Today in jackwagons

Hey, I'll give a guy some rope on occasion. The Blob does stuff like that, despite all those ugly rumors to the contrary.

And so here's what I'll say about the fan in Cleveland who taunted Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran over the weekend: Maybe he was just having a bad day.

Maybe he was torqued at the way Duran was raking Guardians' pitching. Maybe he was mad because the Red Sox were making a 13-3 bonfire out of his baseball team. Or maybe he suddenly realized he lived in Cleveland.

Whatever. In any case, I can understand why he shouted "something inappropriate" at Duran, in Duran's words. I totally get how frustration might make him taunt Duran about his attempted suicide three years ago, with which Duran bravely went public during the recent Netflix doc "The Clubhouse: A Year With The Red Sox."  Hey, everybody's hu-

Ah, to heck with it. I can't pull this off.

I can't plant my tongue that deeply in my cheek, and I've been known to plant it pretty deep. So I'll dispense with the attempt to do so, and just say this: That guy in Cleveland is a jackwagon.

Like, a platinum-grade jackwagon. Like, the kind of jackwagon who still wears a Chief Wahoo cap and a Joe Charbonneau jersey stained with mustard, and who drinks 47 beers  and says "They'll always be the Indians to me!" and then passes out in the street in front of Jacobs Field or Progressive Insurance Base-ball Grounds or whatever they're calling the Guardians' home park these days.

That kind of jackwagon.

Anyway, he said what he said, and Duran, to his credit, didn't go into the stands to turn his head into a ground-rule double. Instead he just stared at the guy, and then the guy took off up the steps with security in hot pursuit. Caught easily, he was ejected from the premises and hopefully will be barred for all eternity from ever again stepping foot in said premises.

Look. As a friend of mine frequently likes to say, "Fans are a**holes." And they are. Or at least some of them are. And what's fascinating about that -- to me, anyway -- is how often the biggest a**holes are the ones in the high-dollar seats above the dugouts or courtside or in the lower bowl at center ice.

Now, I could say that's because the fans in the high-dollar seats think having sackfuls of money means they have more brains and talent than the average bear, and thus they're entitled to say or do anything they like. But that's probably an over-generalization, and it's unfair to those who actually have more brains and talent than the average bear. Because they're usually not the a**holes.

That's reserved for fans like the guy in Cleveland. 

Who clearly stepped waaaay over the line of acceptable fan taunting, as ill-defined as that line often is. Generally, though, it's OK to tell an opposing player he couldn't hit a beachball, or to make fun of his looks ("Flaps down!" you might hear, when a player with unfortunately-sized ears comes to the plate), or to torment him when he shows up on the mound without his best stuff ("Nice arm, Johnson! Is it linguine or penne?").

But when you start in on someone's mother or wife or girlfriend or sister, then you're edging toward jackwagon country. And in a time when mental health is finally getting the attention it deserves, taunting a guy courageous enough to publicly address his own mental health struggles suggests you ought to be in a zoo somewhere.

I hear Cleveland's got a nice one. Just a thought.

Gettin' drafty, Part ...

 ... ah, whatever.

In this episode, we revisit a popular long-running series, "The Cleveland Browns  Did WHAT?", in which the Browns, having already selected Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel in the third round, decide "Ah, what the hell" and take Shedeur Sanders in the fifth round.

"The Browns did WHAT?" America replied, right on cue.

The Browns took Shedeur Sanders, after already passing on him, I don't know, two or three other times, and having already taken another quarterback. Why, you ask? Beats me. They're the Browns, isn't that answer enough?

Anyway, they now have a quarterback room that looks like a half-off rack at TJ Maxx. You've got Deshaun Watson, all but washed after a series of injuries and disgraced as a serial paw-er of massage therapists. You've got Joe Flacco, who's, like, 85 years old. And you've got Kenny Pickett, who flopped in Pittsburgh and now has a terrific chance to flop in Cleveland.

That was a weird enough mix. But the Browns, apparently thinking "We can get EVEN WEIRDER", are adding two rookies -- one of whom (Gabriel) is probably wondering what the hell is going on, and the other of whom (Sanders) reportedly raised so many red flags at the combine teams ran from him in the draft as if he were the Johnstown Flood.

Imagine the vibe in the room when that crowd gets together for the first time. Never mind, I'll imagine it for you ...

Watson: OK, guys, since I'm clearly the presumptive starter here ...

Everyone else: The presumptive WHAT?

Pickett: Not a chance, dude. I'm the man. Forget Pittsburgh trading me to Philly, and Philly palming me off on this train wreck. See this here? This here's a Super Bowl ring. What's that tell ya, losers?

Watson: That everyone on the Eagles including the second-floor janitor got Super Bowl rings?

Flacco: Yeah, I've got a Super Bowl ring, remember? No, really, remember? 'Cause I can't.

Gabriel: Can someone tell me what the hell is going on?

Sanders: What's going on is I'm here to change this sorry franchise's culture. The future is now, baby, and the future is me!

Gabriel (frowning): I thought I was the future. 

Sanders: No way, Duck Boy. Look at this gem-encrusted watch! Look at this gem-encrusted Flavor Flav-sized pendant! And how about the draft room I decorated with "Legendary" all over it? You think I'd have done that if I weren't, you know, LEGENDARY?

(Everyone rolls their eyes and sighs)

Watson: Yeah, OK, fifth-rounder.

Pickett: What he said.

Flacco: Is it time for lunch yet? Also, what day is it? Thursday, right? Thursday?

Gabriel: Can someone PLEASE tell me what the hell is going on? Please?

Watson, Flacco, Pickett (in unison): Of course we can't! No one can! Welcome to the Browns!

Gettin' drafty, Part Deux

 ... in which everyone weighs in on Shedeur Sanders as he falls down the NFL's Big Board like a skydiver without a chute.

His tumble reached epic proportions Friday as the second and third rounds came and went and Shedeur continued to be the wallflower at a middle-school dance, passed over for three other quarterbacks. The Saints took Tyler Shough from Louisville in the second round; the Seahawks took Jalen Milroe of Alabama and the Browns plucked Dillon Gabriel from Oregon in the third round. New Orleans and Cleveland in particular had been tagged as possible destinations for Sanders in the unsuspecting pre-draft days.

Meanwhile, as noted, everyone weighed on the deepening mystery of Sanders' radioactivity. And by everyone, we mean "everyone."

Come on down, Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump!

Yes, that's right. Even Fearless Leader had something to say about Shedeur -- which isn't surprising considering Donald John figures every true American wants to know what he thinks about everything.

And so, never one to leave a rant un-ranted, Donald John jumped on social media to object to the injustice being visited on poor Shedeur.

"What is wrong with NFL owners, are they STUPID?" the leader of our blessed Regime wrote/spluttered. "Deion Sanders was a great college football player, and was even greater in the NFL. He's also a very good coach, streetwise and smart! Therefore, Shedeur, his quarterback son, has PHENOMENAL GENES, and is all set for Greatness. He should be 'picked' IMMEDIATELY by a team that wants to WIN."

First observation: You don't get rational, informed analysis like this just anywhere.

Second observation: A guy doesn't get that kind of attaboy from Donald John unless DJ has gotten some serious jack from him. Wonder how much Deion contributed to his presidential campaign.

Third observation: Also, wonder how much Deion has invested in Donald John's crypto-currency scam, or his various other scams over the years.

And one last observation, just for the heck of it ...

Donald John ranted his Shedeur rant after the first round. Which makes you wonder if passing over the kid in the second and third rounds might been the owners' reaction to the President of the United States publicly calling them stupid.

"Oh, yeah?" you can almost hear them sneering. "Well, watch THIS, Mr. President!"

And, OK, so that's pretty far-fetched. In fact it's beyond-space-and-time-fetched.

But you know what people say about everything Fearless Leader touches. So there's that.

And in the meantime?

In the meantime, Shedeur Sanders keeps waiting for his cell to buzz.

Hopefully it won't be Donald John. More help like that he doesn't need.

Gettin' drafty

 Well, alrighty, then. So the Cleveland Browns braintrust will not get a chance to turn Travis Hunter into, I don't know, a placekicker or something.

Instead, Brownie the Elf traded down, and Jacksonville and the New York Giants traded up, and Shedeur Sanders traded hubris for humble pie, or some such thing. Whatever. The Bears and Colts both picked tight ends, so who cares, right?

Which is the Blob's cockeyed review of Thursday's first round of the NFL Draft, which the Blob again did not watch because sometimes it likes to pretend it has a life. Also I'm allergic to draft gurus prattling on about tight skin or burst or waist-bending or all the other esoterica with which they fill those endless minutes between picks.

Anyway ... here's some stuff that happened:

1. Miami (Fla.) quarterback Cam Ward went No. 1, as expected, to the Tennessee Titans.

I don't know if this is a good pick. I don't know if this is a bad pick. Frankly I wouldn't know Cam Ward from Cam Shaft. Supposedly he was the best QB in a weak draft for QBs. So I guess we'll see.

2. The Browns traded the second pick to the Jaguars, who used it to select Hunter, the all-world two-way star from Colorado.

Does this mean the Jags plan on playing Hunter at both cornerback and wide receiver? Beats me. All I know is the Jags' quarterback is still Trevor Lawrence. This raises the exciting prospect of seeing Hunter trying to chase down overthrown balls, underthrown balls and balls Trevor Lawrence shouldn't have oughta thrown.

3. The Giants, having already selected Penn State edge rusher Abdul Carter, traded up later in the first round to take Ole Miss quarterback Jaxson Dart.

This immediately makes Jaxson Dart the Jints' third-string quarterback of the future, seeing how Russell Wilson and Jameis Winston are already on the roster. Why would the Giants trade up to take a quarterback who may not play that much in 2025, if at all?

I don't know. They're the Giants. Why do they do anything?

4. The Bears took Michigan tight end Colston Loveland with the 10th pick. The Colts took Penn State tight end Tyler Warren with the 14th pick. 

Both look like terrific picks, especially the superbly athletic Warren, whom Penn State lined up pretty much everywhere. This means there's an outside chance the Bears, and especially the Colts, didn't screw up for once.

Something, blind squirrel, acorn, something.

And last, and for the moment, least ...

5. It's Friday morning and Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders is still waiting on a phone call.

I don't know if this is just because he's Deion Sanders' kid, or because, as Deion Sanders' kid, he talked all kinds of smack pre-draft about how only teams that wanted to change their entire culture should pick him. 

No, really. He actually said that. 

