Deja Palou

 America's best racing series started up again yesterday, as drab February gave way hey-maybe-there's-hope-after-all March. It started up again, but if it seemed like it never left ... well, in this case that was more than just a saying.

When last seen, after all, Alex Palou was winning a pile of races and his fourth IndyCar title in five years.

When last seen yesterday down in St. Petersburg, Fla., he was leading 59 laps and winning the season opener in a snoozer.

Meet the new boss, same as-

Ah. You know the rest.

All told, Palou and polesitter Scott McLaughlin, who finished second, led 93 of  the 100 laps, and the top ten was stuffed with familiar names. Look, there's Christian Lundgaard in third! And Kyle Kirkwood in fourth! And Pato O'Ward, Marcus Ericsson and Josef Newgarden!

Oh, there were some off-script developments. Old heads Will Power -- driving his new  Andretti ride with the bumblebee paint scheme -- and Scott Dixon wound up at the bottom of the scoring sheet after completing just 55 and 39 laps, respectively. The only thing that saved them from finishing next-to-last and last were Santino Ferrucci and celebrated newcomer Mick Schumacher, who failed to complete lap before getting tangled up one another's deal.

So, yeah. There was that.

Otherwise, here's hoping someone, familiar or not, gives Palou a push and avoids what happened last year, when the back half of the season became something of a coronation because Palou was just too damn good. He won five of the first six races -- including the  the Indianapolis 500, the only significant achievement in IndyCar he hadn't scooped. After that, the points chase was no chase at all.

But, hey. At least this time we've got the Will Power storyline and the Mick Schumacher storyline to go with the Alex Palou storyline. That's something, right?

Um, right?

Playing out

 Weellll ... at least it wasn't in Mackey this time.

Just trying to say something positive here, you Purdue faithful, because, listen, the Blob loves ya and hates to see you down in the dumps. And speaking of "down in the dumps" ...

Come on down, Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer 'n' them!

Who lost for the third time in the last four games yesterday, 82-74, over there at Ohio State. They're 22-7 and 12-6 in the Big Ten right now; Ohio State is 18-11 and 10-8 in the Big Overinflated. And if it seems like only nine days or so ago that Purdue was 22-4 and being penciled in as a 2-seed by the NCAA Tournament bracketheads ... well, that's because it was only nine days or so ago.

On Feb. 20, the Purdues ball-peened archrival Indiana by 29 in Mackey, their fourth W in five games. The only loss, also at Mackey, was to No. 1 Michigan by 11. It looked like the Boilermakers were going to come to March playing their best basketball.

And then they lost by two to Michigan State -- again in Mackey -- when Smith's 3-pointer for the win wouldn't bed down. No worries, a "meh" Ohio State team was up next, just what the Boilers needed to reset the narrati--

Oops.

Oops, because, yeah, Meh Ohio State beat 'em, shooting 51 percent and outrebounding the Boilers 36-29. Smith, Loyer and Trey Kaufman-Renn, Purdue's three-legged stool, combined for 54 of its 74 points, with Smith scoring 20, TKR 19 and Loyer 15 on five threes in nine tries. C.J. Cox added 13.

Everyone else, however, never showed up. Oscar Cluff, who's been Robin to TKR's Batman inside on occasion, scored just two points to go with five rebounds. And Matt Painter got just five points from his bench, which has proved thinner than previously thought.

And speaking of thin benches ...

Come on down, Indiana!

Who got clipped in Assembly Hall by Michigan State yesterday, 77-64, and are now warming up the NIT  bus. The loss was IU's fourth straight, which means, like Purdue, they're entering March on whatever is the opposite of a roll. The Hoosiers did, however, beat their counterparts in West Lafayette in bench ineffectiveness, however: While the Boilers chair jockeys managed a whole five points, Indiana's managed a whole zero.

Zero points in eight minutes from Reed Bailey. Zero in seven minutes from Tayton Conerway. Zero in 19 minutes from Jasai Miles.

Lamar Wilkerson and Tucker DeVries, meanwhile, scored 26 of Indiana's 27 second-half points, with Wilkerson scoring 29 points an DeVries 20 on the day. He and DeVries, however, were a combined 8-of-26 from Threeville, where Indiana coach Darian DeVries' offense lives and mostly dies. Yesterday the Hoosiers jacked 35 shots from the arc and bottomed just 10 of them; they were 12-of-21 from everywhere else.

