Meanwhile, in Indianapolis ...

Just as there are eternal verities kiting about in the universe, there are eternal mysteries, too. Things that make no sense at all to mere mortals, and for which there seem to be no satisfactory answers.

Like, for instance, does anyone actually still watch "Survivor" after 30-plus years? And if so, why?

Also, who did put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?

Also-also, what the heck are the Indianapolis Colts doing?

This is a question you could ask virtually any time at all in the last six years, and the answer would be "Who the heck knows?" Or, "Beats me." Or, "They're the Colts. If it made sense, they wouldn't be doing it."

Which brings us to this morning, and NFL free agency, and the quarterback carousel whirling so fast various Billy Bob Heisman Arms are being flung off  like Momma being thrown from the train (remember that classic?).

Sam Darnold just signed a $100 mill deal to play for the Seahawks. Geno Smith, his predecessor, is a Raider now. Justin Fields is a Jet; Zach Wilson is a Dolphin; and Matthew Stafford is staying put in L.A. after the Rams agreed to pay him the GNP of Liechtenstein.

Everyone's settling into their digs, in other words. And what of the Colts, who for some earthly reason declared not long ago it would be a brilliant idea to stage real competition for the starting quarterback job?

So far they've sat back and watched the potential Real Competition go everywhere but Indianapolis.

What's up with that?

I'll choose Answer No. 2 from the aforementioned list: Beats me.

First of all, you're got to wonder what Chris Ballard and Co. are thinking by publicly talking about competition at the most important position on an NFL team. Does this mean, after just two seasons, that they're edging toward bailing on their franchise pick, Anthony Richardson? Does it mean bringing in someone to "compete" for QB1, but who, ultimately, the Colts have no intention of starting ahead of Richardson?

And how does Richardson interpret all this, except to conclude the team that took him fourth in the 2023 NFL draft has already decided he's thisclose to being a bust? And what does that do to his standing in the locker room, which is already less than ideal?

Imagine the conversation among the Colts brainiacs ...

GM Chris Ballard: "OK, guys, so we're paying this 21-year-old kid to be the Man, but after an enormous sample size of 15 games in two seasons he's still not the Man. What should we do to help him out?"

Some random guy in the room: "I got it, Chief! How 'bout we manufacture a fake quarterback controversy? That'll toughen up AR, and just think what a calming effect it will have on the locker room!"

Some other random guy: "Why, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"

Ballard: "First Random Guy, I love it. And Second Random Guy ... you're fired."

And then the Colts sit tight while the available quarterback pool keeps shrinking. Perhaps they're waiting on Aaron Rodgers, since bringing in washed senior citizens has paid off so handsomely in the recent past.

Aye-yi-yi.

Media Sustenance 101

 This just in today from the website Awful Announcing: Kim Mulkey cares about nutrition.

Seems Mulkey's LSU women had just lost to Texas in the SEC women's basketball tournament the other day, and she was up on the podium for the postgame media scrum when she spied something she either didn't approve of or was just joking about. Coin flip deal on that one.

In any case, Mulkey's eagle eye caught a reporter over in the media workroom noshing on mozzarella sticks. Now, perhaps Coach Kim was hungry. Perhaps, like Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny", she wanted aaalll the mozzarella sticks. Inquiring minds will never know.

What they do know is Mulkey pointed in that direction and said, "Are those media over there, or are they just eatin'?"

And here the Blob interrupts our narrative for a brief tutorial. Call it Media Sustenance 101, or Sportswriters Gotta Eat, Too.

First of all: The mozzarella stick nosher was a reporter from Greenville, S.C. named Lulu Kesin. She covers South Carolina women's basketball. Her interest in the LSU-Texas game was therefore zero, which is why she wasn't actually in the postgame presser.

"Then how did Coach Kim see her?" you might be asking.

Well, it's because at big do's like a major conference tournament or the Big Tournament itself, the media is frequently housed in a large open space somewhere in the bowels of the  venue. That means the media work space is frequently located right next to the news conference room. And, given that it's all one big room, they're merely curtained off from one another.

So when Mulkey pointed, she was pointing into the media workroom through a space between the curtains. And so, yes, Kesin and likely other media members were eatin' while they hammered out their gamers or notes or fought comma wars over the phone with their editors.

"You mean they let the media eat at these things?" you're saying now. "What a sweet deal."

Well ... yes it is. Sometimes. Depends where you are and what's on the menu.

(Brief pressbox food tour, from my tour of duty as a scribe: The hot dogs and chili at Notre Dame Stadium were excellent. The hot dogs at Michigan Stadium, on the other hand, were Tubes O' Death. And you never wanted to miss Pork Day at Purdue, because the butterfly pork sandwiches were delish.)

Now, you might wonder if it's entirely ethical (or even safe) to feed a bunch of sportswriters, and that's a legit question. And the answer is it's mostly a matter of practicality and convenience. You go to a basketball tournament or a major college football game, you're there all day and sometimes a good chunk of the night. If you get peckish during that time -- and you will -- there aren't many good options.

Yeah, you could leave the pressbox to go stand in a concession line, but then you miss the Irish scoring on two pass interference penalties, a helmet-to-helmet hit and a sketchy ruling in the end zone. Or you spend the time you're supposed to be writing your halftime blog pursuing the wild North American bratwurst.

Or you can bring in your own food. Some of us do that.

Point is, when Kim Mulkey calls out some sportswriter eatin', she's not making the point (Lookit those pampered elites!) she might think she's making. The dirty secret is, we really don't care that much.

I mean, I never once heard any of my fellow ink-stained wretches indignantly cry, "Hot dogs again? Where the hell's the chateaubriand?"  Heck, for years and years, if you covered the Indianapolis 500, you had to scrounge your own food, and no one really fussed about it. Some of us have pangs of nostalgia for the Speedway's Track Dogs to this day.

Here's the thing, though: I never, ever -- not in 40 years -- saw a scribe inhaling a Track Dog while A.J. Foyt was in the Economaki Press Conference Room telling the assembled media why his car was a tub o' s***.  We do have standards, see.

Yeah, I know. And pigs can fly, right?

Rebound

 You know what you were thinking. Come on, 'fess up, it's not like you hadn't seen this movie before.

Hero needs a win to ease himself off the NCAA Tournament bubble.

Hero's at home, it's Senior Day, fickle old Assembly Hall is not only willing but literally starving to pour out its love.

Hero ... craps all over the occasion.

Falls behind early.  Can't hit the broad side of a championship banner, missing 21 of 30 shots in the first half. Trails an equally desperate (but severely average) Ohio State team 46-36 with  12:12 to play after Devin Royal flushes a 3-pointer.

It's the seventh three of the afternoon for the Buckeyes. And, yeah, you know what you were thinking.

Ah, geez. Here we go. Same old Hoosiers, sinking to the occasion again.

Sound about right?

Sure it does. But you know what didn't?

Indiana 66, Ohio State 60.

Indiana clawing its way back into it, throwing a blanket over the 3-point arc and shutting down the passing lanes on the defensive end. Getting two monster triples down the stretch, on Senior Day, from Trey Galloway, one of the senior-est of seniors. Outscoring Ohio State 30-14 the rest of the way, including a 12-0 burst in the final four minutes that sealed it.

Galloway's first three kicked off that run with 4;27 to play and Indiana still light on the scoreboard by five.

His second was the dagger, everyone in the Hall gasping as he rose up from NBA range with 1:24 showing.

Nothin' but net, baby. The place erupts; the scoreboard changes to Indiana 61, Ohio State 56; and just look at Galloway, trotting back down the floor wearing a Christmas-morning grin you couldn't have erased with Janitor In A Drum.

Oh, and Ohio State?

After Royal's three at the 12:12 mark, the Buckeyes make just one more. Their last field goal, period, comes with just under six minutes to play.

I don't know what your definition of lockdown D is. But that sounds an awful lot like it.

It also sounds like another rebound in this crazy bounce of a season, when the Hoosiers couldn't win for losing for long stretches and Mike Woodson lost his job because of it. And then, somehow, they found their mojo, or at least some reasonable facsimile. 

Now they've won five of their last seven games -- winning at regular-season conference champ Michigan State and blowing out Purdue at home along the way -- and they've earned a first-round bye in next week's Big Ten tournament. 

Stay tuned for more Reasonable Facsimile. Or not, this being Indiana and all.

But after yesterday, who bets the homestead against it?

"One of one"

 OK, class, stick that wad of gum to the underside of your desk where you found it, and answer this question: What did Nikola Jokic do last night?

Yes, Johnny.

"Invent some kinda electricity junk?"

No, that was Nikola Tesla. Susie?

"Win Wimbledon eleventy-hundred times?"

Nope. That's Novak Djokovic. Anyone else?

Twenty kids staring back at me, blankly. One -- yeah, it's Johnny -- trying to hide the fact he did not, as requested, stick his Juicy Fruit back where he found it.

But back to Nikola Jokic.

Who plays basketball for the Denver Nuggets, and whose name you know because he's a two-time league MVP who led the Nuggets to the NBA championship a couple of years ago. The Nuggets are still pretty good these days -- they're 41-22 right now, tied for second in the Western Conference -- but they're not the team this season, so maybe you thought Jokic had slipped a bit, too.

Uh, no.

Because what did Nikola Jokic do last night?

He scored 31 points.

Took 21 rebounds.

Dished 22 assists.

In one game.

In so doing, he became the first man in NBA history ever to post a 30-20-20 stat line. It was his 29th triple-double of the season, tying his own team record. And it was the seventh time this season he's put up at least 15 points, 15 rebounds and 15 assists in a game, tying Oscar Robertson's NBA record.

In other words: Nikola Jokic is still around, and he's better than ever. And even if people are tired of voting him the league MVP, he's the league MVP, at least in some people's opinion.

"Nikola Jokic is one of one," said one of those people, Nuggets coach Michael Malone, after last night.

And, yes, Malone and everyone else knows he's not the MVP frontrunner; the odds-on favorite is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the electric guard who's averaging 32.8 points, 5.1 rebounds and 6.2 assists for the  Oklahoma City Thunder. In the last seven weeks, he's gone over 50 points four times, and without him the Thunder would not have 52 wins -- 11 more than any other team in the West, and just one fewer than the league-leading Cleveland Cavaliers, who are 53-10.

