journalism.

 The Blob does not traffic much in hyperbole, except when it does, so I'm not going to say what happened in Maryland last evening was the most significant moment for ink-stained wretches since Woodward and Bernstein brought down a president. 

On the other hand, when's the last time you saw a headline like this: "Journalism Wins!"

Because Journalism did, or at least a horse named Journalism did, and America is better for it this morning. OK, so maybe not, but didja see the way Journalism, the 6-5 favorite in the Preakness, stormed down the stretch at Pocono to catch Gosger at the wire?

Got banged around by Goal Oriented up around the quarter pole, and then came on like, I don't know, a Pulitzer Prize-winning exclusive or something, gobbling up vast stretches of real estate with every yard. And then nipped Gosger literally in the last stride the way, I don't know, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter beats deadline.

OK, OK. I'll stop.

But my profession is bleeding from a thousand mostly self-inflicted cuts these days, so forgive me this bit of silliness. Journalists have never been popular, which will happen when your stated mission is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. The former in particular sticks in the craw of the powerful, who've always preferred not to be questioned and/or exposed as pickpockets of the national interest.

In places where the free press is not so free, that questioning and exposing has even gotten journalists killed. I hope that doesn't happen in America, but given the current Regime's position that an unfettered press is the enemy of the people ...

Well. That's a road I'd rather not to ever have to go down.

In the meantime, I'll enjoy this brief partly sunny moment. A horse named Journalism has won the Preakness, and, just the other day, the new Pope gave a shout-out to hard-working journalists everywhere. The times they are a-changin'.

OK. So probably not.

But throw us a bone here, will ya?

Today in omens. Or not.

 So, then: "Hicks vs. Knicks, The Return," it is.

This after Spike Lee's favorite basketball team firehosed the defending NBA champions out of the playoffs last night, pounding the Boston Celtics 119-81 in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. Man, it was brutal -- especially after the Celtics trounced the Knicks in Boston the other night, giving all the Mikes and Sullys in Beantown a bit of hope that Jalen Brunson 'n' them were about to collapse like a papier mache condo,

Instead, it was the Celtics who collapsed, going down 64-37 at halftime and then apparently saying "Ah, the hell with it."  Nobody likes to accuse a team of flat quitting, especially the defending NBA champs in a playoff elimination game, but a 38-point loss to a team it had just beaten by 25 on its home floor is some pretty damning evidence.

That's a 63-point swing, if you're keeping score at home. Astounding even by NBA standards.

At any rate, it's New York vs. Indiana for the East title, and all the old stories will be told. Most of them, of course, will involve Reggie Miller -- last seen scoring eight points in, like 2.6 seconds (actually nine seconds) in the Garden, throwing a choke sign at Spike Lee over there in Nicholson seats, and humiliating his nemesis, John Starks.

All of that happened 25 years ago, of course, but as this generation of Hicks get ready to take on this generation of Knicks, strange eddies are in the karmic air. In February, NBC Sports announced it was bringing Reggie Miller aboard as a lead analyst in its NBA coverage next season. NBC, of course, was where everyone saw the eight-points-in-nine-seconds game -- and many other Miller playoff heroics, against the Knicks and others.

I have no idea what sort of omen this is, or if it even qualifies as one. Maybe. Maybe not. Doubtless it stretches the boundaries of omen-hood -- or, to put it another way, "Man, are you reaching, Mr. Blob."

On the other hand, NBC didn't hand John Starks a roll of cash to call games for it. So there's that.

People Greatly Anonymous

 They've made the turn in golf's least-major major, the PGA, and so far it is living down to its reputation. Which is to say, the top of leaderboard is occupied by People Greatly Anonymous.

Or maybe you can tell me something -- anything -- about 36-hole leader Jhonattan Vegas, other than he's 40 years old, he's the only Venezuelan with a PGA tour card, and he's won six times in PGA events.

Also, he played his college golf at Texas. So hook 'em horns.

Anyway, Vegas is not exactly a household name, which is why I had to look up all of the aforementioned intel on him. This is no reflection on Vegas, because my depth of golf knowledge goes down about a foot and then fizzles out. But I'd bet the casual fan is looking at the leaderboard this morning and wondering if they've stumbled on the side of a milk carton instead.

