Take that

 Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call your "payback."

Purdue 93, Indiana 64.

Thirty rebounds for the Boilers; 15 for the Hoosiers.

Sixty-five percent shooting for the Purdues, including 10-of-18 from the 3-point arc.

Fletcher Loyer couldn't miss, hitting all five of his shots including all four from Threeville. Braden Smith did Braden Smith things, bottoming half his 10 shots and dishing eight assists. Down low, meanwhile, Trey Kaufman-Renn and Oscar Cluff combined for 26 points, 14 boards and eight assists, with TKR collecting 20, six and five of those.

After Smith and Loyer opened the game with matching threes, and Tucker DeVries flushed a triple of his own, Indiana never got closer than four points again. Down 17 at halftime, the Hoosiers never trailed by fewer than 16 points  the rest of the way, and were down by as many as 34 in the late going.

"So, in other words, Purdue did what the No. 7 team in the nation is supposed to do against an unranked opponent," you're saying now. "How was this payback, exactly?"

Well, because it's Indiana, silly. And Purdue, silly.

Never the bonhomie will meet with these two, and that was especially true last night, with the Hoosiers coming to Mackey and the Boilermakers ... well, just laying for them. A month ago, see, they walked into Assembly Hall as the better team, and the Hoosiers rolled out Curt Cignetti and the CFP national championship trophy for the paying customers. As you might imagine, that blew the roof off the joint, and the basketball Hoosiers, properly stoked, took down the Boilers 72-67.

Doubtful that left a mark, and especially so for Smith, Loyer, TKR and the rest of the seniors, who were 3-4 in their careers vs. the Hoosiers after that one. Acknowledged as perhaps the greatest class in the school's history, you think they wanted to exit with a losing record against, omigod, Indiana?

Of course they didn't. And of course they, well, didn't.

By 29 points, they didn't, and if it was some major Take That, you could also see it coming from several light years away. The question, of course, is just how much carryover there'll be for Matt Painter's crew.

Four nights ago they played well against the best team in the nation, but ultimately fell by 11 to the Michigan Wolverines. The win last night was their fifth in the six games since the loss in Assembly Hall, and four winnable games remain against 15th-ranked Michigan State and unranked Ohio State, Northwestern and Wisconsin. 

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, they've been maddeningly inconsistent at times this season, losing games they shouldn't have lost and struggling to survive against opponents they should have launched into orbit. They were 10-of-18 from the arc last night, but next time out they might just as easily be 3-of-18. So it goes with this bunch.

On the further other hand (yes, the Blob has three, deal with it), they're playing their best basketball of the season precisely when a basketball team wants to be doing that. So that goes, too.

At any rate, onward. Where else?

A day for the USA

 Raise a glass this a.m. to U-S-A!, U-S-A!, which had itself a day yesterday over in Italy.

There was the women's Olympic hockey team, which beat Canada for the gold medal  but not as easily as it beat Canada a week ago in the group phase. That final was a resounding 5-0 keister-tanning; this time it was like pulling teeth, which is what it's usually like when the Americans and Canadians have at it.

Final score was 2-1, and it took overtime to decide it. Megan Keller scored the winner after Hilary Knight, playing in her last Olympics, saved the day on a deflection with 2:04 to play in regulation to force OT. The Americans, down 1-0 since the second period, had pulled their goalie in a desperate attempt to get even.

So hooray for them, and also, whew. And hooray, also, for America's latest golden girl, the irrepressible Alysa Liu, who came to Milan/Cortina just hoping to skate well but wound up skating the, um, well-est of them all.

Her flawless long program, full of triple axels and toe loops and what-not, overhauled the two Japanese skaters in front of her for the gold medal. She's the first American gold medalist in women's figure skating since Sarah Hughes -- remember her? -- 24 years ago.

And also the least likely.

Liu, you see, dropped out of the sport after the Beijing Games four years ago, citing burnout. She was 16 years old at the time, and for the next couple of years did what teenage girls do who don't know a toe loop from a Froot Loop. A year or so ago she took it up again, and came to these Games with no expectations of a medal. Maybe a bronze, if she was lucky.

It's better left to the psychologists to determine if that open-ended, I'm-just-here-to-express-myself approach is what won her gold. Certainly it would seem to have lifted any pressure she might have felt; when you come at something with no expectations, the expectations can't weigh you down or make you turn a blade wrong. 

"We never actually had a goal of winning," said one Liu's two coaches, Phillip DiGuglielmo, noting that the goal for this season was simply to make the Olympic team. "That was the really big deal for her."

And Liu?

"I don't need this (medal)," she told D'arcy Maine of ESPN. "But what I needed was the stage and I got that, so I was all good."

Which may be why she got the medal, too.

A death in the late afternoon

 Twenty-five years on, I can still hear it in Darrell Waltrip's voice. It was the first clue, the initial inkling, that something had gone terribly wrong down there at the end of Daytona International Speedway's long backstretch, and that an awful vacancy had just swallowed an entire sport.

Hope Dale's OK ...

Darrell Waltrip, suddenly saying that as he gabbled on and on in the wake of his brother winning the Daytona 500.

Darrell Waltrip, who'd seen death in the afternoon before -- who'd cheated it on at least one shrieking, metal-shredding occasion himself, and never fully recovered -- belatedly sensing what had happened behind brother Mikey as the checkers flew.

Hope Dale's OK ...

Dale, as in Dale Earnhardt, who'd been blocking for Michael Waltrip entering turn three when he got bumped from behind, slewed up toward the wall, and then got turned directly into it a millisecond before impact.

It didn't look like much. A gentle nudge, as these things go at Daytona. But the angle was all wrong, and the black No. 3 slid back down the banking into the infield, and Waltrip up in the broadcast booth must have belatedly noticed nothing was moving inside the car when he looked in that direction ...

Hope Dale's OK ...

Well, Dale wasn't OK, of course. Dale was dead. Twenty-five years ago yesterday.

Physics turned that gentle nudge into a killer there in the late afternoon, and as I watched the sports shows commemorating the 25th anniversary, it all came back to me. Waltrip's odd, troubling segue. The conspicuous silence on the race broadcast about the crash. And then an aerial shot of an ambulance leaving the sprawling facility, slowly, with no lights flashing.

Final confirmation, that was. Final confirmation for those of us who've been at a million racetracks and know what it looks and sounds and feels like when it's really bad. 

Dale Earnhardt was dead, of a basilar skull fracture, which is what happens when a sudden, catastrophic stop whips the head violently forward. Earnhardt was the fourth NASCAR driver in nine months to be killed by one, and by far the most notable. The man was an icon -- hell, he was NASCAR to a significant portion of the fan base -- and his absence would dominate every NASCAR Cup race for the rest of the season.

Fans all over the country holding up three fingers on the third lap of every race. Broadcasters going silent on every third lap. That sort of thing.

Along the way, that absence would also change the sport, and for the better. The HANS device that holds the head rigid would become mandatory. Soft-wall technology originally introduced by IndyCar would come to the stock-car circuits. And the consequence?

No driver in NASCAR's top three series has died in a racing accident since.

An ironic legacy, perhaps, for a man who never gave safety issues a second thought when he climbed into that black No. 3. But the best legacy, surely, for the death of an icon in he late afternoon, 25 years on.

An outbreak of grumpiness

 Look, I don't blame Mick Cronin. It's that time of year, isn't it?

