Still crushin' it

At some point now, you start to feel sorry for the naysayers. They are running out of nays to say, and panic surely must be welling up: Omigod they won AGAIN. By 50 points. Could it be they're actually GOOD? No, wait, I can't say that! Wait, I just did! Omigod ...

And so on, and so forth.

So on, and so forth, as your Indiana Hoosiers juggered the naut out of poor UCLA yesterday, 56-6, and, oh, look, they're 8-0 now and still crushin' it. Fernando Mendoza collected four more touchdowns, three passing and one running. The Hoosiers scored on a pick six two plays into the game; the offense scored on its first three possessions; and Indiana led 35-3 at halftime. 

Omigod, they won AGAIN ...

And, yeah, OK, so it was only UCLA, a 3-4 bag of hammers coming in. But the Bruins started the season 0-4 before firing their head coach, and they'd won three straight coming in -- including that road win over Penn State in Happy Valley -- and their last loss was a narrow 17-14 decision against a 5-3 Northwestern squad in Evanston.

So it wasn't as if they were playing hideous football. They whipped Michigan State 38-13 in East Lansing, which is worse than No. 25 Michigan whipped the Spartans in East Lansing yesterday. That's not the kind of team you'd expect anyone to spin-cycle 56-6.

But the Hoosiers did it. And you look head now at who they have left, and, yeah, they've still got Penn State in Happy Valley, but the Nittany Lions have lost their stud quarterback for the season and seem to just be marking time until winter. 

Outside of that, it's just Maryland, Wisconsin and Purdue, who are a combined 8-15. And half of those eight wins are Maryland's.

So what's that mean?

That means there's a very real shot -- a better shot than not, even -- that Indiana is 12-0 heading into the Big Ten championship game.

Omigod! You can't say THAT!

Sorry. Just did.

A complete sign of the times

 Mookie Betts called it "amazing." Said he'd never seen anything like it, and he'd been playing this man's game for a long time. Sounded like he'd just seen the ninth wonder of the world -- or, perhaps more accurately, an artifact from some civilization long gone to dust.

And all Yoshinobu Yamamato had done is pitch a complete game victory for Betts's Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the World Series.

OK, so it was second straight complete game in the playoffs.

And, OK, so no one had done that since Curt Schilling 24 years ago.

And, OK, so it was an absolute gem: nine innings, one run, four hits, eight strikeouts. Needed just 59 pitches to get through the last six innings. Retired the last 20 batters he faced, something no one had done since Don Larsen did it 69 years ago, when he pitched the only perfect game in World Series history.

But you know what?

Somewhere in America, Nolan Ryan must have been uttering a dry chuckle.

And somewhere else, off in the celestial void, Bob Gibson must have been chortling.

And somewhere else in those same Elysian fields, Walter Johnson must have been shaking his great head ... and the Christian Gentleman, Christy Mathewson, must have been smiling bemusedly ... and Bob Feller, being Bob Feller, was probably cracking wise about the pale state of major-league pitching in These Modern Times.

That's because 2025 is not, you know, 1925.

Or 1935. Or 1965. Or 1980, or 1990, or even 2000.

It's a time when baseball players like Mookie Betts can declare a pitcher's complete game the wonder of the age, because complete games in 2025 are as dead as triceratops. Instead, being a starter in MLB means never (or rarely) having to say you went more than six innings. It means never never (or rarely) throwing more than 100 pitches in a given start.

It means exiting a no-hitter in the seventh inning because your pitch count is getting up there, and no one's paying you the GNP of Bulgaria to throw no-hitters.

No, sir. In 2025, you're being paid the GNP of Bulgaria to ... well, to pitch as little as  possible, when you get right down to it.

And so now you've got long relievers and short relievers and the guy before the closer, and the closer. And it's why we can go almost a quarter century before seeing what we saw Yoshinobu Yamamato do last night.

No wonder Mookie Betts was amazed. No wonder everyone around him was equally amazed.

And Bob Gibson and Nolan Ryan, old-school guys like that?

Well, Gibson might have been chortling because, in 526 career starts, he pitched 255 complete games. And Ryan might have been uttering a dusty chuckle because once, against Boston in 1974, he pitched 13 innings and threw 235 pitches.

Two-hundred thirty-five! In 2025, that's two-and-a-half starts.

But in 1974?

Four days later, in his next start, Ryan pitched six scoreless innings.

Now that's amazing, Mookie Betts.

Poking the bear

 Look, I get it. Fans get excited. They get jacked. They also get on the outside of a few Molsons or Labatts on occasion -- if we're talking Toronto Blue Jays fans in particular,  which we are.

But, oh, my, O Canada. That doesn't mean you take your brain out of your head and commence playing with it.

Deep into Game 1 of the World Series last night, you see -- the ninth inning, to be specific -- Shohei Ohtani came to bat for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The game was gone by then for the Trolley Dodgers; a nine-run Blue Jays sixth had taken care of that. And maybe that, and the fact it happened in the Jays' first World Series game in 32 years, is what caused their fans to lose their damn minds.

Because that's when they started chanting, "We don't need you!"

At Shohei Ohtani.

At the best player in baseball.

At maybe the best player who ever played baseball, although history takes the long view and it's history that ultimately decides these matters.

In any case, it was a  cringey moment, because as Blue Jays pitcher Chris Bassitt said later, "Don't poke the bear."

Well. They poked, those silly Canadians.

They poked, undoubtedly, because they were still stoked by that sixth inning, when the Jays torched the Dodgers bullpen like Sherman torched Georgia. Starter Blake Snell loaded the bases, and then relievers Emmet Sheehan and Anthony Banda unloaded them. Sheehan walked in a run. A couple of singles added a couple more runs. And then pinch hitter Addison Barger came on to hit a grand slam off Banda, which only made him the first pinch hitter in World Series history ever to do that.

A two-run jack by Alejandro Kirk followed, gild for the lily. And, bingo, nine runs, an 11-4 rout and a 1-0 lead in the series for the Jays.

And yet.

And yet, "We don't need you!"

At Shohei Ohtani.

At the best player in a baseball.

At a guy who'd already launched a two-run tater in Game 1, and who, in the four-game sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers in the NLCS, batted .357 with three home runs, four RBI, a triple and a stolen base. Oh, and who pitched six scoreless innings to pick up the win in Game 4, when he allowed just two hits, struck out 10 and, oh, yeah, hit three home runs when he wasn't throwing the baseball past assorted Brewers. 

 Now, no one's saying Game 4 is going to happen again. It was, after all, maybe the greatest individual performance in the history of the game. But it could. Which is why taunting Ohtani is probably not the best strategy, even if it is in the midst of a stem-to-stern tattooing of the defending world champs.

As Bassitt warned, you don't poke the bear.

Oh, sometimes you can get away with it. But sometimes the bear filets you like Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Revenant," and that's just too gruesome to contemplate if you're the Toronto Blue Jays.

Stay tuned.

Sow, meet reap

 The NBA season unfurled this week with a two-overtime thriller between the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder and the wanna-be champion Houston Rockets. And commissioner Adam Silver and everyone associated with the Association looked at that, and saw that it was good.

Then the Thunder beat the Pacers in another two-overtime thriller as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander went off for 55, and Steph Curry dropped 42 on the Nuggets in an OT win over the Nuggets, and that was good, too.

And the-

I'm sorry, what?

Oh, yeah. That.

They say everything in life is about timing, and boy howdy has the NBA mined that little nugget this week. Because at the same time it was opening the 2025-26 season with a grand flourish, the FBI stepped in with a far less savory flourish of its own.

How's a big fat gambling scandal sound, NBA? How's the arrest of one head coach (Chauncey Billups of the Trail Blazers), an assistant coach (the Cavaliers' Damon Jones) and a player (Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier) sound? How about rigged games, trading team inside info to gamblers, a bunch of Mafia gambinos running the whole scheme?

All of that was unveiled a couple of days ago by FBI director Kash Patel, and while the Kashmeister usually can't find his tuchis with both hands and search planes, the investigation that turned up all of the above allegations precedes him. It goes back several years, and this week it resulted in 31 arrests besides those of Billups, Jones and Rozier.

At its epicenter, according to the indictment handed down this week, are seven games played between March 2023 and March 2024, and which involved the Charlotte Hornets, the Orlando Magic, the Trail Blazers, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Toronto Raptors. Gamblers are accused of using inside team info to bet on those games; in three of those seven games, it's alleged that players actually checked themselves out of games to help bring home the bets.

And you know what's even more shocking, or not?

There's not a single person with a functional brainpan who didn't see this coming. 

The path to this is as clear and straight as a stretch of interstate in Nebraska, and it doesn't take a bloodhound to sniff out its origin. It's on display every day in every sports bar in America, where guys in Lakers jerseys or Trail Blazers jerseys or Raptors jerseys bend over their phones and mull a dizzying smorgasbord of bets.

Bets on games. Bets on scoring. Bets on how a particular drive in football will pan out ..., or how many points or rebounds or yards a given player will get in a given game/quarter ... or who'll score the first touchdown or hit the first three in said game/quarter ...

You name it, you can drop some coin on it. And here's the kicker: All of it is indirectly subsidized by the NBA, NFL, MLB or myriad other sports orgs who used to avoid the gambling industry like the ten plagues of Egypt. 

Now?

Now they all have "official" online betting sites.

Talk about being hoist by your own petard. Or, you know, reaping what you've sown.

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, to toss out another aphorism, and this is one almighty gang of fleas the NBA has acquired. Even if only half the charges included in this week's indictment are true, it's a stain the Association will play hell erasing. How much spadework will be necessary to convince the public ever again that its game is on the level? Will any amount of spadework be able to do that?