Jhonattan Vegas? Si Woo Kim? Matthieu Pavon? Christian Bedzuidenhout, Garrick Higgo, Michael Thorgbjornsen?

They're all tied for seventh or better right now, even if you can't spell half their names. But where's Rory? Where's the defending PGA champ, Xander Schauffele?

Oh, there they are, tied for 62nd with the likes of Bud Cauley, Kevin Yu, Chris Kirk and Sam Burns. But at least they made the cut, unlike, say, Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, Shane Lowry and Ludvig Aberg.

This suggests the PGA site, Quail Hollow, plays no favorites, which is what you like to see from the track for one of golf's majors. But I won't say more than "suggests" because ... well, because lookie here: Right there among the milk carton boys are a couple of names you have heard before.

Scottie Scheffler, for instance. And Max Homa.

They're both tied for fifth, three strokes adrift of Vegas, so maybe Quail Hollow does play a favorite or two. In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd put some coin down on Scheffler to be hoisting the Wanamaker Trophy tomorrow evening. 

Caprice being what it apparently is this week, of course, it might just as soon be Vegas, too. Or Kim. Or even Michael Thorgbjornsen, who could Thorg Bjorn the field and grab the big prize.

Stay tuned.

America's Whatever

 The NFL released its 2025 schedule the other day with the usual fanfare that didn't fit the moment, and once again we were subjected to the phenomenon of star power. Or Star power, as in "Those guys from Dallas with the Star on their helmets."

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. The patron saints of undeserved fanfare, your very own Dallas Cowboys, are going to get major push from the schedule crafters again.

The Pokes, a dreary 7-10 a year ago, nonetheless will get the second most primetime games -- six -- in the 2025 season. This is presumably because the NFL still regards them as America's Team, even though they've been America's Whatevers for some time now. Like, 30 years of time. That's the last time the Cowboys won, or even played in, a Super Bowl.

Thirty years! Heck, Bill Clinton, who's 78 now, was still in his first term as President. Monica Lewinsky was still a then-anonymous White House intern. She's 51 now.

And still the Cowboys haven't been back to the Super Bowl.

And still they're somehow enough of a draw, or at least perceived to be, that they regularly show up in primetime or in the national 4:35 p.m. Sunday game.

Know what, though?

The Star may finally be starting to fade.

In a piece by Richard Deitsch of The Athletic (via the website Awful Announcing), a Fox Sports suit named Michael Mulvihill confessed that network would have been fine with reducing the number of Cowboys games in the late afternoon Sunday slot. Fox, Mulvihill said, would have preferred more relevant NFC teams (the Eagles, the Lions, the Commanders with Jayden Daniels) instead. A few crossover AFC-NFC matchups involving, oh, say, Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow or Lamar Jackson would have been A-OK, too.

In other words; Let's get the stars out there, not just the Star.

This makes sense given the fact (or at least the perception) that America's Whatever has ceded its previous title to the Chiefs. We kinda know this because every time you turn around another Chief -- Mahomes, Taylor Swift's boyfriend Travis Kelce, even head coach Andy Reid -- is on our TVs hawking insurance or subs or breakfast cereal. At this point, in fact, it's fair to ask if there's anything Patrick isn't trying to sell us.

"Y'know, after a tough day knocking heads with Raiders or Broncos or Bengals, there's nothing I like better than easing into a warm, relaxing bath scented with delicate hints of lavender. Calgon, take me away!"

That sort of thing. 

At any rate, if even network execs are starting to question the Star's ratings glitter, you've got to wonder if there might be a turning of the worm at work. Roger Staubach, Emmitt Smith et al don't live here anymore, and haven't for a good space of years. And as much heft as history carries in the world of games, even history in the end becomes just that.

And a Cowboy becomes just a guy on a horse, gittin' those dogies along.

Throw 'em a frickin' bone

 ... to quote Dr. Evil, don't you know.