So, yeah, if SGA wins the MVP, no one's going to be outraged about it like they were when "Shakespeare In Love" beat out "Saving Private Ryan" for best picture.

And yet.

And yet, there is Jokic.

Who is nothing less than Larry Bird 2.0, a 7-footer who can shoot the three and clean the glass and find the open man as inventively and instinctively as Bird himself did. He's simply a beautiful basketball player for devotees of such things, and right now he's having a better season than in his MVP years. You're just not hearing as much about it because either you've decided the NBA is trash, or because SGA and the Thunder have been so brilliant themselves.

If it's the former, all I can say is, sucks for you. Because Michael Malone hit the nail square on Nikola Jokic.

He's one of one. And you're missing the show.

A modest proposal

 All around Candy Stripe Nation these days, the parlor game of renown and fame -- the runaway fun-for-the-whole-family hit -- is "Name That Coach," which of course involves trying to guess whom Indiana will choose as its next men's basketball coach. Why, it's got "Hungry Hungry Hippos" beat all hollow, and it's coming up fast on "Mystery Date."

It goes like this: Find a person in full IU Basketball Combat Gear (cap; jacket; Kent Benson/Steve Alford/Yogi Ferrell throwback jersey; button with a picture of Bob Knight yelling), and say, "Who do you like for IU's next coach?"

Let the fun begin! 

"Brad Stevens!" the guy will say (Even though Brad Stevens is as Boston as Dunkin' Donuts now, and has already, once again, said he ain't goin' nowhere)

"Bruce Pearl!" (Even though Bruce Pearl is as ethically sketchy as Kelvin Sampson was, and we all know how that worked out)

"Mick Cronin!" (Even though Cronin's not likely to leave Los Angeles for Bloomington, notwithstanding the travel would be easier)

"Jay Wright! Tony Bennett!" (Even though both got out of college coaching because they were fed up with what the gig entails now)

"Matt Painter!" (Ha, ha, very funny)

"Steve Alford!" (Ha, ha, even funnier)

What makes this a great game is no one really knows anything about who athletic director Scott Dolson and his crew are looking at, only that they've hired a search committee to facilitate the process. So IU Fan can pretty much throw out any old name that pops into his or her head and it's more or less got as much validity as any other any other name, provided said name is still on the right side of the dirt.

Well. If that's the case, I've got a name for you: Maria Marchesano.

She's currently the women's coach at Purdue-Fort Wayne -- and, listen, before you start ("Now you're just being silly!"), my tongue is only half in my cheek when I mention her. That's because her Mastodons are 24-7 and, after Masto-dunking Wright State lastr night, are headed to the Horizon League tournament semifinals. They finished second in the league to Green Bay --  losing a piece of the title in the last game of the regular season at Green Bay -- after winning their first 15 conference games and 16 straight in all.

For all of that, Marchesano was named the Horizon League women's coach of the year.

That's not the most amazing thing, though. The most amazing thing is where the PFW program was four years ago when she was hired.

In 2020-21, see, the year before Marchesano arrived, the Dons won one basketball game. One. In 23 tries. They were so far down a well they couldn't see daylight. Thought it was just a wild rumor someone made up.

So what happened after that?

Well, in Marchesano's first year, the Mastodons went 7-21. Then they jumped to 14-19. Then, last year, they went 21-12, finished third in the Horizon and reached the third round of the WNIT.

 The woman can coach a bit, in other words. So, you know, as long as we're just throwin' names out there ...

Call it a modest proposal. Or a kinda-sorta modest proposal. Or just me giving a shout-out to someone who well deserves it.

And whose name you should know, and now do.

Devalued

 (Your standard disclaimer/apology for today: Once again, for this one day, the Blob is fleeing Sportsball World.  I am, once again, going off the rails ... straying from my lane .. kicking in doors to strange and alien rooms.  So here's the requisite hall pass, and act accordingly.)

(And, yes, before you start, I know my latest flight is a howl into a hurricane. But ... dammit ... I just. Can't. Help myself.)

Look, I don't know this Alina Habba. Let me say that right off.

Oh, I know of her, of course. I know she's one of Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump's approximately 6,000 attorneys. I know she regularly gets her ass kicked in court. I know, or at least all available evidence suggests, that she got her law degree with either S&H Green Stamps or two boxtops from General Mills.

Here's what I also know, after the other day: I know she doesn't have a damn clue about working people. Or even who they are.

That's because a reporter asked her if she had sympathy for he thousands of people the Felon-in-Chief and his creepy hitman Elon Musk have thrown out of work, and she basically said they all had it coming.

"I really don't feel sorry for them," Habba said. "They should get back to work for the American people, like President Trump and his administration."

Then she was asked about the military veterans Trump and Apartheid Clyde have thrown out of work.

"We are going to care for them in the right way (insert 'blah-blah-blah' here), but perhaps they're not fit to have a job at the moment, or not willing to come to work," she said.

In other words: They're a bunch of lazy bums sitting around at home with their feet up drawing paychecks from YOUR TAX DOLLARS. Eatin' cheese curls and watchin' Netflix all day on YOUR DIME.

OK. Deep breath here.

WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL IS THIS WOMAN TALKING ABOUT??

Whoa. Guess I should have taken two deep breaths.

Guess I should take Alina and her scrambled brain out to Pennsylvania, where a friend of mine lost her job as park ranger in the current bloodletting before, thankfully, someone with a working synapse restored it.  Or maybe I take Alina up to Massachusetts, where another friend working for another federal agency has so far escaped the axe.

Let me tell Alina, the Felon and all his like-minded minions to observe their cheese-dust fingertips and raging "Bridgerton" addictions. And then let me add this: "You might have to wait awhile."

This is because my friends, and thousands upon thousands like them, are not just sitting around Hoover-ing up your tax dollars. This is a fantasy designed to keep "hard-working Americans" angry at the wrong people, the same resentment-bait misdirection play cynical politicians have been employing since the beginning of time. Not only is it as phony as Monopoly money, it's a vile smear aimed at people who -- hello-hello -- are hard-working Americans themselves.

Or were, until the Felon and Apartheid Clyde decided they were worthless and their work was worthless.

That won't play with me, though. See, I know, because of my aforementioned friends, that the vast majority of the folks Alina and her ilk are so consciously devaluing are working their asses off -- for you, the tax-paying public. And in some cases, they've been working their asses off for decades.

It's why our national parks are the greatest monument to America we have. It's why you know when a hurricane's coming if you live on the East Coast, and why your Social Security checks arrive on time (at least for now). 

It's why, at least for now, you can afford to take your sick baby to the doctor if you're literally living on cheese curls.

And what did Alina Habba say of them the other day, the mask slipping momentarily on the extremist right's usually well-disguised disdain for working folks?

They should get back to work for the American people ...

Which leaves me with one question for her.

When do you guys start doing that?

Unfinished

 Of course they're not gonna go easy on themselves. Who really thought they would, in this weird pratfall of a season? 

Here were your Indiana Hoosiers last night, up a point with 90 seconds to play out in Eugene, Ore., and, listen, you win this one and your late-season transformation into a Real Basketball Team is ... OK, so not complete, but right next door to it. A W here, against a 21-8 Oregon bunch that had won its previous five games, and it's four in a row yourselves and five wins in your last six. A W here, and you're at the top of the NCAA Tournament bubble, if not completely free and clear of it.

Instead ...

Well, you know. It's Indiana, right? 

It's Indiana, so the Hoosiers get outscored 10-0 across those last 90 seconds, the Ducks sealing it with a 3-pointer, a couple of steals and 7-of-8 at the stripe as Indiana was forced to foul. The final was 73-64, another unfinished finish for a team that has turned unfinished finishes into a miniseries this season. And now they're 18-12 instead of 19-11, and they have to beat Ohio State at home in their regular season finale Saturday if they want to stay atop that bubble.

They're not gonna go easy on themselves. Which in an odd way -- and what other way has there been this season? -- is hewing to form for a team whose signature characteristic across this long winter is not being able to find a form?

The Hoosiers started the season with Mike Woodson having won the transfer portal and assembled an on-paper powerhouse, and they will end it with Woodson having already resigned and playing out a string his guys will try to stretch as long as they can for his sake. And yet here at the end, after all that, they seem to have found a lineup rotation that works, and with it an identity.

Buncha scrappy street fighters, that seems to be it. Punch it inside to the one-two punch of Oumar Bello and Malik Reneau and hit the spot-up threes at one end; turn loose Trey Galloway and the engine of chaos that is Anthony Leal at the other. 

Sometimes the magic works, to quote Old Lodgeskins from "Little Big Man." Sometimes it doesn't.

Last night it didn't.

Last night Indiana ran into a team that likes the scrappy stuff as well as it does, and that did it a little better. The Ducks outboarded Bello, Reneau 'n' them 43-36. The Hoosiers forced just nine turnovers and turned it over 10 times themselves. And, yeah, they got home-cooked a bit, going just 3-of-7 at the line while Oregon shot 21 free throws and made 19 of them.

That sent Woodson into an f-bombing rage in the postgame, although that 7-of-8 for the Ducks in the last minute made the totals look more biased than they were. 

No matter. It was what it was. And now Saturday is what it is: An absolute must win instead of a kinda-sorta must win.

They're not gonna go easy on themselves.

Surprise, surprise.

Rest stop

 Saw a headline on ESPN's site this morning that made me chuckle a bit, because it was as inadvertently comic as it was inadvertently unaware. 

The headline said this: "Duke's Cooper Flagg Stars In Likely Last Game At Cameron."

"Cameron" being "Cameron Indoor Arena," Duke's notorious home court.

Cooper Flagg went for 28 points, eight rebounds, seven assists, three blocks and two steals there last night, as the Blue Devils euthanized Wake Forest 93-60. 

It was Flagg's 19th game in Cameron Indoor, counting exhibitions. It was his 30th game, total, as a Dukie.

This does not exactly make him a time-honored institution there, needless to say. Although he's now only 120 games behind Amilie Jefferson and 118 behind Christian Laettner and Kyle Singer, who played 150, 148 and 148 games in their time in Durham.

That's why the headline this morning made me chuckle, because it implied a degree of Duke-ly permanence that simply doesn't exist. This not Cooper Flagg's fault, understand. He's the product of his one-and-done culture, blessed by a phenomenal level of talent that ensured Duke would be a mere rest stop for him.