February is the month when rodents predict the future, America observes the birthdays of two presidents on neither date, and men are compelled to defy their natural state and act all gooshy and romantic. Plus, your awesome cherry-red ride turns white with salt, and winter loses whatever charm it might have had.

It's a grumpy month.

And so no surprise, really, that Cronin, the basketball coach at UCLA, did what he did last night in East Lansing. 

First, he ejected his own player for cheap-shotting Michigan State's Carson with 4:26 to play and Sparty up 27. Then, in the postgame, he got into with a reporter who asked about the Michigan State student section taunting the Bruins' Xavier Booker, an MSU transfer.

Cronin replied that he didn't give "a rat's ass" about another school's student section. Then he snidely gave the reporter his flowers for "the worst question I've ever been asked." And then he accused said reporter for "raising your voice at me."

Of the latter, my admittedly biased former-sportswriter response is to suggest Mick pull up his big-boy pants.

Of the former ... well, I'll give Coach his flowers for sending Steven Jamerson II off. The game officials ticketed Jamerson with a Flagrant 1 foul for shoving Cooper from behind, but Cronin decided the punishment didn't fit the crime. As Michigan State coach Tom Izzo joked afterward, Mick arbitrarily elevated it to a Flagrant 2.

To that, my response is, "Good on you, Coach." And to acknowledge that his Oscar the Grouch impersonation last night was, yes, the byproduct of February, and also a nightmare trip to Michigan in which UCLA lost by 30 to the top-ranked Wolverines and by 23 to Sparty.

That'll put any coach out of sorts.  And it's not like Cronin is the only one suffering from the Februaries.

Last week, for example, Kansas State coach Jerome Tang got himself fired fo cause not only because the Wildcats are dead last in the Big 12, but because, after a blowout loss at home to Arkansas, he basically called his players a bunch of losers. Said they didn't deserve to wear the uniform, and that several of them wouldn't be wearing it next season.

A few days later K-State put him on the street, with athletic director Gene Taylor lamenting that he found Tang's comments about the "student-athletes" very "concerning."

Me, I think the term "student-athletes" went out with Victorolas and horse-drawn carriages. Get with the times, Mr. AD. The correct term these days is "paid professionals" -- which means Tang's outburst, while a violation of accepted etiquette, was not as out of bounds as it sounded.

I mean, if you're drawing a paycheck to play basketball, you need to make an effort to earn it. Otherwise, no, you shouldn't be wearing the uniform. Players in professional leagues that (unlike D-I buckets) aren't pretending to be something else get waived for less.

Tang's mistake was forgetting college basketball doesn't have a waiver wire. Or that it's still, at least nominally, college basketball.

Also, again, it's February. 'Nuff said.

That silly car race

 The Great American Race was won yesterday by a guy who'd never won it, by a team owner you might have heard of who'd never won it, and by a team that was last seen slapping an antitrust suit on the family that's run NASCAR like pashas for about 100 years.

In other words, the Daytona 500 once again did Daytona 500 things.

The aforementioned winner Tyler Reddick, led all of one lap but, as they say, the right lap. His team owner, Michael Jordan, got yet another ring to add to his collection. And his team -- 23XI, co-owned by MJ and Denny Hamlin -- is the same team that sued the France family and NASCAR last year and forced it to settle.

"Just true Daytona madness," an ecstatic Reddick observed, when it was done.

What he failed to add was why anyone would expect anything less.

Madness, after all, has been the Daytona 500 's bete noir since Day 1, a completely random deal that has blessed princes and paupers alike. The King, Richard Petty, won it seven times; seven-time Cup champion Dale Earnhardt, on the other hand, won it only once. That's the same number of times Derrike Cope won it, and also Pete Hamilton and Trevor Bayne. 

Combined career wins otherwise, for that trio? Three for Hamilton, one for Cope.

That's Daytona for you.

It's had a year when Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough crashed each other out on the last lap, then traded punches on the backstretch as Petty swept past to the win. It's had a year when Petty and David Pearson crashed each other out on the last turn, except Pearson kept the clutch in and limped to the checkers.

Sterling Marlin won Daytona twice in a row, then finished 40th the next year -- just ahead of Derrike Cope. Marvin Panch won in a year-old car in 1961, and was 44th the next year.

Yesterday?

Some old script.

As always with restrictor plate races, it was like watching the Burlington and Northern pass for 190 laps, and then for 10 laps it was utter insanity. Look, Michael McDowell's in front, going for his second Daytona 500 win!  Wait, now it's William Byron, going for the three-peat! Oops, now it's (who?) Carson Hocevar ... and now Chase Elliott and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. are drag-racing as the white flag drops and Hocevar crashes ... and now ...

Hey, where the heck did Tyler Reddick come from?

From nowhere, or so it seemed. But here he came to the front on the outside -- no, wait, the inside -- on the last lap, getting a helpful shove from teammate Riley Herbst as Elliott and Zane Smith ran nose to tail toward the finish.

Reddick squeezed between Elliott and Smith, got by Elliott as they touched, then took the checkers as Elliott and a pile of others crashed behind him.

Reddick was out front for only the last lap, and probably for less than half of that. Four or five drivers -- hell, who could tell? -- led at some point in the final four laps. All told, a record 25 drivers led at least a lap.

It was like "Wheel of Fortune," only faster and louder. And when the wheel stopped spinning, Reddick and Team Jordan were your grand prize winners.

That silly car race, the Blob's better half always calls Daytona.

Silly's a bit harsh, I always say. But after yesterday?

Not by much.

A Big(ger) MAC

 I know I am old now, because there is so much I can't get my head around. And, no, I'm not talking about America's losing fight with its own sanity, which these days moves me more to hysterical laughter than existential angst.

If you don't laugh you'll cry, in other words. Or take a long walk off a short pier.

Anyway, that's not what I can't get my 70-year-old head around this morning. It's a news item I saw on the Great and Terrible Intertoobz that made me yelp "What th-?", followed by a lot of standard old-man grumbling.

The Mid-American Conference is going bi-coastal, you see. I kid you not.

Comes now the news that it's adding Sacramento State out in California as a football-only member, and as a proud Ball State grad who remembers when a road trip meant Kalamazoo or Toledo, the ground just shifted beneath my feet. Again.

Bad enough that the Big Ten is now USC at Rutgers and Maryland at Oregon; now my alma mater's far humbler conference is warping the accepted verities. The dainty footprint that once stretched only from DeKalb, Ill., to Athens, Ohio, suddenly is bigger than Bob Lanier's legendary hooves. Now,  at least in football, it will cover all of flyover America and then some, from Amherst, Mass., to central California.

Sac State (can we call it Sac State?) has been bucking for entry to big-boy football for some time, though God knows why. It's going to cost it $23 million to do it, for one thing. For this it will get skyrocketing travel costs, presumably, and the right to be a farm team for the Alabamas and Ohio States and, yes, Indianas of the football world.

This is more and more what Group of Five conferences like the MAC are fast becoming in the age of NIL and unrestricted transfers, with the consequence that hardly anyone's playing for the glory of dear old Directional Hyphen State. Like beer, no one's buying Stud Hoss anymore; they're just renting him. And no one's renting the way the Group of Five circuits are.

A close-to-home example: A few years back Ball State lured a running back named Carson Steele to Muncie, where for two years he tore up the MAC. Then, like a hot baseball prospect going from, say, Fort Wayne to San Diego, he jumped to UCLA. 