His immortal line from "Austin Powers" springs readily to mind this morning, or perhaps it just springs readily to the Blob's admittedly warped mind. Anyway, it springs to mind after watching the Indiana Pacers racehorse the Cleveland Cavaliers straight to the glue factory last night, dispatching the East's top seed 114-105 in Game 5 of the conference semifinals.

So the Cavs go down in five to the Pacers, who move on to the conference finals for the second year in a row. And who once again wore down their supposed betters with their Hoosier Blur attack, grinding another 20-point deficit to dust and leaving the Cavs choking on that dust.

Relevant observation: The Pacers finished 14 games behind the Cavaliers in season standings.

Other relevant observation: They won all three games in Cleveland, where the Cavs lost just seven times during the regular season.

Other, other relevant observation: It took Indiana just five games to dispose of a team that in the first round swept the Miami Heat by a ridiculous 30.5 points per game.

Other, other, other relevant observation: In their own first-round series, the Pacers also booted the Milwaukee Bucks in five games. In three of the four wins, their margin of victory was 17.6 points.

And yet ...

And yet, virtually no one gave them prayer against the Cavaliers. And New York finishes off the Celtics as expected, and we wind up with Hicks-vs.-Knicks The Return in the East finals, who do you think the national media will pick in that one?

Thaaat's right. Because who wants to see a bunch of Hicks in the NBA Finals?

Even if they wind up deserving to be there. 

So, yeah. Come on, people. Throw 'em a frickin' bone.

Paroled

 Somewhere in the cosmos today Pete Rose is sliding headfirst into Kenesaw Mountain Landis, that racist old goat. And Joe Jackson is emerging from that literary corn field in Iowa, telling Peter Edward to move aside so he can hit a few line drives at ol' KM's head.

Or, you know, something like that.

Something like that, because yesterday Landis' lineal descendant, Rob Manfred, let Charlie Hustle and Shoeless Joe out of jail. Freed 'em, sprung 'em, paroled 'em, choose your verbiage.

MLB's commissioner formerly decreed that Rose, Jackson and eight others -- including the other seven Black Sox -- were hereby reinstated, which makes them eligible at last to be voted into the Hall of Fame. Manfred did this by wiping out decades of precedence, ruling that baseball's reach should not extend beyond the grave, and that any deceased miscreant on the game's permanently ineligible list thereby is removed from it.

Confirmed cynics like the Blob, of course, will note Manfred broke this new ground because the ground itself has shifted beneath his feet. It hardly seems an accident, after all, that the sudden springing of Rose, Jackson and the Black Sox coincides with baseball's own fervent embrace of online gambling. If you're climbing into bed with DraftKings, BetMGM et al, you can't very well shake an official finger at gamblers anymore. It's that simple.

(It should also be noted, to give credit where credit's due, that Manfred did what he did after our Fearless Leader, Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump, tossed out another of his random social media hiccups, saying, come on, guys, lift Pete's ban. No accident, either, that Manfred almost immediately did so. Maybe he thought Donald John was gonna send Luca Brasi around.)

So does this mean Pete and Shoeless Joe finally will get into the Hall?

Maybe. Probably.

Does it mean the other seven members of the Black Sox will?

Maybe. Not as probably.

I say this because baseball HOF voters are a notably squirrely lot, each driven by his or her own notions of propriety and set of standards. Sometime those notions and standards make sense; sometimes they're just flat-out bizarre. And other times -- let's face it -- they're driven more by personal animus than anything else. 

It's why players who obviously should be unanimous selections frequently aren't. It's why, just this year, some lone bonehead didn't vote for Ichiro Suzuki, while the other 393 HOF voters did.

And so there will be caprice, and flights of tortured reasoning, and all the usual nonsense when Rose, Jackson and whoever else finally appears on the ballot at some future date. Or never appears on the ballot, because some of those cast into outer darkness don't fit the HOF profile anyway.

Me?

I've long maintained that Rose, baseball's alltime hits leader, should never be admitted to Cooperstown until he stopped lying about gambling on the game. And he lied for years. Only when he figured out how to make a buck from coming clean did he finally do so, figuring it would juice book sales if he 'fessed up between a couple of hard covers.

