Another one gone

 Little by little these days, my childhood disappears. This will happen when you ascend to the first class section of codgerdom, which I can reliably claim to have done.

(Great place, codgerdom first class. You get free tapioca. Also unlimited supplies of "consarn it," "dadgum it" and various other codgerisms.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. Disappearing childhood.

Another piece vanished yesterday when the news came down that John Brodie had died, and, boy, that's bummer. For one thing, he was 90 years old, which seems impossible. Wasn't it just yesterday he was throwing to Gene Washington and handing off to Ken Willard?

Who were two others I remember from those 1960s San Francisco 49ers, who used to battle the seagulls in decrepit Kezar Stadium. Every Sunday afternoon, it seemed, we'd get the Bears, the Lions or the Vikings on the early game, and the Niners or the Rams on the late game. Sometimes we'd get both when they played one another.

Brodie, of course, was the quarterback of those Niners, and thus the ringleader. Besides Washington and Willard, they had some guys named Dave Parks and Charlie Krueger, and some other guys named Howard Mudd and Dave Wilcox and Bob Windsor. Even had a young Jimmy Johnson back there at cornerback.

Brodie played 17 seasons for the 49ers, retiring after the 1973 season with 214 career touchdown passes and 31,548 yards. In an era when it was a whole lot tougher to complete passes, he completed 55 percent of them. The 49ers during his time were sometimes decent, more often "meh" and occasionally awful. 

But in 1970 Brodie had his big year, winning league MVP while quarterbacking the Niners to a division title for the first time in his career. They lost to the Cowboys in the NFC championship game, 17-10.

And now he's gone, and those Sunday afternoons of my kid-hood grow that much dimmer. Brodie, Roman Gabriel, Gale Sayers, Dick Butkus, Mel Farr, Bart Starr ... the list goes on, as lists like this always will.

 'Bye, guys. See ya later, alligator.

Musical coaches

 Listen, I don't know what the Buffalo Bills are thinking. I make it a rule assume no NFL team is ever thinking much of anything, on the excellent chance none of them are.

So, yeah, Bills, OK, go ahead and fire Sean McDermott for not getting Josh Allen to the Super Bowl. McDermott's had plenty of chances, after all. So I guess it was time.

And, yeah, go ahead and interview Mike McDaniel, even though the Dolphins just got sick of him. Ditto Brian Daboll, who couldn't even get through the this season before the chronically putrid Giants fired him because he couldn't make them less chronically putrid.

Hey, you don't know! Maybe Mike and Brian will do better this time! Could happen, right?

Same goes for Robert Saleh, fired by the Jets only to be hired as the next head coach of the Titans. Also for Jeff Hafley -- whom the Dolphins just hired to replace McDaniel, and whose last head coaching gig was at Boston College, where he drove a pretty decent program onto the rocks.

But that was college! And this the pros! Whole different ballgame, right?

Which brings us back to the Bills.

Who, yesterday, down in Florida, interviewed not a former college head coach, but a current high school coach. Come on down, Philip Rivers!

"Wait ... what?" you're saying now.

Yes, that's right. Philip Rivers, last seen being called in off the couch to quarterback the Indianapolis Colts at the age of 44, got a sitdown with the Bills. He's never coached at the pro level. He's never coached at any of the various college levels. But Josh Allen thinks the world of him, so ... 

"So this is Gerry Faust 2.0?" you're saying.

Maybe. Although probably not. 

Probably the Bills will go with one of the retreads they're interviewing in this game of musical coaches, unless they go with some flavor-of-the-month offensive or defensive coordinator. It's a roll of the dice either way, especially given the less-than-stellar ownership and front office in Buffalo.

Sometimes, after all, retreads find second lives in new places (See: Bill Belichick, Mike Vrabel, etc.). And sometimes coordinators flourish as head coaches (See: Sean McVay, Ben Johnson, a host of others), and sometimes they crash-and-burn (See: McDaniel, Daboll, Josh McDaniels). 

But a guy with no tread or coordinator chops whatsoever?

Yikes.

Which is not to say Philip Rivers wouldn't be really good at the coaching thing. He probably would. And maybe the Bills are smarter than I'm giving them credit for, or that they've ever shown themselves to be. Maybe what they're really doing by interviewing Rivers is feeling him out for a gig as their quarterbacks coach. It's possible.

