A labor of shenanigans

 Well, that didn't take long. Surprise, surprise.

Two days after the Fort Wayne Komets and the rest of the ECHL's workforce went on strike, the supposedly unresolvable conflict between the league and the Professional Hockey Players Association was resolved. It was magic, I tell you, magic!

Or, you know, not.

Actually it was your typical labor/management shenanigans, which have a long and splendidly phony history. The players demand changes. The owners plead poverty. The players say, bullpucky, you're sitting on more dough than the GNP of Luxembourg, and we're not getting our cut. The owners say the players aren't bargaining in good faith; the players says, nuh-uh, it's the owners who aren't bargaining in good faith,.

And yada-yada, bluster-bluster, everyone follows the well-trodden path. 

The players go on strike.

The owners say it's a damn shame, especially for the fans -- whom they've been sticking it to for years with their king's ransom parking, $200 nosebleeds and $15 Bud Lights, but never mind that now. The fans are getting screwed! By those greedy players!

And then ...

And then, after awhile (or after two days, in this case), everyone sits down and hammers out the deal they likely could have hammered out months ago had everyone not been play-acting for the public and the media.

Now, I don't know if that's exactly how it all went down here. I'm just blue-skyin' it, to be perfectly honest. And so I also don't know if perhaps it only took two days to resolve everything because a few of the players publicly criticized the PHPA -- suggesting there were many more players who weren't happy with the union, either, but just weren't saying so.

Be that as it may, if it only took two days to settle this dispute once the players walked, how much of a dispute could it actually have been? And why couldn't they have settled it before the players walked?

One man's conclusion: They could have. As usual. 

Surprise, surprise.

Missin' out

 BYU beat Georgia Tech 25-21 last night in the Blob's new favorite irrelevant bowl game, the Pop-Tarts Bowl, and too bad for you, Notre Dame. You decided the Pop-Tarts Bowl wasn't worth the net loss, which it probably wasn't. But, hey, man: Sprinkles!

Sprinkles in the end zones. Sprinkles on the sidelines. Sprinkles on the players' helmets.

But no sprinkles for you, Irish!

You missed out, if I may be so bold. You missed out on a Pop-Tart mascot grilling Pop-Tarts on the sideline. You missed out on a chance to hoist the Pop-Tarts Bowl trophy, which, no lie, is an actual working toaster. You missed out on the ritual postgame sacrifice of a couple of Pop-Tarts mascots, who disappeared into a giant toaster and emerged at the bottom (as if by magic!) as a couple of for-real giant Pop-Tarts for the victorious Cougars to feast upon.

What did you feast upon last night, you sons of Erin? I bet it wasn't as good as a giant Frosted Cherry or Frosted Cookies-&-Creme Pop-Tart, which were the two sacrifice-ees to BYU's prodigious appetite.

(Know what else? There was actually a THIRD Pop-Tart scheduled to be sacrificed. But at the last second the Protein Slammin' Strawberry Pop-Tart jumped off the giant toaster and escaped his grisly fate.)

Anyway, too bad for you, Irish. You likely would have smoked BYU had you accepted the expected Pop-Tarts Bowl invite, and that would have been you chowin' down on six feet or so of pure deliciousness. Instead you settled for, I don't know, maybe Arby's instead. 

They have the meats, after all.

But the Pop-Tarts Bowl had the sweets. 

Your loss.

The Eighth-Rate Bowl. Or not.

 Your Minnesota Golden Gophers won the Rate Bowl last night on a walk-off touchdown pass in overtime, but that's not what we're going to talk about this morning. What we're going to talk about is tradition, and what a malleable and sometimes illusory thing it is.

What we're going to talk about is a clip ESPN put up of Damon Bankston of New Mexico (Minny's opponent) returning a kickoff 100 yards for a touchdown, one of the evening's highlights. The giddy tagline attached noted it was the first 100-yard kickoff return in Rate Bowl history! (Italics mine).

This prompted me to ask, not unreasonably, if the Rate Bowl actually HAD a history.

Well. Turns out it does, sort of. 

Also, not really.

I say this because the Rate Bowl traces its ancestry back to 1989, when it was born as the Copper Bowl. Then, after a few years, it became the Insight.com Bowl. Then the Insight Bowl. Then -- let's see -- the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl, the Cactus Bowl, the Cheez-it Bowl, and the Guaranteed Rate Bowl.

That was shortened this year to simply the Rate Bowl, which over the years has moved around Arizona four times. So it's actually the Eighth-Rate Travelin' Bowl  if you want to get technical about it.

Let's do.

Let's say Damon Bankston's return was technically quite the historical achievement, if you consider the Eighth-Rate Travelin' Bowl the Copper Bowl's direct lineal descendant. Or it wasn't, technically, if you think of it not as the 37th Copper Bowl but the very first Rate Bowl -- so far removed geographically and otherwise it's become its own distinct entity.