NFL teams being notoriously averse to too much swagger in a rookie (and too bright a spotlight on same, which could lead to the dreaded "distraction"), everyone passed on Shedeur in the first round. Which was fairly amazing. I mean, even Jaxson Dart went in the first round.

Meanwhile, the Browns, who said "nah" to Shedeur even though they could use a quarterback, have the first pick in the second round. So there's a decent chance he could wind up in Cleveland.

Where there's a decent chance Shedeur Sanders could be either the Brownies' first culture-changing QB since Bernie Kosar, or the next Tim Couch, Brady Quinn, Brandon Weeden, Johnny Manziel et al.

Mongo

Steve McMichael died yesterday at the age of 67, and, man, does that turn 40 years into smoke. Wasn't it just yesterday Mongo was kicking tush and taking names for the best defense in the history of the NFL?

Could it be just a nanosecond ago that Richard Dent, Mike Singletary, Otis Wilson and the rest of the gang were looking across the line of scrimmage at the poor sap calling signals for the other team, and saying (per the movie) "Let's give him to Mongo"?

Of course it was.

Of course it wasn't, because Steve McMichael is dead, and the Chicago Bears' fabled "46" defense is just a page in a history book, its various pieces all pushing 70 or more.

But with Mongo gone now, it seems like the perfect time to turn back to that page.

Kids who think they saw suffocating defense as played by Ray Lewis and the 2000 Ravens, or the Legion of Boom in Seattle, or even the Eagles D that squashed the Chiefs in the most recent Super Bowl, never saw nothin' 'like the Bears 46. In  1985, Buddy Ryan's all-out hell's-comin'-with-me scheme didn't just suffocate opponents; it demoralized them. In a lot of games it had people beat before Mongo 'n' them ever stepped foot on the field.

Some numbers: In the Bears' 15-1 march to the W in Super Bowl XX, they gave up just 12.4 points and 258.4 yards per game. Throw out the one loss -- a 38-24 Monday night loss to the Dolphins that was an aberration if ever there was one -- and in 15 games, the Bears surrendered just 160 points.

That's 10.6 points per, if you do the math. A touchdown and a field goal in an era when everyone was throwing it all over the lot thanks to the 49ers' much-imitated ball-control passing game.

And McMichael?

One of the biggest ducks in the Bears' kick-ass puddle.

That season he had eight sacks, third on the team behind Richard Dent's 17 and Otis Wilson's 10.5. By the time he hung 'em up after 15 seasons, he had 95 sacks. Of those, he racked up 92.5 in 13 seasons for the Bears.

All these years later, that's still second on the Bears' all-time list.

He also never missed a start, or hardly ever. Between 1981 and 1994, he played in 207 games; his 191 consecutive games for the Bears remains the franchise record.

Which might or might not explain why he stayed in the fight so long after being diagnosed with ALS in 2021.

Four years is a long time to go toe-to-toe with such a vile killer, but Mongo did it. Lived long enough to be inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame last August; he was bedridden and unable to speak by then, but he watched on TV as his wife Misty unveiled his HOF bust and delivered his induction speech.

And in the room around him?

His teammates, of course. His fellow 46ers. No doubt, to this day, still looking for the poor sap calling signals for the other team.

And no doubt, on that day more than ever, wishing they could give him to Mongo.

Double duty?

 Tomorrow in Green Bay the NFL Draft begins, and OMIGOD TOMORROW THE NFL DRAFT BEGINS!! THE NFL DRAFT, AMERICA!!

Which is my way of expressing the level of excitement ESPN expects from you humps about the Shield's annual three-day auction to determine which sadsack NFL team is going to ruin which college star's life with one fateful phone call. Congratulations, son, you're a Tennessee Titan/Cleveland Brown/New York Giant. We suck, and now you're gonna suck, too! Welcome!

Any-hoo, the drama is upon us, or so the NFL and ESPN wants everyone to believe. And I suppose there is an element of suspense involved in what is frankly just a series of business transactions when you get right down to it.

For instance:Will the Tennessee Titans, who are expected to take Miami (Fla.) quarterback Cam Ward with the No. 1 pick, screw everything up by taking Penn State edge rusher Abdul Carter or Colorado two-way star Travis Hunter instead?

If so, will a running back (Ashton Jeanty) actually go before a quarterback?

Will the Giants get suckered into trading the third pick to a fictitious team from Idaho, the Coeur d'Alene Maple Creams?

And speaking of ruining a college star's life, will the Browns take Travis Hunter with the second pick?

These are the same Browns, remember, who tried to make an NFL quarterback out of Johnny Manziel. Who turned Baker Mayfield into a bust and then traded him to Tampa Bay, where he not-so-amazingly became a non-bust. And who'll now get to decide whether the multi-talented Hunter plays cornerback, wide receiver or does double duty.

Go ahead and shudder at the implications.

Also, imagine being a fly on the wall as the Browns braintrust mulls its options:

Brain No. 1: I say play him at cornerback. No, wait, wide receiver. No, wait, cornerback.

Brain No. 2: Ah, geez, make up your mind. 

Brain No. 3: Seriously, dude.

Brain No. 1: Yeah? OK, geniuses, what's YOUR idea?

Brain No. 2: Simple. Play him both ways. What the hell, the kid wants to try it, I say let him try it.

Brain No. 3: Seriously!

Brain No. 1: Oh, come on! You can't play a guy both ways in the modern NFL. He'll be on IR by the third game! Or if he miraculously doesn't get hurt, he'll look like Tom Hanks in "Castaway" by Thanksgiving. Hell, he'll probably even be talking to volleyballs.

Brain No. 2: But think of the pub, man! A 60-minute man in the modern NFL? The Browns will be on every magazine cover in America, and not because we did something stupid.  And the day Travis catches 12 balls at wideout and has two picks on defense? We'll be the No. 1 topic on every talk show in America!

Brain No. 3: Seriously!

Brain No. 1 (sarcastically): Well, gee, let's just play him at quarterback, too, then. He could throw a deep seam and then use his superhuman speed to catch it. Or have him kick off and return the kick. Alter the very laws of physics, not to mention the rulebook!

(Brief pause as everyone actually considers this)

Brain No. 2: Well, you know ...

Brain No. 3: Seriously!

Know the most mind-boggling thing about all that?

Given that we're talking about the Browns, it might not be satire.

Seriously.

Tit for tat ...

... or, you know, Nico for Joey.

Welcome to the latest episode in that wildest of Wild West Shows, "Transfer Portal Shenanigans," brought to you by Subway, All-State and whatever college athletics is now. In this edition, major-league college football and basketball's inertial movement toward full professional status reached a new milestone yesterday:

The first actual player trade.

OK, so not a trade, exactly. The two schools involved were not, well, involved in the deal (at least that we know of). But it amounted to tomato, to-mah-to.

What happened was, Nico Iamaleava transferred from Tennessee to UCLA, on account of Tennessee wouldn't rework his NIL deal and said "There's the door, son."

After which a kid named Joey Aguilar, freshly arrived in L.A. from Appalachian State, transferred from UCLA to Tennessee.

Needless to say, both Nico and Joey are quarterbacks. And thus, voila, a quarterback-for-quarterback trade. Of sorts.

And, sure, it was bound to happen sometime, given the way players are portaling from hither to yon like Captain Kirk transporting down to do battle with the Gorn. You say the old alma mater just landed the 2-guard everyone in America was after? Well, say goodbye to your current 2-guard, then. He's leaping into the portal for parts unknown, where his arrival will cause that school's 2-guard to leap into the portal, and ...

And so on and so forth.

In this particular case, it remains to be seen which school got the better end of their quarterback swap. Iamaleava (which, it just occurred to me, could be pronounced "I-am-a-leave(e)-a"), who still has three years of eligibility, threw for 2,616 yards and 19 touchdowns and ran for 358 yards and three more scores for a Tennessee team that went 10-2 and reached the College Football Playoff, where it was washed by eventual national champion Ohio State.

And Aguilar?

In the last two seasons at App State, he threw for 6,760 yards and 56 touchdowns before transferring to UCLA (and his home state of California) in the winter portal. Then Iamaleava showed up, and he was gone before he'd even learned the UCLA fight song.

(The fight song is called either "Sons of Westwood" or "Bruin Warriors", in case you were wondering. And you were, because why else would you read the Blob unless it was to obtain valuable knowledge like that?)

Anyway, Aguilar is headed for the place Iamaleava just, well, left. It's probably unfair to use the word "fled" to describe his departure, because that would imply Joey was afraid of competing for the job with the new arrival. On the other hand, it's perhaps not unfair to imply that.

Then again ...

Then again, maybe Joey thinks he looks better in orange than he does in powder-blue-and-gold. And maybe he thinks "Sons of Westwood/Bruin Warriors" blows because he's always harbored a secret love for "Rocky Top", playing it over and over late at night on his MP3 when everyone else was asleep.

Hey. Stranger things have happened.

And will continue to happen, clearly.

Stanley watch

 The best of all playoffs began over Easter weekend, and the good news is, the regular season champs DID NOT CRASH AND BURN. OK, so they crashed a little, for awhile, but they didn't burn.

I'm speaking, of course, of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and of the Winnipeg Jets, who finished the regular season with a league-best 56-22-4 record. Their 116 points were five clear of the second-best team, the Washington Capitals, and their goal differential -- plus-86 -- was the best in the league by nine goals. They also had the league's best goaltender in Connor Hellebuyck. 

All of this traditionally should doom the Jets in the playoffs. 

That's because the best team in the regular season hardly ever hoists Stanley, and you can look it up. It's been 17 years since it last happened, when the Detroit Red Wings beat Pittsburgh in the 2008 Stanley Cup Final. And it's not like the Jets have a lot of history going for them on top of that.

No, sir. Neither the original Jets (who relocated to Phoenix in 1996) nor the reconstituted Jets (who arrived in 2011 as the former Atlanta Thrashers) have ever won a Stanley Cup. They've never even reached the Cup Final. 

Not once. Not in 53 years. Oh-for-53, that's the Jets.

But, hey, there's still hope!

The other night, after all, the Jets opened the playoffs with a 5-3 win at home over St. Louis. And, OK, so it wasn't pretty. Hellebuyck wasn't himself; he wasn't exactly a sieve, but he did give up three goals in the first two periods. The Blues, who barely scraped into the playoffs, led 3-2 at that point.

But then the Jets said, "Hey, wait a minute, we were the best team in the regular season, and they barely scraped into the playoffs!" (Or something like that). They scored three goals in the third, outshot St. Louis 9-2 and pulled out the W.