The NBA? Crooked as a dog's hind leg. At least pro wrestling is honest about it.

You see (player name here) go to the bench in the middle of the fourth quarter the other night? Wonder if he really had a cramp, or ...

... or, that sort of thing.

You lose the public trust it's damned hard to get it back, and this is the biggest blow to the public trust the NBA has faced since the late 1970s, when rumors of rampant drug abuse -- true or not -- nearly wrecked the league. Only the ascendance of David Stern, and the arrival of Bird and Magic, saved it from itself.

Which is just more bad news for Adam Silver and Co.

David Stern is dead, after all. And no one like Bird or Magic -- if anyone will ever be like Bird or Magic -- is coming to save the day.

Sow, meet reap. And what a bitter harvest it is.

Oh, Canada ...

 Let's hear it out there, America, for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Let's hear it for Vlad Guerrero Jr. and George Springer and Trey Yesavage, the 22-year-old rook the Jays are sending to the bump tonight in Game 1 of the World Series. Let's hear it for Joe Carter and Jack Morris and all the boys from 32 years ago, the last time the Jays were in the World Series. 

Let's hear for poutine and Molson's and Labatt's.  For the McKenzie brothers and pond hockey and the Montreal Alouettes, by god. For the maple leaf, the Maple Leafs, and Le Habitants, lords of hockey that they are.

Come on, people. Strike up a chorus of "O Canada" -- as in, "Oh, Canada, please save us from the stupid Dodgers, because we're already sick of them."

And, yeah, OK. So maybe that's not true.

But the Trolley Dodgers are the new Steinbrenner Yankees -- the overstuffed, reek-of-money-and-privilege overdogs -- so, yeah, let's root for the underdogs. Not that there really is such a thing in baseball anymore, of course. 

The Blue Jays, after all, just agreed to pay Vladdy $500 million, so they're not exactly hanging out on a street corner with a "Will Work For Food" sign. Hardly anyone is in baseball anymore, unless they're my Pittsburgh Cruds. And my Cruds are only impoverished because their owner is Scrooge McDuck.

Still, someone has to play the scrappy over-achiever in these affairs, and this time it's the Blue Jays. They probably won't win, on account of the Dodgers have Shohei Ohtani and they don't. They'll probably lose in, I don't know, six games or something.

Which means the Dodgers would be the first team in a quarter century to win back-to-back World Series. So if baseball is its history, there at least would be a thematic resonance to that.

Because the last team to win back-to-back (actually back-to-back-to-back) World Series?

The Yankees. Of course.

Open (barn) door policy

 Tom Izzo is the winningest men's basketball coach in the history of Big Ten, but he is also a man with a push broom trying to keep sand off a beach. He's a man trying to close the barn door before the horse gets out, oblivious to the fact the horse is long gone.

Choose your metaphor. One size fits all, pretty much.

I say this because the other day Izzo got all exercised about a couple of college hoops signings which, if there's actually the word "college" in college hoops anymore, seemed a blatant violation of NCAA rules. If, in fact, there's actually the word "rules" in "NCAA rules" anymore.

What happened was, a former four-star recruit named London Johnson announced he would be taking his talents to the University of Louisville, and another young man named Thierry Darlan announced he was headed to UC-Santa Clara. Problem is, both players' previous address was the NBA's G-League.

Which means they're both professionals. Which also would seem to violate the NCAA's stipulation that anyone who'd played professionally was no longer eligible to play collegiately.

Izzo, old-schooler that he is, says that's wrong. And of course he's right. And of course he's wrong, because ... well, because the sand is already on the beach, and the horse is already gone.

It fled the moment the NCAA lost in court in the Ed O'Bannon name, image and likeness case, which led the NCAA to grudgingly allow its student-athletes to cut name, image and likeness deals with companies eager to promote their products. This led to the universities essentially setting themselves up as brokers for these deals, which essentially meant they were paying the players, only not really.

Which led to the NCAA throwing up its hands and saying, "OK, fine, we'll let schools pay their student-athletes, since they're pretty much doing so already." This means big-boy college football and basketball is now as professional as the pros, if not more so.

It is, in fact, a lawless frontier in which players are free to wander from school to school  in search of the best deal. This is because of a transfer portal the NCAA won't regulate for fear of losing in court again. Call it, in deference to that metaphorical horse, the organization's Open Barn Door policy.

And Tom Izzo hates it. Hell, every old-schooler does.

"Someone is going to say, 'Well, if they go pro and it doesn't work out, they should be able to come back," Izzo complained the other day. "Well, what about the freshmen you recruited there? That's somebody's son and he thinks he's got himself a good place, and all of a sudden, shazzam, they ... bring a 21- or 22-year-old in (from the G-League).

"To me, it's ridiculous. It's embarrassing, and I love my job. I don't respect my profession, and I don't respect whoever is doing that. Whoever made those decisions because they're afraid a lawyer is going to sue them, sooner or later, you've got to fight the fight."

Except they've already fought that fight. And lost. Repeatedly. And that's why the NCAA is violating its own regs about allowing pros to be Joe College.

Because, let's face it, Joe College already is a pro. And the NCAA started down that road the first time some bastion of higher learning threw seven (or eight) figures at one of Tom Izzo's coaching brethren.

That didn't happen because Coach was a crackerjack history teacher. It happened because  Coach had a reputation for stacking Ws, and Ws mean revenue, and revenue is what makes the world go 'round -- even at dear old Alma Matters U.

"Maybe I'm a dummy, but I'll never agree to that stuff," Izzo railed the other day.

Sorry, Coach. That horse has left the barn, too.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 7

And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the comfortably reliable Blob feature of which critics have said "Rely on THIS, meathead!", and also "You were comfortably dropped on your head as a child, weren't you?":

1. "Woo-hoo! A shutout through three! You can comfortably rely on us not to blow this one!" (The Giants)

2. "Wait ... what?" (Also the Giants, after Denver scored 33 points in the fourth quarter to steal the win)

3. Meanwhile, the Dolphins!

4. Got comfortably blown out by the Browns, who, in their weird all-black threads, didn't look anything like the Browns.

5. "Wait, those were the Browns?" (The Dolphins)

6. (Also most of Cleveland, probably)

7. Meanwhile, the Chargers!

8. Who, in their weird mustard-yellow unis, got trucked at home by the comfortably reliable Colts, who just keep motoring along behind Daniel Indiana Jones and Jonathan "Just Give Me My 100 Yards And Nobody Gets Hurt" Taylor.

9. "Can I get a hot dog with that mustard?" (The Colts)

10. "Dress like clowns, play like clowns." (Whatever part of L.A. that actually cares about the Chargers, probably)

Real football

 Look, I don't blame Paul Finebaum, .poor confused SEC shill that he is. It does look weird. It is a hard thing to wrap your head around.

Indiana University, playing real big-boy football? Like, virtually overnight?

Surely not.

Surely these are the same old Hoosiers, whiling away the fall in preparation for the glories of winter and basketball. Surely they're still the welcome mat of the Big Ten (Come on in and sit a spell on our windpipe, y'all!), the pratfall artists, Dick Van Dyke eternally tripping over that eternal footstool.

Surely Paul and the rest of America didn't wake up Sunday to see THAT Indiana at No. 2 in the nation. 

Surely the Hoosiers are grotesquely overrated, a smoke-and-mirrors magic trick, a cupcake-fat fraud who, any second now, are going to go back to being  ... well, Indiana.

And so when Curt Cignetti came to Bloomington last year and took the Hoosiers on an 11-1 ride that ended with a berth in the College Football Playoff, Paul and everyone else decided it was the biggest joke ever. And when they lost big to Notre Dame in the first round (which meant their only two losses were to the two teams that played for the national title), Paul 'n' them practically smirked: See, they didn't belong. 'Cause they didn't beat ANYBODY.

Fast forward to Saturday morning, when Finebaum once again declared Indiana -- 6-0 and ranked third in the nation this time around -- a paper tiger.

Yes, the Hoosiers had beaten the dog out of a decent Illinois team, 63-10. Yes, they'd gone out to Oregon and taken the Ducks by 10 when Oregon itself was unbeaten and ranked third. But the Hoosiers just weren't that good against Oregon, Finebaum said. Struggled, in fact. Which is why a pretty beige Michigan State team was going to jump up and expose them in Indiana's homecoming game.

So what happened?

Indiana 38, Michigan State 13 happened.

Miami losing to Louisville happened.

And suddenly there Indiana is, 7-0 and now ranked second in the nation.

Must be driving Paul Finebaum and the rest of the-SEC-is-so-much-better-than-the-Big-Ten crowd right up a wall. 

And I get it. I really do. 

You can't erase decades of muscle memory in the relative flick of an eyelid, and the muscle memory says this is Indiana, where Saturday afternoons in the fall go to die. Even now, it's fair to wonder if Indiana really is the second-best team in the nation. And it's fair to wonder, looking ahead to Saturday, if a resurgent UCLA team might be trouble in combat boots for the Hoosiers.

Because that is college football, see, and it's what makes it great. Upsets happen. The mighty fall. And now that Indiana is clearly among the mighty, the Hoosiers are no less  susceptible to that than anyone else.

Last weekend, for instance, four of the top ten teams in the nation went down. Nine of the top 25 did. SEC welcome mat Vanderbilt is ranked in the top ten for the first time since 1947. It's a weird year -- or maybe just a reflection of how radically the landscape has changed in the era of the NIL and the unrestrained transfer portal.

In which case, Indiana ranked second in the nation makes perfect sense.  

