The immortal one

 Look, I don't know what keeps Novak Djokovic going. Carrot juice, perhaps. Kale smoothies. Peanut M&Ms.

All I know is, yesterday down in Australia, while the wider world pretty much ignored it, he did something remarkable.

He outlasted Jannik Sinner in five sets in the Australian Open semifinal.

Won the fifth set 6-4. Walked off the court a winner after four hours and nine minutes of grinding. The match didn't end until 1:30 in the morning Australian time.

Oh, and one more thing: Novak Djokovic is 38 years old.

In tennis years, that's like 65. Maybe 70. And yet the Joker keeps on keeping on. 

Across the years he's won more majors (24), more Masters (40) and been ranked No. 1 in the world (428 weeks) more than any male player in history. He's the only player in history to achieve a career grand slam three times. He is, without much dispute, the greatest male tennis player the world has ever seen.

Maybe the most solid proof of that?

In Sinner, he beat a man 14 years his junior. And it wasn't even that big an upset, because even though Sinner is the No. 2 player in the world, Djokovic is still ranked fourth.

Fourth. At 38.

By contrast, his two major contemporaries, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, are 44 and 39, respectively. Federer retired three years ago, at 41. Nadal retired last year, when he was 38. Neither were ranked anywhere close to fourth in the world when they departed.

Now here is Djokovic, the only one of the Magnificent Three left standing, still standing tall. He won his first major 18 years ago. Tomorrow he could win his 25th.

It probably won't happen. Awaiting him in the final is the No. player in the world, Carlos Alcaraz. He's 16 years younger, faster and absolutely relentless. The Australian Open is also, at the tender age of 22, the only major title he hasn't won. So he has motivation on his side, too.

However.

However, he's facing a man who might just be immortal. 

Ridiculous, I know. Or is it?

Movie time!

(In which the Blob once again escapes the Sportsball compound to maraud freely through the landscape of America, pillaging small villages and frightening the children. You know what to do.)

The long awaited action rom-com "Melania" opened around the country this weekend, and like many of you I am super excited to stop at the gas station, buy some Junior Mints to sneak in and head off to the movie theater. So much anticipation! So much mystery! So many questions!

For instance, in the climactic light saber fight, will Melania take on the giant space centipede in the obligatory Thong Bikini That Leaves Nothing To The Imagination?

(I'm guessing yes)

Also, will there be an epic catfight with Joan Collins at some point? 

(Because there always has to be an epic catfight with Joan Collins at some point)

Will there be a torrid love scene with Glen Powell, who plays the obligatory Wisecracking Secret Service Agent With A Heart Of Gold? And will Melania's husband, President Donald John Trump Esq. -- portrayed by the late Soupy Sales -- discover them, fly into a rage and invade, I don't know, Uruguay, perhaps?

(Unquestionably)

Will Dr. Evil make an appearance? And will he capture Melania, whisk her off to  Mar-a-Lago and inflate her lips to the size of dirigibles?

(Surprise cameos by Kristi Noem, Kimberley Guilfoyle, Lara Loomer et al)

Will Melania then find Diana Rigg's long-lost martial arts unitard from "The Avengers", and, inspired, put it on and kick the hell out of Dr. Evil?

(Surprise cameo by Mr. Miyagi)

Will Melania and Glen Powell live happily ever after, like Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline in "Dave"? Will there be yet another surprise cameo, this one by Martin Sheen as former President Jed Bartlet? And will the real Donald John Trump Esq. demand his own cameo, which then will magically be expanded into a Major Starring Role?

Do we even have to ask that last question?

And now, the Non-Grump Factor

 The Blob had some tongue-in-cheek fun yesterday at the expense of its four-decade profession -- "stupid sportswriters" was the unifying theme -- but today it's time to abandon the standup routine. That's because a couple of those sportswriters have come forward to explain why they didn't vote for Bill Belichick on his first crack at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. 

One of those sportswriters, Vahe Gregorian, is from Kansas City. The other, Mike Chappell, is from Indianapolis.

Which undoubtedly will get all the Sullys in Boston seriously espousing what the Blob largely played for laughs. 

The Colts and New England Patriots, after all, always seemed to wind up on opposite sides of the field back in the day, and the Patriots almost always won. This surely made all the sportswriters from Indianapolis bitter and looking for payback. And so ...

And so, Chappell took it out on poor Bill by voting against him.

Chappell's word for that was "asinine." It's a good word. And it's especially true if you're talking about Mike Chappell.

Full disclosure time: I've known Chap for almost 50 years, and a journalist with more decency and integrity you'll not find if you search forever. He was my mentor in Anderson, In., when I landed my first job as a punk kid out of college, and of all the good fortune with which I've been blessed over the years, that was the ... goodest. Everything I knew about doing the job right, I learned from Chap.

And as an NFL beat writer?

Well, there's a reason his colleagues call him The Dean.

He's been covering the Colts, and the NFL, since the former moved to Indianapolis 42 years ago. Few beat writers, if any, have done it better or with a more even hand. And few, if any, are more familiar with the vagaries of an HOF vote.

So when all the ruckus got ruckus-ing about the Big Belichick Snub, Chap picked up his pen to explain his vote. And it made all kinds of sense.

What he wrote was the the reason he voted for Patriots owner Robert Kraft and a couple of senior candidates was partly because his hands were tied; coaches and contributors are lumped in with senior candidates, so he could only vote for three. He went with Kraft because of his role in building the Patriots' dynasty and forging labor peace in 2011; he went with the senior candidates because they might not get another chance at induction.

Belichick, he figured, had lots of chances left. And it'll probably only take one more for him to get in.

Chappell also admitted that the Spygate scandal of 2007 played a role in his decision to go with Kraft over Belichick. "This wasn't alleged," he wrote, noting the maximum league fine of $500,000 levied against Belichick and the Patriots' forfeiture of $250,000 and a first-round draft pick. 

That wasn't Mike Chappell and a bunch of bitter Indy guys who did that. It was the NFL itself.

And so ...

And so, Robert Kraft got the nod on Chappell's ballot. Belichick could cool his heels for a year. And it was the Non-Grump Factor that decided it.

"Stupid sportswriters"?

Yeah, OK. Whatever.

The Grump Factor

 Couple of days now since Bill Belichick got the big snub from the Pro Football Hall of Fame voters, and the prevailing zeitgeist has boiled down to two basic reactions:

1. This is (choose one) completely ridiculous ... an abomination ... or, as Woody Allen famously said in "Bananas", a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.

2. Stupid sportswriters.

The first, of course, is absolutely on the mark. That perhaps the greatest coach in NFL history will not be a first-ballot Hall of Famer is ... well, a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. The man has eight Super Bowl rings, six as a head coach and two as a defensive coordinator. Only Don Shula won more games as a head coach. If there were a Mount Rushmore of NFL coaches, his face would be on it.

His scowling face.

And therein lies the rub.

It is not, see, that Belichick did not have the resume of a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer. He so plainly did it's hardly worth saying so. If Belichick wasn't a first-ballot HOFer based on accomplishment, no coach from here until judgment trump should ever go in on the first ballot.

No, sir. The reason Belichick got the big nuh-uh, more than likely, was the Grump Factor.

Which is to say, he didn't play nice with the stupid sportswriters, and we are a vindictive lot. All of those years of gruff one-word answers and obvious reluctance to provide them came back to bite him. In every interaction with the media, he looked like he was being waterboarded -- while someone yanked out his fingernails with pliers.

If only he'd smiled once or twice. Cracked a joke or two. Been more down-home-y, spinning yarns like some codger down at the feed store.

Or as an acquaintance put it: "That's what you get for being an a**hole."

Which is entirely unfair to the man, sure, but,  again, sportswriters. If only we'd written more about Bill's zany side, like the time he dressed up as a pirate for a Halloween party. Or that other time when, at the geriatric age of 72, he started dating a 24-year-old hottie.

Oh, wait. We did write about that.

Are writing about it.

Ad nauseum.

Of course, the main reason we're doing that is to paint Belichick as some sort of weirdo. Which, let's face it, he kinda is. But he's also a damn smart weirdo.

Now, some folks will say another reason the stupid sportswriters might have snubbed Belichick is because of Spygate and Deflategate and all his other 'Gates. The guy did get caught cheating a few times, after all.

(Although Deflategate, in the Blob's opinion, wasn't all that scandalous. It basically was a psych job -- the lineal descendant, if you will, of Hayden Fry painting the walls of the visitors' locker room pink when he was at Iowa, or Red Auerbach putting visiting teams in a locker room where the windows didn't open, and then cranking up the heat.)

But enough of that. The point is, it was the Grump Factor that mainly did in Belichick, not the Sleaze Factor. And as illustration, I offer a moment back in 2012, when Belichick's New England Patriots were taking on the New York Giants in the Super Bowl in Indianapolis.

It was Media Day in Lucas Oil Stadium, which anyone who's ever attended will tell you is about anything but Media. It's a three-ring circus -- and, as one of the featured acts, Belichick was penned up in a booth down on the field, surrounded by Media..

Including yours truly.

Anyway, at one point in the proceedings, some radio foof next to me started waving a red plastic tricorn hat at Belichick. "Bill!" he cried. "Bill! Will you  put this on?"

To which Belichick growled, with perfect Belichickian form: "No, I'm not gonna do that."

See what I mean?

If only he'd put on the hat.

If only he'd, I don't know, done a little dance, sung a few bars of "Yankee Doodle," maybe made an off-color joke or two about Paul Revere and his horse.

Why, the man would have soared into the Hall of Fame this week on the wings of eagles. Guaranteed.

Transferrable

 Coach Cig and some of the boys were in the house, and they brought their shiny new hardware with them. So straightaway the mojo was right. 

Straightaway you knew Tuesday wouldn't be one of those nights when Matt Painter brought those ornery Purdue Boilermakers into Assembly Hall and trashed the place. Not with the Hall -- full to the last seat for the first time this season -- bringing a barely remembered thunder. Not with Coach Cig as its monitor, sitting courtside and posing for pictures. Not with that glorious, newly-won CFP National Championship trophy that came along as sidekick and inspiration and, who knows, maybe even spirit animal.

Could the basketball Hoosiers do less than they did, given all that?

Were the Purdues toast on a stick from the start, with all that arrayed against them?

No, and yes. And so here came Indiana 72, No. 12 Purdue 67 -- and barely a flicker of surprise, because if football's mighty example wasn't transferrable, what possibly could be?

First blood to Darian DeVries in this old and fable-shrouded rock fight. First Quad 1 win for the Hoosiers in seven tries this season. Third straight loss for Painter's Boilers, who have hit a patch of black ice as January gives way to February.