All I know is this: If they were really serious about him as a head coaching candidate, let me tell you about the last guy to go straight from the playing field to head coach in the NFL.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau and ESPN, that would be Norm Van Brocklin, also a quarterback, who finished his 12-year playing year in 1960 and was hired the next year by the Minnesota Vikings as their first head coach. Van Brocklin went on to coach 13 seasons with the Vikings and Atlanta Falcons, compiling a 66-100-7 record. He had just three winning seasons in those 13 years.

Not sayin'. Just sayin'.

Diminishment returns

 Four days later, people still can't wrap their heads around it. Indiana, ascending to heights once the exclusive property of the Alabamas, the Ohio States, the Michigans, the Notre Dames? Going where only the Rocknes and Leahys and Bear Bryants and Bobby Bowdens et al had gone before? Indiana?

This does not compute. This does not track. Surely the saddest of sadsacks in college football couldn't be that good, could they?

And so, let the diminishment returns begin (with appropriate refutation):

* Indiana only won because it bought a championship with NIL. 

Well, yes. The Indiana NIL payroll was $21.1 million. Which ain't couch-cushion dough.

But the payroll for Miami, whom it beat in the title game, was $24.1 million.

And the payroll for Oregon, whom it beat twice, was $30 million.

And the payroll for Ohio State, whom it beat in the Big Ten championship, was a whopping $35 million plus.

Truth is, yes, NIL has changed the calculus. But it's a calculus available to anyone; Miami quarterback Carson Beck's NIL haul, for instance, was $3.1 mill, compared to Fernando Mendoza's $2.6 mill. So if Miami or any of the other aforementioned schools had won the CFP, would the yapping poodles of the internet be saying they bought themselves a title? Did anyone say it last year when Ohio State did?

Next, please.

* Indiana only won because it was a de facto pro team, pitting grown men against teenagers.

Well, yes, Indiana did have a veteran team. But, as the Blob pointed out the other day, one of its principal players -- breakout wide receiver Charlie Becker -- is a true sophomore.  Most of the other key figures are either 22 or 23.  So the narrative that Indiana won because it was playing a bunch of 24- and 25-yearold grown men falls apart in a hurry.

Truth is, the Hoosiers brought a fairly traditional senior-laden team to the dance. Of course, no traditional senior-laden team had EVER won a national championship. Not one. No, sirree.

Next.

* Indiana only won because it was the Rent-A-Hoosiers. A transfer-portal team. 

Well, yes. A-portaling Indiana did go.

But so does everyone else these days.

And it's not like Fernando Mendoza was Carson Beck or anything.

Mendoza  came out of high school as the 2,140th-ranked prospect according to the scouting website 247, so little regarded he was recruited by none of the 18 schools whose football camps he attended. A brilliant student, he was headed to Yale before a spot on the Cal-Berkeley roster opened up.

Beck?

He was the backup on two national championship teams at Georgia, quarterbacked the Bulldogs to the 2023 SEC championship, and started 27 games there. The Bulldogs went 24-3 in those games as Beck threw for 7,912 yards and 58 touchdowns.

Portal advantage to Miami.

Truth is, Indiana didn't exactly load up on national champs or 5-stars via the portal. Aiden Fisher, the heart and soul of the Hoosiers' voracious down-seven on defense, wound up at James Madison because the big shooters all thought he was too slow and too small. D'Angelo Ponds, Indiana's All-American corner, didn't get a sniff because he everyone thought he was too small as well.

And Riley Nowakowski, the hybrid fullback/tight end who scored Indiana's first touchdown in the championship game?

He was a zero-star coming out of high school who walked on at Wisconsin and played a little tight end and fullback, but mostly special teams. Not exactly Ron Dayne or Jonathan Taylor.

Yes a-portaling the Hoosiers did go. But not to put together a roster of superstars. To put together a roster of misfit toys that included no five-stars, eight four-stars, and various scrap-heapers whom Curt Cignetti molded into a dynamic whole.

Next.

Next? Anyone?

Moneyball

 UCLA basketball coach Mick Cronin likely never set out to play the lead role in "The Perpetually Unhappy Man," the long-running hoops procedural that once starred Bob Knight, Jim Boeheim and a host of other grumps. But he's doing a bang-up job.