He is, after all, just 18 years old; when he played his first game for Duke back in November, he was still only 17. And yet he's the best player in the college game, and everyone knew before he stepped foot on campus he'd be the best player in the college game. He's that good.

It's why when Duke's season ends in a month or so, Cooper Flagg's association with Duke will end, too. 

As the consensus pick to go No. 1 in the NBA draft in June, off he'll go after his momentary ships-in-the-night brush with Joe College. The times being what they are, he might actually take a pay cut to (officially) turn pro.

What I want to know is this: Did the kid's "likely last game in Cameron" carry the poignancy implied by those words? Or any poignancy at all?

I'm sure it did, some, or at least Flagg had the manners to pretend it did. But every time a one-and-done is done with the one -- or, in this Wild West era, turns pro after playing for three or four schools -- I wonder what he really got from his college "experience."

If you're only there, for, what, six or seven months, are you really (in Flagg's case) a true blue Blue Devil? Have you been at your school long enough to learn the alma mater?  Long enough to discover the best pizza joint, or which hangout has a laissez faire approach to checking IDs?

Long enough that, if a visitor asks you where the library is, you can actually give him or her directions?

Me, I've always been intrigued by what sort of classes one-and-dones sign up for. Do you actually dip a toe in your school's academic rigor? Or is it more like this:

One-and-done: Hey, what classes are you taking this semester?

Actual student: Oh, the usual. The Dynamics Of Muslim/Christian Interaction In The Balkans Between 1345 And 1450 ... Murder, Guilt And The Social Isolation Of Edgar Allen Poe ... that sort of thing. You?

One-and-done: I'm takin' this class where we watch movies and then talk about 'em. We're already up to "Rocky III."

After which Actual Student asks if One-and-Done is taking any serious classes. The kind that count toward, say, a degree in business or law or internal medicine.

One-and-Done has a ready answer for that, I figure.

"I dunno," he says. "They got any degrees in Damn Glad To Meetcha?"

Still the Man

New Zealander Scott Dixon is 44 years old now, in his dotage as the cartoon speed of his profession goes, but the man can still hotfoot it. And the reason he can still hotfoot it is because he still thinks like ... well, like Ricky Bobby.

"Talladega Nights"? If you're not first you're last? All that?

That was Dixie to a fare-thee-well Sunday at St. Pete, minus the Will Ferrell buffoonery. He started sixth and finished second to Alex Palou, and he was NOT. HAPPY. He was kinda pissed, if you want the truth of it. And he was kinda pissed because he thought his teammate Palou got away with one he shouldna gotten away with.

Oh, not because of anything the Spaniard did, mind you. Because of something Dixon couldn't do.

He couldn't communicate with his crew. 

His comm crapped out as soon as the green dropped, and it was mostly radio silence between Dixon and the guys on his pit box the rest of the way. That meant they couldn't properly coordinate pit strategy, which is why Dixon pitted one lap late on the last cycle and therefore was unable to catch Palou for the win.

And yet ...

And yet he still finished second.

Without a radio.

Beat Josef Newgarden, polesitter Scott McLaughlin, Kyle Kirkwood, Felix Rosenqvist, a bunch of other guys.

Without a radio.

I don't know about you, but I find that amazing. I think it's more proof that Scott Dixon is the best IndyCar racer of his generation, and one of the two or three best of all time. I think Sunday was yet another reason only A.J. Foyt has more career IndyCar wins than Dixie's 58, and only A.J. has more IndyCar titles than the Kiwi's six.

Because he finished second without a radio. And was all grumbly that it wasn't first.

Hats off to the man. Or, rather, the Man.

The day approacheth

 Big news out of D.C. this weekend, at least in some precincts: It seems our Felon-in-Chief, Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump, has decided to pardon the late Pete Rose for his crimes against baseball and basic decency.

Now, I'm not smart enough to understand exactly how the Felon can do this, but then I don't understand how he can do a third of what he does. Or why, for that matter.

All I know is birds of a feather flock together, which means the Felon seems tofeel an odd kinship with fellow lawbreakers and the like. Having always had a threadbare understanding of right and wrong himself, he's comfortable palling around with, and carrying water for, like-minded individuals.

That's why it shocked no one when he stayed in character in announcing he was going to pardon Charlie Hustle.

Yeah, he said, Pete bet on baseball, and that was bad. But he never bet against his own team, only for it. So no big deal, right?

Were it possible, I would summon that crotchety old racist Kenesaw Mountain Landis from his grave to explain why that is in fact a big deal. I would also concede Judge Landis would sound impossibly out of touch if he could be summoned from the grave, because the Felon's sketchy ethics seem to be more in line with the current American zeitgeist than some of us would like to admit.

Cheatin', lyin' and out-and-out gangsterin' is A-OK if it Gets Things Done. That seems to be the gist of things these days.

Which is why I can't say if it was synergy, or just a coincidence. that the Felon's announcement came almost simultaneously with another bit of news out of Major League Baseball.

To wit: MLB commish Rob Manfred, it seems, if considering a petition filed by Pete Rose's family to take his name off baseball's ineligible list.

If Manfred does it, and he well could, that would mean Pete would be eligible for the Hall of Fame again. And it would likely mean he'd be voted in, considering his banishment for gambling on baseball is close to 40 years old now, and the guy himself is dead.

Also, Manfred and MLB no longer have a working leg to stand on. This will happen when you climb in bed with the very people you spent more than a century holding at arm's length.

I'm speaking, of course, about MLB's deals with various online betting sites, which makes their traditionally stern anti-gambling stance a veritable laff riot. Heavens to Shoeless Joe, there's even going to be an MLB franchise in Vegas before long, if everything goes according to plan. So how can Manfred and Co. keep Pete Rose consigned to outer darkness and expect the rest of us to keep a straight face?

I've always maintained that's where Pete belonged until he 'fessed up and quit lying about everything. He finally did that, even if, in true Charlie Hustle fashion, it was just another Hustle. But the book sold, and he did confess, so it was all good.

Or in other words, the time is finally right.

Put the man in Cooperstown -- if only because a baseball Hall of Fame without baseball's career hits leader is a Hall with a yawning hole in it. Same, by the way, with Barry Bonds  and Roger Clemens, who are tainted by the Steroids Era but were already gold-card HOFers before they allegedly began juicing.

At any rate, one thing seems clear now: Pete Rose's day approacheth. Best get used to it.

Afternoon in a small town

 Norwell High School won its first Indiana girls basketball title last night in Indianapolis, and when I heard that the years spun away like October leaves. Oh, not because it was Norwell, mind you, although the title came 48 years after a fierce little guard named Teri Rosinski took the Knights to the state finals for the first time. 

It was another milestone that did it for me.

Norwell's victory, see, happened on the day the IHSAA celebrated the girls tournament's 50th year. They brought out a bunch of former Miss Basketballs -- the 2012 winner, Norwell's own Jessica Rupright, was among them -- and everyone turned the clock back half a century to the first girls tourney, when little Judi Warren and the Warsaw Tigers beat Bloomfield in the title game to win it all.

Took me right back, all of that did. Took me back not to Norwell and its dateline of Ossian, but to another small town and another late-winter day.

The town was Lapel, In., 85 or so miles south of Norwell High School, a bedroom community for Indy now but a quiet little farm burg then. The year was 1977, and I'd been a sportswriter for the late, great Anderson Daily Bulletin for about two months at the time. And one particular afternoon I made the short jaunt to Lapel High's gym to cover a girls sectional game.

We were three weeks away from Teri Rosinski and the Knights' big day, and two years into the girls joining Hoosier Hysteria. You couldn't see what was coming, way back then. You couldn't see the steady tramp of years that would give us Pat Summitt and her mighty Tennessee Volunteers, or Geno Auriemma and his even mightier UConn Huskies, or Caitlin Clark playing to sellout crowds wherever she went in a women's professional league everyone seemed to want to watch.

None of it was even a whisper in the wind, that afternoon in Lapel.

Instead it was a bunch of girls dribbling up the floor with their eyes glued to a boys' ball too big for their hands, as if it were a boisterous puppy that might jump its leash at any moment. It was a thousand jump balls and ten thousand fouls. It was Indiana's game, but only if you squinted hard and tilted your head just so.

Fifty years along I tell people about that afternoon in a small town, and say they can't conceive how far the girls have come, and how high has been their ascent. This morning I read about Norwell's ferociously disciplined 1-3-1 halfcourt trap that squeezed the life out of unbeaten Greensburg, yielding 19 turnovers and a 19-4 advantage in points off turnovers, and I try to see it happening that day in Lapel. I literally cannot.

Those days are as alien to these as a Victrola is to an MP3.  And that is  the best tribute I can imagine to the persistence and drive of all the girls and all the coaches between then and now, girls and coaches who loved the game as much as any boy and who saw, even if we couldn't, how skillfully they could learn to play it.

This afternoon, as usual, there will be a bunch of women's college games on the tube. I suggest you watch one, and think about the road that led to it. Or just think about those Norwell Knights, who are most assuredly not their mothers' Norwell Knights.

"The way our girls have learned to play this 1-3-1, this is the best we've ever played it with this group," Norwell coach Eric Thornton told Dylan Sinn of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette when it was done last night. "It's not just that we play a 1-3-1, it's the way we play it. That's these girls ..."

These girls. These girls, who have come so very, very far.

Imagine this ...

 First day of March now, and in the softening air the coming spring suddenly seems more than the ghost of a ghost. The sun really does feel warmer on the neck these days. It really does linger longer in the evenings. Here in Indiana, the high school girls basketball season -- our winter game -- ends today; the boys begin closing the book on their winter at the top of next week.

It's a time of imagining, because the imagining is thisclose to coming true. And so today let's play Imagine This, boys and girls, because the calendar's right for it ...

Imagine a world that is all Florida and Arizona, where the pop of a glove and the crack of a bat are being heard again.

Imagine a world where a Bucknell upsets Kansas, or a Mercer whips Duke, or a Fairleigh Dickinson topples Purdue, because those days are coming again in a little over two weeks.

Imagine a world where Indiana, in a little over two weeks, playing in the NCAA Tournament for their lame-duck head coach, if you can dig that.