The book on this Indiana team is it lives and dies at the 3-point arc, and, OK, so that's mostly true. Last night, for instance, the Hoosiers splashed a dozen threes in 33 attempts, five more than Purdue, who stuck seven of 20. Nick Dorn had four of the 12 for Indiana, and finished with 18 points. Lamar Wilkerson scored 19. 

But it wasn't all a three party. Tucker DeVries stuffed the stat sheet with nine points, 10 rebounds, three assists, three steals and a blocked shot. Indiana's starters outrebounded Purdue's 22-20. The Hoosiers' bench outscored Purdue's 16-12.

The game seesawed back and forth for most of a half, and Purdue almost filched it at the end, turning a 10-point Indiana lead into nervous time. But the Boilers once again couldn't finish, and once again some of their leading lights mirrored that struggle.

Fletcher Loyer, one of the premier shooters in the Big Ten, continued to search for his wandering shooting eye, missing seven of his 10 shots on the night. And Braden Smith, the nation's top point guard, was uncharacteristically quiet, scoring 14 points but missing eight of his 14 shots and racking almost as many turnovers (4) as assists (5).

By contrast, his opposite number, Conor Enright, had three more dimes (8) and one fewer turnover (3). Who had that on their bingo card?

Who had the Indiana players rushing over to celebrate with the student section, and Darian DeVries pumping his fists right in the middle of it? As if, you know, he wasn't still new to all this, just as all the imports on his roster are new to it all?

"Every time we needed the crowd tonight, they were there," DeVries said when it was done. "They never took a possession off either. They played 40 minutes tonight ... 

"Tonight was as good as it gets in college basketball."

Lot of that going around these days.

Disappearing act

 Cruising through my socials today, and I came across a couple of posts from a Facethingy bro that made me sigh and shake my head.

(This is not to say I don't sigh and shake my head at virtually everything these curmudgeonly days, mind you. But sometimes I really sigh and shake my head, and occasionally mutter the more blasphemous version of "Jeezly crow.")

Anyway, what Facethingy Bro -- he has a name, and it's Michael Pointer, a former sportswriting colleague -- had put up were three items about the Washington Post, which was one of the nation's great newspapers until Jeff Bezos got his mitts on it. One item noted that the Post reportedly would not be sending a beat writer to Nationals' spring training this year; a New York Times piece reported the Post had abruptly decided not to send a team to the upcoming Winter Olympics. 

And the third item?

It highlighted the logical conclusion a reasonable person might reach from the previous two: That there are strong indications the Post will soon be doing away with its sports desk altogether.

It was right about then I thought about Bill Gildea.

Bill, you see, worked the sports beat for the Post, along with a number of other luminaries.  You had Bill and Tom Boswell and Christine Brennan and Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon and Chuck Culpeper, and a bunch of others. John Feinstein worked the sports beat there for a goodly stretch. Ditto Sally Jenkins, who worked there twice and is still there.

They were the '27 Yankees of sports scribbling, in other words. The Lombardi Packers/Chuck Noll Steelers/Bill Walsh Niners/Bill Belichick Patriots. And now they're bailing on spring training? And -- good grief -- the Olympic Games?

What a world. What. A. World.

But back to Gildea.

I met him 29 years ago when he was traveling around Indiana, gathering material for his paean to high school basketball in the state. It was the last year of Hoosier Hysteria, Indiana's fabled single-class tournament. One of the teams Gildea was following was DeKalb -- which that season featured soon-to-be Mr. Basketball Luke Recker, and which was right up the road from my port of call in Fort Wayne.

In other words, I saw Bill more than a few times that winter. Reviewed the subsequent book, "Where The Game Matters Most." It was as graceful, and gracious, as Bill himself, who was a first-rate gentleman without a whiff of pretense.

He's gone now, alas. Shuffled off the mortal coil in 2020, at the age of 81. But I'm wondering if, somewhere in the Good Place, he's sighing and shaking his head and saying "Jeezly crow" or some variation, too.

Because the '27 Yankees are skipping the World Series, as it were. They're surrendering the field. It's a disappearing act we're seeing everywhere these days, distressingly. 

Yet it still confounds those of us who remember when a top-drawer sports staff sold the book, so to speak -- and never mind that the metro-desk drones called it The Toy Department.

Now?

Now the Washington Post isn't sending scribes to the Olympics. It's not covering spring training. There's no all-star lineup flooding the zone, as it were;no Tony Kornheiser cracking wise about luge or cross-country skiing or the Zen-like appeal of curling.

Kornheiser, by the way, left the Post years ago for a pile of TV dough. So did his sidekick, Wilbon. In Kornheiser's case, his exit deprived us of one of the funniest writers in America -- a man whose second compilation of columns bore one of the all-time great (and honest) titles: "I'm Back For More Cash."

Pretty much the theme music for the Jeff Bezoses of the world, come to think of it.

To our detriment.

The Who Cares Bowl

Lots of people ... OK, some people ... OK, a few people ... have been caterwauling lately about Shedeur Sanders being named to the Pro Bowl as a replacement for Pro Bowler Drake Maye, who's busy getting ready for the Super Bowl. Lots, or some, or a few, think it's ridiculous that a guy who started just seven games for the hideous Cleveland Browns and threw more interceptions (10) than touchdowns (seven) should be in the Pro Bowl.

"Where's, I don't know, Trevor Lawrence?" they say. "Where's the guy who was a finalist for NFL MVP, threw for 4,007 yards, 29 touchdowns and just 12 interceptions and led Jacksonville to the AFC South title? Where's that guy?"

One supposes they have a point.

One also supposes it doesn't matter.

That's because, hello, it's the Pro Bowl, which is nothing but recess in a warm place these days. There are relay races and skills contests and then a flag football game on the beach. Afterward there's a cookout.

(OK. So it's not on the beach. But it could be.)

(Also, as far as I know, there's not a cookout, either. But there could be.)

Point is, who really cares who plays in the Who Cares Bowl, so heck, why NOT Shedeur Sanders? He's new. He's fun in the sense that you never know when he's going to do something harebrained. And he has a brand, which is a big deal in corporate America these days.

"But ... but ..." you're saying now.

But what? Look around the AFC. Patrick Mahomes and Bo Nix are on the shelf. Ditto Daniel Jones and Cam Ward. Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow missed big chunks of the season with injuries, and CJ Stroud is likely still in hiding after throwing four picks in an ugly playoff loss to the Patriots.

As for Lawrence ...

Well, he was a Pro Bowl alternate. Lots of people, or some, or a few, think he should have been chosen ahead of  Justin Herbert, who's one of the three AFC quarterbacks. The fact Lawrence is not, after the breakout season he had, suggests he was asked and said, "Nah, I'm good."

This in turn suggests Trevor Lawrence is smarter than your average bear, so to speak.

Although he will miss the cookout. I hear it's a hell of a feast.

(Just kidding.)

Welcome to the big city

So, OK, then: Patriots vs. Seahawks in the 60th Super Bowl.

Two head coaches who've never been to the Big Supe as head coaches.

Two quarterbacks who've never been there, either.

It's Mike Vrabel, who's 50 years old and in his second gig as an NFL head coach, vs. Mike Macdonald, who's 38 and in his first. It's Drake Maye, who's in just his second year as an NFL starting quarterback, vs. Sam Darnold, who's the journeyman of all journeymen, bouncing around from place to place as a starter and backup before finding his mojo in Seattle.

This isn't Lombardi vs. Landry or Reid vs. Shanahan in the Big Six-Oh, but never mind that. And it's not Montana vs. Marino or Mahomes vs. Brady, but never mind that, either.

What it is are two teams who talk less about scheme and analytics than about heart and will and belief and vision, all the old verities. They talk about team unity and pieces fitting together into a cohesive whole, and everyone pulling an oar in the same direction for each other and the organization and, hell, even their cities.

They're new schoolers, these two, but they talk as old school as inkwells. It's heartwarming and wonderful and, OK, a little corny, too.

The Patriots, for instance?

Their fresh-faced quarterback looks like Johnny Be Good and plays like Billy Be Damned, out-gritting the Broncos yesterday on a snow-swirled day in Denver with his legs and his guile. It was the Patriots' ninth road win against zero losses this season -- which no one ever does in the NFL, especially not a team that was 4-12 last season.

Know something else about their quarterback?

He's married to his middle-school sweetheart, Ann Michael. Know what she does?

She bakes cookies for Maye and his teammates before every game.

Does it get any more "Little House On The Prairie" than that?

Out in Seattle, meanwhile, you've got a kid head coach who got the Seahawks to buy in on Day One. He did it by envisioning a team that never, ever quits, and that would wind up playing in the NFC championship game on a rain-soaked day Seattle.

Except for the fact it was a gorgeous day in Seattle, everything he envisioned came true.

The Seahawks won 14 games during the regular season in the toughest division in football, earned the NFC's No. 1 seed, and, yes, wound up playing in the NFC championship game. And they never quit, just like their leader -- Sam Darnold himself -- never quit through all his travels and tribulations. 

Matthew Stafford and the nemesis Rams kept coming at them; Darnold and Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Kenneth Walker III kept answering back. Smith-Njigba caught 10 balls for 153 yards and a touchdown. Walker ground out 62 yards and another six against a Rams defense that had no other back on whom to key. And Sam Darnold ... well, Sam Darnold played the game of his life in the biggest game of his life, throwing for 346 yards and three scores without a turnover. 

Does it get any more Shane-Falco-in-"The-Replacements" than that?

It's all a damn movie script, and in two weeks it culminates in the most cinematic of our Roman circuses. Will Drake Maye and the resurrected Patriots win on the road again? Will Darnold and JSN and Walker et al complete their young coach's giddy vision? 

We shall see. But in the meantime ... 

Welcome to the big city, Pats and 'Hawks.

Wear sunglasses. Those lights are some bright.

Another one gone

 Little by little these days, my childhood disappears. This will happen when you ascend to the first class section of codgerdom, which I can reliably claim to have done.

(Great place, codgerdom first class. You get free tapioca. Also unlimited supplies of "consarn it," "dadgum it" and various other codgerisms.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. Disappearing childhood.

Another piece vanished yesterday when the news came down that John Brodie had died, and, boy, that's bummer. For one thing, he was 90 years old, which seems impossible. Wasn't it just yesterday he was throwing to Gene Washington and handing off to Ken Willard?

Who were two others I remember from those 1960s San Francisco 49ers, who used to battle the seagulls in decrepit Kezar Stadium. Every Sunday afternoon, it seemed, we'd get the Bears, the Lions or the Vikings on the early game, and the Niners or the Rams on the late game. Sometimes we'd get both when they played one another.

Brodie, of course, was the quarterback of those Niners, and thus the ringleader. Besides Washington and Willard, they had some guys named Dave Parks and Charlie Krueger, and some other guys named Howard Mudd and Dave Wilcox and Bob Windsor. Even had a young Jimmy Johnson back there at cornerback.