In which case, it also makes perfect sense that an Indiana loss at this point would be regarded as a huge upset.

Beating Indiana, an upset?

Paul Finebaum's head just spun around like Linda Blair's in "The Exorcist." As did a few others'.

Those terroristic dinosaur frogs

 

Went down to the big No Kings to-do on the courthouse square yesterday, because it was a crazy warm afternoon for almost-late October, and also because I'd never seen an actual  criminal-loving anti-fascist terrorist and figured this would be a good chance to do so.

Criminals and anti-fascist terrorists, after all, were what our President and his various flunkies and flacks were calling the No Kings crowd ahead of Saturday's event. Said they hated America. Said they were being paid by that evil George Soros (aka, "That Evil George Soros") to hate America and terrorize our cities and I don't know what all.

Well. Let me tell you, it was just as terroristic and America-hating as the President and every other true American said.

I mean, the first thing I saw was an inflatable unicorn. An inflatable unicorn!

He (or she) was standing on the curb with a bunch of other terrorists, bullying passing motorists into honking their horns in "solidarity." It was just the sort of thing Hamas would have done, which was no surprise considering the inflatable unicorn was probably a Hamas operative paid by That Evil George Soros to be there.

Anyway, there was the unicorn and a bunch of people with signs and a couple of guys in cowboy hats riding inflatable chickens. There was a woman waving a Trump flag, only instead of "Trump" it said "Resist." Another woman was holding up a sign that read, "I like my country how I like my bourbon WITHOUT ICE," which I had to admit was sort of clever in an America-hating terroristic anti-fascist way.

Oh, it was some scary crowd, all right. And I'm not just talking about the street preacher with the sound system haranguing everyone about taking Jesus into their lives because Jesus was the only real king. 

I'm talking about the thousands of  young people and old people and veterans and women with green hair who turned out. I'm talking about the three guys I saw walking down the street dressed in Star Trek uniforms. I'm talking about the inflatable frog -- a tribute, no doubt, to the inflatable frog terrorists out in Portland who were burning down the city and assaulting our brave geared-up National Guardsmen with their froggy violence.

The inflatable frog was palling around with an inflatable dinosaur and an inflatable American eagle, last I saw them. You could tell just by looking at them they were plotting some sort of heinous anti-fascist act of America hatred.

There was also a guy dressed as Superman, and a pirate, and some smartass with a sign asking George Soros where his money was. Oh, and a woman in a wheelchair wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and a crown.

I guess she was supposed to be Our President. As if Our President has ever broken any laws or been convicted of 34 felonies or anything.

I also saw a guy dressed as the Dude from "The Big Lebowski," which I thought was funny so I went up to him and asked if he'd like a white Russian, and also is Walter around anywhere? 

He laughed appreciatively, and I laughed with him. But his laugh sounded vaguely terroristic and America-hating, so I quickly moved on. 

Pretty soon I bumped into a senior citizen wearing a shirt with a Kurt Vonnegut quote on it: "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." It was just the sort of un-American sentiment you'd expect from an America-hating Hamas terrorist like Vonnegut, so I asked the senior citizen if I could take a picture of it. Evidence, you know.

He said sure. A little too readily, now that I think on it. And there was this look in his eye ...

In truth, he and the other senior citizens -- and there were a gob-lot of them -- scared me more than anyone else. Oh, sure, they were smiling and laughing and peacefully protesting on this beautiful afternoon. But there was something, well, off about it all. It was like any second they were going to drop the act and start committing terroristic America-hating violence.

So I hung around for awhile, waiting for them to reveal themselves. But it never happened. Not even the inflatable dinosaurs and frogs and unicorns and the two inflatable cartoon characters I saw on one street corner erupted in violence -- and lemme tell you, you've never seen violence until it's been committed by inflatable dinosaurs and frogs and unicorns and cartoon characters.

I figure they must have been onto me.

And so after awhile I wandered over to the lawn directly in front of the courthouse, where a young woman was wafting soap bubbles into the benevolent October air. They turned and drifted and floated serenely on the breeze, irridescent in the pale sunlight. It was just about as violently terroristic as church on Sunday morning.

Clever, I thought. Verrry clever.

Oh-oh-oh-tani

 Surely there must be another, you can't help thinking. The game is so old, and so many have passed its way.

But if there is, the sheer avalanche of baseball's years obscures the memory. 

If there is anyone in the long history of the Pastime who had a day like Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers had yesterday, please step forward and be recognized. Babe Ruth, perhaps, when he wielded both a lightning arm and a nuclear bat? Tyrus Raymond Cobb? Lou Gehrig, Joltin' Joe, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige?

Name one. Give me a date. Reach deep into the swirl of years, back when John McGraw, the little jerk, was sliding in spikes-high for the dirty-bird Baltimore Orioles. Back when Cap Anson and Nap Lajoie were doing their thing, and Walter Johnson was throwing so hard he made the baseball all but vanish, and Old Hoss Radbourn was winning 59 (or 60) games in '84 -- and not 1984, either.

None of them ever did what Ohtani did yesterday.

What he did, in Game 4 of the NLCS, was hit three home runs in three at-bats, one of them a titanic 467-foot moonshot. He did that while also pitching six innings of two-hit shutout ball and striking out 10.

Three dingers launched. Zero runs allowed. Ten punch-outs. In the same game.

Greatest single performance in the history of the game, it says here.

And, yes, OK, if that declaration is classic prisoner-of-the-moment stuff, it's a hell of a moment in which to be imprisoned. And there is less peril in making said declaration than by any rights there should be in a game which has been an organized professional enterprise for 155 years.

The closest analogy to Ohtani is of course the Babe, who like Ohtani was both a pitcher and slugger. Before the Yankees bought him from the Red Sox and made him solely the latter, Ruth was one of the best pitchers in the game. Across his career, no one has ever approached his combined numbers: 94 wins, 107 complete game in 148 starts, 488 strikeouts and a 2.28 ERA as a pitcher; 2,873 hits, 714 home runs, 2,214 RBI and a .342 average as a batter.

But did he ever have a game like Ohtani had on Oct. 17, 2025?

If he did, history does not record it. Especially in the postseason. Especially when, in a 5-1 win to complete a sweep of the Brewers in the NLCS, Ohtani drove in three of the Dodgers' five runs, scored three of their five runs, and got the win on the mound -- his second of the series.

Surely there must be another, you can't help thinking. The game is so old.

But maybe there isn't. Maybe it's just as Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said last night, when it was all over.

"That's the greatest night in baseball history," he declared.

So be it.

That game

 Somewhere off to my right in the roaring dark, Joe Montana looked small and un-legendary in  blue jeans and an untucked shirt, just another mortal on a sideline clogged with mortals. Farther down the way was Andy Reid, looking similarly ordinary.

The stars were out, in other words, on an October afternoon long since gone to night. But the moment had swallowed them whole, same as it had swallowed all of us.

Famous and fame-less alike, we were just faces in a howling crowd, waiting to see what came next. It was late in the day, and in Notre Dame Stadium the fifth-ranked sons of Eire had No. 1 USC backed up deep. It was fourth-and-9 and there were 92 seconds on the big end zone clock, and the  football rested 74 yards away from Six City. The din was otherworldly, a live thing, pressing down with all its weight on Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush and even the USC band and that obnoxious fight song.

And then ...

And then, somehow, Leinart reared back and threw deep to Dwayne Jarrett, who caught the ball for a completion Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis said couldn't happen against the defensive scheme the Irish were playing.

And a few moments later, it seemed, Leinart was cartwheeling out of bounds inches short of the goal line, the football spilling out of his grasp as he did.

And then the Trojans were lining up again and the Irish in their gold hats and lush green jerseys were lining up, and Leinart was plowing into a massive clog, spinning away, getting a shove in the back from Bush to propel him across the goal line with three seconds left.

USC 34, Notre Dame 31. The Bush Push, an illegality that was hardly ever flagged and wasn't this time. Oct. 15, 2005.

Greatest college football game I ever covered, in 38 years as a professional scribbler. Well, one of the three greatest, anyway.

Twenty years on USC and Notre Dame meet again today, same time, same place, almost the same date. It'll be all different this time, because after two decades of course it is. USC is in the Big Ten now, insane as that is. Notre Dame is in the ACC for everything but football, which remains independent if only in name. The Trojans are ranked 20th for this one, not No. 1, and Notre Dame is ranked 13th, not fifth.

But the Trojans are 5-1 coming to South Bend, and the Irish have won four straight after dropping their first two games to two top-five teams. And there is all that history between them, 2005 plus a whole echoing pile of other years. names upon names upon names: Leinart and Brady Quinn and Anthony Davis and Tom Clements; Terry Hanratty and O.J. and Marchy Schwartz and Grenny Landsdell. And on and on and on.

USC 34, Notre Dame 31. Oct. 15, 2005.

Twenty years on I barely remember what I wrote that night, so big was the moment. It's all a deadline blur, and I had to go back to the archives to see if I'd outlined-against-a-blue-gray-October-sky-ed it up.

I didn't, thank God. But what I'd completely forgotten was the brief exchange I witnessed as the game came to its closing act, and which I decided put the day in its proper light:

... And so down at the end Saturday, as darkness fell and the place shook with a roar barely remembered, a St. Joseph's County sheriff's deputy poked his partner in the ribs. It was fourth-and-9 for USC at the Trojans' 26. There was 1:32 left. Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid stood a few paces away, his eyes on the field; somewhere else was a blue-jeaned Joe Montana, shirttail flapping in the breeze.

The deputy grinned.

"Hey, it's back to the way it used to be," he said.

Sure was.