This was perfectly in character (or lack of it) for Rose, who never met a dime he wouldn't stoop down to pick up. He was, to put it plainly, a dirtbag of a human being. Which of course hardly disqualifies him from the Hall, given that dirtbaggery has never kept out anyone else.

If it did, a whole passel of sociopaths, racists and various other degenerates -- most of them from the early years of baseball, when it was not a notably elevated pursuit -- wouldn't be there.

And Joe Jackson?

He's been portrayed, in film and by sympathetic biographers, as an illiterate bumpkin who was slicked by worldly gamblers and assorted other crooks. This is not a wholly inaccurate portrayal, and it partially lets him off the hook that impales some of the other Black Sox. Yes, he took the gamblers' money to throw the 1919 World Series, but he also batted .375 in that Series -- which suggests that perhaps he didn't quite grasp the concept. 

Ignorance, of course, is no defense. But after 106 years, the punishment for that surely has outlived the crime.

Which I suppose is Manfred's point.

One, it says here, that should have been made some time ago.

Shenanigans!

 Those endlessly suspicious humans known in these parts as the Grassy Knoll Brigade have sworn there was something fishy about the NBA draft lottery for nearly 40 years, or since the infamous Bent Corner Conspiracy. So don't be surprised if they get all revved up again after what happened last night.

("Wait, what is the Bent Corner Conspiracy, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.)

(Well, it happened in 1985, the year of the first NBA draft lottery, and the New York Knicks won the No. 1 pick. Which meant they won Patrick Ewing. Seems the envelope containing the Knicks bid either did or didn't have a bent corner -- no one will ever know for sure -- which got the Grassy Knoll Brigade claiming the whole deal was rigged because the bent corner signaled the guy picking the envelopes which one to pick. That's the skinny, anyway.)

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah. Last night's draft lottery.

Which was won by the Dallas Mavericks, who wound up with the No. 1 pick even though they had a 1.8 percent chance of that happening. To the Grassy Knoll Brigade, this undoubtedly meant the fish market was open again -- and not only that, it was karma cruelly turned on its head.

After all, why would the Mavs be rewarded with (presumably) Cooper Flagg after they traded away the face of their franchise, Luka Doncic, for Anthony "The Doctor Will See You Now" Davis, the oft-injured Lakers big man? How could the basketball gods be so such practical jokers?

("Hey, ya'll! Watch this!" you imagine the gods saying as the Mavs envelope came out.)

Yet there was Mavericks CEO Rick Welts, holding the No. 1 envelope and beaming like ... I don't know, a proud CEO or something. Said he couldn't wait to get back to Dallas. Said this was a reward for the Mavericks fan base, whose "depth of emotion and connection" continues to amaze him.

Of course, this was a spin-cycle way of glossing over the fact that most of the emotion and connection since the Luka deal has involved the  fan base saying "Connect this!" to the Mavs front-office. But CEOs gonna spin, especially on joyous occasions like last night.

And it wasn't as if the Mavs were the only beneficiaries of lottery shenanigans (or not). Drawing the second pick in the upcoming draft were the San Antonio Spurs, another eyebrow-raiser for the Grassy Knoll Brigade. The Spurs, remember, won Victor Wembanyama two years ago, and Wemby went on to win last season's Rookie-of-the-Year honors. Then, last year, they got Stephon Castle, and he went on to win this season's Rookie-of-the-Year.

So back-to-back ROY picks, and now they get the No. 2 pick?

"Oh, come ON!" the GKB is undoubtedly spluttering.

Gotta be another bent corner somewhere. Gotta be.

One sane voice

 I wouldn't know the governor of Utah if he tried to drown me in the Great Salt Lake. But I applaud his sanity in a world that more and more seems not just mad, but stark raving running-naked-through-the-streets mad.

A few years back, see, the aforementioned guv, Spencer J, Cox, vetoed an anti-transgender sports bill. He did this for the excellent reason that it was entirely unnecessary, and would further isolate an already isolated (and consequently vulnerable) group of Utahans. In short, the bill would declare transgenders a threat not because there actually was one, but because they were regarded as one simply by existing.