Brodie played 17 seasons for the 49ers, retiring after the 1973 season with 214 career touchdown passes and 31,548 yards. In an era when it was a whole lot tougher to complete passes, he completed 55 percent of them. The 49ers during his time were sometimes decent, more often "meh" and occasionally awful. 

But in 1970 Brodie had his big year, winning league MVP while quarterbacking the Niners to a division title for the first time in his career. They lost to the Cowboys in the NFC championship game, 17-10.

And now he's gone, and those Sunday afternoons of my kid-hood grow that much dimmer. Brodie, Roman Gabriel, Gale Sayers, Dick Butkus, Mel Farr, Bart Starr ... the list goes on, as lists like this always will.

 'Bye, guys. See ya later, alligator.

Musical coaches

 Listen, I don't know what the Buffalo Bills are thinking. I make it a rule assume no NFL team is ever thinking much of anything, on the excellent chance none of them are.

So, yeah, Bills, OK, go ahead and fire Sean McDermott for not getting Josh Allen to the Super Bowl. McDermott's had plenty of chances, after all. So I guess it was time.

And, yeah, go ahead and interview Mike McDaniel, even though the Dolphins just got sick of him. Ditto Brian Daboll, who couldn't even get through the this season before the chronically putrid Giants fired him because he couldn't make them less chronically putrid.

Hey, you don't know! Maybe Mike and Brian will do better this time! Could happen, right?

Same goes for Robert Saleh, fired by the Jets only to be hired as the next head coach of the Titans. Also for Jeff Hafley -- whom the Dolphins just hired to replace McDaniel, and whose last head coaching gig was at Boston College, where he drove a pretty decent program onto the rocks.

But that was college! And this the pros! Whole different ballgame, right?

Which brings us back to the Bills.

Who, yesterday, down in Florida, interviewed not a former college head coach, but a current high school coach. Come on down, Philip Rivers!

"Wait ... what?" you're saying now.

Yes, that's right. Philip Rivers, last seen being called in off the couch to quarterback the Indianapolis Colts at the age of 44, got a sitdown with the Bills. He's never coached at the pro level. He's never coached at any of the various college levels. But Josh Allen thinks the world of him, so ... 

"So this is Gerry Faust 2.0?" you're saying.

Maybe. Although probably not. 

Probably the Bills will go with one of the retreads they're interviewing in this game of musical coaches, unless they go with some flavor-of-the-month offensive or defensive coordinator. It's a roll of the dice either way, especially given the less-than-stellar ownership and front office in Buffalo.

Sometimes, after all, retreads find second lives in new places (See: Bill Belichick, Mike Vrabel, etc.). And sometimes coordinators flourish as head coaches (See: Sean McVay, Ben Johnson, a host of others), and sometimes they crash-and-burn (See: McDaniel, Daboll, Josh McDaniels). 

But a guy with no tread or coordinator chops whatsoever?

Yikes.

Which is not to say Philip Rivers wouldn't be really good at the coaching thing. He probably would. And maybe the Bills are smarter than I'm giving them credit for, or that they've ever shown themselves to be. Maybe what they're really doing by interviewing Rivers is feeling him out for a gig as their quarterbacks coach. It's possible.

All I know is this: If they were really serious about him as a head coaching candidate, let me tell you about the last guy to go straight from the playing field to head coach in the NFL.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau and ESPN, that would be Norm Van Brocklin, also a quarterback, who finished his 12-year playing year in 1960 and was hired the next year by the Minnesota Vikings as their first head coach. Van Brocklin went on to coach 13 seasons with the Vikings and Atlanta Falcons, compiling a 66-100-7 record. He had just three winning seasons in those 13 years.

Not sayin'. Just sayin'.

Diminishment returns

 Four days later, people still can't wrap their heads around it. Indiana, ascending to heights once the exclusive property of the Alabamas, the Ohio States, the Michigans, the Notre Dames? Going where only the Rocknes and Leahys and Bear Bryants and Bobby Bowdens et al had gone before? Indiana?

This does not compute. This does not track. Surely the saddest of sadsacks in college football couldn't be that good, could they?

And so, let the diminishment returns begin (with appropriate refutation):

* Indiana only won because it bought a championship with NIL. 

Well, yes. The Indiana NIL payroll was $21.1 million. Which ain't couch-cushion dough.

But the payroll for Miami, whom it beat in the title game, was $24.1 million.

And the payroll for Oregon, whom it beat twice, was $30 million.

And the payroll for Ohio State, whom it beat in the Big Ten championship, was a whopping $35 million plus.

Truth is, yes, NIL has changed the calculus. But it's a calculus available to anyone; Miami quarterback Carson Beck's NIL haul, for instance, was $3.1 mill, compared to Fernando Mendoza's $2.6 mill. So if Miami or any of the other aforementioned schools had won the CFP, would the yapping poodles of the internet be saying they bought themselves a title? Did anyone say it last year when Ohio State did?

Next, please.

* Indiana only won because it was a de facto pro team, pitting grown men against teenagers.

Well, yes, Indiana did have a veteran team. But, as the Blob pointed out the other day, one of its principal players -- breakout wide receiver Charlie Becker -- is a true sophomore.  Most of the other key figures are either 22 or 23.  So the narrative that Indiana won because it was playing a bunch of 24- and 25-yearold grown men falls apart in a hurry.

Truth is, the Hoosiers brought a fairly traditional senior-laden team to the dance. Of course, no traditional senior-laden team had EVER won a national championship. Not one. No, sirree.

Next.

* Indiana only won because it was the Rent-A-Hoosiers. A transfer-portal team. 

Well, yes. A-portaling Indiana did go.

But so does everyone else these days.

And it's not like Fernando Mendoza was Carson Beck or anything.

Mendoza  came out of high school as the 2,140th-ranked prospect according to the scouting website 247, so little regarded he was recruited by none of the 18 schools whose football camps he attended. A brilliant student, he was headed to Yale before a spot on the Cal-Berkeley roster opened up.

Beck?

He was the backup on two national championship teams at Georgia, quarterbacked the Bulldogs to the 2023 SEC championship, and started 27 games there. The Bulldogs went 24-3 in those games as Beck threw for 7,912 yards and 58 touchdowns.

Portal advantage to Miami.

Truth is, Indiana didn't exactly load up on national champs or 5-stars via the portal. Aiden Fisher, the heart and soul of the Hoosiers' voracious down-seven on defense, wound up at James Madison because the big shooters all thought he was too slow and too small. D'Angelo Ponds, Indiana's All-American corner, didn't get a sniff because he everyone thought he was too small as well.

And Riley Nowakowski, the hybrid fullback/tight end who scored Indiana's first touchdown in the championship game?

He was a zero-star coming out of high school who walked on at Wisconsin and played a little tight end and fullback, but mostly special teams. Not exactly Ron Dayne or Jonathan Taylor.

Yes a-portaling the Hoosiers did go. But not to put together a roster of superstars. To put together a roster of misfit toys that included no five-stars, eight four-stars, and various scrap-heapers whom Curt Cignetti molded into a dynamic whole.

Next.

Next? Anyone?

Moneyball

 UCLA basketball coach Mick Cronin likely never set out to play the lead role in "The Perpetually Unhappy Man," the long-running hoops procedural that once starred Bob Knight, Jim Boeheim and a host of other grumps. But he's doing a bang-up job.

The other night, for instance, his Bruins handed No. 4 Purdue its first Big Ten loss in Pauley Pavilion, 69-67. It was a taut thriller UCLA snatched off the Boilermakers' plate with a game-ending 8-0 run, Tyler Bilodeau sticking a 3-ball with 8.8 seconds left to provide the winning points.

Think that made The Perpetually Unhappy Man smile?

It did not.

Instead, Cronin lashed out at the Big Ten in the postgame, sarcastically thanking it for making the Bruins play five of their first seven league games on the road. He also remains less than thrilled with the whole Big Ten thing in general, but reluctantly understands "that's gonna be what it's gonna be."

Somewhere in there, he also said this: "They (the Big Ten) don't care about basketball. Truly."

It says here Melancholy Mick only missed the mark by a hair with that one.

Truth is it isn't just basketball the Big Ten doesn't care about, it's also football. And volleyball. And soccer. And just about any other sport the conference offers.

If it cared about any of them -- or rather, any of the "student-athletes" who play them -- it never would have scavenged UCLA, USC, Washington and Oregon from the ruins of the Pac-12. It never would have scooped Rutgers and Maryland. You could even go back 35 or so years and say it never would have welcomed Penn State to the fold.

But the Big Ten did all that, and not because it had to. Or should have. It did it because TV rights and revenue streams drive the bus here in the merry 2000s, and the Big Ten hungered for those juicy east and west coast markets. What's a Big Ten Network without New York and L.A., after all?

So the conference blew up its footprint, because footprints are as old-fashioned as your granny's lace doilies. Moneyball is the new normal.

Heck, they're even paying the players now to spend all that extra time on airplanes, which means Big Ten commish Tony Petitti and the gang don't even have to feel guilty about it. How great is that?

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "What about academics? What about all the class time the student-athletes will miss kiting around the country?"

Bwah-ha-ha-ha. Ha. Ha.

That stuff went out the first time a school realized there was gold in them thar quarterbacks and point guards, and that was some time ago. Coast-to-coast is the most now, and even Mick Cronin has resigned himself to that. If he's mad at the Big Ten, after all, he should be just as mad at his university, which decided satchels of cash trumped its alleged mission.

UCLA's upcoming schedule, for instance?

Beginning the last day of January, the Bruins play three straight at home, then fly to Ann Arbor and East Lansing for roadies at Michigan and Michigan State. Then they fly back home to host Illinois and USC. Four days after that they fly to Minnesota; three days after that, they're back home to host Nebraska.

All that in 31 days.

But, hey. I'm sure the TV numbers will be huge.

An obscenity of riches

 Saw the other day that the Los Angeles Dodgers signed a career .273 hitter for $240 million over four years, and my unkempt mind immediately began imagining a world in which the Dodgers owned everything. Headlines began to blossom in my frontal lobe:

Dodgers Buy Judge, Raleigh, Skenes, Ohtani, Skubal; Ohtani Reminds Dodgers They Already Own Him.

Dodgers Respond By Buying The Re-Animated Corpses Of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio And Ted Williams; "With Or Without His Head?", Fans Inquire Of Williams.

Dodgers Buy Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, France; Tell President Trump, "I Got Your NATO Right Here, Pal."

Dodgers Buy Norway; Tell Trump, "And Your Nobel Peace Prize, Too."

Dodgers Buy MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred For Two Packs Of Bazooka Bubble Gum And A Game-Worn Chico Salmon Jersey; "Paid Too Much," Fans Complain.

