Game of the week

 Tomorrow night Ole Miss welcomes LSU for their traditional Saturday Night Lights  throwdown, and apparently the only question is the choice of weapons. Will the Tigers and Rebels choose broadswords, battle axes or pistols at 20 paces?

This on account of there likely will be an Extreme Venom Alert, on account of LSU's head coach and incorrigible asshat Lane Kiffin was coaching Ole Miss a year ago. Then LSU threw a pile of green at him to jump ship, and Lane-o did, with unbecoming haste. Took a few Ole Miss players with him, too, just to twist the knife.

And speaking of twisting the knife .. Kiffin being Kiffin, after he fled Oxford he couldn't resist flapping his gums about how it was harder to recruit black players to Ole Miss because blacks didn't feel as welcome there.

Never let it be said Ol' Motormouth has trouble locating someone's hot button.

Ole Miss, of course, was where they used to greet football visitors with a forest of Confederate battle flags and full-throated renditions of "Dixie." It's also where the student body practically started Civil War The Sequel because a black student -- James Meredith, perhaps you remember the name -- wanted to enroll there.

All of that was a long time ago, of course, and a few things have changed at Ole Miss since. The majority of the football players are black now, including star quarterback Trinidad Chambliss.  The student body, 100 percent white back in the James Meredith days, is roughly 13 percent black. And the Confederate flags, blessedly, are long gone.

But race is still a sensitive subject in Oxford and surrounding precincts. So it was an on-target cheap shot from Kiffin, not to say some impressive ingratitude from a guy Ole Miss paid $9 million last year to coach its football team.

Anyway, Kiffin comes back to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium tomorrow night, and an ancient rivalry likely will be even more rivalry-er than usual. In fact Ole Miss is calling in extra mounted police to keep the hooliganism to a minimum.

Game of the week for sure in college football. Don't forget the snacks.

Gotcha-ed

 Look, I should know better. OK? I should.

I should know better than to cruise social media certain weeks. I know the level of idiocy, always flirting with the red line, will reach critical mass then. And I know it will frost my cookies, even though I acknowledge frosting the public's cookies is the overarching purpose of social media.

It exists to mine outrage, almost all of it phony. To annoy. To make you splutter, "Why, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard!"

Which is what a lot of social media cruisers spluttered when they saw what a couple of  fools named Jason Whitlock and Laura Ingraham had to say about sideline reporter Holly Rowe after Texas coach Steven Sarkisian blew her off in the wake of the Longhorns' win over Ohio State.

They made her the bad guy, is what they did. 

Whitlock, a former sportswriter transformed by some inner furies into a raging make-me-a-sandwich misogynist, said Rowe was trying to "destroy the patriarchy" and "invade male spaces."  This of course was news to those of us who just thought she was a veteran (and well-respected) reporter doing her job. 

But then, Whitlock used to be a semi-respected reporter, too. Now he's just another insecure male ranting in the online wilds about how all these damn women are ruining America for, you know, men.

And Ingraham, Fox harpy extraordinaire?

You know what you're gonna get from her, too. And so, right on cue, she sided with Arch Manning after the little goof laughed about all the AI memes featuring Rowe and Sarkisian -- particularly the one where Sarkisinian knocks her flat with a backhand slap.

"Have y'all seen that?" the little goof said to reporters this week. "That's a good one. Of him slapping Holly Rowe? It's hilarious."

(The worst part about that? Some of the reporters laughed, too. Oh, yeah, tee-hee, ha-ha, someone AI-ed a video of a woman getting slapped, that's a real knee slapper. Not one of those reporters, apparently, had either the good sense or common decency to say, "Hey, Arch, that's not funny." But then there's no accounting for how some folks were raised.)

Anyway, a day or so later the little goof apologized. I'm guessing this was preceded by a stern phone call from Papa Manning -- Cooper, Peyton's and Eli's brother -- reminding Arch that there was an accounting for how he was raised, and by God you're gonna apologize, mister, and I mean RIGHT NOW.

Ingraham, of course, thought Arch had nothing to apologize for, to get back to the no-accounting-for-how-some-folks-were-raised thing. In fact she blamed Rowe for somehow "extracting" the apology from the poor lad -- which was so ridiculous that, sure enough, it made me splutter "Why, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard!"

And now here I am, writing about it, giving these fools more oxygen -- which of course is exactly what they were after. Gotcha, Blob Boy.

I should know better. I really should.

Stupid geography

The world was too ridiculous to even bother to live in.

-- Jack Crabb, "Little Big Man"

Boy howdy there, Mr. Crabb. You sure hit that one on the noggin.

The world is too ridiculous to live in these days, and it's getting ridiculous-er by the day. We got us basketball players (Kyrie Irving) who think the Earth is flat, and football players (Aaron Rodgers) who think America's pre-eminent epidemiologist is Josef Mengele. And we got us hysterical (or cynical) politicians who tell us Commies and Muslims are trying to take over America and make us all buy crappy Soviet-era cars and pray to Mohammed five times a day.