This means they're up 1-0 in the series and still in the running to become the first Canadian team in 32 years to put their paws on the Cup. Thirty-two years! Geez, Bill Clinton was a newbie president then. Donald Trump was just another mega-rich jackass palling around with Jeffrey Epstein and putting his name on stuff. It was a long time ago.

The good news for our neighbors to the north is they've got more chances than ever this year to end the drought, on account of every Canadian team except Calgary and Vancouver made the playoffs. Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Edmonton are all in. Surely one of them could hot for two months, right?

Except for, you know, the Jets, because the best team never wins. And also the Maple Leafs, because, well, they're the Maple Leafs -- the Chicago Cubs of the NHL, continually raising their fans' hopes only to cruelly dash them on the jagged rocks of failure. 

(Or something like that)

Anyway, that's your Stanley Cup watch for now. May the best team win.

Or the sort of best team. Or some team. Whatever.

Everyday barbarity

 The remembering place is at the top of a grassy hill, up a winding path from a green park where children play and parents watch and families lay out the picnic things. 

It's quiet up here, beneath the wide Colorado sky. A breeze ripples the grass and tugs at your cap. A wide paved entryway opens onto an earth-tone brick wall that curves gracefully away from you. Set into it here and there are bronze plaques inscribed with words of ache and loss and bewilderment, and of a determination never, ever to forget.

A mile away, give or take, across from the park and a parking lot and this peaceful hilltop, sits Columbine High School.

Where, 26 years ago today, two lost kids named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hauled firearms and homemade bombs into their school, murdered a teacher and a dozen of their classmates, and wounded 20 others. Then they shot themselves.

The remembering place -- the Columbine Memorial -- is the result of all that. It's a community's way of coping with an unimaginable loss back when it was still impossible to imagine such loss.

Theirs was not the first school shooting in America's history, but it became the seminal one in the national consciousness -- the dividing line between a time when we could still fancy ourselves a civilized nation, and this different, darker time. The cold deliberation of the act, its naked barbarity, lent it a particular horror that remains even as the barbarity has become a seeming everyday reality.

Columbine, see, was only beginning, or the imagined beginning. In time there would be Sandy Hook and Uvalde and Las Vegas and Aurora and Virginia Tech and dozens upon dozens others -- a veritable mass-shooting-of-the-week that would evoke pro forma thoughts-and-prayers from politicians who couldn't have cared less, and a sort of normalized numbness from an America grown used to living in an armed camp.

That armed camp produced yet another school shooter this week, and it wasn't a transgender or a Venezuelan gang member or some alleged terror-lover. It was a white 20-year-old MAGA from Tallahassee, Fla., the son of a deputy sheriff, who borrowed his mom's service revolver and shot eight people, two fatally, during an afternoon stroll on the campus of Florida State University.

And how did the President of the United States respond?

More or less with a shrug and "these things will happen." Or words to that effect.

Given the mindset of the president's fear-driven Regime, it's not unfair to wonder how different his reaction might have been had the shooter not been a Regime supporter. Not much of a stretch to imagine how the Regime would have revved up the Other machine if the shooter had been one of those creepy transgenders, or a Hispanic immigrant, or a Middle Eastern college student. Or, God forbid, a Democrat.

You might think this is straying a bit afield, but it's not really. In ways both big and small, that hilltop in Colorado, and the date it memorializes, is the on-ramp to a lot of it.

I've been thinking about that hilltop all weekend, and especially the bizarre confluence of the weekend's dates. Yesterday, for instance -- April 19 -- was the 250th anniversary of Lexington, Concord and an uprising of farmers and yeomen that became the American Revolution. It was also the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, who no doubt thought murdering 168 babies, children and everyday working Americans somehow made him kith and kin to those farmers and yeomen.

It didn't, of course. Instead, he was just a monster who died by lethal injection six years later in the federal pen. Put down like a rabid animal, and good riddance.

And today, April 20th?

The anniversary of Columbine. And also Easter Sunday, when those of us who believe celebrate the risen Christ, the most important day of our faith.

The world is a strange place.

And while you're praying your Easter prayers, pray it never becomes stranger, or darker, or uglier, or ever requires another hilltop remembering place.

Off and ... we'll see

 Time now to check in with Your Indiana Pacers, on account of the NBA playoffs have begun and the Your Pacers opened yesterday with a thorough 117-98 fanny-warming of the Milwaukee Bucks. Pascal Siakam scored 25 points on 10-of-15 shooting, Tyrese Halliburton parceled out a dozen assists with just one turnover, and ain't God good to Indiana? Ain't he though?

(Random William Miller Herschell reference. You're welcome.)

Anyway, Your Pacers put four of their five starters in double figures, bottomed 13 threes, shot 53 percent and outrebounded the Milwaukees. Myles Turner scored 19 points, cleared five boards and blocked four shots. Your Pacers led 67-43 at the break and never looked back.

However.

"Oh, here we go," you're saying now. "Why you gotta do this? Can't you just say 'Yay, Pacers'? Can't you let Pacers Nation bask for ONE LOUSY MINUTE in the W before you start in with the 'howevers'?"

OK, OK. One minute. Go.

(Brief 60-second pause in today's post)

Satisfied now? 

Good, because all I mean by "however" is the NBA playoffs outlast entire epochs of human existence, and stuff tends to happen. Momentum is a chimera in sports, we all know that, but it seems especially true in the NBA. You don't have to search very hard for proof; it's as close to hand as the Pacers in last year's playoffs, when they played like kings one game and like beheaded kings the next. 

And so, yes, yesterday was a good start, but a start is all it is. In Game 2 tomorrow, Giannis Antetokoumpo, who scored 36 of the 50 points put up by Milwaukee's starters, might actually get some help. Kyle Kuzma, who didn't score a point in Game 1, could go for 20 this time. Brook Lopez, who had a quiet nine-point, four-rebound night, could got for a double-double. Siakam could miss 10 of 15 instead of making 10 of 15.

Or, you know, not.

Your Pacers could continue to pound the wounded Bucks, who are playing without Damian Lillard. It could be 2-0 for the good guys heading north to Milwaukee. Siakam could go off again; Halliburton, who scored just 10 points in Game 1, could put up a 30-spot; Giannis could come down with a bum back from carrying everyone else.

It's platinum-grade trite to say you just never know. But you just never know.

Which is what makes the NBA playoffs so compelling despite their seeming endlessness. You can be off and running one night. And a couple nights later?

Well. We'll see.

One for the ages

 Science has yet to prove there's some atmospheric disturbance over Wrigley Field that makes crazy stuff happen, but science has a lot on its plate these days. Sooner or later the boys and girls in the lab coats will get around to it.

In the meantime, we have only circumstantial evidence to go on.

Like a young Kerry Wood striking out 20 Houston Astros one April afternoon.

Like the Philadelphia Phillies and your homestanding Chicago Cubs combining for 45 runs, 50 hits and 11 home runs in a 23-22 Phillies win on a breezy day in May.

Like ...

Well. Like the Cubs and Arizona Diamondbacks doing whatever the hell that was yesterday.

The final box score tells us it was a 13-11 Cubs win, but that ain't the crazy part. The crazy part was what happened in the eighth inning.

When the D-Backs scored 10 runs in their half to erase a seemingly safe 7-1 lead for the home team.

And when the Cubs then scored six runs in their half to snatch back the lead and preserve the wildest W in the bigs so far this season, or perhaps in a whole bunch of seasons.

According to baseball's all-seeing record book, yesterday's insanity was only the seventh time in 125 years that a team has given up 10 or more runs in an inning and won. It was also only the fifth time a team has given up 10 or more runs and then scored six or more in the same inning.

So the Cubs have that going for them.

What they clearly don't have, according to a friend who's been a Cubs fan forever, is a bullpen that isn't human lighter fluid. 

Through the first seven innings yesterday, four Cubs pitchers yielded just one run on six hits and struck out eight D-Backs. Then came the firestarters: Across the last two innings, the Cubs pen surrendered 10 runs on nine hits -- two of them homers, including a grand slam -- and fanned just one batter.

It was so bad one of the Cubs relievers, Jordan Wicks, had an ERA of "infinity." Seriously. Go look it up.

Of course, the D-Backs bullpen was a tattoo parlor as well. Handed a four-run lead with just six outs remaining, Arizona relievers Bryce Jarvis and Joe Mantiply were launched into space, giving up six runs on seven hits, including those three dingers.

Final tally for the day: 23 combined runs, 33 combined hits, seven combined home runs, 15 combined extra-base hits. And another one for the ages from the Friendly Atmosphere Disturbance.

Craziness. Glorious craziness.

Head of his class

 Time now to put on an alligator head and salute the man who's never taken himself so damn seriously, because didn't anyone ever tell you college football was supposed to be fun? Didn't any of you notice what an absolute gosh-darn hoot it is?

Well, step right up, then, and hand some flowers to Lee Corso, who is 89 going on 17 and is about to don his last gator (or lion, or tiger, or Oklahoma State cowboy) head. The other day he announced he's retiring after one last ESPN College GameDay broadcast Aug. 30, and the salutes came rolling in from all quarters. Because how does Lee Corso not warm the cockles of your heart, whatever a cockle is? 

You'd have to be the Scroogiest of Scrooges not to give the man his due, even if in his later years his fastball was not what it once was. He's been a part of GameDay -- the fun part -- since it premiered in 1987, and for nearly the last 30 years he's been the grand finale of the whole banana split. That's when he started choosing the winner of whatever game he and the GameDay gang were at by donning the head of that school's mascot.

So, yeah, he's worn a Florida Gator head, oh, you bet. And the head of the Oklahoma State Cowboy. The Penn State Nittany Lion? You bet he'll stick his head in its papier mache mouth. A TCU Horned Frog head? A Brutus the Ohio State Buckeye head? A Colorado Buffalo head, an Oregon Duck head, an Alabama Crimson Tide elephant head, even the full armor of a USC Trojan?

Bring 'em on. It's what America is waiting for, right?

The dirty secret behind all this tomfoolery is Corso knew his football, too, and when he was a coach he wanted to win as badly as anyone. But he was also a realist.

He knew, for instance, that when he came to Indiana in the early 1970s there was an excellent chance he wasn't going to win a lot, at least at first. So one game he and the team arrived on the field in a double-decker bus. He got Woody Hayes all wrathy once when the Hoosiers scored first against one of Woody's Ohio State juggernauts, and Corso gathered his team in front of the scoreboard for a picture.

Then there was the time he scheduled a home-and-home with USC because, as he put it, he wanted to keep his promise to bring a Rose Bowl team to Indiana. And that time at Louisville when he rode an elephant to give his program some badly needed pub.