And last but hardly least:

Dodgers Buy Entire National League. With the subhead, "Finally, Some Competitive Balance": Dodger Execs.

All of this is in jest, of course, but not by much. If the Dodgers can afford to shovel $240 mill at Kyle Tucker, the aforementioned career .273 hitter, how big a pile must they be sitting on? 

Because it's completely ridiculous -- no longer an embarrassment but an obscenity of riches -- and it launches the entire market into orbit. The Dodgers scooped the 29-year-old Tucker from the Cubs. Know what he did for the northsiders last season?

Batted .266. Hit 22 homers. Drove in 73 runs.

Now, those are OK numbers, but they're hardly $240 mill numbers. And they're especially not $240 mill numbers when you consider the Dodgers are back-to-back World Series champs who scarcely needed a .266 hitter to bolster an already gilded lineup. 

So Tucker's a spare part, essentially. And if you can afford to spend that many dineros on a spare part, how is anyone else expected to keep up?

No wonder the other owners have their Jockeys in a twist, yowling for a salary cap even though none of them are exactly destitute. Steve Cohen's Mets, for instance, just dropped $126 million across three years on the Blue Jays' Bo Bichette. That ain't chump change.

Besides, considering Bo's numbers dwarf Tucker's -- Bichette is a .294 career hitter who batted .311 with 18 homers and 94 RBI last season -- the Mets might have gotten him cheap. Bizarre as that sounds.

Then again, it's all bizarre these days. Which is why the Blob's unkempt mind might not be as unkempt this time as it usually is.

I mean, the Dodgers probably could buy NATO. Or at least a piece of it. And if Fearless Leader and the rest of his cabal objected?

Why, the Trolley Dodgers will just call Yoshinobu Yamamoto out of the pen. That'll shut 'em up.

Legendary

 Go ahead and close your eyes, on this morning after. Close your eyes and see what you will see forever now, see decades distant, see the way you see the puck whickering past Vladimir Myshkin off Mike Eruzione's stick or Kris Bryant scooping and throwing to first to end an interminable rainy night in Cleveland.

Now there's this: Fernando Mendoza diving into the end zone, ball outstretched, body and will at full extension. 

Fernando Mendoza going the last full measure for an Indiana football that went the last full measure itself, and now will be remembered the way America remembers the Miracle on Ice and the Miracle in Wrigleyville, aka the Cubs winning the World Series for the first time in 108 long hot summers.

USA 4, Soviet Union 3 in the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980.

Cubs 8, Indians 7 in Game 7 in 2016.

And now ...

Indiana 27, Miami 21 in the 2026 College Football Playoff national championship.

Maybe there's a better ashes-to-apotheosis tale than what happened last night in Miami, but good luck finding it. The Miracle on Ice? Sure, but Team USA had been there before, back in 1960. The Miracle in Wrigleyville? OK, but the Lovable Losers had won 85 or more games four times in the previous nine seasons, including 97 in 2015. They were one of the richest franchises in baseball, with a genius GM in Theo Epstein.

Indiana, on the other hand, was until this season the losing-est major college football program in the entire history of the sport.

Now the Hoosiers are the first major college football program ever to win 16 games in a season, two years after going 3-9 and finishing dead last in the Big Ten. That was right before Curt Cignetti hit town lugging a steamer trunk of hubris and swagger, and stood 100-plus years of dreary history right on its head.

The Hoosiers went 11-2 and reached the CFP in Coach Cig's first year. Now they're 16-0 and national champs, one end of a thread that stretches back 50 years exactly to Indiana's unbeaten 1976 NCAA basketball champions.

Two teams; 48-0 against the world, between the two of them. Who else can say that?

And, yes, OK, so people will say this only happened because of  NIL and the transfer portal, and that Indiana -- Indiana -- winning the national championship is Exhibit A of  how both have ruined the game. You don't have to build a program anymore; all you have to do is rent a few studs and you, too, can become an InstaChamp.

This of course ignores the fact that Indiana's rent-a-studs are for the most part not really studs but (as Mendoza said) "misfits" who became pieces of a greater whole. There isn't a 5-star player on the roster, and for all the caterwauling about the Hoosiers being a bunch of 24- and 25-year-old professionals beating up on children, the reality is somewhat different.

Mendoza, for instance, is 22, as are star wideouts Elijah Surratt and Omar Cooper Jr., star linebacker Aiden Fisher and the DB who made the game-clinching interception, Jamari Sharpe. Charlie Becker, who made two pressure catches last night to add to his growing list, is a sophomore. Running back Roman Hemby and All-American DB D'Angelo Ponds are both 23.

In other words, most of Indiana's key players are no older than the seniors on any senior-laden team. That those sorts of teams generally fare well in college football is hardly a revelation -- nor a reason to diminish what they accomplish.

So how did we get this place with Indiana?

Same as any program has ever gotten there, from the turn of the last century to today: Hard work, attention to detail, obsessive preparation and the right combination of grit, talent and the willingness of players to buy in as a seamless whole. 

What happened last night wasn't magic, in other words. It wasn't Indiana finding some cheat code or slick shortcut. It was just a superb football team being superb when it needed to be.

It was Mendoza getting roughnecked by the vicious Miami defense and bouncing up, over and over. It was Becker making a huge fourth-down catch because he and Mendoza had practiced it over and over. And it was Mendoza, his passing arm looking as if it had been gnawed by wolves, tucking it and running into the teeth of the Miami D on fourth-and-5.

Not stopping, of course, until he was Wilbur-and-Orville-ing into the end zone on the 12-yard run that will forever make him, and this Indiana team, legendary.

Someday a photo of that wingless flight will hang in an honored place in the Indiana football complex. And the alums will see it the way the Mikes and Sullys in Boston still see Bobby Orr's wingless flight after scoring the Cup-winning goal against the Blues. 

That was the iconic image of the Bruins' glory days. Mendoza's will be the same for these glory days. 

Go ahead and close your eyes, on this morning after. Close your eyes and see what you will see forever now, see for decades distant.

Fernando Mendoza, and Indiana football, in full flight.

And never coming down.

Da prediction

 You want to surrender to the narrative, at this point. It's grown so big, after all.

You want to just say "Indiana is going to win a national title in, are you kidding me, FOOTBALL tonight" because it seems the only way the narrative can end now, the only possible outcome now that destiny -- no, DESTINY -- is driving the bus. And destiny cannot be denied, especially when it's shouting as loud as it is now.

So, here's the Blob's prediction: Indiana is going to win a national title in football tonight.

Unless Miami does.

Unless destiny -- no, DESTINY -- decides to ditch the Hoosiers and go home with the Hurricanes, who by the way have their own narrative. If Miami wins, after all, it officially will be a Return To Glory. And it will happen in Miami (OK, so halfway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale). And how is that not karma shouting just as loud as destiny?

The Canes playing for a national title again in their hometown. I mean, come on.

"Oh, here we go," you're saying now. "Durwood Downer has entered the building."

Well ... not really. OK, so maybe.

What I'm really doing is being true to my essential nature, which is always to see the single cloud in a bluebird sky and say, "Oh, crap, it's gonna rain." It's how I get whenever I bump up against the aura of inevitability I sense in all this.

Maybe it's just because I live in Indiana, but it seems as if almost everyone assumes that the Hoosiers are, yes, inevitable at this point. That they're an unstoppable machine that will roll over Miami the way they've rolled over 15 other opponents this dream-like season. That every soul in Bloomington is simply tapping his or her foot until it's time to can pour out into the frigid January night and head for Showalter Fountain.

Where the fish sculptures have already been removed in anticipation of the par-TAY.

I read that the other day, and had this immediate thought: Man, these guys are really tempting fate.

I thought this because football is football, and it is sometimes very hard on narratives. Last night, for instance, was there any doubt about the narrative when Caleb Williams made that ridiculous off-balance throw to Cole Kmet to save the Bears' season again?

He faded back and faded back and faded back, a host of Los Angeles Rams closing in on a game-ending sack. And then, at the last second, he reared back and threw.

It looked like desperation itself. It was desperation itself. Except somehow it arced across the night and hit Kmet in stride in the end zone some 40 yards away.

Touchdown. Overtime. Bears wi-

Oops.

Because in overtime, the Bears stopped the Rams, and Williams led them downfield to within a handful of yards of what would surely be the field goal that would complete the narrative. And then, for some unaccountable reason, he threw deep, and a Rams defensive back made a diving interception, and a handful of plays later, it was the Rams who kicked the winning field goal.

So much for narratives.

Do I think something similar will happen tonight? Do I think Miami -- which has a terrifying defense and a quarterback as unflappable as Fernando Mendoza in sixth-year transfer Carson Beck -- will slap down the Hoosiers for their impertinence?

No. See: Third paragraph of this piece.

I think Indiana will win, because Mendoza will be prepared and his elite receiver corps will be prepared and those two running backs, Roman Hemby and Kaelon Black, will be prepared. The offensive line will be prepared to do some more road grading. D'Angelo Ponds and the other shutdown DBs will be prepared to take away Beck's weapons, and Aiden Fisher and the rest of the defensive down seven will be prepared to chase him around his own backfield.

Call it Indiana 33, Miami 24 this time. Because sometimes the ironclad narrative really is ironclad.

Meanwhile, in Assembly Hell ...

 So remember a week or so ago, when Indiana's basketball team had won four in a row and the Blob saw fit to remind everyone that, yes, there was still quality hoops happening in Bloomington despite all the hoo-ha surrounding the football Hoosiers?

Well ...

That was a week or so ago.

Now you'd be forgiven for actually thinking, "Hey, where'd basketball go?", because right now Hoosier Nation isn't getting any. Not quality basketball, anyway. Not basketball an Indiana fan would actually want to watch unless he or she enjoyed cursing and throwing things at the TV.

This is because, since the Blob rashly sang the praises of the basketball Hoosiers, they've lost three in a row. Two of those losses were in Assembly Hell, er, Hall. Two happened because Darian DeVries' guys blew a 16-point second-half lead at home against unbeaten Nebraska, and gave up 19 straight points in East Lansing in an 81-60 loss to Michigan State.

And yesterday?

Yesterday the Hoosiers got ball-peened in the Hall by an Iowa team that was on a three-game skid. The Hawkeyes won by 17, 74-57. They never trailed -- never trailed -- after a 10-2 start. And after Indiana drew within four in the second half, the Hawkeyes went on a 21-5 run to close the lid.

Two Hawkeyes, Bennett Stirtz  and Tavion Banks, flame-broiled the Hoosiers for a combined 53 points, with Stirtz scoring 27 and Banks 26. Indiana, meanwhile, died again at the 3-point line, bricking 18-of-24 attempts. And once again the Hoosiers were beaten on the glass, albeit this time by just one rebound.

