Wait ... what?

 Some odd stuff happened over the weekend in Sportsball World, and personally, given that it's the holiday season, I think it's because someone slipped something funny in the celestial egg nog.

(I strongly suspect Buddy the Elf. You can't tell me syrup is one of the four food groups unless Buddy jazzed it up somehow.)

Anyway, it was a definite "Wait ... what?" sort of weekend. So let's review, shall we?

* The Bears beat the Packers in overtime, which was bizarre enough, but they walked it off on a perfect Caleb Williams deep ball to DJ Moore from 47 yards away. Best throw of the NFL season, and it came from a guy who supposedly doesn't have the deep ball in his toolbox.

Also, it was the sixth W the Bears have put up this season after trailing with fewer than two minutes to play. This time a Carlos Santo field goal with 1:59 left in regulation and Williams' off-balance throw to Jahdae Walker with 24 seconds left erased a 10-point deficit and forced overtime.

Some weird stuff goin' on in Chi. 

* The Seattle Seahawks beat the Los Angeles Rams on a play that, had it worked, wouldn't have worked.

Allow me to explain.

See, the Seattles were doing for a two-point conversion and the win, and decided a bubble screen was the way to do that. Now, it's a law of nature that the bubble screen hardly ever works, and especially in the NFL, where the speed of defenses simply gobble up attempts to string them out.

But, the Seahawks gave it a shot anyway. Sam Darnold turned and threw. Had he completed the pass, the play would have failed, because the Rams of course had it covered. 

But what's this?

Here came a Rams defender, leaping high to bat Darnold's throw into the air. The ball sailed up and into the end zone, where, after a mad scramble (because the throw was behind the line of scrimmage, and therefore a lateral), a Seahawk picked it up. Conversion good, Seahawks win.

You know what they say: Man plans, God laughs.

Only in this case, God was wearing a throwback Steve Largent jersey. Must have been.

* Speaking of God laughing, the shine is apparently off his bromance with the Detroit Lions. This is because the Lions scored a touchdown on the last play of the game to beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, only to find out they didn't really beat the Steelers.

Here's what happened: Trailing by 12 with less than four minutes to play, the Lions mounted a stirring comeback, only to get not one but two touchdowns called back for offensive pass interference. And both were legit calls.

The second happened on the last play of the game, after Jared Goff completed a pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown at the goal line. St. Brown was wrapped up before breaking the plane, but he alertly lateraled back to Goff, who ran it in for the score that turned a 29-24 loss into a 30-29 victory.'

Except it didn't.

Because earlier in the play, St. Brown pushed off on his defender to get open. Shoved the guy right down to the ground. Blatant as blatant gets.

So, yes, the play ended in a Detroit touchdown. But the infraction occurred before the touchdown, so the touchdown didn't count.

Some weird stuff goin' on in Motown, too.

* And last but not least ...

Your Purdue-Fort Wayne Mastodons did it again.

Head coach Jon Coffman, Corey Hadnot II and the gang went up to South Bend yesterday, and by gumphrey they brought Upset City with them. Again.

Knocked off Notre Dame on its home floor, the Dons did, 72-69. Hadnot scorched the Irish for 29 points, Mikale Stevenson added 18, and for the second time in two years, PFW put a Big East notch in its belt.

In 2023, the Dons took out DePaul. And let's not forget 2016 and 2017, when Coffman's guys upset Indiana in back-to-back years. 

Man's just got a knack for ruining a big boy's day, it seems.

Time warp

Idly scrolling through a few social media sites the other day (because "idly" is the only way I scroll), and I came across this photo on some Indiana Basketball Memories site. It was from Assembly Hall on Feb. 23, 1985, the day Bob Knight introduced the Chair Fling to college basketball.

The vantage point is the baseline, and the photo was taken right after the Fling happened. Knight's out on the floor, about to exit stage left. In the background, behind him, is what was then the media seating.

And it dawned on me: Hey. I might be in this photo.

I was there that day, see, covering IU-Purdue for the late, great Anderson Daily Bulletin. I was 29 years old at the time; I'm 70 now. And I remember where I was sitting: Third tier, above and to the right of the Indiana bench.