 I know. It's confusing.

Not as confusing as why Guaranteed Rate changed its branding to just Rate, which prompted the latest name change to its bowl game. But close.

Sitdown season

 Watched some dude named Max Brosmer knock the back-to-being-the-Detroit-Lions out of the playoffs on Christmas Day, and it reminded me why the last couple weeks of the NFL season are so entertaining.

Nah, I'm just kidding. They're not entertaining at all, just weird and silly.

This is because it's officially the League's Sitdown Season, whose goal seems to be to display more spare parts than an episode of "American Pickers." Brosmer at quarterback for the Vikings and some rando named Chris Oladokun for the Chiefs on Christmas Day; Malik Willis vs. Tyler Huntley today for Packers vs. the Ravens. Everyone else is either in the ICU or the RUFTPU (Resting Up For The Playoffs Unit).

This is what happens when you get greedy and keep adding games to a season that was already over-long before the owners stretched it to 18 weeks. We're now in Week 17 of that run, and everyone who isn't hurt is sitting out for other reasons -- such as, "We're already in the playoffs so who cares if the Cardinals beat us this week?" 

Or how about this: "Were a dog-ass team with a shot at the top pick in the draft and we're playing another dog-ass team with a shot at the top pick in the draft, so who cares if we lose to 'em? WE DO. Because losing to 'em is bigly important."

That's the state of affairs out in Oakland (oops, sorry, Las Vegas) this week, where Raiders head coach Pete Carroll announced that he's shutting down beat-up All-Pro defensive end Maxx Crosby for the year. Crosby, in fact, has already cleared out of the Raiders facility, with Carroll's blessing.

He's the third starter the Raiders will be without this weekend, after tight end Brock Bowers and safety Jeremy Chinn went on injured reserve. Are they actually injured? Probably, because virtually everyone is at this point. Could they have played in a pinch anyway? Wellll ...

Who knows?

See, the Raiders, who at 2-13 are the worst team in the AFC, are playing the New York Football Giants, who at 2-13 are the worst team in the NFC. The winner gets the inside track to the No. 2 (or 3, or 4) pick in the 2026 NFL Draft; the loser gets the inside track to the No. 1 pick. So, in this case at least, to the loser go the spoils.

That makes Raiders-Giants must-see viewing by the Blob's lights, and not just because it's Week 17 and nothing else is. I mean, how often do you get to see two En Eff Ell teams desperately trying to lose (or at least not trying all that hard to win)? It's the Sitdown Season Super Bowl, is what it is -- without the Bad Bunny halftime show all the bigots will be boycotting.

Why, already the Raiders and Giants have battling to see who can sit the most starters. The Raiders came out strong with Crosby, Bowers and Chinn; the Giants will counter with wide receiver Beaux Collins, offensive linemen Evan Neal and Andrew Thomas, defensive lineman D.J. Davidson and safety Tyler Nubin sidelined with various owies.

On the other hand, both starting QBs -- Jaxson Dart for the Giants and Geno Smith for the Raiders -- will be present for duty. So they've got that going for them.

Or not, as the case may be.

Silent night

 Still unsure if the Fort Wayne Komets will be playing hockey tonight, but if they don't it will be an odd feeling indeed. Sort of like showing up to an old friend's annual Christmas party and finding his house dark and all the familiar faces nowhere to be found.

Or  to put it another way: Komet Hockey on strike. Now there's a new one.

The Professional Hockey Players' Association's work stoppage against the ECHL is scheduled to begin today, although as of last night no strike notice had been issued. But the league and its players association are so far apart, and negotiations have so all but stopped, that it seems inevitable.

Komet Hockey on strike. 

The Allen County War Memorial Coliseum dark. All those fans in their orange-and-black throwbacks off somewhere else. Icy banging on his drum and getting nothing back but echoes of echoes.

A silent night, one day after the silent night.

And, look, I'm not going to get into why that's happening, or whether or not what the league has offered is a fair shake and the PHPA is just being pig-headed. All I know is, minor-league hockey is a grind for both owners and players, but it's the players who generally bear the front end of it. The ECHL isn't the Federal League of "Slapshot" fame, but the bus rides through all those bleak winter landscapes -- and everything else about second-tier minor-league hockey -- is real.

And so, as the fictional Private Bucklin of the rebellious 2nd Maine says in the film "Gettysburg," the workforce has grievances. The ECHL has either addressed them (the league's version), or whizzed on the players and told them it's raining (the PHPA's version). 

Me?

I just see the whole business as the world doing what it does -- spinning along as the days and years and decades flutter past -- no matter how much we wish it wouldn't.

We can all long for the days of the Des Moines Oak Leafs and Port Huron Flags and the rest of the dead-and-gone IHL, but they're not coming back and there's nothing for it. The NHL was a half-dozen or dozen teams back then, and there was no true farm system. The same training camp cuts wound up playing ever year for the same teams in the "I", and it all felt as comfortable as an old couch with the hip hollows broken in.