Oh, yeah. Also, Michigan State got 22 points -- a 22-0 margin, if you're keeping score at home -- from its bench. Also-also, it outrebounded Indiana 35-27, including 22-12 in the second half. 

"So why didn't Indiana play Reed Bailey more, on account of he's been one of its few effective guys in the paint?" you're asking now.

I dunno. 

"And why did Conerway only play seven minutes?" you're also asking.

Beats me.

"And how come it's March, when you're supposed to be playing your way into stuff, and Purdue and Indiana seem to be playing their way out of stuff? Like, you know, a 2-seed (Purdue) or a seat at the Madness table altogether (Indiana)?" you're also-also asking.

Hey. Do I LOOK like the Shell Answer Man?

(Obligatory geezer reference)

All I know is, yes, there's a lot more playing out than playing in going on in West Lafayette and Bloomington these days. And that figures to make March a lot less fun than it should be.

 

Not dead yet

 I suppose there's some sort of whack duality at work when I say I despise social media with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, but also spend a disturbing amount of time cruising  the Majik Intertoobz Emporium in search of even more social media.

"That's not duality, that's hypocrisy," someone just said.

Yeah, well. How 'bout I forward you this TikTok of Donald Trump playing hockey naked? That'll learn ya to crack wise.

Anyway, there I was scrolling through my Facebutt wall the other day, and, holy gee, Gene Keady DIED? And Tony Dungy, too?

Uh ... no.

Actually, they're both still alive, but ha-ha, tee-hee, some sick twists thought it would be hilarious to put up virtually identical posts about Keady and Dungy dying enroute to hospice care. This, mind you, was a week or so after some other sick twists put up the same exact post about Lou Holtz and Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger, star of book tours and the movie "Rudy."

"Watch us mess with those Notre Dame (bleeps)!", you can imagine the sick twists saying as they created the latter two posts.

'Cause, see, Holtz and Rudy are not dead yet, either, to quote Monty Python. Or at least they weren't as of this morning.

Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't know what Facebutt (legit, non-mocking handle: Facebook) is talking about when it occasionally tells me I've violated its "community standards." As far as I can tell, Facebutt doesn't have any community standards. It just dings you when you've crossed some mystical algorithmic line or other -- which no one can identify, either, because no one knows who exactly Algo Rithm is, and why the miserable son-of-a-biscuit seems to have no discernible sense of humor.

Point is, how can telling people someone's dead when they're not dead NOT be a massive violation of "community standards"? And why do I think the folks who post this stuff are the Intertoobz equivalent of the drunken redneck whose last words are always "Hey, ya'll! Watch this!"? 

Then they try to jump the General Lee over Farmer Bob's hog barn or some such thing.

These fake-death clowns aren't attempting anything as catastrophically spectacular, but the aim is generally the same. Because it's the Interbooz, see, people actually get sucked in by this cruel hoax-ery. This is true even when they're posted on fan sites with names like Purdue Pete And His Big-A** Hammer and Jesus Saves But Rockne Gets The Rebound.

(OK. So there are no fan sites with those names. But there is a fan site named Black & Gold Hoops Community, which recycled the Gene-Keady-died-on-his-way-to-hospice meme. Doomscrollers beware.)

The rule of thumb here, of course, is don't believe anything you see on the Majik Intertoobz Emporium until you can verify it via a legitimate news source. (Of which there are fewer and fewer these days, thanks to billionaires buying up American media companies and Sovietizing them into Trump State Media. Ah, the good old days of Tass and Pravda, we remember them well!).

But enough about that. Just remember one thing: The next time someone tells you Gene Keady or Tony Dungy or the Great and Terrible Oz has died, consider the source.

Unless, of course, the source is Abe Lincoln. He did tell us never to believe anything you see on the internet, remember.

Saw that on the internet.

Darkest of destinies

 The last time I talked to Dan Serafini it was raining.

It was early September and 1993 and he was wandering around the Fort Wayne Wizards clubhouse in shorts and a B.U.M. T-shirt -- remember B.U.M.? -- waiting to see if he would play that day. It was the last day of his second professional season, and his bags were packed. He was ready to head home to California, where his family and his new pup were waiting for him.

"She's a Rottweiler," he said. "She's like nine months old and, like, 85 pounds now."

Dan Serafini was 19 years old.

Now he's 52 and headed to prison for the rest of his natural life.

He was convicted last year of killing his father-in-law and seriously wounding his mother-in-law, and yesterday he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for it. Of all the destinies any of us might have seen for him that dreary, dripping day 33 years ago, few could have been darker or less forseeable.

