Hail to the conceivable, Part Deux

 Driving around with the radio on a smidge before 5:00 yesterday afternoon, and a high school basketball game was just about to start already. Nothing odd about that, persay. It was January, it was Friday night, it was Indiana. Of course there would be high school buckets in the high school buckets state.

But at 5 p.m.?

Once again, your Indiana football Hoosiers had given us something even the codgers among us had never seen before.

Not even IU basketball, after all, had ever pushed aside the high school version on a Friday night in January. That IU football would cause schools to shove back starting times and/or move their games off Friday altogether was ... well, as Wallace Shawn said in "The Princess Bride": Inconceivable!

And yet, it happened. IU was playing Oregon in the Peach Bowl for a berth in the CFP national championship game, and kickoff was scheduled for 7:30 p.m. So a girls-boys doubleheader between Northrop and Snider was tipping at the alien hour of 5 p.m. High school basketball, the holiest of Hoosier holies, moved aside.

Of course, we're way past the point where Curt Cignetti's Hoosiers made a ghost of the previously inconceivable. Roll unbeaten through the regular season? Conceivable. Beat No. 1 Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game? Conceivable. Destroy Alabama -- Alabama, for pity's sake -- in the Rose Bowl?

Conceivable.

And now we take you to Atlanta last night, the Peach Bowl, first play of the game against a smart, talented Oregon team whose only loss was to Indiana back in October.

Was that really D'Angelo Ponds picking Dante Moore and taking it to the house on the first snap of the game?

Conceivable.

The game wasn't over the moment Ponds danced across the goal line, but it might as well have been. The Hoosiers went on to score touchdowns on four straight  possessions, took a 35-7 lead into halftime, and led 42-7 before Oregon managed a couple of garbage-time scores. The final was 56-22, a lamination no one saw coming except, perhaps, Coach Cig and his guys.

And yet, there it was. The Hoosiers forced three turnovers and turned them into scores, while turning it over zero times themselves. Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza was ridiculous again, throwing more touchdown pass (5) than incompletions (3) for the second game in a row. He found four different Indiana receivers for scores, led by Elijah Sarratt's seven catches for 75 yards and two touchdowns.

And now ... onward.

To play for a national title. Against Miami in Miami. With a quarterback who can't seem to miss, and a wide receiver corps that runs impeccably precise routes and never drops a ball, and a defense that never lets opponents take an easy breath.

In two playoff games, that group has beaten Alabama and Oregon by a combined 69 points, outscoring them 94-25.

In two games, Mendoza has thrown eight touchdown passes, no interceptions and just five incompletions.

In two games, Sarratt has 11 catches for 115 yards and three scores.

Hail, America. Hail to the conceivable.

 

Da prediction

 Every day now people ask me what I think, usually people dressed in IU red this or IU red that. I tell them I don't know what to think. I'm tempted to add this is because thinking hurts when you get to be my age.

They ask anyway.

"So, what do you think? Indiana or Oregon?" they say.

"Beats me," I reply. "Besides, I'm almost always wrong about these things."

It's that "almost" that's hanging me up here.

See, Indiana-Oregon in the Peach Bowl tonight for a berth opposite Miami in the national championship game is one of those conventional wisdom deals, and so it ought to be an easy call. Conventional wisdom says it's hard -- damned hard -- to beat a really good football team twice in one season, and Oregon is a really good football team. Indiana beat the Ducks 30-20 in Eugene back in October, so ...

So, conventional wisdom says it's Oregon all the way. The Ducks have their own sideline wizard in Dan Lanning. They've got their own stud quarterback in Dante Moore. They've got athletes just like Indiana has athletes.

However ...

However, there is this: Indiana eats conventional wisdom for breakfast.

The Hoosiers, see, are as unconventional as they are undefeated, which is why some people still think they're a trick of the light. They've got a 64-year-old head coach who's now 25-2 in his first major-league job, and an OK quarterback who somehow morphed into a Heisman Trophy winner after transferring from Cal to IU. They're the unconventional wrapped in the improbable, these guys.

Which is maybe why last week they became the only team in the two-year history of the 12-team College Football Playoff to actually win its first-round game. This year, Georgia lost and Texas Tech lost and Ohio State lost. Indiana didn't just win, but paved lordly Alabama like an off-ramp, 38-3.