Thus the motif continues for the DeVries Hoosiers: They live and die at the arc because they don't have much of an inside game -- which means when the 3s are dropping they can beat anyone and when they're not ...

Well. When they're not, they lose by 17 at home to a struggling Iowa team.

Some numbers: In these last three losses, the Hoosiers have shot just 31.7 percent from Threeville, going 27 of 85. They've been out-glassed by 19 rebounds -- including a 37-19 beatdown at Michigan State. And they've been outscored by a combined 36 points in the second halves of those games.

Not exactly what anyone was expecting, I'm guessing, when Scott Dolson plucked DeVries from West Virginia, and before that the wilds of the Missouri Valley Conference.

But, hey. At least you still got football, Indiana.

Bills come due

 Three things you can take away from yesterday's NFL divisional playoff games, two of them from the Book of Mr. Obvious and the other from the Book of NFL Rules, which seems occasionally as if it were written in ancient Sumerian:

1. The Seattle Seahawks do not need Sam Darnold to be Sammy Baugh for them to roll whoever gets in their way. He could be Sammy Davis Jr. for all it matters.

2. The Buffalo Bills always come due in the playoffs, by which I mean sooner or later Josh Allen turns into a pumpkin while God and the Book of NFL Rules laugh.

And, speaking of "2" ...

3. The greatest philosophical mystery of our times, at least this morning, is either what constitutes a catch or what constitutes an interception. Because the Book of NFL Rules seems profoundly unclear on that.

 I say this not out of any particular fondness for the Buffalo Bills, who sabotaged themselves enough to guarantee their traditional playoff flameout. This time it was 33-30 in overtime to the AFC's top seed -- aka the Denver Broncos, who got to celebrate for about five minutes before learning their gritty young quarterback Bo Nix broke his ankle and will not be playing in the AFC championship next week.

Of course, Josh Allen will not be playing either, mainly on account of Josh Allen. He coughed up the football four times yesterday, most ruinously in the dying seconds of the first half. That's when he took off running when he should have taken a knee, and the football, which he'd secured the way Pete Hegseth secures classified info, flew out of his hand and was recovered by the Broncos.

A few moments later, the Broncos cashed the gift field goal and had the three points that ultimately decided the outcome. Without it, they go to halftime up 17-10 instead of 20-10, and the Bills' field goal to end the second half wins the game 30-27 instead of merely forcing overtime.

Which means the Book of NFL Rules never comes into play.

About halfway through overtime, see, Allen threw a deep ball that Brandin Cooks caught and fell to the ground with, setting up the Bills for a potential game-winning field goal of their own at the Broncos' 20-yard line. But wait!

After Cooks caught the ball and fell to the ground with it, Broncos defensive back Ja'Quan McMillian pried the ball out of Cooks' grasp and began parading around with it. Perhaps he was celebrating the indecipherability of the aforementioned Book, because the officials thumbed through it, declared the play an interception and awarded the football to the Broncos.

"But wasn't Crooks on the ground when he did that?" you might be asking now.

Yes, he was.

"And didn't he have both hands on the football when he hit the ground?" 

Indeed.

"So shouldn't the play have been over before McMillian took the ball away?"

Well ...

You would think so.

But, nah. In the ancient Sumerian, the Book reads, "The ground can't cause a fumble, but it sure as hell can cause an interception." Also, "Let the word go out from the great god Crom that a catch is a catch not when a receiver wraps both hands around the ball and pulls it to his body, but when he 'secures' it or 'completes a football move'. Both are defined by the game officials, who do not read ancient Sumerian and therefore have no idea what they are, either.

"This also applies to pass interference."

Which, of course, was whistled twice on the Broncos' final march to the winning field goal. One might actually have been interference. Or both. Or neither. No one really knows.

In any event, good on the Broncos. And good on either New England or Houston, who won't have to face Bo Nix next week in the AFC championship.

I'm saying it'll be New England. Unless, of course, the ground causes another interception.

Prize appropriation

 (In which, once again, the Blob kinda-sorta escapes the Sportsball World compound. Act accordingly.)

Have listened to all the chortling and outright guffawing the last few days about Fearless Leader -- the Achievement And Merit President -- accepting the Nobel Prize medal from its latest winner, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. And I have a few thoughts.

One, was it merely a goodwill gesture, or Machado's way of saying, "Please don't have me kidnapped/assassinated"?

Two, does this mean Fearless Leader -- the Achievement And Merit President -- finally will stop whining about getting stiffed by those Nobel chumps?

Three, will Fearless Leader -- the Achievement And Merit President -- admit that accepting someone else's medal is the ultimate DEI move? And sort of pathetic if you think about it?

Answers: Most likely the latter ... we can only hope ... and, not a chance in hell.

It does, however, raise some intriguing possibilities for future prize appropriation by the Achievement And Merit President, beginning with Monday night. FIFA has already allowed him to put his grimy paws on the World Cup, while at the same time handing Fearless Leader its own ridiculous peace prize, presumably composed of construction paper and library paste. What's next?

What's next is Monday, when the President will be in attendance for the college football national championship game in  Miami.

That was reported just the other day, and it immediately inspired possible scenarios from  the irreverent. Will Fearless Leader's legendary megalomania compel him to horn in on the proceedings? Will he wink-wink/nudge-nudge suggest what a cool idea it would be for him to present the championship trophy to the winner?

Will he then hold onto juuuust a smidge longer than etiquette demands?

"Congratulations, Coach Cignetti. Here's your trophy."

"Thank you, Mr. Presi- ... Mr. Presi- ... DAMMIT LET GO OF THE THING, ALREADY!"

After which NCAA President Charlie Baker smooths everything over by presenting Fearless Leader with his own replica trophy.

Construction paper and library paste are well represented.

Another milestone

That boffo new comedy on the interwhatsis, "The Diminishment Of The Hoo-Hoo-Hoo-Hoosiers," achieved yet another milestone the other day. Applause, applause.

Some lint-brain -- and I won't bother looking up which lint-brain, because they're all of a piece these days -- accused Curt Cignetti's Indiana football program of playing dirty.

Said the Hoo-Hoo-Hoo-Hoosiers were cheating. Didn't offer a shred of evidence, because you don't have to on the interwhatsis, but said only that they surely MUST be cheating because they're Indiana and Indiana could not possibly have gotten this good at football without a crib sheet.

Indiana football being accused of cheating.

Does that not signal Coach Cig and the guys truly have hit the big time?

After all, back when Lee Corso was driving a double-decker London bus into Memorial Stadium just to get people to pay attention for a nanosecond, no one would have dreamed of accusing Indiana football of cheating. If the Hoosiers were, they were incredibly bad at it, because Indiana football was incredibly bad. Historically so.

But then Coach Cig showed up, and now the Hoo-Hoo-Hoo-Hoosiers are 26-2 under his hand and playing for a national championship Monday night. This has broken the brains of the college football cognescenti, elitist snobs that they are. How dare the riffraff track mud all over the realm of the Alabamas and Georgias and Texases et al! Why, next they'll be letting one of the Ivies in here!

So, yes, Indiana must be cheating. This, of course, ignores the fact that what used to be cheating is just Bidness As Usual now. The NIL and transfer portal have neatly laundered it.

But logic flees when the status quo is threatened, so Cignetti's as crooked as Al Capone. Or his team's only good because its players are all, like, 30 years old. Or it's only good because its made a mockery of the new reality, simply renting an entirely new team every season while everyone else Respects The Process.

Meanwhile, Miami will trot out a sixth-year transfer from Georgia (Carson Beck) at quarterback Monday night. 

Damn cheaters.

The enduring taint

Once upon a time the City College of New York (CCNY) had a dandy little basketball team that was coached by a legend named Nat Holman, and it was so skilled and played with such discipline and will it won both the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year.

That year was 1950, and the CCNY Beavers were the toast of the Big Apple.

The next year, they were something else entirely.

The next year, several of their players were found to have shaved points during that magic season, taking money from gamblers not to lose games but to knock them off the level. Which comes to the same thing.

Worst part was, CCNY wasn't alone.

Turns out Manhattan College, NYU and Long Island University were also in on the fix, and eventually the scheme swallowed up Toledo, Bradley and '51 NCAA champion Kentucky as well -- plus players from USC, San Francisco, Oregon, Colorado, Georgetown and the Ivy League who met with gamblers but didn't take the deal.

Between that and another point-shaving scandal later in the decade, it all but wrecked college basketball. Nothing destroys the public trust more than players taking money to manipulate outcomes -- and without that trust, our games are just  professional wrestling by another name.

College buckets found that out the hard way 75 years ago.

Unfortunately, the lesson had an expiration date.

Here we are in the science fiction-y year of 2026, see, and it's 1951 all over again. According to a federal indictment in Pennsylvania that detonated like an atomic bomb yesterday, another point-shaving scheme has infected college buckets. This time it involves 39 players on 17 NCAA Division I teams who fixed dozens of games for another pack of hyenas looking to scam their way to riches.

Twenty of those indicted played college buckets either last season or the season before, per the indictment. Four of those played for their current teams just in the last week -- including a kid named Simeon Cottle, who scored 21 points to lead Kennesaw State past Florida International just two days ago.

Cottle, who's averaging 20.2 points per game this season, was the Conference USA preseason player of the year. He's now just an ex-player, Kennesaw State having summarily dismissed him after news of the fix broke.

Look. I'm not going to take to my bully pulpit here (for long, anyway) to point out that not only does history have an uncomfortable tendency to replicate itself, in this case it was as easy to predict as sunrise.  NIL and the unrestrained transfer portal, after all, have turned big-time college basketball and football into a purer money chase than they already were.  

It's been an I'm-gettin'-mine culture for decades, but now it's operating in broad daylight instead of the shadows beneath tables. Those thousand-dollar handshakes are now million-dollar NIL deals, and the "student-athlete" is not just fiction but a fable out of Aesop. The "student-athletes" are purely mercenaries now, same as their coaches and athletic departments.

Throw in all those mushrooming online betting sites, and how can you be shocked by the news out of Pennsylvania yesterday? Especially when the universities (or at least the networks who pay to televise their games) openly promote those sites?

Greed, it seems, is an enduring taint, and so once again history comes back around. That aforementioned point-shaving scandal in the late 1950s, for instance?

It eventually involved some 50 players from 27 schools. And the primary fixer was a former professional basketball player named Jack Molinas -- who, for a brief time, played for the Fort Wayne Pistons and then in a handful of minor leagues.

Now it's all these years later, and guess what?

One of those named but not charged in the indictment yesterday was Antonio Blakeney, who, for a brief time, played for the Chicago Bulls and then in a handful of leagues overseas.

Around and around the wheel goes.