From there it was on to the NFL, where he played a couple seasons in Kansas City and last month signed a deal with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Mind you, I don't begrudge Steele any of this. He didn't invent the current system, after all; he just did what it allowed him to do. It's where we are now: The MACs of the world as the minor leagues, hemorrhaging money the way minor leagues often do.

Which is why it made sense for the MAC to bring Sacramento State aboard, because Northern Illinois jumped to the Mountain West and the conference was short a dues-paying football member. That $18 million of Sac State's $23 mill bill goes to the MAC as the conference's entry fee likely didn't cause anyone to shed a tear, either.

In other words, we know what the MAC gets out of its Bigger MAC. But what does its new member get out of it?

A lot more dealings with Expedia and Travelocity, one imagines.

And the chance to groom more Carson Steeles for the real big boys, of course.

A brief pause for poimes

 ... or, in the proper vernacular, "poems."

Yes, it's Valentine's Day again, and you know what that means: It's time once more for all real men to do their manly duty. So get out there, boys! Buy the flowers! Buy the candy! Buy the gooshy cards expressing love and eternal devotion in iambic pentameter!

And for the Blob?

It's rhymin' time!

"Aw, gee, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Do we hafta?"

Yes, you hafta. Let us proceed, shall we?

* The Daytona 500 appears tomorrow like the first robin of spring, with a hoot and a holler and three 19-car pileups in the last ten laps. William Byron has won the last two Great American Races, but will he three-peat? Will Denny Hamlin win his fourth? Will Kyle Busch become the first polesitter to win since Clyde "The Glide" McBride back in 19-ought-6?

Beats me. But here's a poime about it:

Daytona, Daytona,

To you we're true blue.

All those Kyles, and Ryans, and  ol' Bubba -- him, too.

Look out! It's Chastain!

Driving just like a fool.

Put Chris Bell in the wall.

Man, that guy is a tool.

* The NBA All-Star Weekend kicked off last night with the Rising Stars games, and Team Vince (Carter) won the whole shebang on a free throw by VJ Edgecombe with a second to play. Afterward VJ made a big deal about how hard everyone played, a revealing bit of pushback to the largely accurate narrative that everyone goes through the motions in these All-Star games, which is why the final score is always eleventy-hundred thirty-seven to eleventy-hundred twelve.

Hence, a poime:

All hail to the All-Stars,

Playing wild and free.

Running and jumping,

And diving with glee.

Oh, wait.

That's just Wemby,

Taking a knee.

* The Winter Olympics continue to astound and amaze, even if some of the skaters and skiers and even curlers have been accused of cheating. Not so the U.S. women's hockey team, however, who steamrolled Italy 6-0 yesterday in their seemingly inexorable march to the gold medal.

A rhyme in tribute ...

Poor Italy lies flattened,

Like a pancake sans jelly.

They could not have won

E'en with Wayne Gretz-anelli.

* And speaking of the Winter Games ...

A moment of stunned silence for U.S. phenom Illia Malinin, a favorite to win the gold in men's figure skating. Alas, Malinin flubbed his dub big time, falling twice in his long program and finishing eighth after leading going into it.

Hence this lament:

Oh, Illia, oh, Illia,

What a horrible fate.

No quads in the finals,

And your Salchows weren't great.

And one last detail,

We are sad to report:

Your grand triple axel

Was two axels too short.

* And last but not least ...

Pitchers and catchers reported to spring training this week.

Which means the Blob gets to recycle its annual poime about the glories of returning baseball, with a modification or two:

Baseball is back!

And my thoughts are all radical.

Could this be the year

Pittsburgh's Cruds turn piratical?

And the reply:

Some numbskull just asked

If his Pirates would win.

To which we all say,

"Good lord, is he dim!"

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

An HOF rant

 It's been a few days now since Kansas State basketball coach Jerome Tang went Full Mike Gundy on his own team, but the nation's ears are still burning. Well, maybe not the nation's ears, but at least the ears of those of us with an appreciation for Hall of Fame rants.

The aforementioned Gundy, of course, springs to mind for his epic "I'm a man, I'm 40" rant about a newspaper columnist allegedly trashing his quarterback back in the day at Oklahoma State. And you can't talk rants without mentioning Jim "Playoffs?" Mora, and the Tom Brady/MJ/Babe Ruth of all ranters, Lee "My (Bleeping) Ass" Elia.

Tang?

He's right up there, America. If only because the target was, again, his own damn team.

After his Wildcats got smoked at home by Cincinnati the other night, 91-62, Tang called out his players by calling them ... well, gutless douchenozzles, essentially. Said they didn't deserve to wear the uniform. Added that very few of them will be wearing it next season.

"I'm embarrassed for the university," he said, after the Wildcats fell to 1-10 in the Big 12 in front of a student section wearing paper bags on their heads. "I'm embarrassed for our fans and our student section. It's just ridiculous ...

"It means something to wear a K-State uniform. It means something to put on this purple, and everything this is university is about and why I love this place. They don't love this place, so they don't deserve to be here."

Goodness. Can you say "I hate my team" without actually saying "I hate my team"?

Got to wonder what K-State's next practice was like after all that, and what K-State's next game will look like. If Tang's players weren't already giving up on the season, they surely might be now -- or, who knows, Coach might have finally managed to light a fire under them.

Could go either way. Either Tang's outburst was the method in the madness, or just madness, and I'm guessing it's 50-50. Or maybe 60-40 the latter.

Clearly, Coach was disgusted with his team's listlessness, as well he should have been.  But I'm wondering if Purdue coach Matt Painter wasn't similarly disgusted with the way his Boilermakers failed to finish at Nebraska the other night, needing a timely bucket by Oscar Cluff and a providential slip and fall by a Nebraska ballhandler to escape in overtime after blowing a 22-point lead.

The Boilers still led by 14 with 2:41 to go. And then, well, they didn't. But thanks mostly to Cluff, they could spin it as a gutsy road W over a top-ten team, and Painter wisely chose to focus on that.

Even if one suspects he might have been thinking this: "What the HELL, guys? Are you TRYING to kill me off?"

No word on whether or not that's what Kansas State's players were trying to do to Tang the other night. But after his HOF rant, it might cross their minds.

Today in "Well, duh"

 Caught a little of the skeleton competition last night in the Winter Olympics, and once again I was of two minds.

("Only two? We thought you had four at least, and none of them functional," you're saying now).

One mind was saying, "How do they steer with their arms tucked under them like that? Are they completely nuts?"

The second mind was saying, "Of course they're nuts. They're going 70 mph headfirst on what looks like a piece of Styrofoam. But, hey, at least they've got some really tricky helmets."

Anyway, the three minds left me in the perfect frame of, uh, mind to consider two completely disparate entities at once, and find the connection between them. That connection is the phrase, "Well, duh."

One entity is the ice dancing competition at the Winter Games, which ended with a lot of folks thinking the longtime U.S. pair of Madison Chock and Evan Bates got thoroughly rogered out of the gold medal by a corrupt judge.

The other entity is the National Basketball Association, which today through Sunday celebrates whatever its All-Star Weekend is now and is up to its neck in charges that teams are blatantly tanking to get in on what promises to be a talent-rich draft.

Altogether now: Well, DUH!

Because, first of all, a judging controversy in Olympic figure skating is not not exactly news. It's practically a tradition. The sport has always been prone to sketchy scoring, with the East German judge (at least in legend) always seeming to figure heavily in the shenanigans.