They weren't, of course. And they aren't, despite all the folks running around with their hair on fire shouting that Those Creepy Transgenders are invading girls sports like locusts, and would surely take them over completely if someone didn't step up and put a stop to it.

In Utah, however, the taking-over-girls-sports horde amounted to, um, one transgender student. And four total playing high school sports.

Some invasion.

And hardly worth the taxpayers' dime to devote a second of legislative time, as Gov. Cox noted in sending the bill back with a big "Aw, HELL, no."

Here's what his one sane voice sounded like, which popped up on the intertoobz recently:

Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That's what all of this is about. Four kids who aren't dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they're part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. 

I don't understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce (suicides among transgenders) significantly. For that reason, as much as any other, I have taken this action in the hope that we can continue to work together and find a better way.

Now, I don't know about you. But I find that sort of compassion and common sense uplifting and encouraging.

If exceedingly rare these mad days.

(Postscript: The Utah lege overrode Gov. Cox's veto. Fear and loathing won again.)

A Chicken Little moment, defused

 OK,OK, O-kay. So all my fretting looks as silly as kittens on ether now.

Which only means I was right the other day when I said I was having a Chicken Little moment, thinking the Indiana Pacers might be in trouble now that the Cleveland Cavaliers had all their pieces back and consequently laminated the home-state lads by 22 in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.

Well, I was having a Chicken Little moment. Because that sure didn't look like falling sky Sunday evening in Gainsbridge Fieldhouse.

What it looked like was the Pacers scoring 80 points in the first half -- no, that is not a misprint -- to leave the Cavs  choking on Midwest corn pollen, or some such thing. Outscored the hapless C-towners by 26 in the second quarter. Led by 41 at halftime. Applied the coaster brake in the second half to glide home with a 20-point win, 129-109.

Oh, yeah: And now they lead the series 3-1 going back to Cleveland. 

Also, the Cavs' best player, Donovan Mitchell, injured his ankle and sat out the second half.

(Either that, or he sat out the second half because, I don't know, he felt a twinge or something and what was the point, anyway? The game was gone by then.)

Anyway, I was wrong, wrong, wrong when I predicted Game 4 was going to be knock-down, drag-out Armageddon, that the Cavs would pull out the W, and that they'd go back to Cleveland looking for a 3-2 lead in the series. What a big stupid I am.

I figured that, with Darius Garland, D'Andre Hunter and especially Evan Mobley back, we'd finally see the Cavs who won 64 games in the regular season. Well, Garland scored 21 in Game 4, but it hardly mattered. And Mobley was barely visible: 10 points, five rebounds, one steal.

Adjustments were made, in other words, after Game 3. And I'm sure adjustments to the adjustments already are being made by the Cavs this morning. It's why momentum in the playoffs is a fable out of Aesop, as noted by the Blob the other day.

However ...

However, a 3-1 lead is still a 3-1 lead.  

And even if the Cavs salvage Game 5 to stay alive, the Pacers are guaranteed to come back to Gainbridge for a close-out game.

And Chicken Little is just another dumb cluck.

Disappeared

 Alex Palou won another IndyCar race yesterday, this time at the Mecca, aka the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Won the pole for the Grand Prix of Indianapolis, then won the race after Graham Rahal, who started right next to him, led 49 of the 85 laps.

That makes three Ws in a row for the defending series champion, four in five races so far this season, and even Rahal admitted the other day no one can figure out how to beat him right now. Which of course means he's the odds-on favorite to win the Indianapolis 500 in two weeks hence.

You'd think that would be a great big attention hook for America's best racing series.

You'd be wrong, of course.

You'd be wrong, because apparently the only more dominant force than Alex Palou in IndyCar is radio silence. Or media silence, if you prefer strict accuracy over metaphor.

See, I went looking on ESPN's website for a story on Palou's latest triumph this morning, and I couldn't find one. Not on the main page. Not even on the racing page, where the results were posted but the headlines in the queue included "Harley-Davidson To Launch Series With Moto GP", but nothing on Palou's third straight win.

No headline. No file. In May, at Indy.