A few years later came his spectacularly ham-fisted firing in Bloomington, which school officials announced while Corso was out of town, the cowards. A few years after that came College GameDay, and Corso's signature line "Not so fast, my friend", and all the rest.

Want know something, though?

In 38 years, his best GameDay moment might not have been all those mascot heads, or the time he dressed up like the Notre Dame leprechaun, or the time he dressed up as Ben Franklin when GameDay went to an Ivy League game between Penn and Harvard. It might have happened just last fall.

That's when fellow Gameday host Kirk Herbstreit broke down on the set talking about his beloved golden retriever Ben, who passed away after becoming something of a Gameday mascot himself. The guy sitting next to Herbie promptly reached over and gave him a grandfatherly pat him on the shoulder.

I don't have to tell you who that guy was. You know.

It was Lee Corso.  Ol' Mascot Head himself.

And the head of his class, of course.

Health nuts

 I should know better, after all this time. In fact I do know better, but sometimes the better angels of my nature get pushed aside by the angels from the wrong side of the tracks, and off they take me to places I know I shouldn't go.

In other words: Sometimes I just can't hold my tongue. Even when I know it's pointless.

And so again with my standard disclaimer, because I'm going off the Sportsball rez once more. Here's your hall pass. The library is thataway. You've heard it all before.

Me, I'm gonna talk a bit about Frick and Frack. Mostly Frick.

Their legit handles are Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Frick) and Dr. Mehmet Oz (Frack), and they were in Indiana the other day talkin' about health and stuff. One (Frick) is the head of Health and Human Services, and also a conspiracy kook and former heroin addict. The other is a TV doctor turned political appointee.

That day in Indiana, they stood alongside our illustrious governor, Mike Braun, who was  talkin' up his new initiative, "Making Indiana Healthy Again." Scores of Hoosiers, being notorious contrarians, no doubt put down their giant pork tenderloins long enough to say, "Bite me, Mikey."

Frick and Frack, on the other hand, thought the guv's initiative was a splendid idea, even if one of its more significant proposals is to deny parents on public assistance the use of those funds to buy their kids an occasional Snickers. Take that, urchins!

But I'm getting off the path here.

What I really mean to address is one of Frick's traditional bugaboos, autism. In his new role, he wants to get to the bottom of why autism rates are rising among America's children. And as part of that, he's assigned a man named David Geier the task of looking into links between autism and ... vaccines.

Aaaand down that rabbit hole we go again.

Remember Jenny McCarthy saying vaccines were bad, bad, bad because they caused autism? Remember Frick, before the Regime made him our Health Czar, advancing the same notion?

It was David Geier and his doctor dad, Mark Geier, who put that in their heads.

According to their highly dubious study, an element found in vaccines caused autism. Their conclusions were promptly and roundly discredited by every medical authority who, unlike the Geiers, weren't out-and-out quacks. The whole "study", in fact, was such a joke Doc Geier had his license yanked and his son -- who had no medical background whatsoever -- was charged with practicing medicine without a license.

(You can find all of that, and more, here, in Christer Watson's oped piece in The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. Subscribe today. They put out lots of good stuff.)

In any case, David Geier is back, baby. And Frick is saying stuff about autism that indicates he has even less clear an understanding of it than he does of so much else.

Here's what he said about autistic kids the other day, for instance: "And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted ..."

I can say unequivocally and with some authority that Frick is completely full of s*** about that. No toilet pun intended.

I can say this because I have some fairly intimate knowledge about autism and how it works, and Frick has no ... freaking ... clue.  I won't tell you how I came by that knowledge, because it's none of your damn business. But rest assured I do.

See, what Frick was saying about autistic kids ignores the fact that autism presents in myriad ways, and there are as many coping mechanisms to help those on the autism spectrum fit into the "normal" world. It's true the most severe cases may never manage to do that, but a vast swath of those on the spectrum learn not to just live in a world they find strange, but to thrive in it.

They, yes, hold down jobs. They, yes, pay taxes. They graduate from college, they negotiate business deals, they manage their finances, they find love. Some of them, yes, might even play baseball.

Tarik El-Abour, for instance.

Who in 2018 became the first minor-league player known to be on the spectrum when he signed with the Kansas City Royals organization. Tarik wasn't just on the spectrum; he was on the spectrum. He didn't speak until he was 6 years old. He'd only eat five foods. And when he was 10 years old and first discovered baseball, it was as alien to him as the surface of Neptune.

But at some point, he fell in love with it. 

Played it in high school. Went to college and played it there. Eventually caught the eye of a Royals scout. 

I'm sure Frick never heard of him.

I'm equally sure I pray I don't get sick anytime soon, seeing how we've put the nation's health in the hands of a guy who spent 14 years frying half his brain cells, a TV quack and another quack who presumably still thinks vaccines cause autism.

God help us.

The new chumps

 Time now for another of the Blob's semi-irregular features, seeing how it's mid-April and the baseball season has been chugging along  nicely for about three weeks if you count the Cubs-Dodgers series over in Japan.

Yes, that's right boys girls. "Cruds Alert!" is back, baby!

And, no, this time it does not highlight my very own Pittsburgh Cruds, who are 6-12 and last as usual in the NL Central. This is because even though they're still my Cruds, they're actually the best of the last-place teams in the National League. Call it a pride deal.

But there's more!

In a stunning upset, today's "Cruds Alert!" also does not feature the defending chumps, your Chicago What Sox, even though the Whats are already eight games under .500 (4-12) and have resumed their place as the worst team in the American League. That's because there's a new chump-een out there.

Come on down, you Colorado Rockheads!

Who are 3-14, have lost their last five and are 2-8 in their last ten. They've played all of 17 games, and already they have double-digit road losses (10). And they're already 10 1/2 games out of first in the NL West and seven out of next-to-last.

In 17 games. Seven ... teen.

This is 2024 What Sox-level stuff, and raises the alarming possibility that the south side of Chicago is about to be subjected to the worst of all fates: Ordinary everyday awfulness instead of truly epic awfulness.

 Last summer, after all, a southsider could at least see history being made when he or she visited Guaranteed Comiskey Rate Park. But now that the Rockheads seem poised to be this season's featured loser, all the What Sox can offer their fans is day after dreary day of horrid baseball without the alluring soupcon of immortality.

The Rockheads, on the other hand, are on pace to lose 133 games right now. Which would make the 2024 What Sox' 121 losses look like weak cheese indeed. 

Of course, it's a long season, and circumstances can change. The 'Heads could catch fire and go on a 9-18 tear at some point. Or the What Sox could really catch fire and reel off another book-length losing streak to put the Rockheads in their wake. 

Shoot. Even the rootless Athletics could get in on this, seeing how they only have half a name and thus are already a leg up on both the 'Heads and the Whats. They're not the Oakland Athletics anymore, but they're also not the Sacramento Athletics. Sacramento is just where they've parked their transient selves while they wait for the next train to hop.

In which case, perhaps they should call themselves the Tom Joad Athletics. It's a thought.

At any rate, the A's are no great shakes, either, at 7-10 and last in the AL West. But they're not the Rockheads or the What Sox, aside from the homeless thing. 

And no one's the 'Heads right now.

Who are so bad not even fellow Denverite Nikola Jokic could come across town and save 'em. And that's saying something.

We are all enemies now

 (In which the Blob issues its standard disclaimer about wandering off the Sportsball reservation in search of an open space to shake its fist in a non-compartmented manner. You know the drill.)

A bright chilly Tuesday here in the United States of Suspicion, and I'm thinking about the Brits again.

There were three of them, a father and his almost-adult children, one a university student and the other a high school kid, or whatever they call high school in Great Britain. The young man was a huge NBA fan, and when he found out I was a retired sportswriter he grilled me about Steph and LeBron and all his other faves. The young woman, her father said with ill-disguised pride, was a talented artist.

One warm summer afternoon a couple of years back, we sat chatting in the observation car of the California Zephyr, the stunning canvas of America sliding past as we rode the rails west through Utah and Nevada and on toward San Francisco.

"What brings you to the States?" I asked, at one point.

The father replied that he wanted to show his children America, and he decided taking the train across the country was how to do that. It unfolded more slowly that way, like a topo  map unfolding in real time to reveal worn foothills and mountains and farmland and endless prairie and the stark, jagged beauty of the American west.

The country in all its grandeur and squalor and infinite ordinariness, in other words. That's what Dad was after when they all boarded the train in New York City and set off for the Pacific.

I didn't ask how long they planned to be in the country. It didn't seem to matter at the time.

Now it might.

Now, see, it is no longer that time but this time, the time of the Regime, when America has grown grim and insensate, not to mention deeply paranoid about anyone who is not, you know, American. If you speak no English, or you speak it with a funny accent, or you look, (wink-wink) different, you are not to be trusted, in this America. 

You're a foreigner, dammit. And foreigners are up to no good more times than you think.

Which is why, at the end of last week, the Regime rolled out its latest edict regarding foreign nationals: If you are one of them, and you're 14 or older, you have 30 days to register with the government. If you've been here longer than that, or plan to be, and haven't registered, it's a misdemeanor. Depending on the circumstances, you could even be deported.

Also, once you've registered, you must carry proof on your person at all times.

Me, I wonder if that would have applied to the British father and his two kids.

They were simply delightful people, the three of them, and so, as obvious tourists, perhaps they wouldn't have had to carry the proper papers (German accent implied, naturally). And perhaps, on Day 31, some jackbooted Regime official would not have asked to see them. 

 Honestly, I don't really know. Neither the Dog Killer (i.e. Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem) nor Regime mouthpiece Spinderella Barbie (i.e., press secretary Karoline Leavitt) made it clear how America would treat foreign nationals who were just here on an extended holiday. 

You'd hope my British friends would have been treated like guests and not potential terrorists. You'd hope they would have been treated the way America used to treat overseas visitors back when America was still America, and not this dark, angry place it's become.

You treated people from elsewhere with common decency, in that other America. You assumed the best about them and not the worst. You granted them the benefit of the doubt as a simple courtesy.

But that was then. And this is now.

When we are all enemies, it seems, until proven otherwise.

Closer and closer

 There is professional football afoot in America right now, sort of, and, no, I am not talking about the the Memphis Showboats vs. the Michigan Panthers. That's the UFL, which barely counts, seeing how no one's watching it except degenerate gamblers and various other sadsacks.

 No, sirree. I'm talkin' about real professional football, where players make salary demands and teams either say "yea" or "nay." 

"Oh, come on!" you're saying now. "Isn't the NFL shoving mock drafts down our throats enough for you? Do we have to read about Roger Goodell's kingdom 24/7/365?"