Well. This time around the role of the East German judge is being played by Jezabel Dabouis of France.

Who consistently gave Chock and Evans glaringly low scores in deference to the French pair of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron, who beat out Chock and Evans for the gold by a mere 1.43 points. Dabouis helped this along by scoring Chock and Evans a ridiculous eight points lower in the twizzle portion of the program, and 7.7  points lower in the free dance event.

First of all: I love that ice dancing has a segment called "twizzle." I have no idea what it is, but it sounds way cool.

Second of all, the French judge's name is Jezabel. I mean, come on. What did you think was going to happen?

And in like fashion ...

What did Adam Silver and the rest of the NBA capos think was going to happen when their season lasts longer than the Ming Dynasty?

Silver fined the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers for leaving star players on the bench in recent games, a violation of the NBA's Player Participation Policy. This states that team's must play their stars unless those stars are deemed sufficiently banged up to sit out.

The goal of the policy is to prevent exactly what a whole pile of teams are doing right now. And why wouldn't they?

After all, the season that began as the leaves fell in October still has three full months to run. It doesn't end until April 13. And the Jazz and Pacers?

The former is 18-38, 24 games out of first in the West and nine games out of even the play-in portion of the playoffs. The latter is 15-40 and 26 games out of first in the East, 9.5 games out of the play-in round.

This doesn't even take into account the Washington Wizards, New Orleans Pelicans and Sacramento Kings, who are even worse than the Jazz and Pacers. What the hell are they supposed to do for the next three months, if not position themselves for the draft?

The obvious remedy to this is to shorten the season, but of course the only people who can do that -- Silver and the owners -- will have none of it. Everyone else agrees the season is just too damn long, and the product would be much improved by taking a meat axe to it. The Blob would personally lop 15 to 20 games off the schedule, which would lend more urgency to the play and put a serious crimp in the tanking. 

Fewer games, after all, mean fewer teams will be out of the playoff hunt with a third of the season to play. If you've still got a shot with a month or less to go in the season, you won't be as inclined to tank. Or so it would seem.

Me, I'm going to watch some more skeleton. No crazier than anything else these days.

Just not getting it

 "You're not there to pop off about politics. You're there to play a sport. You're there to represent your country and hopefully win a medal."

-- JD Vance, Vice-President of These United States

Oh, dearie dear, as the Waco Kid put it in "Blazing Saddles." Bless your heart, Mini-Me.

Bless your heart, because while you and your fellow travelers are wrapping themselves in the American flag, you are, per usual, Just Not Getting what it is you're wrapping yourselves in. Because if a kid from the United States of America can't pop off about politics whenever he feels like it -- yes, even at the Olympics -- what country is he representing, exactly?

Here's a hint: It's not the United States of America.

Want to know something else?

If Mini-Me and the rest also are inferring politics have no place in the Olympics, they haven't been paying attention for, I don't know, about 90 years or so.

That would put us back in 1936, when the twisted gnome running Germany decided to turn the Berlin Olympics into an infomercial for Aryan superiority. The entire summer Games that year popped off about politics, if not explicitly then certainly implicitly. That Jesse Owens and handful of other non-Aryans gummed up the message was political popping off in its own right, again implicit but again perfectly clear.

Later would come the great tug of war between the United States and the Soviet Union, each just as clearly using running and jumping and cross-checking as a political scoreboard. Whose way of life is best? Let's see the puny Americans beat Olga Korbut!  Let's see some pasty Russkie  outrun Bullet Bob Hayes!

That sort of thing.

At some point in there, too, were protests against South African apartheid, and the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Black September terrorists, and the U.S. and Soviets trading boycotts over Afghanistan. It's even about something that happened just yesterday, when a Ukrainian skeleton slider chose not to compete because he was ordered by the Olympic capos not to wear a helmet in competition honoring Ukrainian athletes killed in the Russian war.

The real world has always intruded on these Games of ours, in other words. And for me, the image of that intrusion that still resonates more than half a century on is this: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, heads bowed on the medal stand, thrusting gloved fists into the Mexico City night.

It was their silent contribution to the civil rights struggle engulfing America at the time -- a struggle that goes on to this day, sadly, thanks to the retrograde politics of the Regime. Which perhaps is why I saw Mini-Me's quote and immediately thought of Smith and Carlos.

Way back in 1968, they got sent home for those bowed heads and gloved fists. Fifty-seven years later, we're right back there again, with calls to do the same to American athletes deemed not properly worshipful of the US of A -- or at least of its current leadership.

Front and center in the controversy seems to be a freestyle skier named Hunter Hess, plus a handful of others including figure skater Amber Glenn. The Regime-ists and assorted other usual suspects claim they're entitled snots "trashing" America because ...

Well. Because they answered a reporter's question honestly.

Hess, for instance, responded to said question by saying, yes, he had "mixed emotions" about representing the United States right now. 

 “It’s a little hard, there’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of and I think a lot of people aren’t,” Hess said. “Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”

Fellow freestyler Chris Lillis, meanwhile, answered the same question by talking about how his country should focus on respecting the rights of all its citizens, adding that he hoped "when people look at athletes compete in the Olympics, they realize that that's the America that we're trying to represent."

Now, reasonable people would agree those are reasonable sentiments, and miles and miles from "trashing" America. Unfortunately, reasonable people aren't driving the bus right now. Fearless Leader, Mini-Me and the Regime-ists are -- and they will brook no criticism of their rule, implied or otherwise.

"When you wear the Stars and Stripes, you represent ALL of us -- not just the parts you like," one of them spluttered the other day on the Magic Social Media Thingy.

Um, wrong. You represent whatever those stars and stripes mean to you, or what you hope they mean when you put them on. America is America because it means something different to all of us -- and because it does, we have the freedom to cherish it as we see fit.

Even if Mini-Me and Co. have decided criticizing the Regime is the same thing as criticizing America.

One wonders, after all, what Mini-Me's reaction would have been had Hunter Hess and the others lavished praise on the current administration. Would he still have said they weren't there to pop off about politics? Would he still have said, essentially, to stick to sports?

I'll make a wild guess here and say, "No."

Because, see, this isn't about ungrateful punks trashing America or the flag. It's about the un-American notion that loving America means bending a knee, and the very American notion of saying, "Aw, HELL, no."

"Politics affects us all," Amber Glenn told reporters last week. "It is something I will not just be quiet about."

Nor should she have to, Mr. Vice-President. At any time.

More Olympian feats

 You can have your U.S. women's hockey team -- swatted nemesis Canada 5-0 yesterday, yes, the ladies did -- and your latest American figure skating phenom, Illia Malinin. My two favorite Olympians in these Winter Games so far are a German and a Norwegian.

The German is named Philipp Raimund.

The Norwegian is Sturla Holm Laegreid.

Raimund is a ski jumper who'd never won an international event until he won Olympic gold the other day. Laegreid is a biathlete who finished third in the 20-kilometer event this week.

What makes Raimund one of my faves is -- I swear I'm not making this up -- he's publicly admitted he's afraid of heights.

Wait, what?

Here's a guy whose chosen profession is sailing off a ramp 15 feet in the air at 60 mph or so, and he's AFRAID OF HEIGHTS? Really? So why on earth would he choose ski-jumping as his sport to pursue?