To be sure, you could find stories filed on a number of other sites, but the Worldwide Leader's snub seems especially troublesome. If it finds MotoGP more newsworthy than IndyCar at Indy in May, that's a problem, because it implies ESPN thinks IndyCar is even farther off the Sportsball public's radar than even doomcriers like the Blob assumed.

I have typed until my fingers cramped up that IndyCar is as competitive, talent-rich and bursting with saleable personalities as it's been in decades, but somehow that doesn't seem to matter. Truth is, it remains the most chronically disappeared major entity in the sporting world.

I find this exceedingly bizarre.

And, yeah, that undoubtedly owes much to my bias toward IndyCar, which is lifelong and survived even the late, unlamented IRL years. The sport's vanishing from the public consciousness didn't begin then, but it was certainly the kill shot. When a sport of kings --- the sport of the Foyts and Andrettis and Unsers and Mearses -- becomes the sport of Dr. Jack Miller the Racing Dentist and Brad Murphey the Racing Cowboy, you pretty much deserve to have the public show you its back. And IndyCar did that deliberately.

Thirty years later, it's still in a sense paying the price for that.

To their credit, the sport's boardroom jockeys tried to remedy that in the offseason, dumping an increasingly disinterested NBC for Fox. I remember sitting in my living room during the Super Bowl watching the rollout of a new set of Fox IndyCar promos, and being amazed that they actually featured some of those aforementioned saleable personalities -- Palou, Pato O'Ward, Josef Newgarden, others.  They even got Tom Brady to make a cameo in one of the Newgarden bits. 

 "Finally!" I thought. "Finally, someone gets it!"

And then ...

And then came Saturday. And one more indication that the sport still has a long row to hoe with the sporting public.

But, hey. The Big Five's in two weeks. The usual 300,000 humans will fill the most iconic racing venue in the world, millions more will tune in on TV, and IndyCar will once again get to boast that the largest single-day sporting event on the planet resides beneath its banner.

But for most of the multitudes who make it so?

It'll be the last IndyCar race of the season they watch.

A Chicken Little moment

 Look, I know better than this. OK? I know better.

I know momentum in the playoffs is a willow-the-wisp, a puff of air, as weightless and  ephemeral as the brush of a phantom's hand.

I know one game is just one game, and the next game may be an entirely different game. And I know the game after that may be so different it will feel as if it was played in a galaxy far, far away.

I know all this. And yet ...

And yet, I'm looking at Cleveland 126, Indiana 104 in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semis last night, and I'm thinking the Pacers might be in trouble.

I'm thinking this even though the Pacers flat ran over the East 1-seed in Game 1 in Cleveland, then flat stole Game 2 to come back to Indianapolis up 2-0. I'm thinking this even though the Cavs winning Game 3 wasn't that tough a call, because a team that won 64 games during the regular season is not going to go down 3-0 without a fight..

And yet ...

And yet, I'm looking at Cleveland's boxscore, and I'm having a Chicken Little moment.

Evan Mobley was in that boxscore, you see. Darius Garland was. De'Andre Hunter, too.

Those are three pretty big pieces for these Cavs, and they were missing for Games 1 and 2 of this series. Which means those weren't really the Cavs the Pacers clipped up in C-town. They were the economy-class Cavs -- and it still took a miracle comeback by Indiana to win Game 2 on Tyrese Halliburton's three-ball with 1.1 seconds showing.

Last night, Mobley, Garland and Hunter were all back in the lineup. And the Cavs -- the true, luxury-class Cavs -- won by 22 on the Pacers' home floor.

Garland and Hunter scored 18 points between them, but it was Mobley who was the difference. As Donovan Mitchell put up a monster 43-point game, Mobley was the complementary backup monster: 18 points, 13 boards, four assists, three steals and three blocks. He and Hunter also contributed hugely to smothering Halliburton, who finished with just four points on 2-of-8 shooting.

You can't tell me Cleveland didn't kinda miss that in the first two games.

