A real boy after all

 Chatted the other night with an IU basketball fan about Zach Edey, who of course played for Purdue and would therefore seem to be, on general principle, an object of ridicule for said fan.

Surprisingly, he agreed that Edey was pretty damn good after all, and not just tall like his detractors always said.

"Yeah, he's a better Uwe Blab with better hands," the IU fan said at one point, after I mentioned that among Edey's skills was a pair of quality mitts.

Which of course got us reminiscing about Uwe's legendarily bad hands, which -- as the IU fan pointed out -- didn't keep him from playing in the NBA for several years.

Five years, to be exact. With the Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs. Averaged 2.1 points and 1.8 rebounds. I looked it up.

Zach Edey, it must be said, is faring a bit better than that.

Twenty-two games into the season he's averaging a modest double-double for the Memphis Grizzlies -- 14.2 points and 11.6 rebounds per, on astounding 67.1 percent shooting. And in his last three games, he's quietly put together some sit-up-and-take-notice numbers.

Against San Antonio two nights ago: 19 points, 15 rebounds and a block.

Against Sacramento two nights before that: 32 points, 17 rebounds and five blocks.

Against the Clippers last Friday: Just five points, but 19 boards, a couple of assists and three more blocks.

He is, in other words, exactly what some of us (OK, so me) figured he would be: An effective, sneaky-mobile low-blocks presence in a league that still occasionally needs one.

No, he's never going to a big scorer, because it's not a back-to-the-basket league anymore. But neither the Grizzlies nor anyone else expected him to be. He is, rather, exactly what the Grizzlies were looking for when they took him with the ninth pick in the 2024 NBA draft, shocking the gurus who figured he'd be lucky to go in the first round:

A rebounder. A rim protector. A reliable inside option on those occasions when you need an inside option.

But of course, he's just tall.

And he has no skills.

And he's waaay too much the big galoot to ever make a ripple in the NBA.

Well. Look out there now, as Zach Edey one-hands a pass that's headed out of bounds and cashes the layup. What do you see?

Me, I see a ripple or two. And a real boy after all.

An oldie but oldie

 (In which the Blob again strays from the friendly confines of Sportsball World. You know the drill.)

I knew it was December again when I waded into the social media muck Monday, and there was President Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump standing in front of a Christmas tree in the White House. He was declaring victory in the War on Christmas.

OK, so that's not what he actually said. What he actually said was, "We're saying Merry Christmas again!"

This came as something of a surprise to normal humans (and also to me) who were unaware we'd ever stopped saying Merry Christmas. Or that a War on Christmas was being waged right under our noses amid all those public displays of Christmas trees and Christmas wreaths and lighted Nativity scenes, and Christmas carols playing softly over the sound system at your local Malls-R-Us.

Nonetheless, it's with an admirable bullheadedness that those of a certain ideological bent insist there is a War on Christmas in America, and by extension a war on Christianity. This is because somewhere in America someone won't let them put a Nativity scene on the courthouse lawn. Or that somewhere else in America someone is saying "Happy holidays!' at this very moment, recognizing that there are more religious observances this time of year than just Christmas.

This amounts to religious persecution, as far as those folks are concerned. It's the encroachment on American society (going on for years now!) of evil diversity -- even though the founders baked such diversity into our national tradition with a little something called the First Amendment.

It guarantees freedom of religion. It guarantees no particular religion will be instituted as the official religion of the state. It means, yes, Catholics and Protestants and Jews and Muslims and Sikhs and Buddhists have the same access to the same right.

Recognizing that is not persecution, no matter how badly a certain species of Christian wishes it were. And no matter how silly (and tiresome) the overwhelming dominance of Christianity in America renders their imagined War on Christmas.

It's an oldie but oldie, that stuff. Makes you want to ask the Certain Species when it's going to get some new material.

The Certain Species does, however, make up a sizeable chunk of Fearless Leader's base, and he's smart enough to pander to it. And so there he was, saying it was OK for a President to say Merry Christmas again -- the implication being his heathen Democratic predecessors refused to do so.

Well. Except for the dozens and dozens of times Barack and Michelle Obama, both Christians, said it every year at this time.