And that's not even mentioning the senile old fart in the White House, who picks fights with Canada, of all people, and shut down the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts because he refused to renovate it unless they stuck his name on it, too.

Also, he says he'll pay us all $5,000 if the Republicans win in November. Which sure sounds to me like bribing folks to vote Republican, but what do I know.

Oh, yes: And he likes renaming stuff he can't really rename.

Which brings us today's Stupid Geography Trick, which is the Cleveland city council voting to rename a large swatch of Lake Erie the Gulf of Cleveland. Now, apparently this was all very tongue-in-cheek, a splendid trolling of El Presidente by the council. Sort of like, "You know how absurd it is to rename international bodies of water you have no authority to rename? Watch THIS."

In any case, it's yet more fodder for the Blob's seventh-grade-boy sense of humor ...

Q: What did the part of Lake Erie designated for renaming say when it found out?

A: "The Gulf of CLEVELAND?? Aw, HELL, no!"

I got a million of 'em, I tell ya.

Here's another one: If Lake Ontario is Lake America now, and part of Lake Erie is the Gulf of Cleveland, what's our next geographical snatch-and-grab? The senile old fart already has his eye on both Niagara Falls, or so the story goes. And if we can steal Canada's falls for our own, the sky (soon to be renamed "The American Sky") would seem to be the limit.

President Trump: I hereby sign an executive order to rename the Canadian Yukon the "AmeriKon."

President Trump again: I hereby sign an executive order to rename Greenland "Ours," and Iceland "Ours, Too," and Venezuela "You Damn Right It's Ours."

Also President Trump: And from now on, Nova Scotia, whatever that is, will be known as BOSSA Nova Scotia here in the U.S. And the "Montreal Canadiens" will be called the "Montreal Boom Shakalakas" because "Canadiens" sounds French, and really woke, besides.

A million of 'em, I'm tellin' ya. A million of 'em.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 1

 And now, like the swallows to Capistrano or the mosquitos to, well, pretty much everywhere, the perennial return of The NFL In So Many Words, the Blob feature of which John McEnroe said "You CANNOT be SERIOUS!", and Margie in "Fargo" said "Just throwin' up here.":

1. "You CANNOT be SERIOUS!" (Green Bay fans, after the Packers blew another double-digit lead, gave up 29 unanswered points and lost to the Vikings. The Vikings, for pity's sake!)

2. "Just throwin' up here." (Cowboys, Colts, Browns, Rams, Panthers fans)

3. "You CANNOT  be SERIOUS!" (Panthers fans again, after Carolina gave up 59 points to the Bears)

4. "Arrrgh! Sixty points and I woulda won a free Big Mac!" (Bears fans)

5. Meanwhile, the Chiefs!

6. Kicked the Broncos around like a beanbag on Monday Night Football.

7. "Ha! Told ya I wasn't dead! You said I was dead! Well, I'm not! So phooey on you!" (Patrick Mahomes, who threw for two scores and ran for another in the 31-10 Chiefs win)

8. "Ha! I caught a long pass! Told ya I wasn't washed! Marrying Tay-Tay didn't ruin me after all, so nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah!" (Travis Kelce, who caught three balls for 71 yards)

9. "Daaaang. We just lost to Drew Lock!" (The Patriots, after Seattle won the Super Bowl rematch with their backup Lock after losing Sam Darnold in the first quarter)

10. "Daaaang. Australia's, like, really, really far away!" (The Rams, after getting jet-lagged in Melbourne by the 49ers -- who, unlike the Rams, flew down a week early to acclimate themselves)

Historical shenanigans

 God love that Eli Drinkwitz. He's the football coach at the University of Missouri, and even though I've got no dog in that hunt, I'll root for the Tigers every time because that dude has his business together.

For example, hear what happened over the weekend at the Missouri-Kansas Border War game?

Some meatheads in Lawrence decided to engage in historical shenanigans to hype the big game.

Rolled out a video, the meatheads did, about all the Bleeding Kansas stuff that foreshadowed the bloodiest, most tragic four years in American history, when Missouri vigilantes invaded Kansas and sacked Lawrence (home of KU) and murdered a bunch of abolitionists, and John Brown and his boys murdered a bunch of anti-abolitionists in retaliation. It was not a happy time for either state.

But Kansas being a free state and Missouri a slave state at the time, KU decided it would be way cool to dredge it up 170 years after the fact, under the heading "Heroes vs. Villains."

Nice.

Not that Drinkwitz thought so.

After the game, he said, rightly, that it was weird and stupid and in exceedingly poor taste, especially given it was the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and a time when we should all be reflecting on the futility of violence in the name of one ideology or other. Then he admitted he dialed up a take-that touchdown on fourth down late in the Tigers' 38-21 rout. 

"I don't really care of (the rivalry) continues or not," Drinkwitz said. "If they're going to be weird about it, what's the point. If they want to have a football game and play a football game and have a great rivalry on the border, then awesome. Let's do it."