Who says I'm talking about the NFL?

'Cause I'm not.

No, I'm talking about the other professional football, which is frankly just as professional as the NFL and way more so than the UFL. I'm talking about college football.

Where, down at the University of Tennessee, the Volunteers just said "nay" to quarterback Nico Iamaleava's salary demands. Seems Nico wanted $4 mill to stick around, and Tennessee told him to take a hike.

And, OK, so Nico wasn't demanding a salary, exactly. College football hasn't gotten brave enough to dive into those waters just yet. But the day when it finally whispers "OK, time to quit stalling and DO THIS" is getting closer and closer, and the Nico situation illustrates just how close that day might be.

What, after all, is the fundamental difference between an NIL deal and an actual salary to play football for dear old Whatsamatta U.? 

Now that schools can get directly involved in those deals, the fiction of the "student-athlete" is even more fictitious than ever. It's a fairy tale straight from the Brothers Grimm. And the dynamic between Nico Iamaleava and the University of Tennessee only the latest proof.

Nico, or at least his representatives (yes, college kids have "representatives" now) made a demand; Tennessee said no. Word has it he and several other Tennessee players even considered sitting out the College Football Playoff last year to leverage a better deal.

Just like, you know, Player X refusing to report to training camp because he's in a salary beef with the Vikings or the Browns or the Giants or the Eagles or whoever.

The only difference at this point is, unlike the NFL, college football has no contract structure to act as a guardrail. And coupled with the unrestrained transfer portal, that makes every Nico Iamaleava a free agent every year and all the time. 

And that is an unsustainable model.

Which means sooner rather than later college football is going to have to swallow hard and admit, finally and irrevocably, that the fiction is dead and  their "student-athletes" are employees of the university just as surely as, say, Kyler Murray is an employee of the Arizona Cardinals. They're there to generate revenue for a specific brand, only instead of the Arizona Cardinals it's ... well, the University of Tennessee or University of Michigan or Penn State University or the University of Alabama.

An actual professional structure that treated players like the pros they already are would finally acknowledge that reality. It would lock them into multi-year contracts for an agreed-upon salary, throwing a lasso around the current Wild West show.

In the meantime, here is college football: Standing on the high dive, steeling itself, looking down at all that deep, deep water.

It looks more than just intimidating, at this point. It looks inevitable. 

The war within

The leaderboard lied to all of us, first off. Fed us a straight-up, top-of-the-line stretcher.

See those names up there? J. Rose and L. Aberg and, hell, even B. DeChambeau for a time?

They weren't the ones chasing R. McIlroy through the sunlight and shadow of Augusta National Sunday afternoon. 

They weren't the ones bringing the heat, breathing down his neck, turning his knees to jelly and his nerves to marmalade.

The guy who did that was R. McIlroy himself. And it was one almighty struggle.

R. McIlroy, first name Rory, came to Sunday with a two-shot lead and the green jacket and career Grand Slam in sight, and he got both. But not before Himself put him on the rack and tortured him a bit, just for the fun of it.

It was Rory, see, who radared irons into the greens, and feathered a seeing-eye draw on 15 that was the shot of the Masters, and built a four-stroke lead with eight holes to play. And it was Himself who kept finding water and beachfront and sliding spitting-distance putts past the cup, blowing the lead and then regaining it and then blowing it again and then regaining it again.

Any number of times yesterday, Rory could have ended it. He had it in his hip pocket after back-to-back birds at 9 and 10 -- he led J. Rose, first name Justin, by four strokes at that point -- but then Himself seized the wheel.

Bogey at 11. Double-bogey at 13. Another bogey at 14.

That's four strokes lost in four holes, if you're keeping score at home. You could practically hear the beep-beep-beep as Rory backed up to the field.

But wait, there's more!

At 15, Rory took back the wheel and hit that spooky-good draw.

Then Himself yakked the extremely makeable putt for eagle that would have essentially ended it.

Then Rory dropped the comeback birdie to draw even with Rose again, dropped another iron in the bucket to birdie 17 and retake the lead, and came to 18 needing only a par to finish it.

Himself promptly hit a popup into a greenside bunker.

After which Rory blasted out to within whispering distance of the jacket and the Slam. After which Himself -- again! -- put a faint-hearted stroke on the putt for par, trundling it wide right and forcing R. McIlroy into a playoff with J. Rose.

And then ...

And then, Rory grabbed the wheel one last time.

After Rose dropped his approach within a legit birdie putt of the pin, Rory did him one better. He dropped his approach so close to the jar he could have knocked in the birdie putt with a garden hose, and after Rose's birdie try missed, McIlroy tapped in for the green jacket, the career Slam, the whole damned thing.

Rarely has a man won a golf tournament who tried so hard to lose it.

Rarely have we seen the war within every pro golfer more starkly play out, nor seen its toll so openly expressed.

You've seen the video now, no doubt: How Rory flung his putter skyward as the ball dived into the cup, then dropped to his knees, put his head down and wept into the grass, shoulders shaking. Then he was up and screaming at the sky. and grabbing his caddy, and making the long stroll to the clubhouse, his features arranging and re-arranging as he cried and then laughed and then cried some more.

It was the look one of the greatest golfers of his generation wears when he's finally achieved immortality, after years of wrenching misses.

It was the look of a man who once again went toe-to-toe with his cruelest nemesis, and finally, finally took him down.

R. McIlroy 1. Himself 0.

Put that up on the scoreboard.

Again the chasee

 And now the latest renewal of that long-running Augusta National favorite, "How Will Rory Blow It This Time?", aka "Oh, Crap, I'm Leading Again", aka "I Bet I Could Hit One O' Them Cabins Over There If I Really Tried."

Which Rory McIlroy famously did once -- OK, so almost did -- during one of his several Sunday meltdowns at the Masters. And now he's the chasee again after 54 holes, leading Bryson DeChambeau by two nervous strokes. Cue the spooky Organ Music Of Foreboding.

If I were a betting man, I'd drop some coin on DeChambeau to don the green jacket. Guy birdied three of the last four holes yesterday to whittle McIlroy's lead from four strokes to two, and finished by dunking a 48-foot Rand McNally birdie on 18. He's not just breathing down Rory's neck, he's practically sharing McIlroy's shirt with him.

Now, it's true McIlroy put up an impeccable 66 to semi-separate himself, bagging a couple of eagles along the way. It's also true this will be his 11th crack at completing the career Grand Slam, something that's been done in the Masters era only by Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. Your basic golf Hall of Fame, in other words.

McIlroy would fit in nicely with that group, seeing how's he's one of the pre-eminent golfers of his generation. So you can look at him finally breaking through today as merely history behaving itself.

And yet ...

And yet, it's the Masters. 

It's Sunday.

It's Augusta National, Amen Corner and all that mess.

Gruesome car crashes in the final 18 holes are kind of a thing here, in other words. People hitting golf balls into ponds and creeks and up against pines, or deep into the patrons lining the ropes. Snap hooks sailing off into parts unknown. Putts in swim trunks and carrying beach towels rolling fast across the diabolical greens into bodies of water.

I don't know any of that will happen to Rory today, once again. I don't know if he'll smite another cabin, or hit six balls into Rae's Creek, or triple-doink a snap hook off a stately pine, a port-a-potty and the dome of Merle the insurance salesman from Colorado Springs. 

I hope he doesn't.

I hope, for posterity's sake, he holds off DeChambeau, and doesn't get waylaid because one of his other pursuers -- a Corey Conners, say, or Patrick Reed or Ludvig Aberg -- lapses into unconsciousness and puts up some baroque number. The order of the golfing universe, or something, would be all out of round without Rory McIlroy finally donning a green jacket. 

I'm still picking DeChambeau, however. I'm just mean that way.

Bum Rushed

 Twirled the radio dial in the conveyance looking for the local sports talk show one afternoon this week, and the local sports talk show wasn't there. It had simply vanished into the ether (or wherever radio waves go when they vanish), and instead Jim Rome was yapping at me.

This was not an acceptable tradeoff.

It was not acceptable because the local show -- called SportsRush, coming to us live from1380 AM -- was about the only one I regularly listened to, not being a particular fan of most sports talk radio. It kept me plugged into the local/area scene, because as an old sportswriter, old sportswriter-ly habits die hard. Plus the host, Brett Rump, is a friend of mine.

But suddenly it was just gone. Poof. No announcement, no explanation, no nothin'. Just got disappeared the way foreign college students get disappeared these days -- and there instead was Jim Bleeping Rome, whom I frankly despise.

Which means I guess you could call this a personal beef. So be it.

Doesn't mean it's not legit, though.

It's legit because the city where I live, Fort Wayne, is a damn lively sports town, one entirely worthy of two hours in the late afternoon Monday through Friday. We've got one of the iconic minor-league hockey franchises in America here, the Komets of the ECHL. Got one of the best-run, most successful minor-league baseball teams in the country, the TinCaps of the single-A Midwest League.

Over on the southwest side, meanwhile, there's a bonafide college football legend, Kevin Donley, who's brought two national titles to the University of St. Francis. Just east of downtown is Indiana Tech, home to immensely successful track-and-field and women's basketball and hockey programs. And up on the north side, there's Purdue-Fort Wayne, a D-I school whose men's and women's basketball programs are among the best in the Horizon League.

SportsRush gave big chunks of airtime to all of those, plus the Colts and Pacers and IU and Purdue football and basketball and the area high school kids. And now?

 Now 1380's owners, Federated Media, have pulled the plug on all that, without so much as a by-your-leave. Or without the courtesy of giving Rump and SportsRush a farewell broadcast, which any media company with an ounce of class or professionalism would have.

It's probably too much to say that makes Fed Media a total clown car, though there does seem to be a whole lot of greasepoint in its vicinity. Its suits would no doubt argue 1380 still carries area high school football and basketball, so it's unfair to say it has a disdain for local programming. And I suppose it's possible there was a heads-up to the public about the demise of SportsRush, and I just missed it.

Still doesn't change the fact SportsRush got bum Rushed. Still doesn't change the fact 1380 has lost at least one listener, if that at all matters to the clown car.

I mean, Fed Media is now giving us perpetual twit Colin Cowherd and Rome back-to-back. What's the marketing hook for that, Asshats In The Afternoon?

"I like it!" someone in the boardroom would no doubt say.

Yeesh.

Un-blessed relief

The best thing to happen at Augusta National yesterday was not Justin Rose's opening 65, which made him the first-round leader for a record fifth time. Nor was it 65-year-old Fred Couples shooting a 1-under 71, or poor Nick Dunlap -- who became the patron saint of weekend hackers everywhere by machete-ing his way through the pines and azaleas in 90 getting-his-money's-worth strokes.