Raimund hasn't told us that, nor has he explained how he got so good at it he's now an Olympic gold medalist. But for sure he's now the best Olympic ski jumping story since Eddie the Eagle, the British jumper who was so bad -- and yet so cheerful about it -- he became the most unlikely Olympic icon in history.

Good on you, Philipp. You the (petrified) man.

And now, on to Sturla Holm Laegreid. Or Days Of Our Skiin' And Shootin'. Or The Young And The Over-Sharing.

Our man Sturla, you see, turned the 20-kilometer event into a soap opera when, in the immediate aftermath of his third-place finish, he confessed to a Norwegian TV reporter (and thus the world) that he'd cheated on his girlfriend.

"It was the choice I made," Laegreid said, choking back tears. "We make different choices during our life, and that's how we make life. So today I made a choice to tell the world what I did, so maybe, maybe there is a chance she will what she really means to me. Maybe not."

Me, I'd put some coin on the latter. That's because the girlfriend in question -- to whom Laegreid had earlier 'fessed up -- told a Norwegian tabloid she was mucho pissed about not only the cheating, but that her float-brain boyfriend chose to tell God and everyone about it at the freaking Olympic Games.

Later, Laegreid admitted to the same tabloid that perhaps she had a point.

"I deeply regret that I brought up this personal story on what was a joyous day for Norwegian biathlon," he said in a statement. "I am not quite myself today, and I am not thinking clearly."

Gee. Ya think?

Olympian questions

Hanging out in my neighborhood hang yesterday, watching Sam Darnold and Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III tour Disneyland (and wondering if either has slept since Sunday night). And there on one of the TVs over the bar, a couple of young people were ice dancing.

I immediately wondered if it was Tai and Randy.

(As in "Babilonia and Gardner", America's figure skating sweethearts about a thousand years ago).

I was subsequently informed by someone more knowledgeable about these matters that Tai and Randy were pairs skaters, not ice dancers. Torvill and Dean were the latter.

"Who can tell?" I asked.

Because I can't. It all looks like a man and a woman skating around lifting one another off the ice to me.

Anyway, this is just one question I have so far about the Winter Games in Milan/Cortina, which I'm just now catching up with after the tsunami of self-congratulatory hype surrounding the Super Bowl. Some of the other questions are:

* You mean there's pairs curling, too?

There is. And the U.S. pair, Korey Dropkin and Cory Thiesse, have curled their way into the final. They beat Italy 9-8 in the semis and will now face Sweden for the gold medal.

Not even Tai and Randy did that.

* Was Lindsey Vonn insane to try skiing the downhill nine days after tearing her ACL?

Maybe. Probably. OK, so highly likely, considering she crashed mere seconds into her first competitive run and broke her left leg all to hell -- the same leg with the torn ACL.

Vonn says she hooked a gate with her right arm and that's what caused her to crash, not the torn ACL. She suffered a complex fracture of the tibia she admitted will require "multiple" surgeries to repair. Which means her career is likely done, considering she's also 41 years old.

"Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself," she wrote in an Instagram post, adding that she had no regrets. "I also know that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport."

Which is true.

Which is also why, yes, she's insane, but no more insane than anyone else who thinks it's a good idea to go flying down a mountain at 70 mph on two slats of aluminum siding. They're all seriously loco, these folks.

* Despite that, is "Breezy" not the perfect name for someone who wound up winning the women's downhill?

Yes. Yes it is. Breezy Johnson is her full name, and she took the gold for the U.S. So take that, all you other crazy downhillers with not-nearly-as-cool names.

* Is the U.S. women's hockey team still kicking butt?

'Tis. The women shut out Switzerland 5-0 yesterday and are 3-0 in the tournament so far. They face their nemesis Canada today, so buckle up.

*  Does the young American skating phenom, Illia Malinin, sort of remind you of King Joffrey Baratheon from "Game of Thrones" (as a friend suggested the other day)?

Aw, you bet. Except Malinin, by all accounts, is not a giant gaping orifice like Joffrey. That little jerk had it coming for sure.

And last but not least ...

* What's the medal count so far? Is Norway leading like usual?

Not yet. The Norwegians are third with six total medals, half of them gold. The host country, Italy, leads the way with nine medals, six of them bronze. Japan is second with seven medals, and behind Norway are the usual suspects: Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

"Where is the U.S., Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

The U.S. is tied for seventh with seven other countries, among them more usual suspects. They have two medals so far, both of them gold.

"Does this mean Tai and Randy won?" you're asking.

Enough. Enough with the Tai and Randy bit.

That game

 So, then: Seattle 29, New England 13.

Drake Maye 3 turnovers; Sam Darnold 0.

Patriots 79 yards rushing; Kenneth Walker III 135.

Patriots 1 sack; Seahawks 6.

That's your tale of the tape in the 60th rendition of what always winds up being Just A Football Game, because, hello, that's all its. No matter how it plays out.

And how did it play out this time?

Well, how it played out was the Seahawks defense squeezing the life out of poor Drake Maye and the Patriots. It was kind of like watching "Anaconda", only Jon Voight's creepy character doesn't get swallowed whole in the end.

That unfortunate circumstance fell to the baby-faced Maye, who put up decent numbers only because the Seahawks D took its foot off the gas in the fourth quarter. Maye engineered 18 first downs, just two fewer than the Seahawks, and 331 total yards, just four fewer than Seattle. But that was exactly the mirage the numbers so often are in football.

The Patriots, see, racked 11 of the first downs and 253 of the yards in the last 14 minutes of the game, by which time Seattle led 19-0 and the deal was done. Prior to that, the Pats were a rumor; through three quarters, they coughed out just 78 yards of offense and five first downs. The Seahawks at that point had as many sacks.

Eight of New England's nine first-half possessions ended in punts, and the ninth was a kneel-down to end the half. A third of those possessions were three-and-outs. The Seahawks led 9-0 by then, but it might as well have been 90-0.

So does all this mean the Big Roman Numeral was a Big Crashing Bore?

Unless you bore some weird grudge against the eminently likeable Drake Maye, yes.

Will it go down as one of the least memorable of the 60 Supes?

Except for Kenneth Walker III, the Seattle D and Jason Myers' record five field goals, yes.

Do you think Sam Darnold, Mike Macdonald and the rest of the Seahawks care?

What do you think?

Other thoughts ...

* That Puerto Rican guy all those cranky MAGAs despise so much they staged their own Aggrieved White People halftime show did not come out in a feather boa, slingback heels and a garter belt. He did not perform obscene, America-hating acts, forcing parents to cover their impressionable children's eyes. 

No, what Bad Bunny did was invite Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and others to help him celebrate his Latin culture in a joyous mix of dance, music and -- hey, look at this -- patriotism. They danced the salsa. They performed happy reggaeton. A couple actually got married during the festivities, and Bunny handed his latest Grammy to a young child actor who was apparently supposed to be his own young self.

For the finale, Bunny said, "God bless America" in English, and everyone broke out the flags of all the nations of North and South America, beneath a Jumbotron message that read "The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate Is Love."

So, unity, cultural diversity and goodwill toward men (and women). You know, all the things Aggrieved White People believe are un-American.

* Kenneth Walker III was the logical choice for Super Bowl MVP, but only because the officials couldn't chainsaw the trophy into 11 pieces. That way the real MVP of the night -- the Seattle defense -- could have been properly feted.