Shrinking the Big Deal

 Saw an ESPN headline this a.m. that made me laugh, after which it made me say, "Really?" After which it made me say, "How pathetic is this?"

Here's what the headline said: Fans Storm The Court After Stanford Upsets No. 14 UNC.

Really?

Storming the court because you beat somebody ranked 14th?

How pathetic.

Also, what a shrinkage of the Big Deal motif, to the extent that the Big Deal becomes virtually meaningless; if everything is a Big Deal, then nothing is a Big Deal. That's how it goes, right?

Now, I'm sure the kids who stormed the court out in Palo Alto last night would argue it was a Big Deal, because their Cardinal beat North Carolina. Michael Jordan! Sam Perkins and James Worthy! Phil Ford and Tyler Hansbrough and Eric Montross and Saint Dean Smith Himself!

Except that's not North Carolina anymore.

North Carolina -- this year, anyway -- is Caleb Wilson and some kid named Henri Veesaar and some other kid named Luka, though not Luka Doncic. Luka Bogavac is his name.

North Carolina -- this year -- is a team that lost by 14 to unranked SMU and, right now, sits eighth in the ACC.

 North Carolina -- this year -- might as well be Coastal Carolina. 

Oh, and Stanford?

The Cardinal are 14-4 after last night. UNC, on the other hand, is 14-3.

In other words, this was not Chaminade taking down Ralph Sampson and No. 1 Virginia. It wasn't Watford-For-The-Win. It wasn't North Carolina State and Jimmy V shocking Houston and Phi Slamma Jama, or Villanova shocking Patrick Ewing and Georgetown, or Cleveland State taking down Indiana and Bob Knight.

It was one 14-win team beating another 14-win team. That's it.

And, yes, I know, I'm making way too much of a Big Deal myself about this, veering once more across the center line into Old Man Shouting At Clouds  territory. In my day, we only risked getting trampled to death when it MEANT something. In my day, we didn't have to invent achievement, we ACHIEVED it. In my day ...

And so on, and so forth.

But enough of that. I'm not going to embarrass myself completely and take some deep sociological plunge into the Diminishment Of Striving Among America's Youth or  The Entitlement Generation And How It Will Be The Downfall Of Western Culture.

That stuff is boring, for one thing. Also it's the most tired of rants. It is, after all, what every generation has said about the succeeding generation since Pliny the Elder was telling Pliny the Younger to get off his shiftless ass and do something with his life.

"DoorDash is not a career, Younger," quoth Elder.

Again, enough of that. Although I do wonder one thing.

What would happen if Stanford played No. 13 Illinois and won?

Why, they'd tear the roof off the place. Damn kids.

How you do it

 Raise a glass this morning to the people who get it, who can see home truth beyond the glare of ego, who jump instead of making those around them push.

Raise a glass. Raise a glass to Mike Tomlin, who showed everyone how you do it yesterday.

After 19 seasons in Pittsburgh, during which he never lost more than he won with one of the NFL's most iconic franchises, he stepped down as the Steelers' head coach yesterday. He still had a year (plus options) left on his contract, but decided it was time to move on. Maybe the pitiless grind of the gig -- and it is pitiless -- finally had worn him down. Or maybe he just decided he wasn't getting the job done to his own satisfaction, and that maybe a fresh voice was needed.

The latter, of course, is pure speculation, although not particularly fanciful speculation. It seemed to jibe with who Tomlin has been across almost two decades that he both sensed the end coming, and didn't want the Rooney family to be the bad guys of the piece. So he relieved them of that responsibility.

Not that the Rooneys were certain to be the bad guys. Even after the Steelers' latest playoff flameout -- an embarrassing 30-6 loss at home Monday night to the Houston Texans -- there was no immediate sense that Tomlin was going to walk the plank for it. The clamor for a regime change had never been louder, but the Rooneys have always operated by their own clock. You own a football team for well over half a century, you don't let anyone tell you what time it is.

So maybe they'd have reluctantly decided it was indeed time for a regime change, and maybe they wouldn't have. But Tomlin made the point moot.

You lose 30-6 at home in the playoffs, the message is both loud and clear: Something has to change. And so Tomlin changed it.

He'll leave behind that incredible run of 19 straight winning seasons, leavened by seven straight playoff losses. The last time Tomlin's Steelers won a playoff game was a full decade ago, when they beat the pre-Patrick Mahomes Chiefs in the divisional round enroute to a loss to the Patriots in the AFC championship.

That's an unconscionably thirsty dry spell for a franchise with six Lombardi Trophies in its possession. And no one could have been more acutely aware of that than Mike Tomlin, only the third head coach the Steelers have had in 57 years.

Chuck Noll. Bill Cowher. Tomlin. That's all, y'all, since 1969.

Now?

Now there are two jobless coaches out there with a combined 39 years of head coaching experience: John Harbaugh, unexpectedly fired by the Ravens after an underwhelming 2025 season, and Tomlin. Only one, however, is back on the market.

Tomlin, still only 53, will be taking 2026 off. 

Can't say he hasn't earned it. Can't say that at all.

Past as prologue

 The  big news out of golf right now -- it's January, so any news out of golf qualifies as big -- is that Brooks Koepka is coming back to the PGA fold, though with less folding money. Under the PGA's Returning Member Program, he'll be allowed back inside the ropes, but only after paying a hefty fine.

Koepka, who defected to the LIV golf "tour" in 2022, ponied up. And now he'll re-defect back to the PGA, having met the RMP's provisions -- that he'd been away from the PGA Tour for at least two years, and that he'd won the Players Championship or one of the four majors since he left.

So what does this mean?

I'll tell you what it means.

It means you can't spell "LIV" without "WHA."

It means the past is often prologue, and thus LIV golf is just the old World Hockey Association, which 50 years ago was the LIV golf of hockey. Like LIV, it was a breakaway league, only from the NHL instead of the PGA. Like LIV, it threw fistfuls of money at established stars to jump ship. And, like LIV, it turned out to be something less than the defectors expected.

In the WHA's case, it turned out to be an under-capitalized mess that thrived for a bit in some places, and never caught hold in others. The league made a big splash at the outset when it lured established stars such as Bobby Hull, Derek Sanderson, Gerry Cheevers and Bernie Parent, and it put "major league" hockey in places that had never before seen it:  Miami, Calgary, Dayton, O., and San Francisco, and later Indianapolis, Hartford, Conn., and Edmonton, Alberta. 

Alas, not all of those teams survived for long. Dayton and San Francisco, for instance, never made to the ice; before the inaugural season even began, Dayton became the Houston Aeros and San Francisco the Quebec Nordiques. The Calgary Broncos and Miami Screaming Eagles, on the other hand, wound up folding outright.

Eventually, after seven seasons, the league folded in 1979 with four teams -- Winnipeg, Quebec, the Edmonton Oilers and the Hartford Whalers -- being absorbed into the NHL. Of those four, only Winnipeg and Edmonton survive in their original form. The Whalers are now the Carolina Hurricanes, and the Quebec Nordiques became the Colorado Avalanche.

LIV golf hasn't gone that way yet. But the pattern does seem unnervingly familiar.

Like the WHA, it's not all it was cracked up to be; it's turned out to be a gussied-up exhibition tour, with 54-hole tournaments, no cut and guaranteed paychecks even if you play like Weekend Wilbur and snap-hook every ball you address.  Primarily an overseas tour -- Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. -- its TV presence is negligible, and its American venues do not exactly wake up any echoes.

Chatham Hills in Westfield, In., for instance. The Cardinal at St. John's in Plymouth, Mich. Bayou Oaks in New Orleans' City Park.

All very nice venues, I'm sure. But close your eyes and it's 1972 Dayton, Calgary and Winnipeg all over again.

Now, admittedly, this is a lot to extrapolate from one guy coming back to the PGA Tour. But three other LIV golfers -- Bryson DeChambeau, Cameron Smith and Jon Rahm -- also meet the Returning Member Program requirements. So it's reasonable to think Brooks Koepka could be less an outrider than a groundbreaker.

In other words: Stay tuned.

Times and places

 I once heard a reporter in a press conference totally befuddle a young man named Major Harris.

The year was 1989, the occasion was the Fiesta Bowl, and Harris was the quarterback for West Virginia, who would go on to lose to Lou Holtz's Notre Dame legions to secure ND's last national championship. The question, if I recall (and, come on, it's been 37 years), came from a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter. It went something like this:

"Major, what percentage of the Notre Dame mystique will be a factor in the game?"

Harris looked at her like she had two heads.

"Uh ..." he replied, or words to that effect.

This is not how Jaguars head coach Liam Coen responded yesterday in the postgame presser after the Jags lost to the Bills in an wild-card playoff game

No, he merely grinned and said "Thank you, ma'am" when Lynn Jones of the Jacksonville Free Press asked ... well, OK, so it wasn't exactly a question.

What she said was this: "How you doing today, Lynn Jones, Jacksonville Free Press. I just want to tell you, congratulations on your success, young man. You hold your head up, alright? You guys have had a most magnificent season. You did a great job out there today. You just hold your head up, okay? Ladies and gentlemen, Duval, you the one. We got another season, okay? Take care, and much continued success to you and the entire team."

Now, I wasn't there, obviously. But I've sat in enough of these postgames (including the one at the aforementioned Fiesta Bowl) to imagine at least some others among the assembled media looked at one another and mouthed, "What the hell?"

Because, listen, there's such a thing as protocol in these affairs, and Jones' boosterish declaration violated it in any number of ways. One, she didn't ask a question (even a dumb one involving the Notre Dame mystique). Two, she DIDN'T ASK A QUESTION. And, three, even if there's a time and place to give a pep talk to a source (and I'm not sure there is), this wasn't it.

This was the time and place to ask what in the name of Tom Landry was Coach thinking when he dialed up a fullback dive on third-and-9. Or why he didn't take the gimme field goal when he came up short on fourth down inside the 10. Or why he stuck with the Cover Two even though the other team's QB1 was tearing large holes in it.

Look. I don't know Lynn Jones, so I can't tell you what she was thinking. But I know her job, because she's a columnist for the Free Press, and I did a little columnizing myself in my time. So I can say with some assurance (as Drew Lerner of Awful Announcing noted in his story on this) that the place for telling a coach what a magnificent job he did is in the column.  Not in the presser.

It's not that I don't understand that impulse, mind you. I do. More than once I felt for a coach or player in the wake of a tough loss, but I held my tongue. I didn't tell him (or her) to keep his/her head up. I didn't give him/her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. I just asked my questions and moved on.

Maybe that meant I didn't get the best stuff sometimes, I don't know. Maybe keeping a professional distance wasn't always the way to go. But it was my way, and it served me well.

I do know one thing, though.