Form over fashion

 Joe Flacco, who is 97 years old or something, beat Aaron Rodgers and the Pittsburgh Steelers last night in the Osteoporosis Bowl, and raise a glass to the man. Not only did he overcome all the outrages of advancing age, he overcame the shame of modern football fashion, too.

Or to put it the way a lot of America likely did: "You mean Joe and the Bengals actually won? In THAT getup?"

Well, yes, actually. Flacco reached back to his youth -- say, his early 50s -- to throw for 361 yards and three scores. Ja'Marr Chase set a club record with 16 catches for 161 yards and a six. And they did it while reprising the "White Bengal" duds, which would be the height of fashion only if the height of fashion were located at the bottom of the ocean.

Good heavens, those things are ugly. White helmet with black stripes, a yawn in and of itself. All-white uni that looked like the official leotard of the Vestal Virgin Pilates class, which meets every Thursday down at the Our Lady of Stretching YMCA.

Chester the Bengals fan, sitting in his living room with a bag of cheese curls: "Hey! Them ain't football suits!"

His pal Norm, working his way through a sixer of Hudepohl: "Look like a buncha girly men to me! Tell you whut, the NFL sure ain't like it was when ol' Kenny Anderson was slingin' it!"

And yet ...

And yet, somehow the girly men won over Rodgers and a bunch of Steelers who, truth be told, barely looked interested. Maybe they thought they were in some sort of isolation ward, surrounded as they were by all that medical-looking white. Or maybe they thought they'd been kidnapped by some weird purity cult.

In any case, they clearly whiffed on an excellent trolling opportunity.

As in: "Hey, Flacco! Heard the news? Jack LaLanne is dead!"

As in: "Yes, now that you mention it, that does make you look fat!"

As in; "One-two-three-four! Come on, girls! Get those knees up!"

And so on, and so forth.

Here's the thing, though: Not only did the Bengals win anyway, their white-out look will soon be forgotten. I mean, have you seen the all-gold unis the Chargers are rolling out for the Colts?

Poor Indy. They won't know what hit them.

Other than a jar of mustard, that is.

Home-field what?

 Just yesterday, or so it seems, I looked up to see the Seattle Mariners were up two-games-to-none on the Toronto Blue Jays in the ALCS, and I thought, "Well, what do you know, the Mariners look like they're finally going to get to a World Series," because when you win the first two games of a series in the other guy's house, that's how you're inclined to think.

Well, this morning I blinked, and suddenly the series is knotted up at two games apiece. This is because the Jays raked the Mariners 8-2 last night out in Seattle, one night after raking them 13-4, also in Seattle.

You can take this to mean the Friendly Confines are no longer located on the north side of Chicago. In this series, at least, they're wherever the other team's ballpark is.

In Toronto, after all, the Mariners won the first two games by an aggregate score of 13-4, winning 3-1 in Game 1 and blowing out the Jays 10-3 in Game 2. Then the series headed west, and now the Jays have returned the favor, abusing the Mariners 21-6 in Games 3 and 4.

You can imagine the reaction in Toronto and Seattle.

In Toronto: "Oh, sure, NOW you decide to play."

In Seattle: "Oh, sure, NOW you decide not to play."

At any rate, so much for home-field advantage, which seems to become more mythical by the hour these days. The home crowd can bring all the noise and hostility it wants, it seems, but it can't throw a baseball past (in Toronto) Cal Raleigh and Jorge Polanco, or (in Seattle) Vlad Guerrero Jr. and George Springer.

So it's a 2-2 series now, with Game 5 set for tonight in Seattle. Which means you can again imagine the reaction in Toronto and Seattle.

In Toronto: "Yay! One more game in the beautiful Pacific Northwest!"

In Seattle: "Crap! You mean we're home AGAIN?"

The money, shown

 So remember the other day, when the Blob imagined a phone conversation between IU president Pam Whitten and athletic director Scott Dolson about how they were going to keep Penn State's paws off their football coach?

"No. Blocked it out the way we blocked out that stupid Kentucky Derby column you once wrote with the stupid talking horse in it," you're saying now.

OK, FINE. Be that way.

Anyway, in this imaginary conversation, I had Whitten telling Dolson to throw more money at Curt Cignetti to keep him from bolting to Happy Valley. And when Dolson protested that IU was already paying him an arm and a leg, Whitten replied, "So make it an arm and two legs, then."

Well, guess what, boys and girls?

IU did just that this week.

What it actually did was make it two arms and two legs, which is approximately the number of appendages you get when you drop an eight-year, $93-million extension on your football coach. That works out to just over $11 million a year, making Cignetti one of the highest paid coaches in college football.

Take that, Nittany Lions!

Also any other Lions who might want to throw Coach Cig in an unmarked van and make off with him!

It seems odd to say after all those mostly fruitless afternoons in the fall across the decades, but the wind clearly has shifted in Bloomington. Football is no longer just something to keep the alumni occupied until basketball season starts. It's no longer something Lee Corso played for laughs in his early seasons at IU, because if you didn't laugh in those days you'd cry.

No, sirree. Virtually overnight, it's become as big a dog in B-town as it is everywhere else in Power 4 land.

For that you can thank the radically altered landscape of college football, which Cignetti has adroitly used to go 17-2 and 11-1 in the Big Ten in a season-and-a-half. And you can thank the management, which demonstrated this week that it ain't messin' around.

"We didn't come this far only to come this far," Dolson told ESPN after announcing Cignetti's extension. "We're all-in, and going to continue to invest and make certain that we've got our priorities in line. (Cignetti's) Priority 1, and then it's retaining our staff, and it's having the resources to build a roster."

For Cignetti's part, he said he wants to be a Hoosier for the rest of his coaching days. It's what coaches always say when their ship comes in, but usually it's a Michigan Wolverine or an Ohio State Buckeye they wanted to be for the rest of their coaching days. Being an eternal Hoosier? When did any self-respecting college football coach ever aspire to that?

Which is exactly why you should suspect Cignetti isn't just following the requisite script. Could be he really means it -- as does Indiana.

Show him the money, as they saying goes?

Well. Money shown.

The Geezer Bowl

Ah, the jokes, the jokes. Got 'em all lined up here in preparation for tonight's big soiree on NFL Thursday Night Football, which the Blob hardly ever watches on account of there might be a big East Carolina-Sam Houston State intersectional clash in college football, which plays every day of the week these days, too.

Not tonight, though. Tonight, the Blob might actually tune into TNF for a series or two. Because how often in the En Eff Ell do you get to watch two guys with walkers clomping around in prime time?

("Wait, that wasn't supposed to be one of the jokes!" -- The Blob's inner voice)

("OK, so maybe it was" -- Also the Blob's inner voice)

Anyway ...

The point is, it's Steelers vs. Bengals tonight, which means it's also Aaron Rodgers vs. Joe Flacco, who are both older than dirt. ("Hey!" says dirt, in an offended tone). Rodgers is, I don't know, 57 or something. Flacco might be 157 for all we know. Both of them, at any rate, have more gray in their beards than Robert E. Lee.

("That's not one of the jokes, either!" -- More inner voice)

Thing is, for senior citizens, they're both getting around fairly well. Flacco won the starting job in Cleveland, lost the starting job in Cleveland, then was traded to the Bengals last week. He'd with the team approximately five minutes when he started for them up in Green Bay.

The Bengals lost, 27-19. But Flacco went 29-of-45 for 219 yards and two touchdowns.

And Rodgers?

Beat the Browns 23-9, going 21-of-30 for 235 yards and two scores. Which moved the Steelers to 4-1 on the season.

So, yeah tonight's Geezer Bowl might not be as geriatric a spectacle as anticipated. Which is why the Blob is finally going to get the jokes out of the way now:

1. What's the secret to Aaron Rodgers' longevity?

A) Spite.

B) Some weird peyote/ginger root/velvet leaf concoction produced by secret cult of  ancient Mayans.

C) Metamucil.

2. What is Joe Flacco's favorite expression when his receiver runs the wrong route?

A) Consarn it.

B) Dadburn it.

C) These kids today.

3. What did Rodgers say when he called that timeout?

A) "I have to pee."

B) "It's 9:30. Time for bed!"

C) "It's 11:30. Time for Carson!"

4. Why is Joe Flacco yelling and shaking his bony fist at the sky?

A) JaMarr Chase went running off on some silly pass pattern and forgot to fix his dinner.

B) The Steelers are in his backfield.

C) Those damn kids are on his lawn again.

And last but not least ...

5. Who will we see on the commercial breaks in tonight's game?

A) Joe Namath talking about those Medicare benefits you might not know about.

B) Marlin Perkins in a Mutual of Omaha ad from 1964.

C) Sam Elliott (and Sam Elliott's voice) introducing the exciting new line of DeSoto automobiles.

Th-that's all, folks!

The Big Schtick

 The reigning monarch of our current regime was at it again yesterday, threatening to pull 2026 World Cup games out of Boston because apparently parts of the city have been "taken over" by some dangerous character called Unrest.

As usual, very few people of reasonable intelligence knew what the hell the Sovereign Lord of 'Murica was talking about. It does get harder and harder.

Oh, there was a brief outbreak of violence in Beantown at a pro-Palestinian rally earlier this month on Boston Common, but declaring parts of the city have been "taken over" because of that seems as fantastical as most pronouncements from Regimeville. In truth, it seems to be yet another instance of the Sovereign Lord inventing reasons to punish municipalities that either didn't vote for him, or that refuse to put up with his nonsense.