Imagine a world where it is spring for certain gearheads among us, because down in St. Petersburg, Fla., the IndyCar boys go racing again tomorrow, and that means the heat and light of Memorial Day weekend under an endless Indiana sky is only a handful of weeks away. 

Imagine a world where Josef Newgarden becomes, on that weekend beneath that sky, the first man in 109 runnings, to win the Indianapolis 500 three times in a row. Don't tell me it couldn't happen.

Imagine, if you can, a world where the Indianapolis Colts get their, um, stuff together, finally.  A world where the Chicago Bears do the same. A world where the Indiana Pacers win an NBA title, and a Canadian team hoists Lord Stanley again, and the Chicago White Sox become a real boy again instead of whatever the hell they are now.

Dump site. Crime scene. Double-A team. Take your pick.

And last but not least ...

Imagine a world where, instead of backing England with no strings attached, the United States of America goes behind John Bull's back to strike a deal with Hitler that will give the U.S. the rights to half Great Britain's mineral deposits. After which FDR summons Winston Churchill to the White House to lecture him, in front of the media and the public, for not being properly grateful for the shakedown.

Imagine a world where that actually happened this week. Only the names were changed.

I'd rather not, frankly. I'd rather imagine the What Sox winning the AL Central this year.

One seems as unbelievable to me as the other at this point. But that's just me, I suppose.

Coach Dale

 In his long and decorated life, Gene Hackman, who died this week, drove race cars, flew planes, got off one of the funniest ad libs in one of the funniest movies ever made (See: "Young Frankenstein"), and played narcotics agents and submarine commanders and psychotic western sheriffs and every other damn thing. And did it as well as anyone ever did.

But if you live in Indiana, he was one thing and one thing only.

He was Coach Dale.

He was the guy who told the refs "My team's on the floor" ... and the guy who proved the rim in Hinkle Fieldhouse was 10 feet above the floor ... and the guy who got himself thrown out of a game so Shooter could run the picket fence at 'em. He was the guy who got Jimmy Chitwood to play, and the guy who knew Ollie was gonna make those free throws.

If you're a Hoosier, the only movie Gene Hackman ever made was "Hoosiers." And we will brook no argument to the contrary.

The irony, of course, is Hackman hated "Hoosiers" while he was making it, thought its creators, Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh, were amateur hacks, crabbed about this and that the entire shoot. Told Dennis Hooper, who played Shooter, it was a career-ender. Figured it would play to empty theaters everywhere but Indiana.

He was, in short, a perfect ass, according to people who were around the production. He was also as wrong as a man can possibly be.

Because "Hoosiers", an earnest little film about a high school basketball team in a small town in Indiana in 1952, became a smash hit. It earned Hopper an Oscar nommy for Best Supporting Actor and Jerry Goldsmith an Oscar nommy for Best Original Score. And to this day, 39 years later, it remains at or near the top of any list of the best sports movies ever made.

And Coach Norman Dale?

Right up there on the most memorable fictitious coaches list, too.

Get people naming all of them they can remember, it'll only be nanoseconds before they get to Coach Dale. Coach Eric Taylor of the Dillon High Panthers? Sure. Gordon Bombay of the Mighty Ducks? Of course. Ted Lasso, Jimmy Dugan, Morris Buttermaker, Lou Brown?

Absolutely.

But Norman Dale?

Now we're talkin'.

It wasn't Gene Hackman's most decorated role; in his obit this week, "Hoosiers" isn't even listed among the films in which he played. Doesn't matter. He's still Coach Dale, and around our state, "Hoosiers" is still the film everyone thinks of first when you mention Hackman's name.

When he was found dead in his New Mexico home this week, the old gym in Knightstown that was the film site for the Hickory Huskers gym honored his passing. It's a tourist site now, that old barn, and people come from all over the world to visit it. They make pilgrimages to visit it, for God's sake.

I can't think of any other Hackman film site where that happens. Maybe they exist, but if so I haven't heard about 'em.

That's why there was a special poignancy to the timing of Hackman's death this week, because it came the week before the start of the boys Indiana high school basketball tournament. The geezers and cranks will tell you it's not the same since they went to class basketball 28 years ago, but it still defines March in Indiana. It's the demarcation line between winter and spring in these parts, and it starts up again in four days.

Hickory vs. Terhune again, in the universe of "Hoosiers." Tip it up, boys, and remember to make four passes before you shoot. And, Buddy, stick so tight to Terhune's hotshot you can tell me what brand of gum he's chewing.

My guess is Dentine.

Combine time!

 The NFL scouting combine is happening this week in Indianapolis, and it's my favorite part of February. This is not because I find the combine particularly riveting. It's because it's February.

I mean, something's gotta break up the monotony, right?

The combine is just the ticket, because it provides endless opportunities for mirth for those of us who find the NFL's obsession with minutiae weird and hilarious. And the combine is a veritable minutiae-fest.

It's an entire week of weighing top-end prospects and looking at them in their underwear and interviewing them ("If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"). It's seven days of watching them lift and run 40s and measuring their verts, which is combine-speak for "vertical leap." The various NFL teams poke and prod and measure and check under the hood of psyches, and the only thing they don't do is determine whether or not a guy can actually play.

The best part, though, happens tomorrow through Sunday.

That's when the various position groups do their on-field workouts, or at least some of them do. More and more prospects are opting out of that part of it, preferring to wait until their respective schools' Pro Days. This generally includes most of the quarterbacks and some wide receivers and running backs, but not always.

And then there's the Sunday workout group. Which might or might not be the NFL saving the best for last.

Sunday, see, is when they roll out the big boys,, aka the offensive linemen. Great blocks of humanity line shorts and T-shirts line up and run 40s. They run shuttles. They leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Well, OK. So probably not.

What's hilarious about this, to me anyway, is watching these tanks do stuff that has nothing to do with an OL's skill set. Running 40s, really? When does an offensive lineman run 40 yards in one burst? 

Don't know about you, but I don't want to know how fast an offensive lineman runs the 40. I want to know how fast he runs the 5. Seems to me that would be a more accurate read of how quickly he gets off the ball.

I also don't really need to know an OL's hang time. This may be a failure of imagination on my part, because I can't really see a bunch of NFL scouts standing around ooh-ing and aah-ing at 350-pound Marvin "Bridge Abutment" Clampett's jumping ability.

GOOD LORD! A 35-INCH vert! We could put him at tight end down on the goal line! And think how awesome he'll be on the jump ball when the NFL replaces the onside kick with that!

Even more exciting, no doubt, is hearing Bridge Abutment's answer to the tree question.

"I'd be an African baobab tree," quoth Bridge Abutment.

And well-traveled, too! Sign him, boys.

Goin' OG

 So I see by the interwhatsis that an unidentified NFL team has called for the banning of the tush push, which is back in the news now because the Philadelphia Eagles just won the Super Bowl and are most famous (notorious?) for the play they call the Brotherly Shove.

And now I can hear Willie Heston and Pudge Heffelfinger and that whole crowd, having a big guffaw out there in the celestial void.

"The Brotherly Shove?" they're chortling. "Hell, man, that ain't nothin' but football."

And so it is. Or was, long, long ago when the Hestons and Heffelfingers played and the game was as primitive as stone knives and bearskins.

We're talking the 1890s, early 1900s here, when football was the sole province of your Yales and Harvards and Princetons, with an occasional Michigan or Notre Dame thrown in to make it look national. No one had invented the forward pass yet. The wishbone was a wish dream. The triple option was still missing two of 'em, and even the off-tackle run was regarded as exotic and therefore suspect.

No, sir. Football at the turn of the last century?

It basically was just a bunch of guys surrounding another guy and shoving him forward until they couldn't shove him forward anymore.

A century and a quarter later, you saw the Eagles do the exact same thing in the Super Bowl.

Lined up some big guys behind Jalen Hurts. Shoved him over the goal line/past the first down marker. A play as OG as Grover Cleveland, and as elemental as force and mass and the application of the latter to enhance the former.

That's all football was in those prehistoric days, when the flying wedge was a revolutionary act and players went by colorful names like Tack and Belf and Pudge, and of course the immortal T. Truxton Hare, who lined up for Penn during the McKinley administration. Protective gear was either unknown or for sissies in those days, which is why a pile of players died and the flying wedge was eventually outlawed. That, too, was football then.

Now it's all these years later, and we're still arguing about the flying wedge's spiritual descendant, the tush push.

The risk of injury, some people say, makes the play dangerous (sound familiar?). On the other hand, it's an extremely effective throwback; the numbers say the Eagles and Buffalo Bills have run the tush push 163 times, and have gotten a touchdown or first down out of it 87 percent of the time.

And now I can hear Willie and Pudge 'n' them again, having another big guffaw.

"Hell, yes, it works 87 percent of the time," they're chortling. "Why do you think we did it?"

A pause. 

"And we didn't have any of these fancy-dan helmets and pads and junk like that. We were football players, man, not a buncha nancy boys."

More guffaws, echoing down the years. 

Broken compass

 (Your standard disclaimer: This is not a Sportsball post. It is not about the Cubs, or the Lakers, or the Indianapolis 500, or why the designated hitter is an abomination to all right-thinking humans everywhere. Thus, the usual instructions apply. If you don't want to stick around, grab a hall pass and go sit in the library until we're done here.)

We used to know who the bad guys were, here in America.

We looked at Hitler, with his lank hair and his shitty little 'stache and his martial strut, and we knew he was up to no good. Ditto Mussolini, with his arrogance and the bully's itch he scratched by beating up on poor Ethiopia. Ditto, too, Josef Stalin, who occasionally starved and murdered his own people in droves just for the hell of it.

You looked into that guy's eyes, and you knew what you were dealing with. Cruiser-class psychopath, oh, you bet.

Now?

Well, let's consider how our spectacularly unqualified Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, answered a reporter's question the other day.

Reporter: "Fair to say Russia attacked unprovoked into Ukraine three years ago tomorrow?"

Hegseth: "Fair to say, it's a very complicated situation."

Only if you're a Russian toady, Petey old boy.

For those of us with functional brain cells, see, it's not complicated at all. Three years ago, Russia launched a surprise attack on another sovereign nation and decimated a goodly chunk of it before the Ukrainians gained their footing and started to fight back. It was as stark an example of naked aggression as North Korean tanks rolling across the 38th parallel in the predawn hours of June 25, 1950, or Hitler's blitzkrieg crashing into Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. 