The other night, for instance, his Bruins handed No. 4 Purdue its first Big Ten loss in Pauley Pavilion, 69-67. It was a taut thriller UCLA snatched off the Boilermakers' plate with a game-ending 8-0 run, Tyler Bilodeau sticking a 3-ball with 8.8 seconds left to provide the winning points.

Think that made The Perpetually Unhappy Man smile?

It did not.

Instead, Cronin lashed out at the Big Ten in the postgame, sarcastically thanking it for making the Bruins play five of their first seven league games on the road. He also remains less than thrilled with the whole Big Ten thing in general, but reluctantly understands "that's gonna be what it's gonna be."

Somewhere in there, he also said this: "They (the Big Ten) don't care about basketball. Truly."

It says here Melancholy Mick only missed the mark by a hair with that one.

Truth is it isn't just basketball the Big Ten doesn't care about, it's also football. And volleyball. And soccer. And just about any other sport the conference offers.

If it cared about any of them -- or rather, any of the "student-athletes" who play them -- it never would have scavenged UCLA, USC, Washington and Oregon from the ruins of the Pac-12. It never would have scooped Rutgers and Maryland. You could even go back 35 or so years and say it never would have welcomed Penn State to the fold.

But the Big Ten did all that, and not because it had to. Or should have. It did it because TV rights and revenue streams drive the bus here in the merry 2000s, and the Big Ten hungered for those juicy east and west coast markets. What's a Big Ten Network without New York and L.A., after all?

So the conference blew up its footprint, because footprints are as old-fashioned as your granny's lace doilies. Moneyball is the new normal.

Heck, they're even paying the players now to spend all that extra time on airplanes, which means Big Ten commish Tony Petitti and the gang don't even have to feel guilty about it. How great is that?

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "What about academics? What about all the class time the student-athletes will miss kiting around the country?"

Bwah-ha-ha-ha. Ha. Ha.

That stuff went out the first time a school realized there was gold in them thar quarterbacks and point guards, and that was some time ago. Coast-to-coast is the most now, and even Mick Cronin has resigned himself to that. If he's mad at the Big Ten, after all, he should be just as mad at his university, which decided satchels of cash trumped its alleged mission.

UCLA's upcoming schedule, for instance?

Beginning the last day of January, the Bruins play three straight at home, then fly to Ann Arbor and East Lansing for roadies at Michigan and Michigan State. Then they fly back home to host Illinois and USC. Four days after that they fly to Minnesota; three days after that, they're back home to host Nebraska.

All that in 31 days.

But, hey. I'm sure the TV numbers will be huge.

An obscenity of riches

 Saw the other day that the Los Angeles Dodgers signed a career .273 hitter for $240 million over four years, and my unkempt mind immediately began imagining a world in which the Dodgers owned everything. Headlines began to blossom in my frontal lobe:

Dodgers Buy Judge, Raleigh, Skenes, Ohtani, Skubal; Ohtani Reminds Dodgers They Already Own Him.

Dodgers Respond By Buying The Re-Animated Corpses Of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio And Ted Williams; "With Or Without His Head?", Fans Inquire Of Williams.

Dodgers Buy Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, France; Tell President Trump, "I Got Your NATO Right Here, Pal."

Dodgers Buy Norway; Tell Trump, "And Your Nobel Peace Prize, Too."

Dodgers Buy MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred For Two Packs Of Bazooka Bubble Gum And A Game-Worn Chico Salmon Jersey; "Paid Too Much," Fans Complain.

And last but hardly least:

Dodgers Buy Entire National League. With the subhead, "Finally, Some Competitive Balance": Dodger Execs.

All of this is in jest, of course, but not by much. If the Dodgers can afford to shovel $240 mill at Kyle Tucker, the aforementioned career .273 hitter, how big a pile must they be sitting on? 

Because it's completely ridiculous -- no longer an embarrassment but an obscenity of riches -- and it launches the entire market into orbit. The Dodgers scooped the 29-year-old Tucker from the Cubs. Know what he did for the northsiders last season?

Batted .266. Hit 22 homers. Drove in 73 runs.

Now, those are OK numbers, but they're hardly $240 mill numbers. And they're especially not $240 mill numbers when you consider the Dodgers are back-to-back World Series champs who scarcely needed a .266 hitter to bolster an already gilded lineup. 