And so now I look ahead and I see the Cavs winning Game 4 in a grim, knucks-down battle, and suddenly it's an even series going back to Cleveland. And then the Cavs dispatch the Pacers in Game 5 at home, and suddenly the Ps are going back to Indy needing a W to stay alive.

I know, I know. Chicken Little stuff. Ignores that whole momentum-is-a-fantasy business. Also ignores the distinct possibility Tyrese will use his silencing in Game 3 as fuel, and do something Donovan Mitchell-like in Game 4.

And yet ..,

And yet.

Papal intercession

 Comes now the word that the Catholic Church has a new Pope, Leo XIV, whose given name is Robert Prevost and who hails from the south side of Chicago. That makes him the first American pope except, perhaps, on the north side of Chicago, which tends to regard all south siders as scruffy ne'er-do-wells.

Anyway, the world quickly learned that Leo XIV, as a proud south sider, is a Chicago White Sox fan, and of course that got me thinking about the current state of the team known in these precincts as the What Sox. This is short for "What the HELL?", which is surely what Sox fans were thinking last year when their team chased history into the deepest chasms of Earth on their way to a record 121 losses.

Now it's another season, and the What Sox are still What Sox-ing. On the morning after Robert Prevost became Leo XIV, I checked the standings and saw, sure enough, the south siders are as crummy as ever. Right now they're 10-28, they've lost four straight, and they've won three fewer games than anyone else in the American League.

A week into May, they're already 15 games out of first in the AL Central.

All of this gets me wondering if somewhere, or maybe several somewheres, a suffering Sox fan sat down and penned the following to their fellow Sox fan in the Vatican:

Dear Your Holiness:

Congratulations on becoming the first American to fill the shoes of the fisherman. As a Chicagoan, I am prouder than I was the day the Bears kicked Patriot booty in Super Bowl XX, and as a fellow White Sox fan I am thrilled beyond measure to have a pope who is one of our own.

I also have a question.

Is there anything within your papal duties/powers that enables you to intercede in earthly affairs? Like, say, the earthly affairs of our cruddy baseball team?

I'm sure, as a Sox, um, Holiness, you're just as dismayed as the rest of us at how our beloved south siders have become the laughingstock of baseball. That damn (sorry, darn) Reinsdorf has wrecked the franchise, and yet he refuses to sell to someone who actually cares about winning. Can't you, as Pope, do something about this? Like, I don't know, issue a papal bull requiring Reiny to step aside?

Forgive me if this sounds sacrilegious. I'm just a third-trick grunt at Illinois Tool Works, and thus am unfamiliar with Vatican etiquette.  But I have faith in a fellow south-sider who surely remembers the 2005 World Series, and the Go-Go Sox of the '70s, and even Disco Demolition Night in '79.

(You weren't there, were you? Sorry, of course you weren't.)

Anyway ... thanks for listening. And speaking of the Go-Go Sox, whatcha wanna bet Harry Caray has already mispronounced your name, ha-ha?

Sincerely,

A Fellow Sox Fan

Yeah, OK. So no one probably wrote this, nor is likely to.

Besides, what makes you think Leo XIV hasn't already taken care of this?

I say this because, while checking out the standings this morning, I noticed something else: The What Sox are no longer the worst team in baseball. 

That, of course, would be the utterly horrendous Colorado Rockies, who stand 6-31 at the moment. The Rockheads have lost six in a row, they're 18 1/2 games out of first in the National League West, and they're even 13 1/2 games out of next-to-last. And they've won six fewer games than the next-worst team in the NL, my reliably cruddy Pittsburgh Cruds.

I don't know about you, but I sense some divine intervention in this.

I sense that even before Leo XIV became Leo XIV, he had enough pull with the good Lord that he got Him to make the Rockheads so bad they'd take some of the heat off the new Pope's favorite team.

Hey. It's a theory.

Today in misnomers

 (In which the Blob again strays from the Sportsball path. Standard disclaimer applies.)

These are the times that try a history nerd's soul, which is why I find it provident to keep firearms, sharpened steel and C4 away from him. There's too much chance he'll finally lose it entirely and go rampaging through the streets in search of  people who still think the Civil War was about soybean futures or some such thing.