Of course, had the current regime been running America then, they'd likely have blamed the South Koreans and Poles. Or said, "It's a very complicated situation."

We used to know who the bad guys were. But now?

Now we side with 'em.

Now the President of the United States and his handpicked confederacy of dunces spout Russian propaganda with a startling lack of self-awareness or shame, and treat it like revealed wisdom. One of the President's flunkies, Elon Musk, even tweeted the other day that if Russia "went too far" at the beginning of the war, Ukraine was going "too far now."

Which I guess means if Poland had been able to put up a longer fight against Hitler, it, too, would have been going too far. That's how twisted is Apartheid Clyde's logic, and those of his ilk.

We used to know who the bad guys were.

Now we try to make the bad guys into the good guys, or at least the not-really-bad-guys. We blame, not the violators, but the violated, against all common sense and decency. And rather than take up for the violated, the way the United States at least tried to do occasionally when it still had a working moral compass, we go behind their backs to strike a deal that doesn't include their input. 

Think for a second about what a massive betrayal that is. Then think about the President of the United States getting up in, say, 1950, and announcing that, in addition to negotiating with the North Koreans without the South Koreans, the U.S. was also going to extort half the South's mineral deposits as payback for American aid.

That's the idea the Felon in Chief floated the other day, vis-a-vis Ukraine. You can look it up.

I don't know if betrayal is a strong enough word for something that breathtakingly vile. I don't know if a strong enough word exists for it.

We used to know who the bad guys were.

And the corollary to that?

Our allies used to know we wouldn't turn our backs on them.

Now all of that is gone. Now the moral compass lies broken on the floor, and the heel that ground it to shards is the same heel that's busily crushing whatever honor we once had as a nation.

If that doesn't make you weep, I don't even know what to say to you. 

Nor do I wish to say it.

An Indiana sighting, yet again

 And now some numbers this fine morning, to baffle and amaze:

21-4.

28-3; 32-7.

48-21.

44-18.

19-1.

And finally: 73-58.

Which was the score up there on the big board above the Assembly Hall floor when the clock showed zeroes, and for the first time in six weeks it was the home team on the heavy side. In a game bizarre even for a rivalry crowded with the bizarre -- check out where Mike Woodson was sitting yesterday, for example -- Indiana crushed No. 13 Purdue in the second half after Purdue crushed Indiana in the final minutes of the first half.

So, Indiana 73, Purdue 58, fourth straight loss for the spiraling Boilermakers, and, oh, yes, about those numbers:

Purdue finished the first half with a 21-4 run that sent the Boilers to the locker room up 12 and seemingly in position to beat Indiana again, ho-hum, nothing to see here.

Except ...

Except Indiana, in the second half, outscored Purdue 28-3 and 32-7 to start, outscored the Boilers 48-21 for the entire half, and outscored them 44-18 in the paint for the game. Oh, and outscored them 19-1 off turnovers in the second half.

You call that a butt-kickin', in some parts of this world. You call it a rump-roastin', a sheep-shearin', a woodshed-takin', a strap-you-to-a-rail-and-run-you-up-the-Monon-line-in'.

Mostly, though, it was a cleanse of sorts for an Indiana program that's tasted way to much bitter this strange season, and that it happened on the 40th anniversary of Bob Knight throwing a chair in the midst of a dreary loss in the Hall to these same Boilers added an element of poignancy or something to it. Which gets us back to where Woodson was sitting yesterday: In the very chair Knight flung four decades ago, rescued from some broom closet somewhere.

Or so the story goes.

Woodson said in the postgame he "happened to get my hands on it," and maybe he did, although others have gone looking for it and have never known for sure which chair was The Chair. Suffice it to say it was one of the chairs that comprised the IU bench on Feb. 23, 1985, and therefore the symbolism still holds true.

No matter, in any case. What mattered this day was not a thrown chair, but Indiana throwing the book at its too-often tormentor.

Down and looking out again at the end of the half as Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer and Myles Colvin rained threes on their heads and celebrated loudly, the Hoosiers somehow found the key to beating Purdue that three other teams have in the last two weeks: Pound the ball inside, defend the arc, rattle the suddenly rattle-able Smith and Co. into coughing up the rock.

So in the second half, they went to Malik Reneau, who responded with 15 points, six rebounds and four assists. Fellow big man Oumar Ballo added a dozen points and five more boards. Out on the perimeter, meanwhile, Trey Galloway, Luke Goode and Anthony Leal combined for 34 points, 13 assists, 10 rebounds, four steals and two blocks, and, along with Myles Rice, did the lion's share of harassing Smith and Loyer  into seven of Purdue's 16 turnovers -- six of which came from Smith in another shaky outing, and 11 of which came in the second half.

In the second half, Indiana shot 64 percent. Purdue shot 30 percent. 

When it was done, the Hoosiers had their first win in the Hall since Jan. 8, and another big step toward an NCAA Tournament berth that's gone from "no way" to "weeeell, maybe" in the last couple weeks. And for 20 minutes, at least, they gave the nation a peek at the team they were supposed to be after Woodson spent last summer mining the transfer portal.

That team has been only sporadically in evidence this season, which led to Woodson agreeing to step down when it's done. Sunday afternoon, though, sitting in the infamous chair/one of the infamous chairs, he not only beat Purdue but beat the dog out of  Purdue, and this strange coda got even stranger as his players mobbed him and rubbed his shiny bald head and a March run -- an authentic, by-god last hurrah -- suddenly looked possible.

How weird would that be, after all that's happened?

Weirder than getting outscored 21-4 to end the first half yesterday ... and then outscoring Purdue 28-3 to begin the second ... and then going on to blow out the Boilers by 27 points in the second half?

Nah. No weirder than that, surely.

That Game

 Purdue goes to Bloomington to play Indiana again this afternoon, and one thing we reasonably can be sure of: No molded plastic furniture will be harmed in the settling of this ancient grudge.

Yes, that's right, ladies and germs. This is the 40th anniversary of That Game, aka The Chair Game, aka The Day Bob Knight Discovered The Aerodynamic Properties Of The Aforementioned Molded Plastic Furniture.

Now IU and Purdue meet again in Assembly Hall, on the very date, and how can 40 years have scooted by so quickly?

It doesn't exactly seem like yesterday, but it does seem like the middle of last week, maybe, because some of the details come back so readily. I was 29 years old then, almost 30, and now I'm 69, almost -- ye gods! -- 70. And, yes, I was there, covering the game for the late, great Anderson Daily Bulletin, partly because two local guys were playing for Indiana.

Stew Robinson and Winston Morgan, from Anderson Madison Heights. Perhaps you remember them.

At any rate, in those days there was print media seating on the team bench side of the floor -- decent spots, and somewhat remarkable considering Knight's low opinion of the sporting press. I was toward the Indiana end, looking down and to my left at the IU bench. The Hall was a baying, howling cauldron as usual, and Knight was up and down, chirping at game official London Bradley, never one of his favorite refs -- if in fact he had any.

(Quick aside: Unbeknownst to either of us, my future wife was sitting off to my left and maybe 12 or so rows up. We were six years away from meeting one another in the newsroom of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.)

So Knight's carping at Bradley, Indiana isn't playing well, and there's a whistle. Foul, Indiana. (I think it might have been on Marty Simmons, but time has hazed that detail). Steve Reid toes the free throw line for Purdue. And I'm looking down now at Knight, still raging, and I see him turn around and look down at his orange plastic chair. 

A sudden thought -- premonition? -- flickers through my head: No. He's not gonna do this, is he?

A split second later, he does this.

Bends over. Grabs the chair. Gives it a mighty fling -- you could tell he'd had lots of practice, because his form was perfect -- and off it goes across the floor, twirling and whirling, catching some air, skittering past Reid at the stripe and on into the corner where the wheelchair patrons sat.

Missed them by a mile, thankfully. God looks after drunks and crazy basketball coaches, apparently.

Anyway, all hell broke loose after that. Knight drew a tech, then another, and off he stalked toward the IU locker room like a wounded bear. The Hall shuddered with outrage, boos and howls of protest exploding from all quarters. 

And then ...

Something whizzed past my ear. Once. Twice. Sounded like bees, but why would bees be in Assembly Hall in February?  

The guy next to me gets it right.

"Pennies," he said. "They're throwing pennies."

They were indeed. One hit Purdue coach Gene Keady's wife Pat in the eye. None hit me or the guy next to me -- which suggests, somewhat dubiously, that God must like sportswriters, too. In any event, it was the closest to a full-on riot I'd ever experienced or ever would.

Eventually, of course, things calmed down, and Purdue went on to a nine-point victory. It was Indiana's third straight loss in an end-of-season spiral that would see the Hoosiers drop six of their last seven games. Which might have had something to do with Knight's chair-throwin' mood.

Forty years later, it's Purdue who's spiraling a bit -- the Boilermakers have dropped three straight and plummeted from first place to a tie for third in the Big Ten -- while Indiana ... well, who knows. The Hoosiers are playing out the string with a lame-duck coach who clearly just wants to pack his bags and get the hell out of Dodge, so guessing what kind of game they'll play today is a fool's errand. 

Maybe pride will compel them to finish the job they couldn't finish in West Lafayette a month ago. Or maybe playing in that hostile red cauldron will fire the Boilers' boiler, and they'll play like Purdue again instead of the imposter of the last couple weeks.

Either way, no chairs will be thrown to commemorate the Chair Game anniversary. Matt Painter's not the type, and Mike Woodson's heart likely isn't in it enough these days.

Also, both of them are getting up there. They're probably not as quick at dodging pennies as they used to be.

Expansion blues

 Comes now the news that the New York Yankees, those old stick-in-the-muds, are easing their no-facial-hair rule, so I guess it's not really 1955 after all -- or even 1895, which is the direction the confederacy of dunces in Washington seems to be taking us these days.

No, it's definitely 2025 out here in America, and I know this because the NCAA is seriously considering expanding its men's basketball tournament to 76 teams. That's eight more beyond the 68 that are already in the field, which are four more than the ideal, which was the 64-team tournament.

I guess madness really does beget more madness -- or in this case, more Madness. Also, greed. Greed begets more greed, too.