Boston would certainly qualify, given that its mayor (Michelle Wu) is both a member of the wrong party  -- she's one of those evil Democrats the Regime seems determined to exterminate, either metaphorically or otherwise -- and someone who does not suffer fools gladly. Which naturally has put her crosswise with the Sovereign Lord.

More and more these days when he waves the Big Stick, it looks more like a Big Schtick. Every city he imagines under siege by murderous left-wing terrorists, after all, is an opposition city. And Sherman ain't burning Atlanta in any of them.

But the Sovereign Lord holds his fantasies close, because they play well politically with his base. And so, as night follows day, he's also maintained he could declare certain cities "not safe" for the World Cup -- among them, surprise, surprise, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, favorite political targets of the Regime., 

How he could actually do this, alas, seems another of his fantasies. The ruling body of international soccer, FIFA, confirmed its hosting plan three years ago, and FIFA suffers fools and their grudges even less than Mayor Wu. That it would be inclined to bend to anyone's whims now that it has contracts in place with 11 U.S. cities and five in Mexico and Canada is even more fantastical than the notion that Boston is a seething cauldron of violence unsafe for World Cup enthusiasts.

Especially when you consider the games wouldn't even be played in Boston, but in Gillette Stadium. Which is 30 miles from Boston and as remote from it as the mountains of the moon.

In any case, the imagined conversation between the Bullyboy-In-Chief and FIFA about moving games out of Gillette at the last minute would likely go like this:

President Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump: We're going to move the games.

FIFA: The hell you are.

Trump: I'm the president, and I say we are.

FIFA: Well, we're FIFA, and this is our show, not yours, bucko. We'll decide if it's safe to play games in, gee, the perilous hamlet of Foxborough, 30 miles from anywhere. Try to stop us, and the U.S. will never see another World Cup.

Trump: We'll send in troops. We can do that now that I'm the law.

FIFA: We'll send in lawyers. We have contracts. You try to make us break them, it'll cost you big time. Wonder how the U.S. taxpayers will like THAT.

And off to the courts everyone will go.

And, meanwhile, the games will go on.

And the Big Stick -- er, Schtick -- will add another dubious chapter.

Out of his time

 Poor John Calipari, the dear man. Why, just look at him out there.

Look at him thrashing around through the Jurassic Period, looking for some tasty ferns to gnaw on. It's OK, because the raptors aren't up and around yet. And as for the fearsome T-Rex ... well. you can hear those big dumb oafs coming from miles off, the way they blunder and crash around.

So Calipari is safe for now, dinosaur that he is. He's not at all happy, but he's safe.

The familiar landscape he's always known is changing now, see, and not because T-Rex has passed this way, knocking over trees and uprooting the ground cover in his big-dumb-oaf way. It's because Calipari has coached college basketball for decades, and he no longer recognizes it. Where did his world go?

It's the unspoken question that was behind everything Coach Cal said yesterday at the SEC basketball media day, where the Arkansas coach told everyone if college buckets was going to become wholly transactional, he'd hit the bricks like Jay Wright, Tony Bennett and Jim Larranaga have. Even Bruce Pearl abruptly called it quits -- although with that notoriously shady character, you'll always wonder if he merely fled the premises before the NCAA could close in again.

Anyway, Coach Cal said he misses the days when he could build relationships with his players, because so many of them now are vagabonds flitting from one school to the next via the unregulated transfer portal.  It's why Calipari has told his players if they announce they're entering the portal, they're done at Arkansas. Changing their minds and deciding to stay will not be an option on his watch.

"I don't mind kids transferring," he said. "You just can't transfer four times, because it's not good for you. Four schools in four years, you'll never have a college degree. But that last place you'll be at, they'll really be loyal to you? No, you're a mercenary."

God bless the man, he's absolutely right. But like any dinosaur, he's also entirely out of his time.

Not to say blind to his own role in the changing of his world.

All that talk about building relationships, for instance, sounds more than a bit odd coming from a man who was Coach One-And-Done when he was at Kentucky. Under his regime, Lexington was a halfway house for players who needed somewhere to hang for a year until they could enter the NBA draft. What sort of relationship was he building with those kids? And how were they not the very mercenaries Coach Cal now decries? 

Yes, college buckets is uncomfortably transactional now for relics like Coach Cal, but then it always has been. The difference is, back in the day, it was transactional only for coaches, not players. They chased the buck just as aggressively as the players do now, trading (as the players do now) loyalty for a fatter paycheck and brighter lights. And, like the players, they never look back, let alone wring their hands in despair over unfulfilled relationships.

So, yeah, Coach Cal and his like-minded brethren have a definite blind spot there. Even if they are as right as ham on rye.

Poor John Calipari.  Why, just look at him out there.

The Extinction Express is coming, and there's nowhere to hide.  If only he could see he helped set it in motion.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 6

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the intermittently redemptive Blob feature of which critics have said "More intermittent, less redemption," and also, "How 'bout I intermittently redeem your face with my fist?":

1. "Well, I'll be. He's NOT dead!" (Millions of viewers watching Patrick Mahomes beat the Lions with four total touchdowns)

2. "Well, I'll be. I'm NOT dead!" (Patrick Mahomes)

3. "But I might be!" (Justin Fields, after passing for minus-10 yards for the unredeemed Jets, who even clear across the Atlantic continued to Jets it up in a dreary 13-11 loss to Denver in London)

4. "Flash in the pan? Flash in the pan?? I fart in your general direction!" (Jaxson Dart, saying, um, something like that after passing for 195 yards and a score and rushing for 58 yards and another score as the suddenly not-Giant-y Giants humiliated the Super Bowl champion Eagles 34-17)

5. In other news, the Bears beat the Commanders on a walk-off field goal by a backup kicker as Caleb Williams outplayed Jayden Daniels; the Panthers beat the Super Bowl-bound Cowboys as their tiny, tiny suddenly-not-too-tiny quarterback, Bryce Young, threw three touchdown passes; Jonathan Taylor kept being Jonathan Taylor and Daniel Jones kept being Not That Daniel Jones as the Colts kept rolling; and Drake "Hey, Look, We Got A Quarterback Again!" Maye led the Patriots to another road win with another stellar day: 18-of-26, 261 yards, three scores, a 140.1 passer rating.

6. "Hey, look, we got a quarterback again!" (Patriots fans)

7. "Ha!" (Bryce Young, Caleb Williams, the Bears' backup kicker)

8. "Ha-ha!" (Jonathan Taylor, Daniel Jones, the Colts)

9, "Hey, what about us? We beat the Bills and made Josh Allen look human!" (the Atlanta Falcons)

10. "OK, FINE. You can have a 'Ha!', too." (Blob management)

Reverie for an October morn

Yesterday, Oct. 12, 2025, Penn State fired football coach James Franklin, less than 24 hours after the Nittany Lions lost their homecoming game to Northwestern ... a week after they gave up 42 points and lost to a previously winless UCLA team that had scored 47 points all season ... and just two weeks after Penn State was undefeated and ranked third in the country.

 What follows, from the Blob's own admittedly diseased mind, is an imagined (or not) phone conversation between Indiana University athletic director Scott Dolson and IU president Pam Whitten on Oct. 13, 2025:

"Scott? Pam here."

"Yes, El Presidente?"

"Come on. I told you not to call me that."

"Sorry. Just trying to lighten the mood after the news from Pennsylvania yesterday."

"Ah, so you've heard. Well, what do you propose to do about it? I mean, this couldn't have happened at a worse time."

"You mean because Curt Cignetti just pulled off the biggest road win in our admittedly beige football history? You mean because it was our first win over a top five team since beating Purdue to go to the Rose Bowl in 19-freakin'-67? You mean because we're now ranked No. 3 in the nation, the highest we've ever been ranked in 138 years of playing football?"

"Yes, of course I mean that! Jesus, you're dim sometimes."

"Sorry."

"Anyway ... Coach Cig's stock has never been higher. And now Penn State, one of the legendary programs in all of college football, is looking for a head coach? Gee, where do you think will be the first place they look?"

"I know, I know. But what do you propose I do about it? We're already paying the man an arm and a leg."

"So make it an arm and two legs, then. You have my green light."

"I don't know. How's that gonna look now that you're eliminating entire programs and firing faculty members left and right? 'Yeah, we don't need any of those snowflake-y liberal arts programs or history professors who refuse to stick to the Whitewash 101 script, but we'll spare no expense for football.' People will think we're Ohio State, for heaven's sake -- or, god forbid, Alabama."

"Hmm. Yeah, bad optics, I get it. Well ... why don't you just confiscate Coach Cig's phone? I mean, if Penn State can't contact him, it can't poach him. Can't you do that?"

"Not without breaking about fifty laws. Besides, he's probably got a couple of burner phones tucked away. Coaches usually do."

"So get ICE to raid his home and office. Hell, those guys do that all the time."

"Because that would be against the law, too."

"Are you kidding? Those cowboys don't worry about laws. They just kick in your door and zip-tie your toddler. This is 2025, Scotty. Laws are for losers."

"You would know."

"What was that?"

I said 'You would know.'"

"Damn straight, I would know. Never forget I'm the one who illegally changed the rules overnight and then called in the staties to run off all those damn protesters. Even had 'em deploy a sniper. God, it was beautiful."

"Well, I'm not gonna do it. I mean, what if Coach Cig is having a cookout for the team? You want to see half our players get bundled into unmarked vans and taken God knows where? There goes our season."

(Pause)

"OK, OK.  Didn't consider that. Well ... maybe we can kidnap Coach Cig's wife and kids and hold 'em in an undisclosed location until Penn State hires a new coach."

(Another pause)

"Nah, I'm just kidding."

(Another)

"Maybe."