Lynn Jones' way is not the way to go. Never was. Never will be.

Cliffhanger Central

 Look, there has to be a name for them now. Has to be. They can't just be the Bears ... or Da Bearz ... or Da (Bleepity-Bleeping) Bearz.

So what do we call them, as Caleb Williams and his crew pull another one out of either the hat or a certain orifice? What do they answer to?

The Kardiac (as opposed to Kodiak) Bears?

The Windy City "Whew"s?

Or Chicago Med, because they've sent more of their fans to the ER this year than six Chicago dogs with extra peppers and a Malort chaser?

You tell me. You tell me after Chicago 31, Green Bay 27 last night, which was either an epic Packers choke (the Wisconsin version) or just another day of the week for the Bears (the Illinois version).

Seven times now this season the Bears have fallen down the well, which is about two more times than Timmy did on "Lassie." Seven times they've found a rope that conveniently seemed always to be there and clambered out.

The seventh time happened after the Bears went down 21-3 at halftime to their ancient rivals ... and after Packers quarterback Jordan Love kept picking them apart ... and after they kept going for it on fourth down and failing, which happened a staggering four times. It was as if Bears coach Ben Johnson's gambling old boss in Detroit, Dan "Call And Raise" Campbell, had pulled off some sort of alpha-male demon possession.

At any rate, it was still 21-6 heading to the fourth quarter, and the Bears looked expired. The Packers own 'em, the Pack's their daddy, all that noise.

And then ...

And then Super Caleb sprang from the phone booth, and the Bears followed.

Somehow, some way, they scored 25 points in the fourth quarter, and stole it right off the Packers' plate. D'Andre Swift ran for a score and Williams found Olimeade Zaccheaus for another score, and then threw to Colston Loveland for the two-point conversion. 

That pulled the Bears within three at 27-24. The Packers promptly missed a 44-yard field goal try -- a virtual gimme, these days -- and here came Super Caleb again, hitting DJ Moore from 25 yards out with 1:43 to play for the winning six.

Voila: Fifteen straight points in the last 6:36, at which point the Bears trailed 27-16. Seventh fourth-quarter comeback. Seventh win after trailing with two minutes to play.

And, oh, yeah: First playoff W for the Bears in 15 years.

Lovie Smith was still the coach then. Devin Hester was still running back kicks. Brian Urlacher was still terrorizing ballcarriers, and Jay Cutler was the surly quarterback.

Fifteen years along, Super Caleb fills that role, minus the surliness. And the Bears are headed to the second round, where they'll welcome either the Eagles or the Rams to Soldier Field -- aka Cliffhanger Central.

"I think it's our identity here at this point," Johnson said, when asked about all the fantastic finishes. "Some people say it's not sustainable. I don't know."

Or maybe he does. Wink, wink.

Hail to the conceivable, Part Deux

 Driving around with the radio on a smidge before 5:00 yesterday afternoon, and a high school basketball game was just about to start already. Nothing odd about that, persay. It was January, it was Friday night, it was Indiana. Of course there would be high school buckets in the high school buckets state.

But at 5 p.m.?

Once again, your Indiana football Hoosiers had given us something even the codgers among us had never seen before.

Not even IU basketball, after all, had ever pushed aside the high school version on a Friday night in January. That IU football would cause schools to shove back starting times and/or move their games off Friday altogether was ... well, as Wallace Shawn said in "The Princess Bride": Inconceivable!

And yet, it happened. IU was playing Oregon in the Peach Bowl for a berth in the CFP national championship game, and kickoff was scheduled for 7:30 p.m. So a girls-boys doubleheader between Northrop and Snider was tipping at the alien hour of 5 p.m. High school basketball, the holiest of Hoosier holies, moved aside.

Of course, we're way past the point where Curt Cignetti's Hoosiers made a ghost of the previously inconceivable. Roll unbeaten through the regular season? Conceivable. Beat No. 1 Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game? Conceivable. Destroy Alabama -- Alabama, for pity's sake -- in the Rose Bowl?

Conceivable.

And now we take you to Atlanta last night, the Peach Bowl, first play of the game against a smart, talented Oregon team whose only loss was to Indiana back in October.

Was that really D'Angelo Ponds picking Dante Moore and taking it to the house on the first snap of the game?

Conceivable.

The game wasn't over the moment Ponds danced across the goal line, but it might as well have been. The Hoosiers went on to score touchdowns on four straight  possessions, took a 35-7 lead into halftime, and led 42-7 before Oregon managed a couple of garbage-time scores. The final was 56-22, a lamination no one saw coming except, perhaps, Coach Cig and his guys.

And yet, there it was. The Hoosiers forced three turnovers and turned them into scores, while turning it over zero times themselves. Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza was ridiculous again, throwing more touchdown pass (5) than incompletions (3) for the second game in a row. He found four different Indiana receivers for scores, led by Elijah Sarratt's seven catches for 75 yards and two touchdowns.

And now ... onward.

To play for a national title. Against Miami in Miami. With a quarterback who can't seem to miss, and a wide receiver corps that runs impeccably precise routes and never drops a ball, and a defense that never lets opponents take an easy breath.

In two playoff games, that group has beaten Alabama and Oregon by a combined 69 points, outscoring them 94-25.

In two games, Mendoza has thrown eight touchdown passes, no interceptions and just five incompletions.

In two games, Sarratt has 11 catches for 115 yards and three scores.

Hail, America. Hail to the conceivable.

 

Da prediction

 Every day now people ask me what I think, usually people dressed in IU red this or IU red that. I tell them I don't know what to think. I'm tempted to add this is because thinking hurts when you get to be my age.

They ask anyway.

"So, what do you think? Indiana or Oregon?" they say.

"Beats me," I reply. "Besides, I'm almost always wrong about these things."

It's that "almost" that's hanging me up here.

See, Indiana-Oregon in the Peach Bowl tonight for a berth opposite Miami in the national championship game is one of those conventional wisdom deals, and so it ought to be an easy call. Conventional wisdom says it's hard -- damned hard -- to beat a really good football team twice in one season, and Oregon is a really good football team. Indiana beat the Ducks 30-20 in Eugene back in October, so ...

So, conventional wisdom says it's Oregon all the way. The Ducks have their own sideline wizard in Dan Lanning. They've got their own stud quarterback in Dante Moore. They've got athletes just like Indiana has athletes.

However ...

However, there is this: Indiana eats conventional wisdom for breakfast.

The Hoosiers, see, are as unconventional as they are undefeated, which is why some people still think they're a trick of the light. They've got a 64-year-old head coach who's now 25-2 in his first major-league job, and an OK quarterback who somehow morphed into a Heisman Trophy winner after transferring from Cal to IU. They're the unconventional wrapped in the improbable, these guys.

Which is maybe why last week they became the only team in the two-year history of the 12-team College Football Playoff to actually win its first-round game. This year, Georgia lost and Texas Tech lost and Ohio State lost. Indiana didn't just win, but paved lordly Alabama like an off-ramp, 38-3.

The Hoosiers were a machine in that game, their first Rose Bowl victory ever (and only their second trip to Pasadena). It was yet another convention-trashing moment for a school whose national perception still is skewed by a football lineage that is ... well, somewhat less regal than Alabama's.

Andnow  here we go again: In two years of the 12-team CFP, every rematch has gone to the team that lost the first meeting -- the latest, of course, being Ole Miss taking down Georgia in the Sugar Bowl after losing to the Bulldogs earlier in the season.

This bodes well for the Ducks, to reiterate. Or would, if they were playing anyone but Indiana.

Let's call it this way, then:

Indiana 30, Oregon 26.

And now ...

 ... allow us to introduce Indiana University's basketball team.

Did you even know Indiana University had a basketball team?

Well, it does. They've got uniforms and everything.

Oh, they're not the football team, these Dribblin' Hoosiers, and no one on the roster is as famous as Fernando Mendoza (who won the Heisman Trophy!), or the Baron of Bloomington himself, Coach Curt "Coach" Cignetti (who once ACTUALLY SMILED!). Heck, lots of people couldn't even tell you who the basketball coach is.

"Is it Coach Cig?" they ask.

Nah. It's this guy named Darian DeVries.

Who, don't look now, has a whole roster of new names runnin' and jumpn' and wearin' out the three-point arc, in case you haven't noticed. The Dribblin' Hoosiers shoot threes like they're about to be outlawed, if you must know. In 15 games so far this season, they've jacked up a shameless 435, which works out to 29 per game.

They're shootin' fools in other words. And, yeah, OK, so they're only making a touch over 36 percent from the arc; last night at Maryland, they got up 25 from Threeville but made just eight, or 32 percent.

Here's the thing, though: They won. On the road. By 18, 84-66.

It was the Hoosiers' fourth straight win since a 12-point loss to Kentucky just before Christmas, and now they're 12-3 overall and 3-1 in the Big Ten. Lamar Wilkerson led them with 24 points, including 16 straight at one point. They also got 19 from Tayton Conerway, 16 from Conor Enright and 15 off the bench from Reed Bailey.

And, yeah, I know. Unless you're still an obsessed Hoosier basketball fan, you've likely never heard of any of them, being all newbies. But they can play. And they can shoot. And when they make enough of 'em, they tend to overwhelm folks.

Like Maryland last night. Like Penn State, whom they swamped by 41, 113-72. Like Marquette (a 23-point win), Kansas State (a 17-point W) or Washington (90-80).

All told, the Dribblin' Hoosiers are averaging 85 points per game. That's way more than Coach Cig's boys scored against Alabama in the Rose Bowl -- although the 35-point lamination the Hoosiers laid on the Crimson Tide looked a lot like the Dribblin' Hoosiers vs. Penn State.

Saturday, those Hoosiers welcome unbeaten Nebraska to Assembly Hall. It'll be their sternest test of the Big Ten schedule to date. And you might actually hear something about it -- or not.

Coach Cig's boys, after all, take on Oregon in the Peach Bowl the night before. At stake is a berth in the national championship game.  And if the Hoosiers manage to serve up Duck L'Squash for the second time this season, the most insane sports story of the year will get even more insane.

And the next day?

The most quietly interesting sports story in Bloomington will have a chance to be a lot less quiet. And a lot more interesting.

A gamer goes

That must be one whale of a 0-0 save-fest they've got going on up in the Great Beyond right now, with the word coming down that Mr. Goalie himself has passed. Glenn Hall was 94 and follows by a few months the great (maybe the greatest) Ken Dryden, which means when the celestials choose up sides for pond hockey each gets a stud between the pipes.

Dryden, of course, owned the 1970s for the lordly Montreal Canadiens. Hall, on the other hand, made his rep with the less-than-lordly Chicago Black Hawks of the 1950s and early '60s, when you could set your watch by two things: That the sun would come up in the east every morning, and that Glenn Hall would be in goal for Chicago every night. 