And except for the dozens and dozens of times Fearless Leader's predecessor Joe Biden -- a practicing Roman Catholic -- said it, too.

The stubborn notion that both routinely snubbed what Fearless Leader bravely does not was exposed years ago, when Slate magazine put out a one-minute video compilation of Obama saying "Merry Christmas" 17 times. Alas, this was offset by Joe Biden opening his remarks at last year's White House Christmas tree lighting by saying, "Happy holidays, everyone!"

Just kidding.

What he actually said was, "Merry Christmas, everyone! Merry Christmas."

Wow. Not once, but twice.

The War on Christmas never sounded more fanciful.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 13

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the Blob feature with a surprise prize inside just waiting to jump out and say "Surprise!", and of which critics have said "Sinking to new lows is never a surprise with you," and also, "You jump out and say 'Surprise!', Imma surprise you by jumping on your face":

1. "Surprise!" (The Carolina Panthers, who jumped out and surprised the Super Bowl-bound Los Angeles Rams, causing the previously un-surpriseable Matthew Stafford to throw two picks in a 31-28 loss)

2. "What th-?" (Rams fans who came up with "Super Bowl-bound Rams" thing)

3. "Surprise!" (Joe Burrow, who jumped out, back into the Bengals lineup, to surprise the  Ravens so much they turned it over five times in a 32-14 loss)

4. "What th-? We thought we were facing 80-year-old Joe Flacco again!" (The Ravens)

5. "Surpri- OK, so almost surprise!" (The Commanders, who surprised the high-riding Broncos enough to force overtime before losing 27-26)

6. "I'm surprised I didn't have a heart attack!" (The Broncos)

7. "Surpri- OK, so not really." (The surging Texans, who beat the spiraling Colts, who've now lost three of their last four games)

8. Meanwhile, the Bears took down the Eagles 24-15, their fifth straight win and ninth in their last 10 games.

9. "Surprise, bleeping bleepers!" (The Bears)

10. "Double surprise!" (Bears coach Ben Johnson, tearing off his shirt in the locker room afterward and dancing around bare-chested*)

(* - No, really. He did.)

Decisions, decisions, Part Deux

 The shoe finally dropped yesterday in Oxford, Miss., and, well, it went almost exactly the way everyone expected it would.

To wit:

1. Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin took the money and ran to LSU.

2. And, being Lane Kiffin, he was a total douchecanoe about it.

What he did was tell his staff if they wanted to follow him to LSU, they'd best be on the plane to Baton Rouge or he'd leave them behind. This was an attempt to carry out his rumored threat that if he wasn't allowed to coach the Rebels in the College Football Playoff, he'd take his entire staff with him and leave the team and community he professed to love high and dry.

Then he released an official statement that was a masterwork of obfuscation, blaming Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter for not allowing him to stick around for the CFP. And making it sound like he, Lane Kiffin, was the hero in the whole deal for standing by his players.

"My request ... was denied by Keith Carter despite the team also asking him to allow me to keep coaching them so they could better maintain their high level of performance," the statement read.

In other words: I WANTED to stand by my guys for another minute or two, but the AD wouldn't let me. 

In further other words: Therefore I am throwing him under the bus, driving over him, then backing up to do it again. Even though he revived my faltering career by hiring me when a lot of others wouldn't.

There are words to describe such breathtaking ingratitude, but most I can't repeat here. This is a PG-13 Blob, after all.

Suffice it to say it was nuclear level self-absorption for Kiffin to think Ole Miss would allow him to coach the Rebels in the CFP after he'd already told them he was abandoning them. And not just abandoning them, but abandoning them for a conference rival.

(Somewhere in suburbia. A typical middle class neighorhood.)

Suburban Dad: "Honey, I'm home! And guess what? I'm leaving you for the 25-year-old stripper who lives next door!"

Suburban Mom: "Pack your bags and get out then, mister."

Dad: "Aw, come on. Don't be that way. Think about Junior. Can I still take him on our big fishing trip this weekend? The kid is really looking forward to it, and I'd like to be there for him one last time before I ditch his ass."

Mom: "What?? NO."

Dad: "Well, OK. But he'll be really disappointed when I tell him you wouldn't let him go."