For real

 Listen to the narrative one last time, before it fades to a whisper and then the memory of a whisper. Listen to it riding out from the Pacific Northwest, out from an unfathomable scoreboard and a stadium awash in yellow and green, out and out until it's gone.

What were the naysayers naysaying about Indiana football, before Indiana 30, Oregon 20?

Overrated.

Fraud.

Never beaten anyone who's actually good.

Travesty of the century, making the playoffs last year.

And this morning, of course, this one, as surely as night follows day:

Gee. Obviously Oregon wasn't as all that as we thought.

Because you know it's coming. Because even as Indiana continues to kick it to shards, the narrative is Indiana football simply can't be THAT good, not really, because it's INDIANA FOOTBALL. It's all a trick of the light, smoke and mirrors, a bunch of wins over Who's That State, Nobody Tech and the Big Ten's table scraps.

Well. What can the naysayers naysay now, after 30-20 in Autzen Stadium?

What can they say after the Hoosiers destroyed a ranked Illinois team, 63-10, and won out in Iowa City, and took down third-ranked Oregon with an attack dog defense and just enough offense to get the job done?

They can say, yes, that obviously Oregon wasn't as all that as everyone thought.

Except the Ducks marched into Happy Valley and took down then-No. 3 Penn State before Penn State had begun to unravel.

Except they hadn't lost in Autzen since 2022, the year Dan Lanning arrived as head coach.

Except everyone was looking at quarterback Dante Moore and his guys as 1A to Ohio State's 1 in the Big Mathematically Challenged, and that if Indiana presented a challenge surely the Hoosiers weren't going to be that much of a challenge.

Because when you win 18 straight home games, and you've got Dante Moore going for you, that's how you're gonna think.

But then here came that Indiana D, a couple thousand pounds of bad attitude and grievance, intercepting Moore twice and sacking him six times and making eight tackler for loss. And here came Moore's counterpart, Fernando Mendoza, throwing for 215 yards and a score. And here came Elijah Sarratt and Omar Cooper Jr., who made 15 catches between them for 179 yards and a six, and Roman Hemby, who bulled and quicked his way to 70 yards and two touchdowns on 19 carries.

Want to hear something crazy?

If Mendoza doesn't hang the ball and throw a pick six in the second half, Oregon finds the end zone just one time, on a busted-coverage throw from Moore to Malik Benson. It gets outscored 17-3 in the second half. It scrapes out just 13 points all day.

Thirteen points. At home. From a team that came in averaging 47 points per.

Conclusion: Yes, Indiana is for real -- really for real -- and the unglamorous past is the unglamorous past. And the narrative that attended that past?

Can barely hear it anymore.

A fall classic

 This is why we still watch baseball in October, and why we can still sometimes hear it even over the metal howl of the industrial NFL. It's why there's still magic in it, even as its fan base ages and it lives more and more in our memories than in the present day.

They played a baseball game out in Seattle last night, see, and even if our erstwhile pastime lives another 155 years, people will still be talking about it. It was a fall classic,  and it went on for15 innings and just shy of five hours. The Seattle Mariners finally won, 3-2, on Jorge Polanco's walkoff single. In so doing they eliminated but did not bow the Detroit Tigers, who were not only brave in the attempt but damn near indomitable.

The Tiges sent their ace, Tarik Skubal, to the mound to finish the deal, and all he did was strike out 13 Mariners and depart after six innings and 99 pitches with a 2-1 lead. You can argue that was a mistake -- maybe the mistake -- and it probably was. Skubal was still throwing 100-plus when he and Detroit manager AJ Hinch called it a night, and he rung up the last batter he faced. So he still had plenty of juice left in the wing.

What followed was grim, riveting hand-to-hand combat that chewed up both bullpens, neither of which would give an inch. Seattle used seven pitchers, including two other starters (Logan Gilbert and Luis Castillo, who got the win). Detroit burned through eight -- the last of them Tommy Kahnle, who finally surrendered the last run.

"An epic game," Hinch declared when it was done.

"From the eighth inning on, I had a massive headache," said Seattle starter George Kirby, who matched Skubal pitch-for-pitch for five innings. "I am glad that game is over."

Kirby is still a young man (27), so you can forgive him the missteps of youth. Because he couldn't have been more wrong.

That game isn't over.

That game will never be over, so long as baseball and memory both live.

Nun better

 An American icon passed yesterday in Chicago, and if the country still had a soul flags would be lowered in every burg that loves March and its Madness and its holy brackets. Certainly we have lowered them for lesser mortals than Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, God and all the saints preserve her.

She was 106 years old when she died -- a life full to the top by any measure -- and she was already 98 when the nation found her. Across a couple of magical weeks in March 2018, she became simply Sister Jean to America, the spiritual groundwire/good luck charm for a bunch of gritty overachievers from Loyola University of Chicago, who became that year's beloved underdog in the NCAA Tournament.

Went all the way to the Final Four, the Ramblers did. And Sister Jean, the basketball team's chaplain, went with them, becoming in the process one those unwitting celebrities fame sometimes lands on with its full weight.

As the Ramblers kept winning, Sister Jean went from a humble nun dedicated to a life of service to, well, Sister Jean.  There were Sister Jean bobbleheads and Sister Jean T-shirts and all manner of Sister Jean accoutrements. The teevees interviewed her endlessly, endlessly. When Loyola reached the Final Four in San Antonio, tournament officials even conducted a Final Four news conferences for her.

Loyola fans broke out "Win One For The Nun!" T-shirts at the games. And in the national semifinal against Michigan, signs blossomed in the Alamadome demanding the Wolverines follow "Jean's Plan."

Alas, the Wolverines didn't listen. They dispatched Loyola by 12, and the Ramblers' -- and Sister Jean's -- glorious run was over.

Over, but not forgotten. For the rest of her days, Sister Jean would never be just a nun employed by a Catholic university. She would be the nun. 

And there would be, pardon the pun, nun better.

An oops for the ages

 Somewhere today Fred Merkle is throwing a spectral arm around Orion Kerkering's shoulders and saying, "Don't sweat it, son. No one will remember this."

Then he'll laugh and add: "Just kidding. No one's ever gonna forget this. And not just because your parents named you 'Orion.'"

That's because last night, with the season in the balance, Orion Kerkering, a relief pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, pulled a Fred Merkle. And every baseball fan worth the name knows instantly what that means. 

It means even after 117 years, every baseball fan worth the name remembers what Fred Merkle of the Giants did on a late September day in 1908. Locked up in a death struggle with the Chicago Cubs, Merkle cost the Jints a crucial victory over their rivals when, after an apparent game-winning single, he veered off and headed to the dugout rather than finishing his jaunt to second base.

By failing to touch second, he was ruled to have made the third out of the inning, and the game remained tied 1-1. Called because of darkness, the Cubs won it the next day, wound up tied with the Giants for the NL pennant, and ultimately went to the World Series after beating the Giants again in a one-game playoff.

Forever after, the notorious blunder was known as Merkle's Boner. It was a dark cloud that followed him for the rest of his days as a player.

Orion Kerkering?

His blunder was throwing the ball halfway to, well, Orion on a slow roller in the 11th inning, with the Phillies and Dodgers tied and the bases loaded. It allowed the Dodgers to score the winning run in Game 4 of the NLDS, and win the best-of-five series 3-1.

Everyone was going when Andy Pages' broken-bat squib glanced off Kerkering's foot, and panic swallowed him up. Rather than going to first for the out, he tried a hurried throw home, and it eluded catcher J.T. Realmuto by roughly ten light years.

Game, set, match to the Dodgers.

"Just a horses**t throw," Kerkering said in the postgame, manning up.

He can take solace in the fact that, no, everyone likely won't remember his oops-for-the-ages for, um, ages, the way everyone remembers Fred Merkle's. That's because baseball doesn't consumer America the way it did back in the old-timey days. Nowadays it's pro football that does that.

Which is why talk radio in Philly today likely will have a lot more folks griping about the Eagles getting rinse-cycled by the Giants last night ("34-17? To the bleeping Giants? What the hell was THAT?") than by Orion Kerkering.

Unique name or no unique name. 

Fading bloom

 The headline has been parked in the nether reaches of my brain for a couple of weeks now, or since it became apparent Bill Belichick was just another guy struggling to deal with college kids. It awaits the day the University of North Carolina finally realizes, "Damn, Bill Belichick is just another guy struggling to deal with college kids," and picks up his buyout.

On that day, the Blob's aforementioned headline would be this: "Beli-Chucked!"

Yeah, I know. You were expecting something better.

("From YOU?" you're saying now)

Anyway, that day may or may not be imminent, depending on whether you believe the always-reliable rumor mill or the equally always-reliable Official Statement. The former claims the University and Belichick are already negotiating a lower buyout, five games into Belichick's ballyhooed tenure; the latter says, nah, that's not true at all, Coach Bill still has the school's "full support."

What we know for sure is the Belichick Era in Chapel Hill is off to an underwhelming 2-3 start in which the two victories came against Charlotte and Richmond. The Tar Heels' three Power Four opponents, meanwhile, have crushed them by a combined score of 120-33.

That includes last week's 38-10 erasure by Dabo Swinney's struggling Clemson Tigers, in which the Clemsons scored on two of their first four offensive snaps and led 28-3 after quarter. And it includes the opening game of the Belichick Era, when Beli-Fever had the campus in a tizzy until TCU parachuted into all that Carolina blue and paved Belichick's boys like a county highway, 48-14.

It was just about then a thought bubble appeared over Belichick's head. It said, "Dammit, they all told me I was a genius."

OK. So I'm making that up.