So I magnified the photo. Looked. And there I was, fuzzy but clear enough: Above Knight's left shoulder, wearing a white shirt, hand over my mouth.

Weird City.

Weird City, because how often do you see yourself in the crowd on a day that's been dead and gone almost 41 years? Witnessing, in real time, an incident that's been described/referenced/anthologized six ways from Sunday since?

Oh, what I could tell that kid with his hand over his mouth, all these years later.

I could tell him that in a bit more than two years he'd lose his beloved nephew, all of  five years old, to leukemia. If I could stand to, that is.

I could tell him in two years he wouldn't be in Anderson anymore, but in his hometown of Fort Wayne, where he'd work 28 years for the newspaper he grew up reading.

I could tell him if the prehistoric Teleram Portabubble he was typing his Indy 500 column on got stuck and started backspace-eating his words, it was just a glitch and not an editorial comment. And the technological caveman fix was to give it a good smack.

I could tell him that, on the day in the photo, his future wife was sitting somewhere several rows up and off to the left of him, and that he wouldn't meet her for six more years.  I could tell him about the children they would have, one of whom just turned 30. I could tell him about the time, years in his future, when I got locked in a high-school football stadium one night and had to scale an eight-foot fence to get out.

I was in my 50s by then. And what I was thinking, wobbling atop the fence, was this: I am too old for this (expletive depleted).

I could tell my 29-year-old self that, within three years, the newspaper he worked for would no longer exist. And that someday there would be this thing called the internet that would kill the newspaper industry as he knew it and transform it into an entity both more expansive and less professional. And that he would come to pine for the days when a guy could fix a stuck backspace key by physically assaulting his expletive-deleted portable computer.

I could tell my 29-year-old self do not, under any circumstances, enter the locker room of a hockey team that had just won a championship unless you wanted a beer poured on your head. I could tell him do not, under any circumstances, attempt to close his laptop with the power cord lying across the keyboard, unless he wanted to wind up dictating his gamer over the phone on deadline. 

I could also tell him to keep his head on a swivel when covering a Purdue-IU basketball game, because, years after the day he watched Knight fling the chair, a Purdue player named Brian Cardinal would come flying into press row and land on his chest.

What else could I tell 29-year-old me?

Well, I could tell him that someday he would cover a high school basketball game whose final score was 16-14 (no, really!). That he would see the Indianapolis Colts win a Super Bowl (really, really!). That the friends he'd made in the business would still be his friends 41 years later, and that he would make many more in the meantime.

Mostly, though, I would tell him this: Oh, you kid. You're in for a hell of a ride.

The real Cinderella

 Goodness gracious. All this time, and Cinderella was hiding out somewhere else.

No, not in the College Football Playoff, where yesterday Tulane and James Madison mounted a convincing argument for a separate Group of Five CFP. The Tulanes went down to Ole Miss, 41-10. JMU trailed Oregon 34-7 at halftime before the Ducks lost interest and coasted to a 51-34 win. 

Football, it turns out, is not basketball, and Tulane and JMU were not George Mason or Florida Atlantic. If the CFP selectors were hoping for some sort of December Madness, they didn't get it. 

So who were the real Cinderellas?

Well, they hail from Normal, Ill., where things definitely are not normal these days. Instead, the Illinois State Redbirds of the Missouri Valley Conference are getting ready to play in the FCS national title game after one of the more improbable runs in that playoff's history.

The unseeded Redbirds made the playoffs after finishing third in the MVC with an 8-4 record. They took out 16th-seed Southeastern Louisiana in the first round, then journeyed up to MVC champion, defending national champion and top-ranked North Dakota State for round two.

The Redbirds lost to the Bison 33-16 back in October. This time, though ...

Well. This time, they jacked around and won, 29-28, knocking out the most dominant program in FCS. The Bison, after all, had won 10 national titles since 2011, including five of the last eight. They weren't supposed to lose to the likes of Illinois State.

But they did.

And then the Redbirds beat 8-seed UC-Davis 42-31 in the quarterfinals.

And yesterday they beat 12-seed Villanova 30-14, snapping 'Nova's FCS-leading 22-game home winning streak.