Which of course makes Mom the bad guy.

Which of course means she has to patch things up with her son while Dad hits the bricks with Trudi Kazootie.

Which of course is precisely what Kiffin is doing to Ole Miss.

And, look, it's not as if we didn't know already that loyalty is as obsolete as the rotary phone in the age of NIL and ungoverned transfer portal. But somehow when people wring their hands over the perceived crumbling of college athletics, it's always the athletes who get tagged as faithless carpetbaggers. Yet all they're doing is exactly what Coach Slobberknocker has been doing for decades.

Jumping schools for a chunkier payday, or more exposure, or a better situation. Being a me-first guy even as he preaches teamwork and family and all-for-one, one-for-all. Being the rankest of hypocrites when he bemoans how the kids are just in it for themselves these days.  

I never want to hear that again from anyone. 

Especially if "anyone" is named Lane Kiffin.

For the life of Lem

 A body ought to know by now not to believe everything he or she reads on the internet. Even the good stuff, like Xtwitter posts by Abe Lincoln such as "Fourscore and seven years ago McClellan finally moved his ass", and also, "Jeff Davis has the IQ of a hamster and he smells like one too!"

And speaking of people who are dead ...

Here's someone who isn't: Lem Barney.

If you grew up watching the NFL in the 1960s, you know who Lem Barney is. He's the shutdown corner and return specialist who played on a lot of mediocre Detroit Lions teams during that era -- teams whose quarterbacks went by names like Bill Munson and Milt Plum, and whose best players (aside from Barney) went by names like Mel Farr and Altie Taylor and Charlie Sanders.

In his 10-year career, Barney was the NFL's Defensive Rookie of the Year in 1967, played in seven Pro Bowls and was All-Pro twice. In 1992, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

Which is why the HOF put out the sad news Saturday that Lem Barney was dead at the age of 80. Other media sites on the 'net quickly picked it up, including Sports Illustrated, NBC and even the NFL's official website.

Problem was, like the old man in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," Lem Barney wasn't dead yet.

His family confirmed that he was, in fact, very much alive, and they were not happy about the HOF reporting otherwise. In fact, it's fair to say they were supremely pissed.

"My brother is fine,"  his sister, Verina Carter, told Tony Paul of the Detroit News. "I don't know where this (expletive) is coming from."

I do. It's the (expletive) internet.

Where I just ran across an Xtwitter denial from a certain A. Lincoln.

"I never said Jeff Davis had the IQ of a hamster," Lincoln posted. "That was one of those parody accounts.

"I said he had the IQ of a gerbil. Get it right, people."

Decisions, decisions

 Look, I don't know what Lane Kiffin's going to do, down there in magnolia country. I don't much care, either, except for the fact he's a not-so-shining example of what big-boy college athletics have become.

A football coach holding an entire university -- Ole Miss -- hostage? A university that produced William Faulkner holding its breath because, again, a football coach can't make up his mind?

If that doesn't tell you how the athletics tail now wags the academic dog, I don't know what else does. It's the American university as Walmart -- a spreadsheet-driven corporate entity whose function is merely to serve as branding for its football or basketball teams.

And so here's Lane Kiffin, who's taken Ole Miss football to heights it hasn't glimpsed in 60-plus years, being aggressively pursued by another company. And not just another company, but one that's a direct competitor. It's like Macy's raiding Gimbel's for its director of sales.

The direct competitor, of course, is LSU, whose delusions of grandeur have birthed a willingness to fling outlandish amounts of money at every hot property that comes down the pike. And Lane Kiffin is the hottest right now, having coached Ole Miss to an 11-1 record and a surefire spot in the College Football Playoff.

Even in Oxford, everyone assumes he's headed one state over to one of Ole Miss' ancient SEC rivals. But he dithers. He deflects. And the suspicion -- probably more than a suspicion -- is that he's trying work out a deal where he can collect LSU's big bucks but still coach Ole Miss in the CFP.

In other words, he wants the ranch and the beach house. It's the Trumpian ethos in full flower, where greed is not only good but practically an imperative for every right-thinking American.

And if I'm the Ole Miss powers-that-be, I push back on that.

