Prize appropriation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Construction paper and library paste are well represented.

Another milestone

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

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

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

Indiana football being accused of cheating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damn cheaters.

The enduring taint

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

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

The next year, they were something else entirely.

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

Worst part was, CCNY wasn't alone.

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

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

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

Unfortunately, the lesson had an expiration date.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around and around the wheel goes.

Shrinking the Big Deal

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

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

Really?

Storming the court because you beat somebody ranked 14th?

How pathetic.

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

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

Except that's not North Carolina anymore.

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

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

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

Oh, and Stanford?

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

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

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

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

And so on, and so forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How you do it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now?

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

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

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

Past as prologue

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

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

So what does this mean?

I'll tell you what it means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words: Stay tuned.

Times and places

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

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

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

Harris looked at her like she had two heads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do know one thing, though.

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