What I'm not making up is the fact the bloom, if not entirely off the rose, is fading fast. The rumor mill (remember: always reliable) says a planned documentary about Belichick's first season as a college coach is now on the scrap heap, and there's growing discontent with Coach B in the locker room. Meanwhile, The Athletic reports cornerbacks coach Armond Hawkins has been suspended for recruiting violations.

Which in the anything-goes landscape of 2025 must take some doing.

So, yeah, matters seem to be getting perilously close to the dreaded term "disarray." And thus the sentiment grows that perhaps Belichick, at 72, is clueless about the college game and should have just stayed on the coaching Mount Rushmore -- where, if nothing else, the view is better.

(The sentiment also grows that it mainly was Tom Brady who put Belichick on that promontory. This owes to the fact that Belichick, at New England and now North Carolina, has a decidedly beige 31-41 record post-Tom. On the other hand, it ignores the fact he was astute enough to recognize a sixth-round pick who'd started all of one season in college had the potential to be something better -- like, for instance, the greatest quarterback ever to play the game.)

Now, where were we?

Oh, yeah. Belichick. North Carolina. Down from the mountain, as it were.

Shoulda stayed up there, Bill. You really should have.

A fine(d) mess

 Somewhere today Coach Slobberknocker is giving up on 'Murica. After all, it ain't the 'Murica he  learned all the words to The Star-Spangled Whatchamacallit for, and you can take that to the bank and do whatever it is you do when you take something to the bank.

"Finin' a coach for yellin' at his dumbass runnin' back?" he's saying, incredulously. "The hell's the world comin' to?"

What it's comin' to, it seems, is the Arizona Cardinals indeed fining head coach Jonathan Gannon for a sideline, um, discussion with running back Emari Demercado on Sunday. It was right after Demercado dropped the ball before crossing the goal line on a 72-yard jaunt to Six City, costing the Cardinals a score it could have used in their loss to the Tennessee Titans. So it stands to reason Gannon was not in the best of moods.

Still, it's worth noting Gannon did not do what Coach Slobberknocker would have done, which is maintain a good grip on Demercado's facemask while informing him that he was one sorry sumbitch, and a damn dumb sumbitch besides. Also, if he had a brain, he'd be playin' cornhole with it or somethin'.

No, sir. All Gannon did was walk over to Demercado and yell at him a little, and then yell at him a little more, and then maybe/maybe not brush his arm as Demercado walked away. 

Of course, modern times being what they are, it was all caught on video. And apparently that was embarrassing for certain people in the Cardinals organization (which, considering it's the Cardinals organization, they ought to be used to). And so they're getting in Gannon's folding cash for $100,000.

All Coach Slobberknocker can do is shake his head and maybe laugh a little at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

"Good gravy," he says, or something like it. "They're actin' like this was Georgie Patton slappin' that soldier. Or ol' Woody Hayes punchin' that Clemson linebacker. Shoot-fire, yellin' at his players was nothin' but jumpin' jacks for Woody. Got him all warmed up for tearing up sideline markers and punchin' photographers.

"Why, I bet he and Bo are howlin' up there in Headset Heaven."

They probably are. A lot of crusty old coots no doubt are. Because, no, this is not the 'Murica they came up in, or at least not the 'Murica proscribed by sidelines and 100 yards of turf and large people stomping around on it.

It is, after all, 2025, not 1925, and the world has changed, as the world tends to do. Len Dawson isn't firing up a dart at halftime of the Super Bowl anymore. Fans don't wear jackets and ties and jaunty fedoras to the games. And if Dick Butkus were playing in today's NFL, he wouldn't be playing in today's NFL. He'd be in jail for hitting people too hard.

Some of this has been to the game's detriment. Some of it has not. All of it is the consequence of a corporatized America whose first loyalty is to quarterly earnings, and whose second loyalty is to the omnipotence of the Franchise and its Brand.

So, yeah, a viral clip of Coach yelling at his dumbass running back won't play, even if the dumbass running back did something really dumbass this time. (And  DeMercado did). A marquee quarterback getting blown up by a Butkus-channeling edge rusher won't, either.  

The quarterback is, after all, the Face Of Our Franchise. And the Franchise -- aka, the product -- is inviolate.

"Good gravy," Coach Slobberknocker says, or something like it. "Football ain't supposed to be a 'product.' It's supposed to be football. Blockin', tacklin', yellin' at your dumbass running back for forgettin' to take the ball into the end zone with him. THAT'S football."

Was football, Coach. Sorry.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 5

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the alternative-reality Blob feature of which critics have said "Alternatively, I'd rather read 'What's New This Month in Paper Products'," and also "How 'bout an alternative reality where you fall in a black hole that carries you to the far corners of the Klingon Empire?":

1. The Colts and Jaguars are 4-1. The Chiefs are 2-3 after blowing Monday night to the Jags. The Ravens have the exact same record as the Browns (1-4).

2. Also, Daniel Jones is third in the league in passing, leads all starters in yards per attempt, and has been sacked an NFL-low four times.

3. "What is this, some alternative reality?" (The Chiefs and Ravens)

4. "Daniel who?" (Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson)

5. "Hey, look, in this reality, I'm SECOND in the league in passing. Suck on that, losers!" (Dak Prescott)

6. In other alternative reality, the previously winless Saints excommunicated the Giants and their shiny new quarterback Jaxson Dart, 26-14; the Patriots flag-waved the previously undefeated Bills,23-20 in Buffalo; the Colts frisky-ed the Raiders to death 40-6; and the Broncos came from two touchdowns back to throw the previously unbeaten Eagles 21-17 in Philadelphia.

7. "Jaxson who?" (The Saints)

8. "It's not Drake WHO, it's Drake MAYE, bitches, and I am comin' for your ass!" (Patriots quarterback Drake Maye)

9. "Oh, yeah, THAT Daniel Jones." (Raiders coach Pete Carroll)

10. "Imma throw this bleepity-bleep cup of bleepity-bleep beer at your bleepity-bleep bleepin' alternative reality. The bleep is a Bo Nix, anyway?" (Eagles fan, probably drunk)

Question for the times

 I could be snarky here, a couple of days after. I could do that.

I could say if Indianapolis really wants to do something about violent crime in the downtown area, it should keep Mark Sanchez out of the city.

I could say Mark Sanchez forgot the first rule of a rumble, which is never bring an NFL analyst to a knife fight.

I could joke. I could make light. I could go for the big laugh and the "Oh, man, you are so bad."

But Mark Sanchez, NFL analyst and former New York Jets quarterback, lies in a hospital bed after being knifed in Saturday's wee hours, a circumstance he apparently bought with his own dime. According to Indianapolis police, he got angry because a 69-year-old delivery man wasn't moving his truck out of the loading dock area fast enough, jumped in the truck with him, and started a scuffle that didn't end until the delivery man stuck a blade in him.

Tried to fend Sanchez off with pepper spray, the delivery man did, and that didn't work. Sanchez kept coming after him, so the delivery man did what he had to do to stop him.

Now Sanchez, who was in town to work the Colts-Raiders game, is facing three misdemeanor charges -- one of them, as might be guessed from the past-midnight time of all this, public intoxication.

And now my wife Julie, as we discussed this whole deal the other day, raising a question uniquely suited to these times: Is Mark Sanchez suffering from CTE?

It's a question sprung from the landscape of decades, of case after case of former athletes flying into rages over nothing or committing suicide because they couldn't stand the chaos in their heads anymore. It's about Dave Duerson shooting himself in the chest so the docs could study his brain, and Junior Seau jumping off a cliff, and a former Steelers defensive lineman named Justin Strzelczyk ending his life one September day in 200 by crashing head-on into tanker truck at 100 mph while driving on the wrong side of busy New York toll road.

A post-mortem examination of Strzelczyk's brain indicated that, sure enough, he was suffering from CTE.

I don't know if that's the case with Mark Sanchez. But the sheer irrationality of what apparently went down in Indy early Saturday morning makes it a fair question.

This is, after all, a man who played in 79 NFL games across eight seasons, and was sacked 168 times in those 79 games. Seventy-three of those sacks came in 2011 and 2012 alone, when the Jets went 14-18 and had the sort of offensive line you'd figure a 14-18 team would have.

It was also right about the time the NFL was reluctantly admitting that, yes, head trauma was a problem in its national game. Which means concussion protocols and helmet-to-helmet hits were not as rigidly policed as they are today.

So, yeah. You read about Sanchez going after a 69-year-old delivery man over, well, nothing, really, and it makes you wonder what Julie wondered the other day.

Could CTE be at work here?

A question for the times. A question for the times indeed.

Saturday's America*, Part Deux

 (*Hat tip as usual to legendary sports scribbler Dan Jenkins)

So, you know what was great about Saturday?

No, not sitting five rows behind the home bench watching my Ball State Cardinals pull off the Big Upset, taking down the defending MAC champion Ohio Bobcats 20-14. Although that was pretty special. Made the out-of-season sunburn (October, and I'm sunburned? What backward freaking pageantry is this?) worth it.

But enough about the mighty Cardinals.

Let's journey out to the west coast instead, where college football did the sort of thing that makes it college football. Which is, deliver us the Really Big Seismic Upset.

That would be winless UCLA shocking the world by upsetting No. 7 Penn State, 42-37.

It was one of those "Wait, that can't be right" moments, an Appalachian-State-beating-Michigan vibe blended seamlessly into a Chaminade-beating-Ralph-Sampson-and-Virginia-in-basketball vibe. It's tempting to say there won't be a Bigger or more Seismic upset in college football this fall, but because it's college football and college football is crazy and wonderful that way, it's probably wise not to.