Records are made to be broken, to lapse into cliche, but Hall holds one that likely will never be touched. For seven years, between 1955 and 1962, he started every game -- and with his bare face hanging out, because goalie masks were not yet a thing. 

Counting playoffs, he started 552 games in a row. That's 295 more than the guy in second place, Alec Connell of the original Ottawa Senators between 1924 and 1930. 

The man was a gamer, in other words. Even if he wasn't always rewarded for it.

In all his years fielding pucks aimed at his mug, after all, Hall hoisted the Stanley Cup only one time. That was in 1961, when he backstopped the Black Hawks to the Stanley Cup. Seven years later, he was in the net for the St. Louis Blues in another Cup Final, but the expansion Blues were swept by the Canadiens in the Cup Final.

Know what, though? 

In four games, Mr. Goalie gave up just 11 goals. He made so many kick-saves-and-a-beauty, in fact, he won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff MVP anyway. At the time he was only the second player from a losing team to do that; all these years later, he's still only one of six.

Rarity was his thing, it seems. And not just for those few times someone managed to slip a puck past him.

Night of the sieve

 So, you think you had a bad day yesterday? You didn't have a bad day.

Jacob Markstrom, now, he had a bad day.

Markstrom, see, is the goaltender for the New Jersey Devils -- the spiritual descendant, as it were, of the great Martin Brodeur, who backstopped the Devils for years and years. Last night against the New York Islanders, however, he was more like the spiritual descendant of, say, Martin Short. 

Gave up all nine goals, Markstrom did, in a 9-0 obliteration. On just 24 attemps. The Islanders put two pucks behind him on their first two shots, and three on their first five. Enough biscuits went into Markstrom's basket to feed an impoverished nation for a month.

You go all hockey traditional and call him a sieve. But that would be an insult to sieves.

Not that his teammates were much better.

The Devils actually outshot the Isles 44-24, but still were somehow shut out. And just two nights before, they lost to Carolina when defenseman Luke Hughes put not one but two pucks in his own net. 

"I'm embarrassed of myself," Markstrom said, sounding the general theme in the postgame locker room.

I should say so.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 18

 And now the last, final, this-is-it edition of the season of The NFL In So Many Words, the time-sensitive Blob feature of which critics have said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord!", and also, "Does 'time-sensitive' mean I can't hit you over the head with this giant clock?":

1. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord!" (The Raiders, the Jets, the Browns, the Cardinals, the Giants et al)

2. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord!" (Fans of the Raiders and Browns after they fired Pete Carroll and Kevin Stefanski, respectively)

3. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord!" (Pete Carroll and Kevin Stefanski, presumably)

4. "Hey, look, you guys! We beat the Cowboys in an utterly meaningless game! Woo-hoo!" (The Giants)

5. "Hey, look, you guys! We won our last three utterly meaningless games after being eliminated from the playoffs!" (The Saints)

6. In other news, the Bears lost to the Lions but still clinched the No. 2 seed in the NFC because the Eagles rested everyone and lost to the Commanders; the Seahawks clinched the .top seed in the NFC by smothering the black-helmeted 49ers 13-3; and the Steelers missed an extra point but the Ravens retaliated by missing what would have been a game-winning field goal to hand Pittsburgh a playoff spot.

7. "Hey, look, you guys! We  beat the kinda-sorta Eagles! Woo-hoo!" (The Commanders)

8. "Hey, look, you guys! We're in the playoffs and we have ... OK, Aaron Rodgers is older than dirt, but still! Woo-hoo!" (The Steelers)

9. "Hey, look, you guys! We clinched the top seed in the NFC and we have ... OK, we only have Sam Darnold, but still!" (The Seahawks)

10. "Look like clowns, play like clowns." (The 49ers in those black helmets)

Sign of some very new times

 They're having a whole pile of fun down in Bloomington, In., these days, trying to figure out how IU football has gone from worst to first in just two short years, and if maybe it's all just a dream brought on by too many giant pork tenderloins from the Edinburgh Diner 50 miles to the north and east.

If it's a dream, don't wake 'em up. And if it's not ... well, here's a sign of some very new times in the kingdom of Hoosiers football:

The head coach is getting the full Secret Service treatment.

According to a very reliable source in B-town, there's now a university police car stationed at the turnoff to head coach Curt Cignetti's home, and more university police stationed outside the residence. They've been stationed there, my source has learned, since before the Hoosiers departed for the Rose Bowl.

Now, this suggests one of three things: Either it's standard procedure and always has been;  or Coach Cig has gotten a threat or two from some deranged Ohio State or Alabama fans; or the uniforms are there to keep equally deranged IU fans from knocking on Coach's door and expressing their appreciation.

If it's the second, my source noted, it indicates just how seismically the worm has turned in Bloomington.

"An IU football coach getting death threats," he said, chuckling. "I guess that means we've arrived."

Indeed.

Q's with few A's

 The Indianapolis Colts died trying again yesterday, this time falling 38-30 to the playoff-bound Houston Texans. It was their seventh straight loss to close out the 2025 season, which at one point held so much promise when Daniel Jones was ambulatory and the Colts were 8-2 and looking like the best team in the AFC.

And then ...

Well. We know all about "then", don't we?

First, Jones cracked his fibula, and then he tore his Achilles, and then Riley Leonard got hurt. With Anthony Richardson already on the shelf, the Colts had to call 44-year-old granddad Philip Rivers off his living room couch to play quarterback.

Rivers played like, I don't know, a 35-year-old, maybe, a minor miracle in itself. But the Colts lost all three games he started.

So yesterday they handed the car keys to Leonard, who played OK enough:  21-of-34, 270 yards, two touchdowns and a rating of 94. It was enough to convince at least some people in Indy media (i.e.: Indy Star columnist Gregg Doyel) he'd not only make a decent QB2, but maybe, in time, even a decent QB1. Which I suppose means hope springs eternal when you've just watched a good football team circle the drain thanks to a horribly unlucky run of injuries.

By the time the season ended under water at 8-9, after all, the Colts' injured-reserve room had become the hey-we've-got-no-more-room-in-here room. Guys were sitting in the lobby reading year-old Ligament Illustrateds waiting for a space to open up.

So what now?

Lots of questions. Not nearly enough answers.

First off, how soon will Daniel Jones be back, and in what condition? 

Depending on the latter, will he still be QB1?

If he's not, does the job devolve to Riley Leonard?

Because what are the Colts going to do with AR, whose eye injury has put his future in limbo? Has the hardest of hard-luck stories turned the last page in Indy?

Lots of Q's. Very few A's.

Here are some more: What about the draft? Will GM Chris Ballard screw it up again? (Though, to be fair, he did get the NFL's next great tight end in 2025). Will he even be around to screw it up? 

No doubt a healthy slice of the Colts fan base hope he won't be, given that in nine years he's produced zero division titles and just two playoff appearances. But all indications out of Indy are that the Irsay daughters will stand pat with both Ballard and head coach Shane Steichen, at least for one more year.

Which makes about as much sense as not.

If you're getting rid of Ballard, see, you have to get rid of Steichen, too, because the new GM is going to want his own guy in the big chair. And if you get rid of both, you're starting from scratch with a team that, to reiterate, was a damn good football team until all the injuries hit.

I'm not saying that's the logic at work here. I'm not even saying it is logic as we humans understand it. I'm just saying it sounds like the logic at work here.

In any case, dumping Ballard and Steichen may or may not be the answer to the Colts' core woes. That may lie elsewhere.

Me, I'd dump the medical staff first. Just a thought.

Chaos, lovely chaos

 A-portaling we will go ... a-portaling we will go ... heigh ho the dair-

Oops, sorry. Just trying to get with the zeitgeist here.

Just trying to sync up, to circle back, to embrace the culture, as the corporatists say. (Is that what they say?). In other words, I'm trying to become comfortable with utter chaos, which is what the transfer portal has brought to big-time college athletics now that every kid in America is shopping around for the mythic Better Situation -- or at least for enough NIL jack to buy himself that Maserati the well-heeled alums used to buy for him back in the olden days.

What's that?

Yes, I do carry on sometimes. And, yes, I do have a healthy complement of that old-man cynicism.

But it's hard not to be cynical when you look up and see that somewhere around 3,700 "student-athletes" entered the transfer portal Friday when it opened for business. Thirty-seven hundred. That's a lot of kids looking for somewhere else to land, and a lot of high-dollar programs carnival-barking to get them to land at dear old State U.

Quarterbacks? You say you're looking for a quarterback?

Well, step right up, because here are just a few who either entered the portal Friday or are expected to: Josh Hoover from TCU, Sam Leavitt from Arizona State, Dylan Raiola from Nebraska, DJ Lagway from Florida. Oh, and the big prize in this deal: Brendan Sorsby from Cincinnati.

Sorsby did not play in Cincinnati's 35-13 loss to Navy in the Liberty Bowl Friday night, having already decided to bail on the Bearcats after playing the last two seasons for them. Indiana fans might remember him from his time with the Hoosiers, for whom he played two seasons before bailing on them to go to Cincinnati.

Now he's on the market again, with 7,208 career passing yards and 82 touchdowns in tow. And let you think the Blob is picking on him, it should be noted he's no more itinerant than Raiola (who originally committed to Georgia, flipped to Nebraska, and now is flipping somewhere else after two seasons) or Leavitt (who played one season at Michigan State, portal-ed to Arizona State, and now is portal-ing somewhere else after two seasons).

It's a landscape of vagabonds now, in other words. Have endorsement dough, will travel. Need a QB who can throw a football over those mountains? Uncle Rico is yours for a song and a fat check from Subway, State Farm or Murray's Mercantile in downtown Hog Wallow.

And, listen, I'm not blaming the kids. For years, they were walking billboards for their schools' apparel deals and got zippo for it -- at least above the table. If they're now commanding serious NIL money instead of the fabled Thousand-Dollar Handshake, more power to them.

And the portal chaos that's resulted?

Not the kids' fault, either. They're just playing by the non-rules the NCAA unleashed by instituting all this without a plan. So that's on Charlie Baker and the gang.

Still, it is a strange new world. it is indeed.

 In the wake of Indiana's 38-3 paving of Alabama in the Rose Bowl, for instance, 'Bama predictably pissed and moaned and made all manner of hilarious excuses. None was more hilarious, or more revealing of what chaos has wrought, than this: One of the internet whiners complained that of course Indiana won, because the Hoosiers had a surfeit of fourth- and fifth-year juniors and seniors, 23- and 24-year-olds with a lot more experience and maturity. 

Which is to say, Indiana was exactly what good college football teams used to look like before all the portal-ing began. Go figure.

Or, you know, sync up, circle back, embrace the culture, as the case may be.