Which brings us to Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump, Fearless Leader of our Regime and noted graduate of the Kollege of Historikal Knowledge.

See, today is May 8, the 80th anniversary of VE Day, or Victory in Europe Day. It's called Victory in Europe Day because, well, that's what it was. Fearless Leader, of course, begs to differ.

He says from here out, Americans are to refer to it as "World War II Victory Day", because calling it Victory in Europe Day gives Europe too much credit and America not enough. After all, he reasons, America won the war for those lame Euros, so why do they insist on calling Victory in Europe Day?

(Because, again, it was the end of the war in Europe. Just like VJ Day commemorates Victory over Japan. Because that's what that was, too.)

(And why am I having to explain this?)

Look. We all get it. Fearless Leader and logic do not pal around much, and his grasp on history is such that if he and history were recreating the scene in "Die Hard" where Hans Gruber falls from the Nakatomi Tower, he'd be falling just like Hans. His grasp is that bad.

For instance: When FL says those European dopes did next to nothing to win Big Two, it ignores the fact the Soviets crushed the life out of half Hitler's armies. And somewhere Bernard Montgomery likely would be saying "EXCUSE me?",  because it was Monty and the British Eighth Army who chased Rommel out of North Africa.

The RAF would likely chime in, too, having reduced Goering's Luftwaffe to a shadow of itself before the Americans arrived on the scene. Ditto the British troops who suffered through the bloody Gethsemane of the Italian campaign right alongside the Americans.

But Fearless Leader is gonna do what Fearless Leader is gonna do, and his feckless lapdogs in Congress will say "You got it, boss!" Which is why the Senate just voted to codify Donald John's decree that from now on the Gulf of Mexico shall be called the Gulf of America.

Even though it's not. Even though Donald John and his lackeys can codify 'til the cows come home and it will still be the Gulf of Mexico.

So, yeah, today is VE Day, no matter what Fearless Leader decides to call it. Bless your heart, Donald John. You go ahead and call it World II Victory Day -- even though it isn't, and even though you posted it on social media today over a photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.

Which of course doesn't have a damn thing to do with the German surrender this day commemorates. 

And which of course happened in February 1945, three months before and half a world away from the aforementioned.

Uh-oh. My history nerd just asked where I've stashed the Bowie knife.

Extinctual

 So, then: The Utah Mammoth.

That's the new official nickname of the currently-named Utah Hockey Club of the NHL, and, listen, I've got NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER with naming a hockey team after a huge, lumbering extinct animal. If you weren't gonna name it the Blizzard on account of there's already a Colorado Avalanche, and the Stormin' Mormons would have stirred up too much religious hoo-ha, I suppose the Mammoth will serve as well as anything.

True, it doesn't exactly conjure up images of a blazing 3-on-2 break, with two swift wingers flashing down the ice and a blur at center looking to dish the biscuit at the speed of light. But Mammoth works for me.

This is because here in my hometown we have a Division I university (Purdue-Fort Wayne) whose nickname is the Mastodons, another extinct lumbering creature. It's unique, which might be just a polite way of saying "weird."  Seems to suit PFW just fine, though.

(A brief historical aside: Reputedly the Mastodons became the Mastodons because the bones of one were once unearthed on what are now the school grounds. Me, I prefer to think it's because PFW's mascot, Don the Mastodon, was out of work and needed a paying gig. But what do I know?)

In any event, if you can have Mastodons as a nickname for your basketball and volleyball and baseball teams, you can surely have Mammoth for your hockey team. The historical context may be a trifle sketchy (Did vast herds of mammoth once roam what is now Utah? Beats me, I wasn't there), but you could whip up a suitably fierce-looking mascot named, I don't know, Marvin or something. And think of the marketing possibilities!

Piles of Marvin the Mammoth stuffed animals for the kids. Recordings of the official team song, "The Mammoth Mash." T-shirts with slogans such as "Everything's Extinctual", "Tusk This", "Wild And Woolly", and "I Got Mashed By The Mammoth", accompanied by various other NHL logos.

"That's just silly, Mr. Blob," you're saying now.

Yeah, well. Just you wait.