Which is the only explanation that makes any sense for expanding a tournament that's already been expanded too much already, at least according to cranky geezers like me. Sixty-four teams was perfect. Sixty-four put the spotlight squarely on the first four days of Da Tournament, which are the four days that sell the whole schmear. 

Sixty-eight?

Well, now we've got this weird prelude over Dayton, which everyone considers just that -- a weird prelude -- no matter how hard the NCAA and the teevees that pay to carry their water try to make it otherwise. They can call it the First Four until their larynxes give out, but most of America still thinks the show doesn't really begin until First Thursday.

Of course, the NCAA is a monopoly run by two or three or four mega-conferences now, and the mega-conferences are an endlessly grasping bunch. The more dough they have, the more dough they want. Which is why Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the SEC, griped thusly last year: "We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from smaller leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of (conference) expansion ..."

In other words: Fewer Coastal Carolinas and Bucknells, more SEC and Big Ten bottom feeders.

Uh ... no. No, no, no.

At 68 teams, there are likely already too many mega-conference cruds in the field, it says here. Expanding the field to 76 or 80 or whatever only means there'll be more. It means a whole pile of yawn-inducing first-round matchups between, say, 16-12 Vanderbilt and 15-15 Northwestern.

No one wants to see that. No one wants to see the first weekend be diminished because it gets buried beneath a two- or three-day Prelude Tournament.

Not a chance. What people want to see -- what they tune in to see -- is First Thursday and First Friday. They tune in to see Florida Atlantic reach the Final Four or Oakland and Yale take down Kentucky and Auburn. The latter actually happened last March, and, as always, it was the lifeblood of the Madness.

Now Sankey 'n' them want to muck it up with a bunch of teams that don't deserve to be there, just to add even more to their already immense piles of cash?

Uh ... no. No, no, no.

No-May day

 People think I know stuff. It's the burden a man carries when he spent a good chunk of his life sitting in press boxes eating hot dogs and watching games and then hammering sentences together about them.

And so these days they ask me who will be Indiana's next basketball coach, now that Mike Woodson is stepping down (and who seems already to be checking out, frankly). And I shake my head and look all sage-y and give them the sum total of my revealed wisdom.

"Hell, I don't know," I say.

And I don't. 

I do know whom it won't be, however, and whom I never thought it was going to be.

That would be Dusty May up at Michigan, who won fame coaching humble little Florida Atlantic to the Final Four two years ago and cashed in those chips to grab the big chair at glitzy big-boy Michigan. He's in his first season in Ann Arbor now, and he's already working wonders; the Wolverines, a flat-tire program coming off a last-place finish in the Big Ten, are now 20-6 and 12-3 in the Big Ten, half a game out of first after losing to frontrunner Michigan State.

No matter. The other day, Michigan extended May's contract anyway -- in large part because May, a one-time student manager when Bob Knight was coaching in Bloomington, is an IU grad and therefore the name most prominent on Candy Stripe Nation's lips.

Let me tell you why I never thought that was realistic, with or without May's shiny new deal in Ann Arbor.

I never thought that was realistic because, let's face it, jumping from one Big Ten school to another after just one season would have been a jackass move, and everything I've seen and heard about Dusty May suggests the one thing he's not is a jackass. He is, by all accounts, a standup guy. So to come to Michigan, get paid a carload of jing to do so, and then after one season say "Just kidding!" and sprint five or so hours south to Bloomington seemed highly unlikely.

Now, there are some morals-clause guys I could see doing that, because there are plenty of them out there. But not May. And even though I suppose Mark Cuban or some other moneybags IU alum could have opened enough bank vaults to make it tempting, Michigan's one of the few schools that can go checkbook-to-checkbook with Indiana.

So, Dusty May is out as a potential target in Bloomington. And who's still in?

Hell. I don't know.

Hockey's night

 He was all by his lonesome high in the slot, the wallflower at a middle school dance, and here at last was the lapse that would end it. Best hockey player on the planet, and not a soul in blue marking him. Connor McDavid, just hangin' around.

And now here came the puck to him off the stick of Mitch Marner.

And here was McDavid (of course!) snapping off a perfect shot -- top shelf to the glove side of Connor Hellebouck in the Team USA goal -- and the puck nested in the roof of the goal and McDavid went tearing off into the corner and everyone in red engulfed him in a joyous happy scrum.

Canada 3, United States 2.

Canada 3, United States 2 ... in overtime ... in the 4-Nations Face-Off championship game ... on U.S. soil in the TD Garden in Boston ... in front of a howling America First crowd wearing American flags and  MAGA hats and dressed as eagles and Founding Fathers and who knows what all.

Hell of a W for the Canadians, a whole nation that had its back up because our oafish president decided for some oafish reason to belittle it and threaten it and make juvenile wisecracks about Canada becoming America's 51st state.

Hell of a W for hockey and the NHL, which launched the 4 Nations Face-Off to replace its worthless All-Star game and got a gift from the gods when the Oaf-in-Chief chose to pick on our good neighbor to the north, adding a delicious layer of enmity to the 4 Nations that wouldn't otherwise have been there.

"You can't take our country -- and you can't take our game," Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau snarked on social media late last night, a taunt no fair-minded person could say the oaf didn't have coming.

On the other hand, what we all had coming, and got, was that rarest of things: A sequel that not only lived up to the original, and perhaps exceeded it.

That's because what got the 4 Nations Face-Off revved up was the first Canada-USA meeting six days in Montreal, which began with a "Slapshot"-like dropping of the gloves -- three fights in the first nine seconds -- and ended in a 3-1 U.S. victory. That put the tournament on the path to last night's immensely anticipated finale.

Which was 68-plus minutes of everything that makes hockey the best of all our games when it comes down to win-or-else.

Offense? 

How about both teams tearing up and down the ice without a pause, one rush leading to another rush the other way, over and over, all night long?

Defense?

How about U.S. defenseman Jacob Slavin blunting Canadian chances with one heads-up play after another in his own zone? Or Brady Tkachuk wallpapering the glass with various unfortunates wearing the maple leaf?

And then there was the goaltending ...

But honest, now. How could even the most rabid "USA! USA!' shouter not appreciate Canadian goalie Jordan Binnington reaching back five years to his rookie season, when he stonewalled the Boston Bruins in Game 7 to bring the Stanley Cup to St. Louis?

That Binnington was this Binnington last night, making 31 saves including 20 in a row across the third period and overtime, stealing food off the Americans' plates with jaw-droppers like the flailing glove save he made on Tkachuk in overtime?

That should have ended it, Tkachuk camped on the doorstep as the puck skittered around in the crease. But somehow Binnington sprawled across the goalmouth, got the mitt up, swallowed the puck in one mighty gulp.

A few minutes later, and here was Connor McDavid alone in the slot.

A few minutes after that, 37-year-old Sidney Crosby was hoisting the 4 Nations trophy, and the red maple-leaf flag was suddenly everywhere, and the Canadian were standing arm-in-arm as "O Canada" rang through the Garden.

Hell of a night for them.

Hell of a night for hockey.

Hell of a promo for the Olympic hockey tournament coming up next year in Italy.

"I think guys that are at home watching, I'm hoping they're wanting a piece of it," said U.S. forward Dylan Larkin, who plays his NHL hockey in Detroit, Hockeytown itself. "This grew the game really well, but I hope it pushes guys to want a piece of this and then the next generation that got to watch this, they're going to watch the Olympics next year and hopefully there's a different outcome."

And even if there isn't ... who can't wait to find out now?

Criminal minds(less)

 So, remember that part in "Goodfellas" where Jimmy Conway, Henry Hill and the gang pull off the famous Lufthansa heist out at JFK International Airport? 

(And don't say, "I've never seen 'Goodfellas'." If you've never seen "Goodfellas", you are no true Blobophile, and I will politely ask you to leave.)

Anyway, remember what happens next?

One of Jimmy's crew shows up at a Christmas party driving a brand new Cadillac. Jimmy goes ballistic, because he specifically told everyone to lay low and not make any conspicuous purchases -- like, you know, a brand new Cadillac.

So Jimmy has the guy whacked. And for good measure, he has the rest of the Lufthansa thieves whacked in an eliminating-loose-ends sort of deal.

I'm thinking maybe whoever's running the gang of Chilean burglars who've been targeting famous athletes recently wishes he'd followed Jimmy's lead.

This is because the feds have collared three of the seven members of the burglary ring because, like the poor sap with the Cadillac, they couldn't keep their good fortune to themselves. After stealing watches and other jewelry from the homes of, among others, NFL stars Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Joe Burrow and Milwaukee Bucks forward Bobby Portis Jr., they took selfies of one another with items from the Portis heist.

I guess they figured none of the images would ever find its way into the Great Interwhosis Universe, even though they almost always do. Which means these geniuses not only provided the authorities with photos of the items the athletes in question had identified as missing, they put them on and mugged for the camera with their bare faces hanging out.

You gotta wonder how that thought process went. Assuming there actually was a thought process.

"Hey, guys, check it out! Imma gonna take a selfie wearing one of the NBA guy's watches!"

"Cool! Me, too!"

"Think we should wear masks or something to, you know, conceal our identities?"

"Nah, man, what for? It's not like we're gonna show these to the cops or anything. I mean, that would just be stupid."

Yeah, well ...

The odd thing about this is up until the selfie-fest, the burglars had been quite professional about the whole thing. They staked out their targets to determine security patterns. They used burner phones. They dispatched different individuals to rent cars and places to stay to make their movements harder to track, and pawned the watches, rings, gold chains et al for cash using using launderers well removed from the crime scenes.

And then ...

And then, "Hey, world, look at this watch I'm wearing!"

Yeesh. Jimmy Conway woulda had 'em hanging from a meat hook in a refrigerated truck for sure.

A history lesson

Some days I can't keep my inner history nerd in his box. Either I need a stronger box, or I need to just let it go when stupid people say stupid stuff that fairly begs to be exposed to the light.

Which brings us to this morning, sock-puppet Indiana Sen. Jim "Jimbo" "Whatever President Trump Says" Banks, and American military disasters.

And, yeah, I can already hear you whining, Blobophiles.

"Aw, gee, Mr. Blob," you're saying. "History again? Boring names and dates and crap like that? Why can't you write about car racing or hockey or Purdue dropping three key Big Ten games in a row, or how Los Angeles Dodgers Inc. is now the majority owner of Major League Baseball?"