The Hoosiers were a machine in that game, their first Rose Bowl victory ever (and only their second trip to Pasadena). It was yet another convention-trashing moment for a school whose national perception still is skewed by a football lineage that is ... well, somewhat less regal than Alabama's.

Andnow  here we go again: In two years of the 12-team CFP, every rematch has gone to the team that lost the first meeting -- the latest, of course, being Ole Miss taking down Georgia in the Sugar Bowl after losing to the Bulldogs earlier in the season.

This bodes well for the Ducks, to reiterate. Or would, if they were playing anyone but Indiana.

Let's call it this way, then:

Indiana 30, Oregon 26.

And now ...

 ... allow us to introduce Indiana University's basketball team.

Did you even know Indiana University had a basketball team?

Well, it does. They've got uniforms and everything.

Oh, they're not the football team, these Dribblin' Hoosiers, and no one on the roster is as famous as Fernando Mendoza (who won the Heisman Trophy!), or the Baron of Bloomington himself, Coach Curt "Coach" Cignetti (who once ACTUALLY SMILED!). Heck, lots of people couldn't even tell you who the basketball coach is.

"Is it Coach Cig?" they ask.

Nah. It's this guy named Darren DeVries.

Who, don't look now, has a whole roster of new names runnin' and jumpn' and wearin' out the three-point arc, in case you haven't noticed. The Dribblin' Hoosiers shoot threes like they're about to be outlawed, if you must know. In 15 games so far this season, they've jacked up a shameless 435, which works out to 29 per game.

They're shootin' fools in other words. And, yeah, OK, so they're only making a touch over 36 percent from the arc; last night at Maryland, they got up 25 from Threeville but made just eight, or 32 percent.

Here's the thing, though: They won. On the road. By 18, 84-66.

It was the Hoosiers' fourth straight win since a 12-point loss to Kentucky just before Christmas, and now they're 12-3 overall and 3-1 in the Big Ten. Lamar Wilkerson led them with 24 points, including 16 straight at one point. They also got 19 from Tayton Conerway, 16 from Conor Enright and 15 off the bench from Reed Bailey.

And, yeah, I know. Unless you're still an obsessed Hoosier basketball fan, you've likely never heard of any of them, being all newbies. But they can play. And they can shoot. And when they make enough of 'em, they tend to overwhelm folks.

Like Maryland last night. Like Penn State, whom they swamped by 41, 113-72. Like Marquette (a 23-point win), Kansas State (a 17-point W) or Washington (90-80).

All told, the Dribblin' Hoosiers are averaging 85 points per game. That's way more than Coach Cig's boys scored against Alabama in the Rose Bowl -- although the 35-point lamination the Hoosiers laid on the Crimson Tide looked a lot like the Dribblin' Hoosiers vs. Penn State.

Saturday, those Hoosiers welcome unbeaten Nebraska to Assembly Hall. It'll be their sternest test of the Big Ten schedule to date. And you might actually hear something about it -- or not.

Coach Cig's boys, after all, take on Oregon in the Peach Bowl the night before. At stake is a berth in the national championship game.  And if the Hoosiers manage to serve up Duck L'Squash for the second time this season, the most insane sports story of the year will get even more insane.

And the next day?

The most quietly interesting sports story in Bloomington will have a chance to be a lot less quiet. And a lot more interesting.

A gamer goes

That must be one whale of a 0-0 save-fest they've got going on up in the Great Beyond right now, with the word coming down that Mr. Goalie himself has passed. Glenn Hall was 94 and follows by a few months the great (maybe the greatest) Ken Dryden, which means when the celestials choose up sides for pond hockey each gets a stud between the pipes.

Dryden, of course, owned the 1970s for the lordly Montreal Canadiens. Hall, on the other hand, made his rep with the less-than-lordly Chicago Black Hawks of the 1950s and early '60s, when you could set your watch by two things: That the sun would come up in the east every morning, and that Glenn Hall would be in goal for Chicago every night. 

Records are made to be broken, to lapse into cliche, but Hall holds one that likely will never be touched. For seven years, between 1955 and 1962, he started every game -- and with his bare face hanging out, because goalie masks were not yet a thing. 

Counting playoffs, he started 552 games in a row. That's 295 more than the guy in second place, Alec Connell of the original Ottawa Senators between 1924 and 1930. 

The man was a gamer, in other words. Even if he wasn't always rewarded for it.