At 19, see, Serafini was a lefty pitcher who could throw baseballs past batters on the regular, or at least on the regular enough. He'd made 27 starts with a 10-8 record and 3.65 ERA in the Wizards' inaugural season as the Minnesota Twins low-A affiliate, and it seemed the Twins might have some plans for him.

For awhile, they did. And then they didn't.

They dutifully kept bumping him up the minor-league ladder until June 25, 1996, when he made his first major-league start against the New York Yankees. The Yanks tattooed him for five runs and seven hits in 4 1/3 innings, and Serafini hit one batter and gave up a home run to Bernie Williams. The Yankees won 6-2.

After that ...

Well. After that, it never got much better.

After a couple of seasons the Twins traded Serafini to the Cubs, and after that, across the next decade, he bounced around from the Bear Cubs to the Padres to the Pirates to the minor league stints with the Giants, Mets, Brewers and Cardinals. His last MLB gig was with the Colorado Rockies in 2007, where he pitched three games and posted a 54.00 ERA.

No, that's not a misprint. His ERA really was 54.00.

In any event, that was end for him. He finished with a 15-16 lifetime record in MLB to go with a 6.04 ERA and 127 strikeouts. Five years after his last start, he was still pitching in the Mexican League, chasing a dead dream or clinging to his vanished youth or who the hell knows.

Dan Serafini was 38 years old by then.

Nine years later, he walked into his in-laws' home, shot and killed his father-in-law and shot and almost killed his mother-in-law. Then he burgled the place.

All of that was in the news story I read this morning, the one that said Dan Serafini was going behind bars forever. And suddenly it was a rainy day in September again, and Serafini was just a teenager in shorts and a B.U.M. T-shirt, talking happily about his dog the jobs he had lined up for the offseason.

"I'll be working six, eight hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "I work Monday through Thursday at a pet store, and at a garbage company I work Friday through Sunday. I'll be driving a truck and collecting garbage and stuff like that."

At the time I wrote that made Dan Serafini the perfect symbol for Labor Day, which had just passed.

Now I'm compelled to write he's the perfect symbol for something much sadder, and infinitely darker:

The wreckage of a ruined life.

Pro days

 A long, long time ago -- mere seconds in College Athletics New Reality time; eons in real time -- you knew Brendan Sorsby.

He was a quarterback from Texas who landed at Indiana University, where he suited up and played some for the Hoosiers in the pre-Cignetti years. Then he hopped in the transfer portal and vagabonded to the University of Cincinnati.

Now, a century later (OK, so only a couple of years or so), he's vagabonding again to Texas Tech. Along the way, he took the Bearcats for a cool million.

That, at least, is UC's contention, which is why they're suing Sorsby for breaching his NIL contract. Apparently there was a $1 million exit fee if he decided to transfer somewhere else, which Cincinnati's complaint alleges Sorsby refused to pay on the advice of his "representative."

In other words, the kid's stiffing them, allegedly. And if so, good on Cincinnati.

 Someone has to try to tame the Wild West college athletics have become. And if it takes hauling your student-athletes (or, these days, ""student-athletes") into court, so be it.

Of course, this was never the way it was supposed to work when the NCAA was finally compelled to cut its "student-athletes" in on the billions it was generating, but let's face it: The NCAA painted itself into this corner. It went from "You'll get nothing and like it!" to "Aw, hell, do whatever you want" virtually overnight, with the predictable consequence that the "student-athletes" are now professionals with all the trimmings.

They can go to the highest bidder now, same as any professional. They have contracts, same as any professional. And -- same as any professional -- when there's a dispute over those contracts, it usually winds up in court.

And so, here we are: A university suing one of its scholars (or presumed scholars) over money. We're a long way from those quaint times when cheating on a test was the biggest dispute a university had with its "student-athletes."

But then, those were the back-in-the-day days. These are the pro days. 

See ya in court.

Misdirection

 OK, gotta be honest here, on account of the Blob values honesty in all things except his basketball prowess back in the day: I almost bought the Bears-to-Indiana thing. I mean, I was thisclose.

Oh, all along I suspected it was a just big ol' misdirection play on the part of the McCaskeys, a bit of strong-arming to put the arm on Illinois for a better deal. But the chatter kept chattering, and there was talk of an actual stadium site in the Wolf Lake area around Hammond, and then the Indiana lege and Gov. Mike Braun pushed through a bill to basically hand the Bears anything they wanted ...