Later for that, Blobophiles. Today ... well, here's a hall pass. Go to the library and watch old boxing movies like we boys used to in school when they were teaching the girls about where babies come from.

Today, the inner history nerd gets some run. 

He gets some run because Sen. Jim-Jimbo got on Elon Musk's propaganda feed the other day and tweeted some celebratory stuff about our wonderful new Secretary of Defense investigating the messy U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. This happened during Joe Biden's time in the White House, which of course is the only reason Pete Hegseth 'n' them want to investigate it. 

Jim-Jimbo figured it was high time someone did. And that's because, in his words, the Afghan pullout was one of the "worst military disasters in American history."

To which my inner history nerd responded: "Whaaaaat??"

Inner history nerd, see, knows from military disasters, and the Afghan pullout, while as tragically chaotic as these types of operations invariably are, simply doesn't pass muster. And, yeah, I get it, it's like a D.C. rule that Sen. Jim-Jimbo and his ilk are required to grossly exaggerate anything bad that happens on the opposition party's watch. Which of course is why you won't hear a peep from them about the role their own president's sellout deal with the Taliban played in the pullout's chaos.

I get all that. And I know I should just dismiss it as the usual nonsense. However ...

Well. Let me tell you about some of the actual worst military disasters in American history.

For instance, has Sen. Jim-Jimbo ever heard of Chancellorsville?

That happened in Virginia in May 1863, when swagger-y old Joe Hooker got his clock cleaned by Robert E. Lee despite the fact Lee's army was half the size of Hooker's. Hooker even stole a march on Lee, crossing the Rapidan and putting his immense army squarely in Lee's rear. So what happened?

Lee about-faced, sent Stonewall Jackson on a flank march directly under Hooker's nose, and blew the Federals' right flank to matchsticks. Two days later Hooker meekly retreated back across the Rapidan despite the fact a good chunk of his army was never even engaged.

Cost: 17,287 U.S. casualties, including 1,606 dead. Afghan pullout cost: 13 American dead.

Or how about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, when George Armstrong Custer left more than half his 700-man force behind (in two different places!) and went gallivanting after a huge Native American compound with the rest? 

He and his five companies, as we all know, were wiped out to the man. Cost: 268 dead.

Ever hear of the naval Battle of Savo Island during the Guadalcanal campaign of 1942? The U.S. lost three heavy cruisers, with two more heavy cruisers and a destroyer damaged; only three Japanese cruisers were damaged and none were lost.

It was -- along, obviously, with Pearl Harbor less than a year before -- one of the worst naval defeats in U.S. history. Cost: 1,077 dead bluejackets.

And last but not least ...

What do you suppose Sen. Jim-Jimbo knows about St. Clair's Defeat, which happened a mere 78 miles southeast of Jim-Jimbo's hometown of Columbia City?

This happened in and around present-day Fort Recovery, Ohio, in 1791, when a U.S. army force under the command of Arthur St. Clair was surprised and overwhelmed by a combined Miami/Shawnee/Delaware/Potawotami alliance. In almost less time than it takes to tell, the Native contingent wiped out all but 24 of St. Clair's 1,000-man force, with 656 soldiers and civilians either killed or captured. Native losses were just 21 killed and 40 wounded.

It was at once the worst defeat ever inflicted on U.S. forces by Native Americans, and one of the worst in U.S. military history.

I could go on, but I can see your eyelids drooping. So, class dismissed.

But at least my inner history nerd feels better now.

The fix is in ... place

 Two days from now Team USA plays Team Canada in the finale of the 4 Nations Face-Off,  the best idea the NHL's had since making goalies wear masks. It cut down on the league's stitch count, for one thing, and who needed to see Gump Worsley's Gump-ish mug, anyway?

(This is not to single out poor Gump, mind you. No one was tuning in to gaze upon Glenn Hall's face or Rogie Vachon's or Bernie Parent's, either. And they certainly weren't all excited to see Terry Sawchuck's famously stitch-o-matic visage.)

Anyway, the 4 Nations' final is going to be appointment viewing like nothing else currently on the dead February docket, and if that is a rare victory for NHL commish Gary Bettman -- think blind squirrels and acorns and you've got the gist -- it also illuminates, in the most glaring way possible, the mess that was the NBA All-Star Game or Mini-Tournament or whatever the hell that was last weekend.

I didn't watch a second of it, but many of those who did apparently are still trying figure out what they saw. It was a Rising Stars first-to-40 tournament, and then the past-their-expiration dates 3-Point and Slam Dunk contests, and then some Rising Stars vs. Kenny's Young Stars vs. Chuck's Global Stars vs. Shaq's OGs first-to-40 action. Somewhere in there Kevin Hart appeared for some reason no one's yet been able to decipher.

The end result was a sort of variety show/playground ball mash-up, a steaming pile lowlighted by the OG of OGs, LeBron James, announcing at the last minute he wouldn't be participating on account of a foot boo-boo. That got things off to a rollicking start, and now NBA commissioner Adam Silver and his cohorts are no doubt in red-line panic mode. How to save this off-off-Broadway farce?

The Blob has some ideas. And they start with a fix the NBA already has in place.

That would be the NBA's in-season tournament, which, unlike the current All-Star festivities, the players have actually embraced and seem to care about. So why not steal a page from the NHL's playbook and replace the All-Star Game/Games/Whatever It Is with that?

The early-season timing of the in-season tourney has always been bizarre, except that Silver and Co. apparently figured it would get someone paying attention to the NBA at a time when no one's paying attention to the NBA. Maybe so, but it's wasted there. Why not move it to mid-February?

You could steal a page from the NHL and divide it into a Team USA, Team Americas, Team Europe and Team World round robin. Take ten days or so off to play it, with the two survivors squaring off in the final on what used to be All-Star Game weekend.

Or how about this: Steal a page from Major League Baseball and put together two Eastern Conference teams and two Western Conference teams. Play the semis one weekend; the survivors play an East-vs.-West final the next weekend. The winning team secures homecourt in the NBA Finals for its conference; the winning team's players get the lion's share of a 70-30 split of all ad revenue and TV money from the Finals.

I don't know about you, but I think either of the aforementioned scenarios might perk up a few attention spans. They'd make the All-Star Game about the game again. And the participants  might actually try, or at least appear to.  

Heck. LeBron might even play this time.

Girls' weekend

So how did you spend your basketball weekend, boys and girls?

Did you spend it watching Shaq's OGs (whoever they were) beat Team Chuck (whoever they were) in the we-got-next carousel that used to be the NBA All-Star game? Or did you catch No. 1 Auburn taking down No. 2 Alabama in what used to be a great football rivalry, but now has morphed into a great men's college hoops rivalry?

Or maybe you watched the Michigan State men come from behind to beat Illinois, 79-65, which pushed Tom Izzo past Bob Knight into first place in career Big Ten victories.

Izzo has 354 conference Ws now, and that ain't an easy thing in the Big Contusion Conference. In the postgame he said he hoped Knight, Izzo's dad and Izzo's predecessors at MSU, Gus Ganakis and Jud Heathcote, were having a drink together somewhere in the Great Beyond.

Nice moment, that, in a stellar weekend for the basketball males.

And for the basketball females?

Well, consider this: I spent lunchtime yesterday watching the two best women's teams in the Ivy League, Columbia and Harvard, duke it out for conference supremacy.

This is not necessarily because I'm six flavors of weird, although my friends and family would heartily second that assessment. And it's not necessarily because sporting events sometimes come winging out of nowhere to grab my attention.

Nah. It's because it felt like the thing to do in a spot-lit weekend for the women, too.

Girls' weekend actually started on Thursday, when No. 1 UCLA took on No. 6 USC in maybe the biggest UCLA-USC collision since O.J. Simpson and Gary Beban went Heisman-on-Heisman in 1967's Poll Bowl. This time it was Juju Watkins 'n' them going bucket-on-bucket with Lauren Betts 'n' them -- and, just like in '67, Watkins and USC got the best of it.

Although "got the best of it" might be understating it a trifle in Watkins' case.

Surely there must be some more high-end adjectives to describe Juju's night, which included 38 points, 11 rebounds, five assists, a steal and eight blocked shots. Oh, and she dropped six threes on just nine attempts, too.

It added up to a 71-60 win over the Bruins, who came in 23-0 and left 23-1. Betts, UCLA's stickout 6-7 pivot, put up an 18/13 double-double and added two assists and a block, but it wasn't enough to stop the Juju-nami. No. 1 got swamped.

But that's not all, as a game-show host would say.

Come Sunday, there was No. 3 Texas holding off No. 5 LSU 65-58 in a showdown between SEC powers with just three losses between them; and No. 12 North Carolina clipping No. 10 North Carolina State, 66-65; and of course Harvard, now 19-3, coming from behind on the road to hand Columbia its first Ivy loss, 60-54.

Oh, yeah. And after that, here came UConn and South Carolina. 

The fourth-ranked Gamecocks were 23-2 and had won 71 straight home games, but Sunday they had nothing for the No. 7 Huskies. Ten days ago Geno Auriemma's crew came up empty against Tennessee, but in the interim they rediscovered their essential, I don't know, UConn-ness or something.

First they floor-waxed Providence by 37. Then they blistered St. John's by 38. And then came Sunday.

When Azzi Fudd went for 28, Paige Buechers added 12 points, seven rebounds and 10 assists, and Ashlynn Shade came off the bench to stick a trio of triples in nine tries. And the Huskies shot 46.7 percent from the arc (13 of 28) and utterly matchsticked South Carolina's home streak, 87-58.

Hell of a performance. Hell of a weekend. Take a bow, ladies.

Daytona Whatchamcallit

 Word has arrived at Blob headquarters that William Byron won the Daytona 500 for the second year in a row yesterday, somehow surviving the annual end-of-the-race crashes  that happen because everyone commences to drive like idiots in the last 15 laps or so.

So there was a red flag in there somewhere, per usual. It happened 11 laps after a Big One took out Joey Logano, Kyle Busch, Ryan Blaney and Chase Elliott, and it took out Bubba Wallace, Kyle Larson, Daniel Suarez and Brad Keselowski. That all happened before another Big One pushed the race into overtime for the sixth time in the last eight years, and before yet another Big One wiped out the front of the field in OT and allowed Byron to go from ninth to the checkers on the final lap.