It's important, first of all, to understand the context here. The Nittany Lions, ranked third in the nation just a week ago, were coming off a prime-time clash of the titans with fellow Big Ten power Oregon. The Ducks marched into Happy Valley and stole the biggest W of the season so far, a titanic 30-24 struggle that wasn't decided until a former Purdue Boilermaker, Dillon Thieneman, intercepted Penn State quarterback Drew Allar in the second overtime.

Until that game, Penn State's defense had given up 17 points all season. They came to California having given up just 34 in regulation in four games. Barbed wire was more accommodating.

As for UCLA ...

Well, they were awful. Oh-and-four, and the most points they'd scored were 23 against UNLV. Utah bounced the Bruins by 33. New Mexico strafed 'em by 25. They'd already fired their head coach, and they were coming off a 17-14 loss to Northwestern.

So what happens?

The Bruins drop 27 on the Penn States in the first half.

After Penn State goes from 20 down at the break (27-7) to six down early in the second half, the Bruins do not do what 0-4 teams are supposed to do in that situation. Which is fold like a card table and wind up losing 44-27 or something.

No, sir. What UCLA does instead is, they keep answering back.

And somehow they win by five.

And score almost as many points as the Nittany Lions had given up all season.

And make internet wise guys snark that just to prove he not only can't win the big ones, Penn State coach James Franklin went out and lost a little one.

It was the alarmed exclamation point on a day when Cincinnati toppled Iowa State, Arch Manning's woes continued in a Texas loss to "meh" Florida, and (yes, I'm going to mention this AGAIN) Ball State outscored Ohio 20-0 in the second half to beat a Bobcats team that earlier in the season had taken out West Virginia. 

It was the Cardinals' first conference game, so they're 1-0 and in third place in the MAC.

Penn State, meanwhile, is 0-2 and sits 14th in the Big Ten.

Saturday's America, boys and girls. Ain't nothin' like it.

The caprice of October

 Playoff baseball and playoff baseball's month came in together this week, and the usual quirks and eddies came with it. It is both odd and wonderful what October does our former national game, bringing everything odd and wonderful about it into the sharpest of focus after the long slog of summer.

In other words, the Cubs beat the Padres 3-1 in a winner-take-all Game 3 of the wild-card, but not without doing what the Cubs do, which is surrender a leadoff home run in the ninth and then load the bases before allowing their faithful to breathe again.

And your Detroit Tigers?

Blew a 15-game lead and lost the division title to the onrushing Cleveland Guardians in the last days of the season, then eliminated the Guardians by taking two-of-three in Cleveland.

And then, of course, there was Cam Schlittler.

"Who?" you're saying now.

Exactly.

Can Schlittler, rookie arm for the New York Yankees, who suddenly was the very epitome of playoff baseball. He was the 24-year-old kid with 15 lifetime starts and 85 days in the bigs who was thrust suddenly into the spotlight's glare, the full weight of the playoffs coming down on his shoulders the way it so often does.

The kids, the washed relics, the pinch hitters deep on the dugout bench: Playoff baseball somehow finds them all. And then, for at least one afternoon or evening, infuses them with magic.

Schlittler, see, had never pitched a major-league playoff game until the Yankees sent him to the hill last night to save their season against their mortal enemies, the Boston Red Sox. The best-of-three was tied at a game apiece. Every anxious soul in Yankee Stadium was projecting its hopes and prayers and raw nerve endings on Schlittler's 6-foot-6, 225-pound frame. 

So what did the kid do?

Well, not unravel like a cheap sweater, the way a mortal would.

Instead, the young righty pitched the game of his life in, well, the game of his life, striking out 12, walking none and giving the Red Sox straight zeroes for eight fairy-tale innings. Got the shutout win, 4-0, and a piece of history to go with it: According to the folks who keep track of such things, it was the first time a pitcher had ever thrown eight playoff innings with at least 12 strikeouts and zero walks in a postseason game.

The 12 punch-outs were the most in a winner-take-all game in baseball's ancient history. They were also the most in a playoff debut in Yankees history.

Which, includes, you know, some guys. Whitey Ford, Ron Guidry, Andy Pettitte, those kind of guys.

None of 'em did what Schlittler did last night -- against, by the way, his hometown team, Schlittler having grown up in Walpole, Mass., 27 miles southwest of Boston.

The caprice of October rarely has been more capricious. Or more true to its nature.

Hot seat

 I don't know if WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert is hearing footsteps yet, but if she isn't she's either not paying attention or she's in willful denial. Because the footsteps are shaking the ground all around her.

First it was WNBA star Napheesa Collier flame-broiling her leadership, or lack thereof, in a brutal but carefully crafted four-minute takedown.

Then it was ESPN blowhole Stephen A. Smith calling for Engelbert's resignation -- significant not because it differed much from a lot of Stephen A.'s spew, but because it was Stephen A. Who, let's face it, is on your TV screen more than a 1950s test pattern these days.

Then it was former WNBA player Stacey Dales lighting her up with a story about how Engelbert basically ignored the rollout of the WNBA's new Toronto franchise.

Then ...

Well. Point made.

That point being Engelbert is on an exceedingly hot seat these days, and it's not apt to get cooler in the days ahead. Among league players and coaches, for instance, there's all but a full-scale mutiny going on over the WBNA's glaring officiating issues, and no amount of fining or suspending can seem to slow it down.

Collier's ripped the officiating. Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham have. And when Engelbert suspended Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve for her profanity-laced rant about the officiating in the Lynx-Phoenix Mercury series?

Fever coach Stephanie White and Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon both publicly backed Reeve's play, essentially saying, well, hell, she's not wrong.

Engelbert's lost the locker room, in other words. This will happen when, according to Collier, the commissioner all but sneers at the league's most prominent seat-filler (Clark), and says the players should be on their knees thanking the commish for the chunky TV deal, she got for them.

That was part of Collier's four-minute manifesto the other day, and it tracks with the contempt the boardroom seems to have for its working stiffs here in the Oligarch America of 2025 -- i.e., you should be grateful you have a job, ya bunch of bellyachers. Now go away and let me count the pile I'm making off you.

I don't know if that's Engelbert's mindset, but she did come to the WNBA from the corporate world (Deloitte) and seems to have brought those above-the-little-people sensibilities with her.

This from Sports Business Journal: "She hasn't connected; she's not a relationship builder, which you have be in that job with the teams, with the players," a source familiar with league office dynamics said last month. "I think she's a wicked smart business person, and the success she gets a lot of credit for. But a commissioner has to have a personality element that can touch every constituent that they have. I think she's lacking in it."

Which makes her appallingly tone-deaf, not to say appallingly wrong. To say Clark owes the WNBA for her off-the-court endorsement haul (as Collier claims Engelbert did) is to ignore the fact Clark was making major endorsement coin before she ever stepped foot on a WNBA floor. And, of course, it ignores the fact the fan base and attention Clark brought to Engelbert's league gave the commish major leverage in negotiating that aforementioned TV deal.

In other words, Engelbert ought to be on her knees thanking Caitlin Clark. And doing something about the league's officiating instead of fining and suspending players and coaches for criticizing it.

Because they're right, and she's wrong. And the spotlight that's on her league now is glaringly exposing just how wrong.

And as those footsteps get louder and louder.

A W of an L

 The Indiana Fever departed the 2025 season out in Vegas last night, but sing no sad songs for them. They went out on their feet, not on their shields. They went out the way champions go out, even if their names will not be inscribed on the championship trophy in a couple of weeks.

In the win-or-get-packin' Game 5 of the WNBA semis, after all, they pushed the Las Vegas Aces to overtime, on the road, before running out of weapons and gas in a 107-98 loss.

And if it seems vaguely obscene to use that word ("loss") this morning, that is entirely on the Fever. Because they didn't lose, really; they just didn't win. It was a W of an L. 

It was the Fever pushing a superior team to the cliff's edge on its home floor, and doing it, by the end, with all but empty hands. Kelsey Mitchell, the Fever's playoff engine, had departed with a leg injury in the third quarter after playing just 23 minutes. Aliyah Boston, their other playoff engine, had fouled out. Lexi Hull (43 minutes) and Odyssey Sims (41) had barely been off the floor; Brianna Turner and Shey Peddy had played heavy minutes off the bench.

And, of course, there was the Casualty Brigade over on the sideline in streets: Damiris Dantis and Chloe Bibby and Sydney Colson and Sophie Cunningham  and Aari McDonald and, of course, Caitlin Clark.

Another entire lineup plus a sixth woman, in other words.

To couch it in inappropriate but perhaps inevitable language of war, the Fever were surrounded and out of ammo. But they clubbed their muskets (to use a handy Civil War nerd term) and went down swinging.

Every one of the starting five scored in double figures, led by Sims with 27 points. Boston put up 11 points and 16 rebounds before fouling out. Natasha Howard had a16-point, seven-rebound, five-assist line. Hull scored 12 points, took down seven boards and dished three assists.

Mind-numbing stat of the night: The Fever outrebounded the Aces 40-21. And no that is not a misprint.

What it was, instead, was the evening's clearest demonstration of the Fever's will, because will is mostly what rebounding is. He (or she) who most wants the ball usually gets the ball when it goes up on the glass.

I don't know who's going to be the WNBA coach of the year. But if it's not the Fever's Stephanie White, Congress should convene one of those investigations of which it's so fond.

She essentially lost one entire team and had to cobble together another entire team in mid-season, and somehow managed to get cohesion and heart from both. That's a hell of a coaching job, is what that is. And last night?

Hell of a not-loss, Fever. Hell of a not-loss.