Me, I think they should have named Myers the MVP for his five field goals and 17 total points. Just to hear all the yapping sportstalk poodles howl.

* Super Bowl commercials rating: Generally lame.

The standouts were the Dunkin' Donuts sendup of "Good Will Hunting"; the Budweiser eagle ad; and the Hellman's ad starring "Meal" Diamond. Everything else was "meh" to "meh"-minus.

And your winner is ...

 OK, OK, O-kay. Guess I've put this off as long as I can.

You want to know who's gonna win the Big Roman Numeral today, right?

"Nah, nah, nah," you're saying now. "We want to know who's gonna win halftime. Who'll it be, Bad Bunny or Up With Butt-Hurt White People?"

Oh, hell, I don't know. I think the people who aren't Butt-Hurt White People and the people who are will watch whatever they watch. Me, I'll prolly watch the Puppy Bowl. I hear the doodles are even money to knock off the labs this year.

Anyway ...

Anyway, back to the Big Roman Numeral.

I have some thought

My first thought is sometimes experience counts in this game, and sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it does, though -- which is why, weirdly, I think the younger, less-seasoned Patriots have the edge here. 

This is because their head coach, Mike Vrabel, has played in a few of these big to-do's, and Seattle's head coach, Mike Macdonald, has not. The whole three-ring circus is all new to Mac and the Seahawks; it's old hat to Vrabel. So if I had to pick the team that likely remained more focused on what matters this week, I'd pick the Patriots, despite their youth. Nothing like an OG to get you through the BS.

So, advantage, Patriots.

However.

However, it's hard to get around the fact that the Seahawks are ... well, just better.

They get the slight nod at quarterback, if only because Sam Darnold has been through every indignity the league can throw at a high-draft-pick QB, and Drake Maye has not. Now, Maye is eerily unflappable for a relative neophyte -- if you want to compare him to a young Tom Brady in that regard, I'm not gonna stop you -- but I look at Darnold and see another guy who got knocked around before finding his home place.

That would be the Jim Plunkett who won a Super Bowl with the Raiders after years of getting beaten up with (hello) the 1970s Patriots. The writer in me likes the symmetry of that.

Of course, the Seahawks also have a slight edge defensively, it says here. They have, maybe, a slight edge at running back with Kenneth Walker III. And they have Jaxon Smith-Ngjiba -- the one guy the Patriots simply don't have, and the guy most likely to flip the game with one touch.

They also have a team sharpened to a fine point by surviving the toughest division in football this season. To get here, they had to play league MVP Matthew Stafford and the Rams three times -- and beat them twice -- and Brock Purdy and the 49ers twice. The Patriots had to play the Jets.

On the other hand, the Pats are 9-0 away from home this season. Who does that in this league?

So who wins?

I say if the Maye and the Patriots upset the Seahawks the way Brady and the Patriots upset the Greatest Show On Turf all those years ago, it'll again come down to a field goal. Patriots win 24-23.

Or ...

Or, if Darnold and the Seahawks do what they've been doing all season, it'll be more like 30-17, Seattle.

I'm pickin' the latter. If only because the Patriots feel like they're a year away at this point.

You may now commence with the ridicule.

The great vacancy

 So Sonny Jurgensen is dead now, and who is left, I ask? Who is left to throw the deep out, the flag and the post, the home run ball to Charley Taylor or Carroll Dale, to Jack Snow or Raymond Berry or Gene Washngton?

All these arms of my youth, gone from this earth now. Sonny, and John Brodie, and Roman Gabriel, and Bart Starr, and Dandy Don, and the greatest of them all, John Unitas. Gone.

Sonny went yesterday, at the full-to-the-top age of 91, and here's the real tragedy: The great vacancy it represents is not my childhood slipping away full life by full life, but that there are so few left to craft a proper chronicle. Who is left, in other words, to tell the tale?

Sonny Jurgensen, you see, spent most of his Hall of Fame career in Washington, D.C., which lends his passing a special poignancy. In the same week he died, after all, billionaire vandal Jeff Bezos eviscerated the proud Washington Post, eliminating 300 jobs. Among them was the entire sports desk, once the home of Shirley Povich and John Feinstein and Dave Kindred and Christine Brennan; of Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon and Tom Boswell and Sally Jenkins.

Institutional memory has rarely experienced such a gory reckoning. And without institutional memory, journalism is nothing but a Wikipedia entry, bloodless and devoid of soul or context. It can tell you that Sonny Jurgensen led the NFL in passing three times and still holds Washington's single-season record for touchdown passes, but it can't tell you what it looked or felt like.

It can't tell you how the city felt about him. It can't describe the way the stadium drew in its breath every time Sonny launched one of his gorgeous parabolas downfield to Taylor or Bobby Mitchell or Jerry Smith. It can't tell you how it felt to actually cover those gorgeous parabolas, or to listen to one of the old-timers describe what it was like.

The suits will toss out suit words like "synergy" and "re-purposing" and "branding," but what they're really talking about giving readers less and selling it as more. They'll farm out their sports coverage to websites like The Athletic (as the New York Times did) and tell the paying customers they're getting MORE STORIES THAN EVER.

Except.

Except the stories will be written by people (or, in the age of AI, perhaps not) who have no connection to the community. Who have no institutional memory. Who'll provide only the context they can find on the web, because it's not about context anymore. It's about "content."

I can't say this any better than a longtime sports journo named Buddy Martin did the other day, when he penned a screed I shared with my Facebook bros. And so I will turn the wheel over to Buddy, who wrote the following:

I spent a lifetime in these trenches -- five sports editorships, five mastheads, five sets of presses humming through the night -- and I'll tell you this: A real sports section is a living, breathing organism. It's the guys and women at 11:45 p.m. arguing over a headline, the copy desk catching a stat on deadline, thde beat writer changing ledes because a kid hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth ...

Sports sections were never just about scores and standings. They were the back fence of the city. You learned who you were as a fan, as a town, by the way your paper told the story of your teams ... It was a covenant. We show up, every day, on deadline, to tell you what happened and why it mattered.

Damn skippy.

A wintry mix

 It's snowing again outside as I write this, winter doing what winter does some years in these northern climes. This year in particular what it seems to be doing is annoying the hell out of us, like that party guest who stays too long and eats all the Chex mix.

Or maybe it just feels that way because it's February, and February is always when winter goes from "Aw, look at the pretty snow" to "Bad word bad word SNOW bad word bad word."

At any rate, with the world gone all gray and white, it seems the perfect time to talk about this weekend's official Sportsball World forecast: Wintry mix with a chance of contusions.

I say this because the Winter Olympics are officially underway in Milan/Cortina, Italy, and this weekend they'll go head-to-head with that most hallowed of American sacraments, the Feast of St. Lombardi. Or the Super Bowl, if you prefer.

This year is the 25th edition of the former and the 60th of the latter, which calls for a little blended reminiscing. Remember when Jean-Claude Killy caught two touchdown passes in Super Bowl I after partying all night? Or how about Joe Montana winning the downhill in ... Montana?

Was it Mike Eruzione who quarterbacked the Jets against the Colts in the Miracle on Turf in Super Bowl III? Or Joe Namath who scored the winning goal against the Soviets in the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid?

Lord knows a body could get confused.

This weekend we'll get figure skaters and lugers and skiers and hockey players in Milan/Cortina, and large men with bad intent trying to turn Drake Maye and Sam Darnold into macrame. And the tie that binds is both pursuits tend to booger people up.