Four games. Four wins. All on the road.

Now the Redbirds get 2-seed Montana State in the national title game. Montana State will be favored, of course. This will mean nothing, of course -- or at least it has so far.

Cinderella gonna Cinderella, after all. At least in some precincts of college football.

Crimson all over

 Well, alrighty, then. Alabama it is.

Alabama, which erased a 17-0 deficit to Oklahoma in Norman last night, outscoring the Sooners 34-7 the rest of the way in a 34-24 win.

Alabama, losers of three games (including to Oklahoma a little over a month ago), and last seen getting squashed by Georgia in the SEC title game.

Alabama ... whom a lot of folks un-doctrinated by the SEC thought was an absolute imposter in the College Football Playoff, and who only got in because the selection committee knew Tuscaloosa's zip code by heart.

Well. I guess the Crimson Tide and their more-insane-than-most fan base have earned the right to gloat a bit this morning.

They are, after all, headed to the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day to play No. 1 Indiana, and what a weird sentence that is to write. It sounds hella more normal to write "No. 1 Alabama is headed to the Rose Bowl to play Indiana," but these are not normal times. These are the times when Indiana goes 12-0, beats No. 1 Ohio State to go to 13-0 and win the Big Ten championship, and heads off to Pasadena for the first time in 58 years.

You can expect those Harry Gonso retrospectives any day now. Or perhaps a Dave Koronowa retrospectives, given that the IU kicker scored the only points for the Hoosiers in a 14-3 Rose Bowl loss to O.J. and USC.

More likely we'll see a feature or two on Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer, because he was Indiana's offensive coordinator in 2019. People love that cross-pollination stuff. 

(He was also the head coach on the other sideline when the Fort's very own Saint Francis Cougars lost to Sioux Falls in the 2006 NAIA national championship game. Just sayin'.)

Anyway, it's gonna be the Crimson Tide vs. the Cream and Crimson in the Rose Bowl, which is a lot of crimson for any bowl. The Blob thinks Indiana's the better Crimson -- hell, I think Notre Dame's better than the Tide, though we'll never know -- and will move on to the CFP semifinals.

If not, we'll all just have to endure more gloating from Paul Finebaum and the rest of the snooty SEC shills. And if that's not motivation enough for the Hoosiers to bring their "A" game, I don't know what is.

And so as odd as it feels to take a rooting interest after all my years as a professional sports scribbler, I say this: Go, Indiana. Please.

Influencer paddling

 So, Jake Paul at last found out where the other half lives, and -- surprise, surprise -- it was at the intersection of Right Fist Boulevard and Glass Jaw Way. 

In other words, former world champion Anthony Joshua hit the Jakester with his right fist once, and then again, and then a bunch of other times last night, and finally ol' Jake babied up to the canvas. In the sixth round, Joshua hit the social media influencer (as Paul is sometimes described) one last time, and Paul folded like a Vegas sharpie holding a handful of nothing.

KO in the sixth. Broken jaw in two places for Paul. And the only reason it happened in the sixth round and not, say, the second or third, is because Paul spent the first three or four rounds running like Usain Bolt.

This is what happens to social media influencers when they fight someone who isn't a tomato can or 58 years old like Mike Tyson. It becomes not influence peddling but an influence paddling, if you'll excuse the pun.

Look. Anyone who knew the difference between a left hook and coat hook knew Paul was as phony as most stuff you see on the internet, so last night was entirely predictable. Mr. Social Media Influencer climbed into the ring with a legit fighter, and found out there's an ocean of difference between a legit fighter and one who just plays one on TV.

Or, you know, Instagram or TikToc or whatever.

Time to find another online schtick, Jake. I suggest pilates.

Echoing tragedy

 Awful things happen to good people in this world, which is why every human with a working soul occasionally shakes his or her fist at the heavens. "Life's not fair," after all, has never been an adequate response to the inexplicable.

And so we come, reluctantly, to a small plane burning on a runway in Statesville, N.C., yesterday, a week before Christmas.

The small plane, a Cessna C550, crashed on approach to Statesville Regional Airport, killing all seven people aboard. Among them were former NASCAR standout Greg Biffle, his wife, and their two children, ages 14 and 5.