And then, taking one last shot he couldn't resist: "But if we want to make it deeper than that, man, we left Kansas bleeding again."

Ouch.

Close-out of the year

 You can call Caitlin Clark a lot of stuff -- and, lord, everyone has -- but one thing you're never gonna call her is The Glove, which is what they used to call NBA star Gary Payton. This is because Payton made his bones as a shut-down defender, and Caitlin does not.

She's a scorer, a facilitator, a court visionary. But "D" is never gonna be her A-game.

However ...

However, that might have been the close-out of the year she pulled off yesterday.

This was after Team USA cleaned its plate in the World Cup basketball tournament, dispatching France 97-79 in the championship game. The 'Mericans rolled unbeaten through the tournament, and have now won five straight World Cups. 

Among many notable items in the win was Breanna Stewart once again leading the way for Team USA. And also the way Clark and her supposed nemesis, Angel Reese, worked in concert on the floor as if they'd been playing together since childhood.

Clark dished to Reese. Reese dished to Clark. This astonished a lot of folks who've dined on the phony narrative lazy media types have been selling about women's buckets these days -- which is that mean black girls are resentful of a white girl (Clark) becoming the face of of the WNBA, and thus are picking on her.

The corollary to that is Clark and Reese are mortal enemies. Which led to an exchange between Clark and a reporter in the postgame yesterday, as reported on the website Awful Announcing..

It began with the reporter asking if Clark and Reese were, you know, "friends now."

Clark, who has had it up to here with all the nonsense surrounding her and the WNBA, shut that s*** right down.

"We've always been friends," she snapped.

And then:

"Don't try to do that," she went on, shaking her finger at the reporter. "Don't try to do that."

Not content with that, when her media availability was done she walked back to said reporter and gave him another piece of her mind.

Now THAT was some stellar "D." The Glove would be proud.

Invisible

 You probably missed it while the Bears were scoring eleventy-hundred points and your Indianapolis Colts were getting off to a rousing start in their season opener, but Kyle Larson drove his race car to victory in a race-car race yesterday.

(And, OK, so the Colts DIDN'T get off to a rousing start. That was a joke. So were the Horseshoes, who played like big dummies and got paved by the visiting Baltimore Ravens, 41-23.)

(Also, the Bears DIDN'T score eleventy-hundred points. They only scored 59. Caleb Williams threw for two scores and ran for two more and looked the best quarterback the Bears have had since Peter Tom Willis. OK, that was a joke, too. He actually looked the best quarterback the Bears have had since, I don't know, forever.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah, Kyle Larson driving his race car to victory in a race-car race. It happened at World Wide Technology Raceway in Madisonville, Ill., which is close enough to St. Louis to count as St. Louis. Larson snapped a 51-race winless streak with his win, which came in the second race of the NASCAR Cup playoffs and featured two red flags in the last 11 laps because guys kept running into one another.

I know all this only because I looked it up on a sports website. And not on the lead page of the sports website, but way back in the NASCAR section. What, you thought NASCAR was gonna be front-page news on the first Sunday of the NFL season, and also the day an American (Ben Shelton) couldn't quite close the deal in the U.S. Open final against Alexander Zverev?

(Too bad for the latter. Shelton and Frances Tiafoe are the two most dynamic American men to come down the tennis pike in a long time. One or the other's gonna win a major before long, just you see.)

Anyway ...

Anyway, seeing NASCAR turn invisible just when its playoffs get rolling makes me wonder again who's running this sport and why they can't see what seems so obvious to the rest of us. Namely, that its season is waaay too long, and consequently gets swallowed up every year by King Football and the World Series and who knows what all.

What NASCAR ought to do, in the Blob's humble opinion, is follow IndyCar's lead.

And, yeah, I know, that's the last thing NASCAR wants to hear, but listen: IndyCar does this right. It ran the last race of its season last week, on Labor Day weekend. That got it  off the stage before football and all the rest began, which is as organic a stopping point as there is.

NASCAR?

NASCAR's season begins in mid-February and lasts until the voyages of the starship Enterprise. This year it didn't even begin the climax of its season until Labor Day weekend, when it ran one of its traditionally iconic races, the Southern 500 at Darlington. It was the first race of the playoffs, which go on for another 2 1/2 months.

If yours truly were running the show, the Southern 500 would be the LAST race of the playoffs, and thus the last race of the season. I'd achieve this by axing eight to ten regular-season races and running a 26-or-27-race regular season. That seems like plenty to me.

And, again, yeah, I know. There's no way that's going to happen. Cutting  eight or ten races out of the schedule means cutting revenue stream, for both NASCAR and the venues it supports. In a sport that sucks down dollars the way Joey Chestnut sucks down hotdogs, that's a non-starter.

And yet ...

And yet, at least NASCAR wouldn't vanish into the ether once the clock struck football season. At least it wouldn't do that.