No, sir. The best thing was Jose Luis Ballester, a 21-year-old amateur out of Spain and Arizona State.

And what he did was, he pissed on the Masters. 

OK, so not on the Masters, exactly. What he actually did was piss in Rae's Creek. 

And, OK, so not in Rae's Creek, exactly, but in one of the tributaries that feed into it.

He and playing partner Justin Thomas were on the 12th hole, and Thomas was fiddling around up on the green, so Ballester ... well, followed the dictates of nature. Seems the dictates were really dictatin', and so, not knowing where the closest restroom was, he wandered down to the stream and unzipped.

"I'm like, I really need to pee," Ballester said later. "Didn't really know where to go, and since JT had an issue on the green, I'm like, I'm going to sneak here in the river and probably people would not see me much."

First rule of the Masters, young man: They're not "people" here at Augusta. They're not even a "gallery." They're "patrons."

Second rule: Augusta is not "a golf course." Bite your tongue and say ten Our Fathers.

It's actually a house of worship, a mighty cathedral where great men of faith in fades, draws and hybrid irons come to genuflect. The azaleas! The pines! Tinkly piano music, Sarazen's Bridge and, yes, Rae's Creek!

Where some goofy college kid decided to take a whiz. 

Good lord, what's next? John Wayne playing patty fingers in the holy water with Maureen O'Hara?*

(*Random "The Quiet Man" reference)

Surely Jim Nantz swooned, when he heard about it. Surely the tinkly piano music faltered, turned discordant, and then became Elton John banging out "Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting." The azaleas wilted; the pines bowed their heads and wept; and. far away in Washington D.C., President and champion golfer Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump ordered an ICE hit squad to snatch Ballester, put a bag over his head and whisk him off to that country club in El Salvador.

Me?

I think Jose Luis Ballester is my new favorite golfer.

He had, after all, already tweaked the Masters' upturned nose by wearing a baseball cap with "Sun Devils" printed upside-down on the crown. Social media raked him for it, declaring such apparel inappropriate for THE MASTERS. And then ...

And then he drains the lizard in Rae's Creek. As if it were just another weekend round at Mudflap Hills Golf Club And Arcade, where the fairways are shredded wheat and the greens look less like bent grass than chewed grass.

Un-blessed relief, you might call that.

Also bit of comic relief, at a joint that could use some.

Homecoming

 Professional athletes are the most transient of creatures. Let's begin with that "well, duh" this morning.

Let's begin by saying today's pro is a '30s vagabond riding rails paved not with despair but with eight-or-nine figures, back-loaded and incentive-heavy. They move through the world dressed in Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana, and their boxcar is a Gulfstream 5. They're Tom Joad with a numbered account in the Caymans and a portfolio thicker than a filet mignon.

All of which makes you think a mailing address would just be a mailing address to them. And also to the fans who understand how the game is played these days, and thus learn to keep their heartstrings to themselves.

However.

However, this does not explain what happened in Dallas last night.

Luka Doncic came home, is what happened. 

Came back to Dallas with his new team, the Los Angeles Lakers, and discovered that  transience is sometimes just a word in the dictionary. He's been gone two months now after spending 6 1/2 years in Big D, but damned if the place can't quit him.

A tribute video played on the big screen, and Luka's vision got all blurry. Mavericks fans waved "Welcome Home, Luka" signs. And, yeah, they filled the place with "Fire Nico!" chants, in honor of Nico Harrison, the head of basketball operations who shipped Luka off to the Lake Show.

Nico was there last night for all of it, hiding back in the shadows somewhere. And no doubt wondering when the hell the fan base was going to just let ... it ... go.

Sorry there, rough rider. But it wasn't gonna be last night.

Last night, there was that video, and then Luka swallowed the lump in his throat and gave the fans what they came for.  Dropped a cool 45-spot, tying his season high. The Lakers bounced the Mavs like a Superball, 112-97, and when Luka came out at the end of  his 45-point, eight-rebound, six-assist, four-steal night, the crowd rose and tore its throats out bellowing his name.

Luka! Luka! Luka! ...

Six-and-a-half years were in that cry. 

Pain and longing and memory were in it.

Love that transcended transience was in it; loyalty that defeated distance and the bloodless ritual of transaction.  And that, for one moment and one night, reminded us why the games of children matter so much to us.

Luka! Luka! Luka! ...

Masters of entitlement

Looked up at the TV yesterday and there were the azaleas and Rae's Creek and late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the pines  -- it's always late afternoon in this place, and the sunlight always slants -- and I thought, "Gee, it must be Masters week again."

Then I thought, "Gee, I wonder if Collin Morikawa will finally win a green jacket?"

Then I thought, "Gee, if he's leading on Sunday, and Amen Corner jumps out of the bushes and throws his ball in Rae's Creek or one of those tranquil ponds or up against one of those slanting-sunlight ponds, will he go Dixie on the media again?"

Because, see, Morikawa did that last month at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he was closing in on the "W" until Russell Henley eagled 16 and swiped it right off his plate. Morikawa was so pissed he bagged the post-match presser, then defended his bail-out by saying he didn't owe the media anything but his golf game. In fact, he said he didn't owe anyone anything.

This was not the wisest thing for him to say. Oh, not because he stiffed the media; every ink-stained wretch who went to a decent journalism school learns very quickly that no one has an obligation to talk to us. And most of the time it's no skin off our carcasses either way.

Doesn't mean we still won't write, however. 'Cause we will.

No, the reason it wasn't wise for Morikawa to say he didn't owe anyone anything is because it reinforced the perception that pro golfers are a bunch of pampered snots who wouldn't know what to do without a courtesy car, balls fresh from the sleeve and someone to lug their sticks. No doubt there'll be a few of those out there this week -- call 'em Masters of entitlement, if you will -- but there'll be many more who understand that without the ink-stained wretches, TV cameras and "Get in the hole!" Joe Visors on the other side of the ropes, they'd all be selling whole-life insurance for a living.

So Collin Morikawa said what he said, and then doubled down on what he said, and here came a proper bashing from the media. Golf commentator Brandel Chamblee took him to task for it. Fellow commentator Rocco Mediate really took him to task for it, saying it was "a horses*** thing to say" and Collin was dead wrong. And the website Awful Announcing did a whole deal on the controversy, including that Rory McIlroy basically backed Morikawa's play in his media availability yesterday.

Morikawa, meanwhile, intimated that the media was just too lazy to track him down and get a comment after the Palmer tournament, because he hung around the premises afterward and could have been tracked down. 

Gotta say, I halfway agree with him on that one.

Best and worst thing about big-league events like a Super Bowl or a Final Four or, yes, a Masters or Arnold Palmer Invitational? It's how media availability, and thus easy-bake features, are perpetually at your fingertips.

There are daily gang pressers and quote sheets and transcripts piled high as an elephant's eye from the daily gang pressers. One year at the Super Bowl, I walked past a table groaning with stacks and stacks of those transcripts, and figured half the trees in North America must have given their lives so Peyton Manning could explain the Colts audible system. It was that excessive.

All of this, of course, tempts you into taking the easy path, because the easy path is eight lanes wide and smoother than a clean shave. Hey, it's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I'm lazy. Now where's that Julian Edelman transcript?

In other words, Morikawa's point is taken, if not always well-taken. The PGA media guy tells you he ain't showin', but might still be on the premises, you grab your notepad and go looking for him. You can call him a gutless punk for not facing the music, but if you track him down and he obligingly sings, maybe he's not such a gutless punk after all.

Which still doesn't let him off the hook for saying he doesn't owe anyone anything. That part he needs to take back.

And if he doesn't, make him carry his own sticks. That'll learn him.

Dirt devils

I don't know how many lives a gator has, but if you're a cat it might be time to file a protest. Those scaly man-eatin' bastids are horning in on Tabby's deal.

See, nine lives may make the cat the king of resurrections, but the gator -- OK, the Florida Gators, then -- are coming up fast on the outside. Last night they got themselves down a hole again in the national championship game, and once again they climbed back out to stun another victim.

This time it was Kelvin Sampson's fierce, relentless Houston Cougars, who came up two points short of their first national title -- the final was 65-63 -- and were left appropriately shell-shocked by the outcome. That's because  for pretty much the entire evening they did what they do: Take opponents right out of their game and exhaust them.

Last night they took Florida's north star, Walter Clayton Jr., and locked him in a closet, holding him to zero first-half points and just 11 total. The Gators floundered around as a result, and by the 15-minute mark of the second half the Coogs had them down a dozen.

Which of course was dead center in Florida's wheelhouse.

Down and all but out, it seems, is their launch pad, it seems, or at least it has been for half of March. They never seem comfortable until the first shovelfuls of dirt hit them as they're being lowered into the grave. Then they transform into dirt devils, kicking away the clods, ripping the shovel from the hands of their tormentors and braining them with it like Moe braining Curly.

Last night was the third game in a row they followed that script, going back to the West Regional final. In that one, Texas Tech led by double digits in the second half, and still led by nine with three minutes to play. But Clayton sparked an 18-4 Florida run to close it out, 84-79.

And in the national semifinal?

Against Auburn, the Gators were once again down -- by eight at the half, and by nine early in the second half. Then they went on a 13-3 rip to take the lead, and out-gritted Auburn down the stretch for the 79-73 W.

And last night?

Bogarted Houston's identity, is what they did. Plain and simple out-Houstoned 'em, right down to the final ticks of the clock.

If the Cougars were the authors of the lockdown D, the Gators did the rewrite, after going down 12. During one stretch of the second half, they held Houston without a field goal on nine straight possessions. And in the last 3:24, they forced five turnovers -- including three in the final minute.

It all came down to Emmanuel Sharp rising up from beyond the arc with 4.9 seconds left, and guess who scrambled that? Oh, you bet, it was Walter Clayton Jr. his ownself, flying out on the shooter, closing with such vehemence that Sharp bagged the shot and dropped the ball lest he be called for traveling.

A mad scramble ensued, and the star of that was Florida's Australian big man, Alex Condon. Channeling his youth -- in addition to basketball, he played Australian rules football as a kid -- he went sprawling to the floor, got his hand on the ball and swiped it to Clayton.

Game over. Season over.

And then the blue-and-orange confetti, the national champs hats, Clayton and Condon and the rest hoisting the Big Trophy for the Gators for the first time since Joakim Noah 'n' them went back-to-back in 2006 and 2007. They hauled out the ladders, handed out the scissors, and up they all went for the ritual snipping.