So Tucker's a spare part, essentially. And if you can afford to spend that many dineros on a spare part, how is anyone else expected to keep up?

No wonder the other owners have their Jockeys in a twist, yowling for a salary cap even though none of them are exactly destitute. Steve Cohen's Mets, for instance, just dropped $126 million across three years on the Blue Jays' Bo Bichette. That ain't chump change.

Besides, considering Bo's numbers dwarf Tucker's -- Bichette is a .294 career hitter who batted .311 with 18 homers and 94 RBI last season -- the Mets might have gotten him cheap. Bizarre as that sounds.

Then again, it's all bizarre these days. Which is why the Blob's unkempt mind might not be as unkempt this time as it usually is.

I mean, the Dodgers probably could buy NATO. Or at least a piece of it. And if Fearless Leader and the rest of his cabal objected?

Why, the Trolley Dodgers will just call Yoshinobu Yamamoto out of the pen. That'll shut 'em up.

Legendary

 Go ahead and close your eyes, on this morning after. Close your eyes and see what you will see forever now, see decades distant, see the way you see the puck whickering past Vladimir Myshkin off Mike Eruzione's stick or Kris Bryant scooping and throwing to first to end an interminable rainy night in Cleveland.

Now there's this: Fernando Mendoza diving into the end zone, ball outstretched, body and will at full extension. 

Fernando Mendoza going the last full measure for an Indiana football that went the last full measure itself, and now will be remembered the way America remembers the Miracle on Ice and the Miracle in Wrigleyville, aka the Cubs winning the World Series for the first time in 108 long hot summers.

USA 4, Soviet Union 3 in the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980.

Cubs 8, Indians 7 in Game 7 in 2016.

And now ...

Indiana 27, Miami 21 in the 2026 College Football Playoff national championship.

Maybe there's a better ashes-to-apotheosis tale than what happened last night in Miami, but good luck finding it. The Miracle on Ice? Sure, but Team USA had been there before, back in 1960. The Miracle in Wrigleyville? OK, but the Lovable Losers had won 85 or more games four times in the previous nine seasons, including 97 in 2015. They were one of the richest franchises in baseball, with a genius GM in Theo Epstein.

Indiana, on the other hand, was until this season the losing-est major college football program in the entire history of the sport.

Now the Hoosiers are the first major college football program ever to win 16 games in a season, two years after going 3-9 and finishing dead last in the Big Ten. That was right before Curt Cignetti hit town lugging a steamer trunk of hubris and swagger, and stood 100-plus years of dreary history right on its head.

The Hoosiers went 11-2 and reached the CFP in Coach Cig's first year. Now they're 16-0 and national champs, one end of a thread that stretches back 50 years exactly to Indiana's unbeaten 1976 NCAA basketball champions.

Two teams; 48-0 against the world, between the two of them. Who else can say that?

And, yes, OK, so people will say this only happened because of  NIL and the transfer portal, and that Indiana -- Indiana -- winning the national championship is Exhibit A of  how both have ruined the game. You don't have to build a program anymore; all you have to do is rent a few studs and you, too, can become an InstaChamp.

This of course ignores the fact that Indiana's rent-a-studs are for the most part not really studs but (as Mendoza said) "misfits" who became pieces of a greater whole. There isn't a 5-star player on the roster, and for all the caterwauling about the Hoosiers being a bunch of 24- and 25-year-old professionals beating up on children, the reality is somewhat different.

Mendoza, for instance, is 22, as are star wideouts Elijah Surratt and Omar Cooper Jr., star linebacker Aiden Fisher and the DB who made the game-clinching interception, Jamari Sharpe. Charlie Becker, who made two pressure catches last night to add to his growing list, is a sophomore. Running back Roman Hemby and All-American DB D'Angelo Ponds are both 23.

In other words, most of Indiana's key players are no older than the seniors on any senior-laden team. That those sorts of teams generally fare well in college football is hardly a revelation -- nor a reason to diminish what they accomplish.

So how did we get this place with Indiana?

Same as any program has ever gotten there, from the turn of the last century to today: Hard work, attention to detail, obsessive preparation and the right combination of grit, talent and the willingness of players to buy in as a seamless whole. 

What happened last night wasn't magic, in other words. It wasn't Indiana finding some cheat code or slick shortcut. It was just a superb football team being superb when it needed to be.