All of this occurred  sometime last night, I am told. I say "I am told" because I wasn't watching by that time, having tuned in at 1:30 to watch Air Force One buzz Daytona International Speedway, and then watch our illustrious president take a ceremonial lap in his Brink's armored car before flying right back home.

(And, OK, so it wasn't a Brink's armored car. It was more like a stylish armored half-track. Or maybe a stylish Sherman tank.)

Anyway, that all happened, and the race started, and then, after just 11 laps, it rained. That's when I stopped watching, because it looked like it was going to rain for awhile. And then, later on, I just kinda ... well, forgot about it.

A gearhead like me, forgetting about the Daytona Whatchamacallit. This is what it's come to with the Great American Race, at least in this precinct.

Time was I used to go to watch parties on Daytona Sunday, and we'd eat wings and drink beer and hope that dweeb Jeff Gordon didn't win again. Daytona was appointment viewing in those days, back when NASCAR still mattered. It was Super Bowl Sunday, only faster.

And then ...

And then, I don't know what happened.

The watch parties fizzled out, gradually. I started watching the 500 (aka, "that silly car race" according to my wife) on the couch at home. Then I started watching only the first 50 or so laps and the last 20 or so laps. And then, yesterday, I watched 11 laps before the rains came, checked out, and never checked back in.

I don't know if that constitutes a eulogy of sorts. But it kinda feels like one.

Sunday thoughts

 Where I live it snowed in the night, and this morning a fresh blanket and deep silence lay over a monochrome world. It's a study in grays and whites, this world -- frosted tree branches reaching for a battlement sky -- and every other color in the palette has dried to a crust, its own day still a month or two off.

I don't know if this has made me more contemplative than usual. Maybe so.

What I do know is I'm not thinking this morning about Team USA beating Team Canada in a damn fine game of hockey last night ... or about some guy fresh out of ideas jumping over a car in the NBA slam dunk contest, something Blake Griffin did years ago ... or about the Daytona 500 trying to beat the rain down there in Florida this afternoon.

No, sir. I'm thinking about someone I know.

I won't tell you who she is, or even how I know her, but the other day she lost her dream job for no legitimate reason. A longtime elementary school teacher, she was a U.S. Park Service ranger out east. It was something she'd always wanted to be, and the only thing good you can say about the vandals who took it away from her is they didn't single her out. A whole lot of other rangers across America lost their dream jobs, too.

 According to the chief vandal and all his little cyberpunk vandals, see, they're government waste, fat to be trimmed and discarded so the chief vandal and the rest of the leisure class can help themselves to another superfluous tax cut. The other day, the chief vandal (with typically elitist disdain) dubbed them the "Parasite Class," and all true hard-working Americans should be glad they're gone.

They should be like the chief vandal, who celebrates like his team won the Super Bowl every time he gets to issue some civil service employee his or her walking papers.

This is because the chief vandal is the richest man in the world, and so doesn't have to concern himself with the little people. It's also because he's an asshole, although the latter too often seems naturally to follow the former.

In the meantime, I'm thinking about this person I know. I'm thinking about the park rangers at some of my favorite Civil War sites who also lost their jobs this week -- dedicated professionals who were worth every dime they made. And I'm thinking about another person I know who works for a different federal agency, and whose job therefore may be in the chief vandal's crosshairs, too.

I'd use the chief vandal's name, but you know who he is. Me, I just call him Apartheid Clyde because of his South African roots, and also the fact his family got rich on the backs of black labor back when Nelson Mandela was in prison.

Anyway, I'm thinking about Apartheid Clyde whooping it up over putting people like my friend out of work, and it makes me want to send his sorry ass back to Johannesburg in a leaky boat. The people he's turning cartwheels over firing, see, are human beings with spouses and children and mouths to feed, and mortgages to pay. They are not government "waste" or "fraud" or the beneficiaries of "corruption." Nor are they "parasites," for the love of god.

No, I'd sooner think that term applies to Apartheid Clyde, who gets fat off our tax dollars thanks to the millions in government contracts he rakes in. And over which he's now allowed to sit in judgment.

You want to talk fraud and corruption, let's start there.

In the meantime, I won't think about the chief vandal and the rest of the vandals, and all their unproven claims about the waste, fraud and corruption they're supposedly cleaning up. They never tell us how they're doing this, see, or even if what they consider waste, fraud and corruption are actually that. And so from here all it looks like they're doing is plumping up the nation's unemployment numbers.

Which brings us back to this person I know. 

Like the many others upon whose unemployment graves the chief vandal likes to dance, she in no way deserved such a vile little waltz. She in no way deserved to lose her dream job, and she for damn sure doesn't deserve to be slandered on top of it by the likes of Apartheid Clyde.

Who came to America to get rich. And who got rich, because, as we were all told in school, America is the land of opportunity.

Yeah, well. Not for everyone these days, it seems.

A W, on ice

 They say you'll never go broke betting on the National Hockey League to do the wrong thing, the dumb thing, the what-the-hell-were-you-thinkin' thing. But they also say every dog has its day, so give Gary Bettman 'n' them a hand for once.

They figured out the All-Star thing.

Which is to say, they killed it dead and buried it in an unmarked grave.

What the NHL did, see, was replace the usual Farce Capades All-Star weekend -- a skills competition followed by a riveting 19-14 "game" -- with an actual by-god international mini-tournament. It's called the 4 Nations Faceoff, and it features Team USA, Team Canada, Team Finland and Team Sweden. Buncha NHL guys playin' for their national flags, in other words.

Canada beat the Swedes in overtime the other night, and the U.S. flushed the Finns 6-1 on Thursday. Today they play each other in a rivalry game which might or might not be a tad spicier than usual, on account of our brilliant new administration decided to start kicking our neighbors to the north around for no discernible reason.

Canadians have been booing our national anthem at hockey and basketball games since. Just desserts, you might say.

At any rate, the 4 Nations Faceoff is a landmark moment in Sportsball World, because it might be the first time in recorded history the NHL had a bright idea and the NBA and NFL didn't. The latter two should have knifed their All-Star weekends by now, too, but so far haven't figured out how to do it.

That's why the NFL's All-Star weekend has devolved into Field Day at Millard Fillmore Elementary School. And as for the NBA's All-Star extravaganza ...

Well. It's happening this weekend out in the Bay Area, and it's, I don't know, Shirts-Vs.-Skins, Make-It-Take-It In The Park or something.

It began Thursday with a celebrity game featuring "celebrities" old white guys like me had never heard of. Tonight 's highlights are the 3-point and increasingly irrelevant slamdunk contests; last night was the Rising Stars game, which wasn't really a game but a mini-tourney of three mini-games -- first two to 40, the last to 25 -- among three teams of first- and second-year players and a fourth team comprised of G-Leaguers. 

Team C won, and will now advance to play Shaq's OG team in the All-Star game tomorrow. Which, again, isn't actually a game but three mini-games to 40/25 because last year's All-Star "game" was such an utter joke.

I think the final score was 932-912. Something like that.

No word yet on whether Sunday's exhibition will be shirts-vs.-skins or make-it-take-it. Though it would be cooler if it were.

Bottom line, both the NBA and NFL are still floundering around trying to breathe life into a concept that's been demonstrably cold on the slab for awhile now. The NHL, by contrast, recognized that and went in a totally different direction.

So give 'em the W. On ice.

Some valentines

 Today is Valentine's Day, so get out there, men, and do your manly duty. Buy the flowers. Buy the candy. Suck it up, venture into Victoria's Secret and browse through the negligees like you're not at all skeered that people will point and laugh at you.

That's what a man does, on Valentine's Day.

What the Blob does is break its rule (first advanced by the great Dan Jenkins in one of his novels) that a journalist should never write anything that rhymes.

Well. Today I'm gonna write stuff that rhymes. I'm gonna write some poems (or "poimes", in my case) because poimes are a traditional Valentine's Day thing, too.

Let's start with a poime from fans of the Dallas Mavericks to their ownership, whom the fans have been abusing since ownership decided it would be a good idea to trade away the face of their franchise (Luka Doncic) in his prime. This was not a good idea, as it turns out. It was, in fact, an unfathomably bad idea, and the fans have been loudly reminding them of that at every Mavs home game.

Today, I figure they can remind them in verse:

Roses are red

But you clowns traded Luka

And so we just say

You guys make us all puke-a

* Moving right along, pitchers and catchers reported this week, which means baseball is starting again, which means the first stirrings of spring are in the air and the gladdened hearts of baseball fans everywhere. Well, OK, so not everywhere, maybe ...

Baseball is back!

Hope springs fresh from the box

Oh, wait, not so fast there

You Chicago White Sox

* The New York Jets have officially told Aaron Rodgers to hit the bricks, and the bidding will now begin for a washed 41-year-old quarterback who, in his one full season in New York, ranked 25th in the league in QBR. That was one spot above Daniel Jones, four spots below Geno Smith and five below Bryce Young, if you're keeping score at home.

At any rate ... let the romancing begin:

Hey, Raiders, what's shakin'?

Saints and Browns, how you farin'?

Whoever's most desperate

That's the market for Aaron

* The Great American Race That Includes Cars Made In Japan takes the green Sunday in Daytona, and you know what that means: Half-a-dozen crashes in the last 10 laps, a red flag, a couple of green-white-checkers or some combination of the three.

It's what always seems to happen in the Daytona 500, which means predicting the winner is virtually impossible. Usually it's the guy who just happens to be in front when the last crash happens; last year that was William Byron, who took the white flag a millisecond before the Big One and therefore won this annual spin of the roulette wheel.

So who wins this year? 

Here's a poime about it:

Won't be a Cale

Won't be a Dale

Could be Cole, Chase or Dan-o

Or some rando from Plano

And last but not least ...

* On this date in 1929, Al Capone's hired guns greased seven members of rival Bugsy Moran's gang in a garage in Chicago. It was called the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and  everyone knew Capone was behind it. But he was in Florida at the time, and therefore had plausible denial, sort of. 

Even wrote a poime to that effect, some say:

Don't know nothin' 'bout nothin'

But I heard cops turned green-y

So much bloodshed! I'm sickened!

Waiter ... one more martini