And, no, it's not true the Gators gave the nets a head start. But it woulda been just like 'em.

A raging case of the stupids

 I became a Pittsburgh Pirates fan because of Roberto Clemente. 

On the bookshelf immediately to my left here in the den of our home -- I can reach out and touch it without moving from my chair -- are a Roberto action figure, a Roberto Starting Lineup baseball card, a placard commemorating Roberto's induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and a commemorative ticket, encased in plastic, from the day Roberto got his 3,000th hit. 

Six feet or so over my left shoulder, a framed photo of Roberto hangs on the wall. He's standing either at the plate or in the on-deck circle, waiting to hit. He's scooped up some dirt and is rubbing it into his palms. His head is turned to the left, and his bat leans against his thighs like a war club leaning against a battlement wall.

The number on his back -- 21 -- fairly leaps out at you.

Unlike in PNC Park, apparently.

Maybe you missed it in all the March Madness buzz and Alex Ovechkin become the NHL's alltime goal king -- Ovi got No. 895 Sunday, knocking Wayne Gretzky out of the top spot -- but over the weekend it got out that my Cruds had committed their most Crud-like blunder yet. After which, in something like a panic, they hurriedly un-Crudded it. 

What Pirates management did, see, was replace a No. 21 logo on the right field wall with an advertisement. Which meant right-field, Roberto's old domain, became instead the domain of Yinzer Joe's Auto Body Repair And Spa, or some such thing.

Well. Needless to say, management immediately caught an epic raft of doo-doo from not only Roberto's family, but from every right-thinking Pirates fan in Pittsburgh. Rumor has it the fabled Primanti Bros. sandwich shop even went Full Soup Nazi, declaring, "No sandwich for you!" 

OK. So I made up that last part.

But the backlash was so intense club president Travis Williams immediately released a desperate mea culpa saying the removal was all on him and, oopsie, his bad, it was an honest mistake and he'd immediately restore the logo.

This either proves they're not as stupid as they look in the Pirates organization, or they're just a bunch of greedhead vandals who regard one of the oldest franchises in baseball history as little more than a money pump. Current ownership would suggest the latter, given the way Bob Nutting has turned the Cruds into the Cruds -- a modern-day version of the 1950s Kansas City Athletics, who functioned as little more than a farm team for the Casey Stengel Yankees.

Anyway, the logo will go back up, with Williams saying how sorry he is for the whole mess, and how no one ever intended to insult Roberto Clemente's family or his legacy as the greatest Pirate ever (with a nod to Honus Wagner). Why, they have a deep appreciation for their ballclub's long and decorated history, really they do, and never mind the way they've so thoroughly trashed it on Nutting's watch. We care, by God.

To which there is only one proper response from this Roberto shrine in Fort Wayne, In.: Yeah, surrre.

Blowout City, Part Deux

 This was all UConn's fault.

It was all on Paige Bueckers, Azzi Fudd, Sarah Strong and the rest of the Huskies, last seen celebrating giddily after smooshing 1-seed South Carolina 82-59 in the women's national championship game. It was UConn's, I don't know, 59th national title or something (actually 12th), but the first for Bueckers -- one of the greatest women's collegians in history, and almost certainly the best player never to have won the Big Trophy.

Well, no more.

She scored 17 points with six rebounds, three assists, a steal and two blocks in Blowout City Part Deux, then shared a long, tearful I-finally-did-it-coach hug with Geno Auriemma. She got to do that because, for once, she hardly needed to be Paige Bueckers; Strong (24 points, 15 boards, five assists, two steals and three blocks) and Fudd (24, five, one  and three) were more than enough for the Huskies, who won their two Final Four games by an astonishing 57 points, or 28.5 per game.

Bled the drama white, in other words. Turned the women's big show into a "Remembrance Of Things Past" snoozer. Were just too damn good, and ruined everything.

This was all UConn's fault.

But wasn't it glorious?

What I saw

(In which the Blob issues its standard disclaimer when it's about to stray from Strictly Sportsball Stuff: If you don't want to indulge my more self-indulgent impulses, you may leave the room and go down to the library. Make sure you have your hall pass, or crabby Mrs. Fernwinkle will turn loose her attack dogs, Marty and Beauregard.)

Went down to the local "Hands-Off!" rally the other day, and boy were Elon and the MAGA patriots right. Why, it was wall-to-wall mayhem, violence and plain old liberal/commie/socialist terrorism.

Senior citizens, veterans and other vicious thugs waved signs in a threatening manner. Harassed passing motorists into honking their horns in a nearly constant chorus. The heartless mob then cheered to celebrate the fruits of their bullying.

And the signs! Horrible, subversive things about Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, and vile attacks on brave Elon and our brave President Trump. One guy was parading around with an upside-down American flag, which is just out-and-out treason unless it's carried by one of the January 6 heroes. Another woman had a sign that actually called our wonderful senator, Jim Banks, a clown!

Why, I never.

You could tell George Soros was behind all this, like X said, because there's no way so many people are this angry about Elon and the president cutting child cancer research and aid to the sick and poor around the world, and gumming up the Social Security works by firing hundreds of its employees. Probably 1,500 or so America haters showed up on a raw, windy day at the local rally, which undoubtedly means they were actors paid by Soros to be there. 

They had to be, because everyone there looked suspiciously well-fed -- even the retired South Bend firefighter, the retired park service worker who complimented me on my Olympic National Park cap, and the young woman holding the sign that read, "My grandather didn't flee a Russian dictator only for his grandchildren to suffer a Russian puppet!"

Scary people, I'm tellin' you.

The whole shameful deal was organized by the local chapter of an organization called Indivisible, which is nothing but a Soros-financed front. I know this for a fact because I read it on the internet, and also because there were rallies like this all over the country that day. Millions of people turned out, their pockets no doubt bulging with Soros cash. Such nationwide coordination simply could not have happened without it, according to the internet, and it was deeply, outrageously un-American.

Anyway, that's what I saw at the "Hands Off!" rally. Frankly I felt lucky to get out of there alive.

P.S. I have not yet received my check from George Soros, but I'm sure it's in the mail. It must be. Elon, the president and the internet wouldn't just make stuff up, would they?

Unbreakable

 The One That Got Away is not a movie high on the viewership list for either Duke or Auburn, whom a lot of the smart guys figured would be playing for a national championship Monday night. You don't reach the heights they have if it is.

Duke, the 1-seed in the East, was looking more and more like your national net-snipper, Cooper Flagg 'n' them having stampeded through the bracket with an average winning margin of 23.4 points. And Auburn, the 1-seed in the South, was the overall top seed and had Johni Broome, who was the player of the year in college buckets if Flagg wasn't.

All of which fails to explain why Broome was weeping into his jersey at the end Saturday night, and why Flagg and the Dukies were wandering the floor in a someone-just-lifted-my-wallet daze. And why it's Florida and Houston who'll have Monday's big date.

What does explain it is one incandescent player, and another movie title.

Or in other words: Walter Clayton Jr. and True Grit.

Clayton did all his usual Clayton things in Florida's 79-73 knockout of the Tigers, scoring 34 points, dropping five threes and making a sprawling swipe of the ball in the final seconds to keep it inbounds and in Florida's possession, thereby certifying the W. Auburn had the Gators down eight at the break, but Florida went on a 13-3 run to open the second half, and the battle was joined in earnest.

And Clayton?

Combined with his 30 points in the Gators' win over Texas Tech in the regional final, it made him the first player since Larry Bird 46 years ago to rack back-to-back 30-spots this far along in Da Tournament. He's the leading scorer in Da Tournament and certain to be its Most Outstanding Player if the Gators hoist the big trophy tomorrow night.

But first, they'll have to get past the True Grit part of this tale.

That belongs to your Houston Cougars, who are so gritty you can taste it on your tongue just watching them. They were down a 14-point hole to the Blue Devils with eight minutes to play last night, and they were still down nine with 3:03 showing. With 75 seconds left, they were seven points adrift. With 34 seconds, six.

After which they outscored Duke 9-0 the rest of the way to claim a 70-67 win.

"Hang in there. Hang in there," Kelvin Sampson kept telling his guys as the clock tipped toward the halfway point of the second half.

Hang in there, they did. Though not in a pretty way, because pretty is not what Houston does.

What it does is put a pillow over your face and smother you, which is exactly what it did to Duke. Across the final ten-and-a-half minutes, the Blue Devils made just one field goal. They scored nine points. This from a team that averaged almost 83 points per game this season.

And so on to Monday night, when two unbreakable forces will try to break one another. It'll likely not be poetry in motion. Forty minutes (or perhaps more) of barbed wire and hearts left on the floor probably hits closer to the mark.

Whoever bleeds last wins.

The numbers game

 Alexander Ovechkin -- aka, the Great Eight -- tied Wayne Gretzky's career NHL goals record last night, putting the biscuit in the basket for the 894th time in his long and decorated career. Even more astounding: While Gretzky got 894 in 1,487 games, Ovi reached that mark in ... 1,486 games.

Same number of goals. One game's difference. Talk about your harmonic convergence.

Of course, Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson probably doesn't want to talk about that at all. More likely he'd rather focus on why Ovi's called the Great Eight.

"Because he wears No. 8, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

Always knew you were smarter than you looked.

Why Lamar Jackson would care about that is because he, too, wears No. 8. And right now he's sending a bunch of suits to court to challenge Dale Earnhardt Jr. for -- wait for it -- trademark rights to the No. 8. Specifically, a certain font that Junior last ran with his Dale Earnhardt Inc. car almost 20 years ago.

Somehow, Jackson's attorneys are arguing that the certain font is too close in style to Jackson's own "Era 8" brand. So there might be some confusion there because Junior is trying to trademark the same style of 8.

In other words: Lamar Jackson says this certain font of the No. 8 belongs to him. And if Junior is allowed to use it, some folks might get confused, because, after all, Lamar Jackson is an NFL quarterback and Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a retired NASCAR driver.

Perfectly understandable how people might mix up the two, right?

What do you mean, "No"?

And what do you mean, "This is the silliest thing I've ever heard"?

This is not silly. This is a serious trademark beef, because Lamar is paying his suits a lot of money to say it is. It's not at all the sort of frivolous nonsense a judge would throw out of his courtroom unless that judge was of sane mind.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "How can you trademark a number? And how you can do it retroactively? How can Lamar sue Junior for the rights to a certain style of No. 8 when Junior  first used it 26 years ago? And what about all the NFL players before Lamar who wore No. 8? Is he gonna sue them, or can they sue him?"