It was Mendoza getting roughnecked by the vicious Miami defense and bouncing up, over and over. It was Becker making a huge fourth-down catch because he and Mendoza had practiced it over and over. And it was Mendoza, his passing arm looking as if it had been gnawed by wolves, tucking it and running into the teeth of the Miami D on fourth-and-5.

Not stopping, of course, until he was Wilbur-and-Orville-ing into the end zone on the 12-yard run that will forever make him, and this Indiana team, legendary.

Someday a photo of that wingless flight will hang in an honored place in the Indiana football complex. And the alums will see it the way the Mikes and Sullys in Boston still see Bobby Orr's wingless flight after scoring the Cup-winning goal against the Blues. 

That was the iconic image of the Bruins' glory days. Mendoza's will be the same for these glory days. 

Go ahead and close your eyes, on this morning after. Close your eyes and see what you will see forever now, see for decades distant.

Fernando Mendoza, and Indiana football, in full flight.

And never coming down.

Da prediction

 You want to surrender to the narrative, at this point. It's grown so big, after all.

You want to just say "Indiana is going to win a national title in, are you kidding me, FOOTBALL tonight" because it seems the only way the narrative can end now, the only possible outcome now that destiny -- no, DESTINY -- is driving the bus. And destiny cannot be denied, especially when it's shouting as loud as it is now.

So, here's the Blob's prediction: Indiana is going to win a national title in football tonight.

Unless Miami does.

Unless destiny -- no, DESTINY -- decides to ditch the Hoosiers and go home with the Hurricanes, who by the way have their own narrative. If Miami wins, after all, it officially will be a Return To Glory. And it will happen in Miami (OK, so halfway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale). And how is that not karma shouting just as loud as destiny?

The Canes playing for a national title again in their hometown. I mean, come on.

"Oh, here we go," you're saying now. "Durwood Downer has entered the building."

Well ... not really. OK, so maybe.

What I'm really doing is being true to my essential nature, which is always to see the single cloud in a bluebird sky and say, "Oh, crap, it's gonna rain." It's how I get whenever I bump up against the aura of inevitability I sense in all this.

Maybe it's just because I live in Indiana, but it seems as if almost everyone assumes that the Hoosiers are, yes, inevitable at this point. That they're an unstoppable machine that will roll over Miami the way they've rolled over 15 other opponents this dream-like season. That every soul in Bloomington is simply tapping his or her foot until it's time to can pour out into the frigid January night and head for Showalter Fountain.

Where the fish sculptures have already been removed in anticipation of the par-TAY.

I read that the other day, and had this immediate thought: Man, these guys are really tempting fate.

I thought this because football is football, and it is sometimes very hard on narratives. Last night, for instance, was there any doubt about the narrative when Caleb Williams made that ridiculous off-balance throw to Cole Kmet to save the Bears' season again?

He faded back and faded back and faded back, a host of Los Angeles Rams closing in on a game-ending sack. And then, at the last second, he reared back and threw.

It looked like desperation itself. It was desperation itself. Except somehow it arced across the night and hit Kmet in stride in the end zone some 40 yards away.

Touchdown. Overtime. Bears wi-

Oops.

Because in overtime, the Bears stopped the Rams, and Williams led them downfield to within a handful of yards of what would surely be the field goal that would complete the narrative. And then, for some unaccountable reason, he threw deep, and a Rams defensive back made a diving interception, and a handful of plays later, it was the Rams who kicked the winning field goal.

So much for narratives.

Do I think something similar will happen tonight? Do I think Miami -- which has a terrifying defense and a quarterback as unflappable as Fernando Mendoza in sixth-year transfer Carson Beck -- will slap down the Hoosiers for their impertinence?

No. See: Third paragraph of this piece.

I think Indiana will win, because Mendoza will be prepared and his elite receiver corps will be prepared and those two running backs, Roman Hemby and Kaelon Black, will be prepared. The offensive line will be prepared to do some more road grading. D'Angelo Ponds and the other shutdown DBs will be prepared to take away Beck's weapons, and Aiden Fisher and the rest of the defensive down seven will be prepared to chase him around his own backfield.

Call it Indiana 33, Miami 24 this time. Because sometimes the ironclad narrative really is ironclad.