Same favorites wearing the same home sweaters every year. Same villains wearing the same visitors' sweaters. And the only people going on strike were those bleeping-blank baseball players.

Now, of course, hockey is like every other sport, with affiliations and two-way deals and a structured developmental system. Players get called up; players get sent down. Managing a roster has become an art form in itself.

A lot of folks in my advanced age bracket hate this. I tend to see it merely as the inevitability of change. Whether I like it or not (and I don't, particularly) is irrelevant.

All hope for at this point is that the possibility Komets general manager David Franke floated in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette this morning doesn't happen: That the league might consider bringing in replacement players. This was a terrible idea when the NFL did it 38 years ago, even if Hollywood did get a movie out of it ("The Replacements", starring Keanu Reeves as the immortal Shane Falco). It remains a terrible idea -- especially for a league like the ECHL.

This is because, while I'll make no blind assumptions about the demography of the league's fan base, I'm guessing at least a fair percentage of it is composed of union men and women. And union men and women don't generally cotton to scab labor.

(And, yes, I'll use that term, because I grew up working class myself. My people were factory workers and mechanics and farmers and schoolteachers. I get it honest, in other words.)

Anyway, on we go. We're a handful of hours from Friday night, and Komet Hockey most likely will not be on the air. Strange times.

These times, though.

The annual message

 (Re-posted from last year. And the year before that. And, I don't know, every year)

It's Christmas season again, and you know what that means, Blobophiles. 

"Blood sugar spikes? Marauding, over-stimulated toddlers? Aunt Wilhelmina's festive Jell-O Mold From Beyond Space And Time?" you're saying. 

Uh, not where I was going.

No, where I was going was, it's Christmas season again, and that means a brief pause in the clamor of our days. It means, for those of us who observe, a chance to celebrate the birth of a Prince of Peace whose grace transcends the madness of kings and wanna-be kings, and every other madness besides.

Which is to say: Happy Merry Christmas Holidays, everyone. Health and good fortune and every other blessing to you and yours from the Blob, which really, really means it despite your suspicion I'm just joking around like usual.

I'm not. And to prove it, here's the Blob's annual message, courtesy of Charles Dickens, a crotchety geezer and a few not-quite-random spirits:

"Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea—on, on—until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him."

Merry Christmas, everyone.

A lesson in engagement

 Pittsburgh wideout DK Metcalf spread his own particular brand of Christmas cheer in Detroit Sunday, and now he'll get a two-game sitdown for it from Roger "The Hammer" Goodell and the En Eff Ell. And you can't say he didn't have it coming.

However ...

However, so did the fan to whom he spread Christmas cheer, via his fist.

What happened was, some guy in a blue wig started chirping at Metcalf on the sideline, waving a yellow Steelers T-shirt at him. So Metcalf strolled over to him. The guy then apparently called Metcalf something you never call a black man, and said something nasty about his mother on top of it. 

After which Metcalf grabbed him, pulled him close and punched him in the head.

Now, you can't do that sort of thing if you're an NFL player or coach. You cannot. And so the two-game suspension the league handed down was fully justified. Because even if the guy said what witnesses say he said, Metcalf still shouldn't have throw a punch.

No, sir. It says here he should have thrown two.

A right to the head. A left to the jaw. Or vice-versa.

I say this because, as a friend of frequently reminds, fans are asshats (although he uses the R-rated version of that word). But it takes a special kind of asshat to drag Mom into it. And it takes a REALLY special kind of asshat to follow a player around the country dragging Mom into it.

Reportedly, that's what this particular asshat does. Started harassing Metcalf when he was with Seattle, and followed him to Pittsburgh, apparently. So the two of them have history, allegedly.

Which means it was even more incumbent upon Metcalf not to walk over and engage this clown. That's on him -- and also on security for not clearing out said clown.

(Where was security, by the way? Beats me. Hanging out in a little joint called Nowhere To Be Found, perhaps. It's apparently where they were Sunday, and it's apparently where they were 21 years ago when some drunk in the stands touched off the Malice in the Palace by throwing a beer at that crazy Ron Artest. It's a Detroit thing, I guess.)

Still, it's on Metcalf not to engage, especially if he knew the clown in the blue wig. Engagement is what asshat fans crave, after all. It's why they go to the Mom well, the N-word well, and wells similarly vile. Ignoring them is a player or coach's best defense -- not to mention the ultimate comeback, because there's nothing that drives an asshat fan crazier than ignoring him (or her).

So there's the lesson. Unfortunately, it's too late for Metcalf. Not only did he get suspended, but you just know the asshat he punched is even now chasing fame on the internet, and fortune via some sort of lame civil suit.

Justice is swift in the NFL. But in this case, it's also incomplete.