In all his years fielding pucks aimed at his mug, after all, Hall hoisted the Stanley Cup only one time. That was in 1961, when he backstopped the Black Hawks to the Stanley Cup. Seven years later, he was in the net for the St. Louis Blues in another Cup Final, but the expansion Blues were swept by the Canadiens in the Cup Final.

Know what, though? 

In four games, Mr. Goalie gave up just 11 goals. He made so many kick-saves-and-a-beauty, in fact, he won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff MVP anyway. At the time he was only the second player from a losing team to do that; all these years later, he's still only one of six.

Rarity was his thing, it seems. And not just for those few times someone managed to slip a puck past him.

Night of the sieve

 So, you think you had a bad day yesterday? You didn't have a bad day.

Jacob Markstrom, now, he had a bad day.

Markstrom, see, is the goaltender for the New Jersey Devils -- the spiritual descendant, as it were, of the great Martin Brodeur, who backstopped the Devils for years and years. Last night against the New York Islanders, however, he was more like the spiritual descendant of, say, Martin Short. 

Gave up all nine goals, Markstrom did, in a 9-0 obliteration. On just 24 attemps. The Islanders put two pucks behind him on their first two shots, and three on their first five. Enough biscuits went into Markstrom's basket to feed an impoverished nation for a month.

You go all hockey traditional and call him a sieve. But that would be an insult to sieves.

Not that his teammates were much better.

The Devils actually outshot the Isles 44-24, but still were somehow shut out. And just two nights before, they lost to Carolina when defenseman Luke Hughes put not one but two pucks in his own net. 

"I'm embarrassed of myself," Markstrom said, sounding the general theme in the postgame locker room.

I should say so.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 18

 And now the last, final, this-is-it edition of the season of The NFL In So Many Words, the time-sensitive Blob feature of which critics have said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord!", and also, "Does 'time-sensitive' mean I can't hit you over the head with this giant clock?":

1. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord!" (The Raiders, the Jets, the Browns, the Cardinals, the Giants et al)

2. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord!" (Fans of the Raiders and Browns after they fired Pete Carroll and Kevin Stefanski, respectively)

3. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord!" (Pete Carroll and Kevin Stefanski, presumably)

4. "Hey, look, you guys! We beat the Cowboys in an utterly meaningless game! Woo-hoo!" (The Giants)

5. "Hey, look, you guys! We won our last three utterly meaningless games after being eliminated from the playoffs!" (The Saints)

6. In other news, the Bears lost to the Lions but still clinched the No. 2 seed in the NFC because the Eagles rested everyone and lost to the Commanders; the Seahawks clinched the .top seed in the NFC by smothering the black-helmeted 49ers 13-3; and the Steelers missed an extra point but the Ravens retaliated by missing what would have been a game-winning field goal to hand Pittsburgh a playoff spot.

7. "Hey, look, you guys! We  beat the kinda-sorta Eagles! Woo-hoo!" (The Commanders)

8. "Hey, look, you guys! We're in the playoffs and we have ... OK, Aaron Rodgers is older than dirt, but still! Woo-hoo!" (The Steelers)

9. "Hey, look, you guys! We clinched the top seed in the NFC and we have ... OK, we only have Sam Darnold, but still!" (The Seahawks)

10. "Look like clowns, play like clowns." (The 49ers in those black helmets)

Sign of some very new times

 They're having a whole pile of fun down in Bloomington, In., these days, trying to figure out how IU football has gone from worst to first in just two short years, and if maybe it's all just a dream brought on by too many giant pork tenderloins from the Edinburgh Diner 50 miles to the north and east.

If it's a dream, don't wake 'em up. And if it's not ... well, here's a sign of some very new times in the kingdom of Hoosiers football:

The head coach is getting the full Secret Service treatment.

According to a very reliable source in B-town, there's now a university police car stationed at the turnoff to head coach Curt Cignetti's home, and more university police stationed outside the residence. They've been stationed there, my source has learned, since before the Hoosiers departed for the Rose Bowl.

Now, this suggests one of three things: Either it's standard procedure and always has been;  or Coach Cig has gotten a threat or two from some deranged Ohio State or Alabama fans; or the uniforms are there to keep equally deranged IU fans from knocking on Coach's door and expressing their appreciation.

If it's the second, my source noted, it indicates just how seismically the worm has turned in Bloomington.

"An IU football coach getting death threats," he said, chuckling. "I guess that means we've arrived."

Indeed.