I tell Lane Kiffin if he's going to LSU, then get packin' and quit jacking us around.

I tell him there's only two ways we'll let him coach our football team in the CFP: No way, and no (bad word that starts with "F") way.

The powers-that-be probably wouldn't add that Kiffin is a yellow-dog dirtbag, because he did lift Ole Miss to unimagined heights. But, well, he is a yellow-dog dirtbag.

Ole Miss, remember, hired Kiffin at a time when a lot of big-money schools were off him because of his reputation as an entitled me-first snot. Ole Miss took him in, anyway. Gave him a home. Gave him a second chance, and the wherewithal to make it work.

It was an act of charity that enabled Kiffin to resuscitate his career and put him a position to be wooed  by ... well, by LSU. And he'll repay that act of charity, most people now think, by taking LSU's money and running.

Even though LSU is three rings of fun right now, having fired both Brian Kelly and athletic director Scott Woodward because Louisiana's dopey governor couldn't keep his mouth shut. Even though Governor Dopey very publicly -- and very stupidly --  said Woodward was an idiot to give Kelly that enormous buyout, and said there's no way LSU would ever offer such a buyout again.

Just the sort of sales pitch you want to put out there when you're shopping for a new coach. Yeah, boy.

But Kiffin's apparently OK with it -- even though if he stayed at the school to whom by all rights he owes his loyalty, he'd hardly be living in a cardboard box under the overpass.

A product of his times, Lane Kiffin. And that's no compliment.

The 'Eyes have it

 Waiting for my order at a local pizza joint Friday night, and there was a woman wearing an Ohio State sweatshirt, so of course I had to say something. And, no, it wasn't a mean something like you all probably think.

"Your guys gonna win tomorrow?" is what I said.

She smiled.

"I hope so," she replied. "Four years in a row is just too much."

By which she meant, "Four years in a row losing to Michigan." Or maybe, "Four years in a a row losing to those turds from up north," relations between the Buckeyes and Wolverines being what they are.

Ohio State vs. Michigan has always be one of the marquee annual rivalry games in college football, even if during the Woody vs. Bo years it was also the most boring. It was Archie Griffin going off-tackle 4,000 times vs. Billy Taylor or Ed Shuttlesworth or Rob Lytle going off tackle 4,001 times, and the final score was always 12-10 or 13-12 or some other Novocaine number.

Still, the enmity kept you watching, because to someone with no dog in the hunt it was endlessly fascinating and a trifle amusing. After all, if you were an alum of one of those other Big Ten schools Bo and Woody routinely beat 69-7, you despised both of them. You regarded both as merely football factories masquerading as institutions of higher learning.

Unlike, you know, Northwestern. Or Purdue or IU or Wisconsin.

At any rate, the week leading up to Ohio State's 27-9 dismantling of the Wolverines in Ann Arbor yesterday was particularly entertaining.

Michigan fans kept saying Ohio State's 2024 national title was bogus on account of the Buckeyes lost to the Wolverines for the fourth straight time. Ohio State fans retaliated by saying, "Oh, yeah? Well, your 2023 title should have been voided because Jim Harbaugh was a (bleeping) cheater. Also, you've beaten us just seven times since the turn of the millennium, so shut the hell up."

The Michigan fans' insult was ridiculous because, by their logic, every national champion who's ever lost a regular season game is a fraud. And the Ohio State fans' retort is ridiculous because, if you voided every national champion who'd ever pulled a fast one -- fast ones much worse than spying on future opponents, in some cases -- "Void" would have more national titles than anyone.

Not that the Ohio State fans are caring much, this morning. The Buckeyes went to Ann Arbor, got down 6-0 early to the jacked Wolverines, and then methodically did what they've done to everyone in this 12-0 run of theirs: Beat them down with their endless supply of talent and depth.

Outscored the Wolverines 27-3 from that point on. Put a big smile on Ryan Day's face -- because Michigan fans spent the last four years laughing at him, and Ohio State fans, until last year's natty, spent the last four years saying he didn't know jack-all about football.

Well, Day and the 'Eyes have it now, at least for another year. So neener-neener-neener, Michigan. And you, too, Ohio State complainers.