Football, of course, is the home office for the aforementioned contusions, not to mention abrasions, concussions and shredded-wheat ligaments. But one of the reasons the Blob loves the Winter Olympics is they, too, have a more than nodding acquaintance with extreme physical calamity.

You've got the downhill, first off, the marquee event in Alpine skiing. It's basically falling with style, as Buzz Lightyear likes to say. Last man and woman to cross the finish line upright, and not in a cartoon jumble of arms and legs, wins. 

Then of course, there's ski jumping, which is more falling with style. Short-track speedskating, which is what NASCAR would be if the drivers were allowed to pack switchblades. Luge, in which competitors rocket down a funnel of ice feet-first on jumped-up Flexible Flyers; and skeleton, in which competitors do it headfirst.

(The latter, by the way, are clinically insane in the Blob's opinion.  There ought to be a study of this.)

What else?

Well, ski-jumping, of course, and not just because of that old Wide World of Sports clip of the guy crashing on takeoff. Those people are nuts, too. Even figure skaters, sequined-up though they are, occasionally succumb to the deadly triple Salchow. And then there's the biathlon, in which cross-country skiers par-boil their lungs while occasionally stopping to shoot at stuff.

Imagine your heart banging away like Thor's hammer (because cross-country skiing at the Olympic level is extremely cardiovascular), and  suddenly you're commanding it to stop so you can squeeze off a shot. Why more biathletes' tickers don't just say "Aw. HELL, no" and pack it in is one of life's great mysteries.

Anyway ...

Anyway, the Blob is looking forward to it all -- even curling, which is weirdly compelling, especially when the Danish women's team is competing. And then comes Super Bowl Sunday, when America eats too much and drinks too much and critiques commercials like ad execs, and mainly doesn't care or even know who's pla- wait, you mean there's a football game, TOO?

Yes, indeed. And I don't know about you, but I'm like way super-excited for it.

I mean, have you seen Drake Maye in sequins?

Pulls a 9.8 in the long program, that kid. Every time.

Mickey Lolich, and a son's tale

 So word comes down now that Mickey Lolich has died, and again I think of my father. This is the grand American construct, of course, fathers and sons and baseball. But with us it was different.

Part of this is because of circumstance: My dad was 40 years old and in the hospital recovering from back surgery the day Lolich took the hill on two days rest to face Bob Gibson in Game 7 of the World Series.

The other part is Dad's son was quite possibly the worst baseball player the good Lord ever saw fit to place on this earth.

They say hitting a round ball square is the hardest skill to master in sports, but for me it was quantum physics -- and I was lousy at math, too. My dad would stand in the backyard and lob the ball to me, and I would swing and miss. And swing and miss. And swing and miss.

"Don't try to kill it," Dad would say. "Swing level."

Now, "Don't try to kill it" might have been fatherly advice, or it might have been Dad's idea of a joke. I was, after all, a speck of a kid whose Coke-bottle glasses outweighed him. I'd have been no better than even money in Vegas against a fruit fly, let alone a baseball.

I was, however, obsessed with sports, possibly because of the aforementioned. And in 1968, being servants to geography, Dad and I were rooting for the Detroit Tigers against the mighty St. Louis Cardinals, the defending World Series champs.

Well, it went about as expected. The Tigers got down three-games-to-one, and one day a note arrived for me from my dad in the hospital. Faithless memory blurs the details, but what I remember clearly is the last line, written by a father to his sports-nut son: "They (the Tigers) are really gonna have to hustle to pull this one out of the fire."

Enter Lolich.

He went the distance in Game 2 and struck out nine, and the Tigers won 8-1 to even the Series at a game apiece. The Cardinals won Games 3 and 4, but Lolich won 5-3 in Game 5, again going the distance, to begin the Tigers' comeback.

Denny McLain, who won 31 games that year for Detroit but lost his first two duels against Bob Gibson, came back on two days rest to win Game 6 in St. Louis; the Tigers thoughtfully provided him with 13 runs in a 13-1 rout. That set up Game 7, again in St. Louis, again with the fearsome Gibson on the mound for the home nine.

And for Detroit, here came Lolich again, on two days rest.

He'd already pitched 18 innings in the Series and faced 71 batters. But in Game 7 he surrendered just five hits and one run and struck out four, and Jim Northrup hit the ball over Curt Flood's head, and St. Louis and the great Gibson were vanquished, 4-1. It was the Tigers' first World Series title in 23 years.

Lolich, of course, was the Series MVP. In seven days, he'd pitched 27 innings, faced104 batters and struck out 21 of them. His three complete-game World Series victories remains unmatched to this day; when he retired, no left-handed pitcher in history had more striketouts. 

If life were at all fair, he'd have a plaque in Cooperstown, having punched out more batters in his career than Bob Feller, Warren Spahn, Don Drysdale, Christy Mathewson, Cy Young and Whitey Ford. But life isn't fair, and Lolich died, at 85, on the outside looking in.

But on the day he passed, a son read the news and remembered his father. That's something, right?

This just in ...

 Because the Blob is your First Source For News You Can Use (or something like that), we present to you this morning a couple of breaking (or broken) items you didn't think you needed to know.

One: The NFC won the Pro Bowl Flag Football Game And Fish Fry, 66-52. Antoine Winfield Jr. intercepted Joe Burrow with about four minutes to play to seal the comeback victory. A lineman scored a touchdown. A wide receiver intercepted a pass. And Micah Parsons, still recovering from a season-ending injury, tried to check himself into the game on a scooter.

 Alas, the officials wouldn't let him. Big meanies.

Meanwhile, in actual sporting events that aren't really sporting events ...

Two: A Doberman pinscher named Penny won the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

Penny, you'll be pleased to learn, is four years old and loves treats. She's the fifth Dobie to win the Westy. And she'll tear you into tiny bite-sized chunks when her handler says "Mustard!"

Nah, just kidding. Penny's a sweetheart, apparently. 

Other stars of the show included an Afghan hound named Zaida; a Lhasa apso named JJ; a Maltese named Cookie; and old English sheepdog named Archibald Burlingame IV (actually, Graham). There was also Storm the Newfoundland, Oliver the golden retriever and the Blob's personal favorite, Lumpy the Pekingese, whom the spectators of course serenaded with cries of "Lumpy! Lumpy! Lumpy!" Lumpy responded by putting on oversized rhinestone sunglasses and breaking into a cover of  "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" while the crowd went wild.

Nah, just kidding.

It was actually "Bohemian Rhapsody."

The lunacy lives

 In world of bizarre flights of fancy from our national "leaders", plus a general free-floating insanity from same, it's comforting to know there are still grounded elements amid all the chaos. There is, for example, Super Bowl Media Day.

Those of you who read the Blob's post yesterday ("Oooh! You're calling them 'posts' now! Fancy!" you're saying) were treated to a lot of old-man reminiscing about the sheer lunacy that is Media Day. It's been recast now as Super Bowl Opening Night, but the good news, is, the lunacy remains.

At one point in the festivities last night, for instance, Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold was compelled to put a plastic ham on his head. No, I don't know why. Maybe because "Sam" rhymes with "ham" or something.

Meanwhile, according to the website Awful Announcing, the Guy Who's Just There To Ask Stunt Questions was also on hand. He's been a Media Day/Opening Night staple for years, and these days his name is Dave Dameshek. He hosts a podcast for something called the DraftKings Network, and Awful Announcing describes him as a "longtime NFL personality."