And, well. For a second or two there, I could see the Hammond Bears becoming a reality. 

More astute minds kept telling me, nah, no way, and that I was right the first time. Wait 'til the unions get involved over there in Illinois, they said. Wait 'til the Illinois lege gets off the schneid.

And the Illinois lege did, finally.

Just as our lawmakers and our Guv were passing a bill that would, as usual, ding the taxpayers for a chunk of the cost, the Illinois lege was hard at work this week pushing a measure that would ... well, ding their taxpayers for a chunk of the cost. It basically gives the Bears the property tax break they were looking for out in Arlington Heights, which critics say would in turn cut into funding for schools and other local agencies.

In other words, same-old, same-old, world without end, amen.

The Blob takes the very libertarian stance that if an organization worth $8 billion -- i.e., the Bears -- wants to build itself a new home, it should by God foot the bill for it. And I mean the entire bill. Getting into Joe Citizen's pocket to help defray the cost shouldn't be an option.

I say this because the long-term economic impact of athletic facilities is almost always oversold, which means the owners are the primary beneficiaries. And if the owners are the primary beneficiaries -- especially if they own as valuable a property as an NFL franchise -- they can damn well pay for their new digs. Not like they can't afford to and then some.

And, yeah, I know, that's not how it works in bidness. But it should.

It should, because a fancy new stadium with plush skyboxes and videoboards you can see from space doesn't mean jack to a public schoolteacher who already has to buy his or her own supplies thanks to the "school choice" leeches. It doesn't mean jack to the kids at P.S. Poorhouse who subsist on hand-me-downs thanks to the aforementioned leeches, and to legislators who think it would super neato keen to score seats on the 50-yard line.

OK. Rant over.

And the Hammond Bears?

Over, too, apparently. But as always, stay tuned.

No to the throw

 The NFL combine begins today in Indianapolis, and I know this because I looked up at the TV screen the other day and Mel Kuiper Jr. was on it.

Mel Kuiper Jr., if you've been living in a cave for the last 40 years like one of those Japanese soldiers who didn't know the war was over, is the guru-iest of ESPN's NFL Draft gurus. So if Mel's on my screen in February, it means the combine can't be far behind.

And, listen, I love the combine. It's sillier than coked-up kittens: Bunch of extra-large humans in shorts and T-shirts running and jumping and being measured like Holsteins, and taking a test (the Wonderlic) that generally indicates nothing about a prospect's prospects. Also they sit for interviews with various NFL GMs, who ask weird questions that, again, indicate nothing except that NFL GMs are a profoundly weird lot.

All of this is ostensibly a safeguard against NFL teams throwing huge dollars at, say, Ryan Leaf or Jamarcus Russell. Of course, they wind up doing it anyway, so whatever value the combine has -- aside from the hilarious sight of some 340-pound left tackle huffing his way through the 40 yards he'll never run in an actual game -- remains open to question.

This is especially true of quarterbacks. 

Who, more and more, are rejecting the idea that they need to throw at the combine, because, why? It's 2026, not 1926. NFL scouts have access to miles and miles of game-action video, plus a virtually endless array of analytic widgets that enable them to break down a quarterback's throwing mechanics to the molecular level. 

And yet ...

And yet, there is always a subset of scouts, ex-scouts, GMs and jersey-wearing NFL junkies who'll take it as a negative when a high-profile QB says no to the throw at the combine.

Which brings us to Indiana's Heisman Trophy quarterback, Fernando Mendoza.

He's caught some flack this week for (wisely, in the Blob's opinion) choosing not to throw at the combine this week. He's also not caught flack from wiser heads. There's a couple of reasons for the latter.

One, he already knows he's the Raiders' guy. Throwing against air to unfamiliar receivers isn't going to change that.

Two, going back to the 2026-not-1926 thing, how could any scout worth the name not already know what Mendoza can do? With all the video and tech at their disposal, any NFL scout who doesn't already have the full book on Fernando is, let's face it, not very good at his job. In fact you can say he's pretty darn lousy at it.

Oh, Mendoza will still play the game. He'll have his own Pro Day in Bloomington, where he'll be throwing to (as he puts it) "his guys"  -- not for his benefit, but for theirs. Give the scouts a look at them, because they've already gotten an eyeful of him. 

I don't know about you, but I think that ought to be worth at least a couple of bonus points on the Wonderlic. But that's just me.