An entire family, wiped out in one violent instant. A week before Christmas, and five days before Biffle's 56th birthday.

And, no, the fact one of those who died was moderately famous doesn't make it worse. 

For the non-NASCAR crowd out there, Biffle wheeled a stock car for Jack Roush most of his Cup career, which spanned 16 years. He came up in the truck series in 1998, eventually becoming the first driver ever to win both the truck series (2000) and what's now called the Xfiniti series (2002). His won 19 races for Roush, with his best season in Cup coming in 2005, when he finished second in the points.

All that got him selected as one of NASCAR's all-time top 75 drivers.

What didn't get him selected, but should have gotten him onto a different, more prestigious list, was what he did just last year.

A registered helicopter and small plane pilot, Biffle flew his own copter to rescue those trapped by the catastrophic floodwaters that hit North Carolina during hurricane Helene. He spent the next several weeks flying in supplies and flying out the stranded.

And then came yesterday. And, no, life isn't fair, and, yes, I'm going to say, "That's not good enough," and what the hell, besides.

I guess the best answer I can come up with is what happened yesterday is part of a legacy of tragedy that echoes long down the years. Whatever it is that gets inside a man (or woman) and makes him want to go fast also makes him want to take to the skies -- and with too often numbing finality.

Biffle, see, is only the latest racer to die in a flying machine. There was Davey Allison, who died in a helicopter crash at Talladega almost 33 years ago. Alan Kulwicki, another NASCAR star who died in a plane crash the same year. Formula One icon Graham Hill, killed when the plane he was flying crashed on approach in 1975.

And yet another NASCAR star, Curtis Turner, who crashed his plane and died in 1970.

 Echoes upon echoes. And, again, still no answer why.

Attention not paid

 I wouldn't know Rex Elliott if he worked for 1-800-555-HURT, but I do know he has the attention span of a gnat. The reason I know is this what he said the other day about his client, a gentleman named Brian Smith.

Smith was the head football coach at Ohio University, until he wasn't. OU fired him after one season not long ago, in which the Bobcats went a respectable 8-4. Based on what OU officials said when they dropkicked him to the curb, it was a hell of a one season.

During it, OU alleges, Smith carried on multiple extramarital affairs, including one with an undergraduate student. He eventually, also allegedly, dumped the the student for a 41-year-old woman. And somewhere in there he (again, allegedly) showed up drunk at a university function.

Elliott, of course, denies all of this. In a sharp fire-back at OU president Lori Stewart Gonzalez, he said Smith "didn't participate in an extramarital affair and you know it," noting that Smith and his wife separated earlier this year. He also said Smith never showed up drunk at any university affair. And then ...

And then Elliott screwed up bigly, as a certain notable reprobate allegedly once said.

In his letter to Gonzalez, he wrote that Ohio University had no policy stating employees couldn't date students, and thus his relationship with the aforementioned student was a "perfectly appropriate consensual adult relationship" that lasted four months. The student, Elliott added, worked in the athletic department and she and Smith dated for about four months until he dumped her for the 41-year-old. 

(And, OK, so he didn't put it in exactly those words. That was me.)

Smith, by the way, is 45 years old. Which would make him roughly twice as old as your average undergrad. Not illegal, perhaps, but definitely "Ewww" as hell.

In which case, this is where an invisible arm reaches down from Ann Arbor, Mich., and smacks Rex Elliott upside the head.

"'Perfectly appropriate consensual adult relationship'?" the invisible body attached to the invisible arm says. "Son, have you NOT been paying attention?"

Because, listen, up there in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan just fired its head football coach for almost exactly the same Perfectly Appropriate Consensual Adult Relationship. This one involved the coach, Sherrone Moore, and a 24-year-old woman. She wasn't a student, but she also worked in the athletic department. In fact she was Moore's top assistant.

The entire sordid situation, of course, blew up into a huge national story. Which apparently never filtered down to the space between Rex Elliott's ears, because there he was this week, protesting OU firing its football coach for behavior remarkably similar to the behavior for which UM fired its football coach.

To reiterate: Son, have you NOT been paying attention?

It seems not.