Rule of thumb to know and learn: Anyone people describe as a "personality" is most certainly not  "media." He (or she) is a lounge act. A rodeo clown. The comic relief with a well-established bit.

Dameshek's bit is to ask the same intentionally absurd question at every Super Bowl Media Day/Opening Night, just to see how his target reacts. This time the target was Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel, and the question, as always, was, "Is this a must-win game?"

Ha-ha. Tee-hee. Hilarious.

Now, I don't know what reaction Dameshek was shooting for. Likely he wanted Vrabel to blurt out something along the lines of, "'A must-win game'? What are you, stupid? It's the Super Bowl, for God's sake! You must have cream cheese for brains!"

Alas, Vrabel played it straight. Said something about how he regards every NFL game as a must-win game. And Dameshek did not get the honor and glory of being told he had a cranium full of bagel condiments.

Better luck next year, dude.

Excuse me. Better luck next year, Longtime NFL Personality.

Welcome to Super Roman Numeral Week

 I don't know if the groundhog or porcupine or whatever it is saw his shadow this morning, but I do know what today ushers in. It's Super Roman Numeral Week, boys and girls!

During which there will be parties and lots of patting oneself on the back by the NFL, and also parties. And other parties. And Sam Darnold being asked 900 times why he doesn't suck anymore. Followed by even more other parties.

I say this as someone who covered three of these distinctly American bacchanals, and was always left slack-jawed at the pure silliness that attends the biggest week in the nation's biggest sport. Dirty little secret: As a sportswriter, it wasn't all that hard a gig. There were news conferences every day that spoon-fed us stories only a hundred or so others wrote; there also stories just lying on the ground that, if you were lucky or enterprising enough, no one else thought to write.

It also provided some, shall we say, unique experiences.

Like the year Prince was the halftime show, and turned his pre-Super Bowl news conference into an impromptu three-number concert. Alleged journalists leaped to their feet cheering and clapping and dancing in the aisles. Weirdest presser ever.

On the other hand, nothing was weirder than Media Day. This became an event in itself -- in Indianapolis in 2012, they actually sold tickets to it -- and it had as much to do with actual Media as the Jerry Springer Show. You had legit writers and radio and TV foofs, but you also had quasi-celebrities and self-promoters and that one guy from Telemundo asking questions via sock puppet. 

For instance, I was there the day someone asked Bears tight end Desmond Clark what position he thought Chewbacca would play if Chewbacca played football.

I was there the day some Nickelodeon character named Pick Boy was traipsing around in orange-and-green tights and cape pronouncing that his muscles were real and his hair was perfect. I was there for Super Bowl Wayne -- legit handle: Wayne C. Lavelle -- who was from Honolulu and whose claim to fame was he'd been to 32 Super Bowls in a row.

I was there the day someone showed up dressed as Red Grange, complete with leather helmet.  There the day Genghis Khan made an appearance, only this Genghis Khan was wearing white sunglasses with lenses the size of dinner plates. There ... oh, look, here's Super Bowl Wayne again, handing out business cards.

"Television Radio Film Internet Personality," it read.

I hope the Television Radio Film Internet Personality is at this week's Media Day.

I mean, someone's got to ask Drake Maye, for the 500th time, if he's ready for this. And if he's ready, how ready? Is the percentage of his readiness 60 percent? Seventy-five percent? Ninety percent?

After which someone really does have to ask Sam Darnold why he doesn't suck anymore.

And, by the way, what's the percentage of his readiness?

Mother Unnatural, Part Deux

 So remember yesterday, when the Blob talked about Nelly Korda and the LPGA, and the bomb cyclone that hit Orlando and the rest of Florida before Bond could disarm it?

(Because, to reiterate, "bomb cyclone" sounds more like a doomsday weapon Goldfinger would come up with than a weather system)

Well, it's not just women's golf Mother Unnatural messed with. 

It was also NASCAR. 

Know what the folks at that venerable old bullring Bowman Gray Stadium were doing Sunday, instead of kicking off the season with the Busch Clash?

They were plowing snow off the track. Like, lots and lots of snow.

This is because Bowman Gray is in Winston-Salem, N.C., which got a foot of snow last week. A foot of snow. In North Carolina.

Meanwhile, in Tampa, Fla., the NHL played an outdoor game Sunday in what actually felt like hockey weather (game-time temp was a wintry 40 degrees without the windchill). Talk about turning the globe upside-down.

By the time the storm blew itself out, after all, Winston-Salem looked more like Helsinki,  and Charlotte -- where most of the NASCAR teams are quartered -- was doing a passable imitation of Oslo. And this in a state where you can usually handle winter with four snowplows and a salt shaker.

(OK, so I exaggerate. North Carolina prolly has five snowplows at least.)

So, yeah, on Sunday, when folks were supposed to be tuning into the Clash, they were tuning into the Highway Department 200 instead. Plus, it got down to 14 degrees in Winston-Salem last night. And a '64 Volkswagen Beetle has a better heater than your average Cup car.

Ah, but by Wednesday, the temperature supposed to climb all the way to 40. That's when the Clash is supposed to take place now, the good Lord willing and the creek don't freeze over.

Any-hoo, I guess we can infer from all this that Mother Unnatural not only doesn't like golf, she apparently doesn't like stock-car racin', either. Which oughta be grounds for deportation, in my mind. It is what we do best these days, after all.

Mother Unnatural

 Happy February, everyone, that benighted month in which "winter wonderland" becomes an epithet and everyone thanks the calendar gods that it's also the shortest month.

I'm looking out my window right now, for instance, and it's not some Currier and Ives print of the horse pulling the sleigh over the river and through the woods. No, sir. It's  Siberia out there: Eight or so inches of snow on the ground, minus-1 degrees. . 

Everything's white, including my salt-encrusted car. Woo-hoo.

Want to know the worst thing?

You can't even go to Florida to get warm.

Hanging ten through my socials this a.m., and I saw that play was suspended yesterday in the third round of the season-opening LPGA Tournament of Champions. Not because of thunder, lightning and rain, mind you. Because it was TOO DAMN COLD AND WINDY.

That's got to be a first. Especially since they were playing in FREAKING ORLANDO.

The wind was blowing at 20 mph with gusts up to 40, dropping the windchills into the 40s. The weather boys and girls said the culprit was a bomb cyclone -- which sounds more like a weapon Bond must dismantle than a weather system -- staging a daring daylight raid on the Sunshine State.

And elsewhere. I surfed a little more, and some pictures from Myrtle Beach and Charlotte, N.C., popped up. The roads were white with snowpack, and it was still coming down. It looked like Norway had invaded the Deep South. 

Either that, or Mother Nature (Mother Unnatural?) saying, "You wanna see a War of Northern Aggression? I'll show you a War of Northern Aggression!"

Yeah, boy. Don't try to tell me our weather isn't doing some weird stuff. It is. And it's getting weirder the more our elected numbskulls keep denying our weather is doing weird stuff.

But enough about that. Let's get back to Orlando.

Where, according to my weather app, it's 28 degrees right now, with a windchill of 17. But the good news is, it's supposed to be a balmy 40 by noon.

Which means Nelly Korda, who shot 64 yesterday before play was suspended and sits atop the leaderboard, could make history today: 

First LPGA player to win a tournament while wearing a thermal mittens and a parka. Visor by Cabela's.