Well, now that you mention it ...

Turns out Lamar's attorneys are also going after former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, who wore No. 8 some 30 years before Lamar Jackson donned it for the Ravens. A few years back, Aikman started marketing a brand of beer named "Eight" after his old number. Which of course Lamar's guys decided might confuse people, too.

Now, those of us not possessed of great legal minds might argue only persons with the reasoning power of amoeba could possibly confuse the numeral 8 with the written eight. But that's why we're not great legal minds.

Those folks would scoff at our ignorance. Why, how on earth could we not see this case as the Brown vs. Board of Education of numeric adjudication?

In the meantime, we await the resolution of this momentous numbers game. And wonder when the law firm of Owie That Hurts and Associates sues Lamar's "Era 8" brand on behalf of the Steroids Era, the Deadball Era and the Era of Good Feelings.

Coming soon to a court docket near you.

Blowout City

So, then: UConn vs. South Carolina for the women's marbles.

And what a letdown that is.

No, not because of UConn and South Carolina. Because of UCLA and Texas, a pair of 1-seeds who were supposed to show up to the party but sent their regrets instead.

Texas, see, lost by 17 to the Gamecocks. It was a three-point game at halftime and still a six-point game with 4:54 to play in the third quarter, but then the Longhorns went almost four-and-a-half minutes without scoring, South Carolina outscored them 11-2 in the interim, and that was pretty much that.

Texas scored just 22 points in the second half. It shot 39 percent for the game. In the second half, the Longhorns made just eight field goals.

Meanwhile, in the other semifinal ...

You know that old Woody Allen saying about how 80 percent of life is just showing up?

Well, UCLA flunked the 80 percent part.

Like the Longhorns, the Bruins scored just 22 points in one half, only in their case it was the first half. By that time they were down by 20, 42-22. And it never got any better, as Paige Bueckers and the Huskies rolled them like cookie dough, 85-51.

A 34-point rip, in a national semifinal game. With the 1-seed on the losing end. Holy guacamole, what an unscheduled trip to Blowout City.

Bueckers finished with 16 points, five rebounds, two assists and three steals, but she got plenty of help this time. Sarah Strong led the Huskies with 22 points, eight boards, two assists, a steal and a block; Azzi Fudd added 19, an assist and three steals and was 3-of-5 from the 3-point arc.

The Huskies never trailed, and the score was tied only once, at 4-4 on a layup by UCLA's Kiki Rice two minutes into the game. Eighteen seconds later Jana El Alfy tipped in a miss to send UConn back in front, and the Bruins never got even again.

So, then: UConn vs. South Carolina.

Here's hoping the suspense will last longer than it did Friday night. The women's game deserves it.

Whole new thing

 Well, isn't this just the world turned cattywampus.

Remember back in the day -- and I mean really back in the day -- when college hoopers of a certain refinement could declare something called "hardship" and enter the NBA draft before their college eligibility ran out?

Didn't really matter whether the hardship was actually hardship (though in a lot of cases it was). It was a slick little loophole for players to escape the collegiate plantation and start drawing a hefty paycheck for doing what they were good at. And a lot of guys did that.

Bound forward over an Everest of years and a foothill of decades, change "guys" to "gals", and check out what's happening here in the year of our Lord 2025.

Seems the women are declaring anti-hardship. Or something very like it.

In the last week, a couple of them with college eligibility still to run have decided to stick around campus -- some campus, anyway -- for another year rather than enter the WNBA draft. And this despite the fact both players were likely to be lottery picks in said draft.

The first, Notre Dame guard Olivia Miles, was projected to be the No. 2 pick in the draft and ship out for Seattle and the Storm. She's decided to enter the transfer portal instead, on account of she can probably make more money next season via NIL deals than the Storm would be willing or able to pay her.

And the second player to announce she's foregoing the WNBA?

That would be LSU guard Flau'Jae Johnson, also a virtual lottery lock, who was last seen scoring 28 points for the 3-seed Tigers in their Elite Eight loss to top-seeded UCLA. This season she averaged 18.6 points and was a third-team All-America.

But she's got a cozy NIL deal with Unrivaled which includes equity in Unrivaled's 3-on-3 league, which just concluded its inaugural season. This, again, almost surely makes her more financially secure than any WNBA team could make her. So Johnson will stick around Baton Rouge or wherever for another year, because the WNBA will still be around next year and, if Johnson has another stickout season, her draft status will likely rise still further.

This of course knocks the whole concept of "turning pro" into a cocked hat, because Miles and Johnson and college players of their stature have already turned pro in everything but name.  The NCAA so botched the NIL and transfer portal rollout that virtually every college kid who can hit the J or bang the glass is a perpetual free agent, jumping from one school to another to another in an unending search for the chunkier deal.

It's a model that simply isn't sustainable, and everyone knows it. It remains only for the schools to finally admit their "student-athletes" really are paid employees after all, and start signing them to contracts the way they would some hotshot coach.

Now, I don't know if two players opting to stay in college because the potential money's better constitutes a trend, but it kinda feels like it. And in a backassward sort of way, it lends weight to WNBA player complaints that they are grotesquely underpaid in light of the league's Caitlin Clark-fueled explosion. 

That they are grotesquely underpaid is beyond debate; Clark, the driving force behind the WNBA's surge in popularity, will make just over $78,000 this year to play for the Indiana Fever. The average NBA player is making just shy of $12 million -- or not quite 154 times more.

This is not to say WNBA players should be paid what NBA players are paid; even Clark admits that's ridiculous. But it is saying they should be paid more than they are.

Especially when a potential lottery pick can decide to "stay in school" and make more money.

World turned cattywampus. Oh, you bet.

Cruds and stuff

 We're officially one week into the baseball season, and that means it's as good a time as any for our first Cruds Alert of the new campaign. And there is both exciting news and no news at all on that fr-

Hey, where are you going? 

(Background noise of desks being pushed back, hurried footsteps, panicked cries of "No! Not the stupid Pirates!" and "Run for your lives before he says 'Buccos' again!")

Oh, relax. This isn't about my Buccos.

Well. Not entirely.

I will say the "no news at all" part of today's report is that my Cruds have already moved into their accustomed digs in the NL Central, which is to say the cellar. At 2-5, they're a half-game adrift of the next-to-last Brewers. Of course, they're also just 2.5 games out of first, which means the division title is still in reach.

OK, so no. No, it probably isn't.

But you know what?

There is exciting news in Crudville. As promised.

That's because the Chicago What Sox, the worst baseball team in modern history last season, are off to a glittering 2-4 start. This means that, after an entire week, they're tied for first in the AL Central. Giddy joy is presumably unrestrained on the south side.

Then again ...

Then again, the What Sox are also tied for last place in the Central. This is because everyone in the division is 2-4. Heck, if Connie Mack came back from the dead and brought his old Philadelphia A's with him, they'd probably be 2-4.

At that, they'd still be a game better than the Colorado Rockies, who were the worst team in the National League last year and apparently no better this year. The Rockies are 1-4 and already five-and-a-half games out of first in the NL West, where the grotesquely loaded Dodgers are 8-0 and probably headed for a 160-win season or something. 

So who's the Cruddiest of the Cruds right now?

Surprisingly, it's the Atlanta Braves, who are off to an 0-7 start and likely wondering what  happened to all that tall cotton in which they used to be awash. The Phillies are already five games clear of them, and the Marlins, of all people, are four games ahead of them. 

The Marlins! Who lost an even 100 games last year.

The baseball gods are cruel.

Rumor milled

Look, we all know what social media is. It's that nice thing we can't have because some thoughtless gomer tracked mud all over it, or smeared it with his or her greasy fingers, or used it as as a shop rag to wipe 10W30 off his/her hands.

"But that was my favorite Whitesnake tee!" you cry.

 "So?" the gomers reply.

This is kind of what they're saying to Mary Kate Cornett right now.

If you don't know her name, it's because there's no reason you should, but of course that's not the way the social media hellsphere works. People do know her name now, and it's all because the gomers decided her life was their business. They decided to wipe their hands on it, and now she's that ruined Whitesnake tee and wants to know what she did to deserve this.

The answer, of course, is nothing.

The answer is Mary Kate Cornett was just an 18-year-old freshman at Ole Miss until she started dating a certain frat boy, and a handful of troglodytes started spreading vile, baseless rumors (i.e.: blatant lies) about her. That's just what some people do, and, no, I don't know why. Because the world is over-served with  asshats, I suppose.

I mean, just look at the collection of insufferable clods running the show in Washington these days. Talk about Asshat Central.

Anyway, the rumors/lies would have been bad enough for Ms. Cornett had they just been confined to campus. But then the social media gomers got hold of them, and, being the Junior Fire Marshal journos they imagine themselves to be ("We got badges and everything!"), decided a college freshman's private life was Big Honkin' News.

So here was Pat McAfee of ESPN, a gomer first-class, yapping about it on his widely listened to/watched show. And two guys from Barstool Sports, that bastion of oafish seventh-grade-boy misogyny. And an ESPN St. Louis radio host. And former NFL wide receiver/certified loon Antonio Brown, another gomer first-class.

The Barstool Sports guys were a couple of yapping poodles who go by the online handles Jack Mac and KFC. The St. Louis poodle was Doug Vaughn. Just to get their names out there.

Thanks to them, but mostly thanks to McAfee, Mary Kate Cornett has been thoroughly rumor milled, with predictable results. Asshat America, remember? 

And so she started getting mail calling her a slut and a whore, surprise, surprise. Was moved into emergency housing and switched to online classes because of the harassment.  Her family's home was even "swatted" -- i.e., someone called in a false report that brought the police SWAT unit to their door.

All because McAfee and the rest of the gomers thought her business was their business.

Now Cornett and her family are thinking about dropping a lawsuit on McAfee's head, and by proxy on ESPN's. In a fair world they'd win and lighten a few wallets, but, again, it's not a fair world. That's because the phrase "social media" includes the word "media."

One of the most nefarious things the gomers have done, see, is blur the line between what is mere entertainment, and what is the legitimate gathering of news. The gomers tap-dance on either side of that line, and they're pretty slick about it -- slick enough that they can defend themselves by claiming any salacious rumors they were amplifying were legitimate news because someone else thought so, and how about that First Amendment, boys and girls?

You see the problem here. They're not really media in the traditional sense, all these yapping poodles, but in 2025 the traditional sense no longer applies. If the Pat McAfees cannot in any way be regarded as newsmen, the blurring of that aforementioned line allows them to operate within the newsman's framework.

No matter how poorly the newsman's hat fits them. And with what reckless disregard they wear it.