What price Larry

So now the question is this: Why hire Larry Brown?

Three times now he's occupied a sideline in college basketball, and three times the NCAA has banned his programs from the postseason.

Three times this happened while he was still there, and three times it happened because he either looked the other way or actively took part in the shenanigans.

The last time Larry Brown coached college basketball, in the 1980s, he led Kansas to the national championship. Then he led the Jayhawks off a cliff. So outlaw was his program at KU that the NCAA seriously considered dropping the death penalty on it. Seriously considered it.

So why did Brown's latest employer/patsy, SMU, decide to bring him aboard?

That's the question. And it doesn't really require an answer.

SMU brought him aboard because college hoops is a business, and Larry Brown is the CEO who kicks businesses into overdrive. He took Kansas to the national title. Prior to that, he took a UCLA team thick with freshmen to the national championship game (after which he got them, you guessed it, banned from postseason play). He has a basketball mind matched by few others, and that makes him a valuable commodity, because those kinds of basketball minds win March. And winning March keeps the market share fat for everyone who makes up College Hoops Inc.

And so, hiring a man who'd proved he had no place in college basketball (or at least college basketball as imagined by the NCAA) was a business decision, pure and simple. And until the NCAA dropped the hammer this week, it was a damn smart business decision.

Because Brown, of course, did what he does: Win March. He took a program going nowhere, and in two years the Mustangs were 27-10 and in the NIT. Then they went 27-7 and reached the NCAA Tournament, the fabled ATM of college buckets.

And then, alas, Brown did what he also does.

This time around it involved a guard named Keith Frazier, who apparently got some illicit help from an assistant coach and basketball administrator in order to become eligible. And by "illicit help," we mean, "Here, son, let me write that paper for you."

Brown wasn't in on the scam this time, but when he found out about it, he didn't report it for a month. Then he lied to the NCAA about it before finally coming clean.

It will come as no shock to anyone that the NCAA isn't real cool with that.

And so Brown will sit for nine games, and SMU's seniors -- among them Warsaw grad Nic Moore -- get their final season ruined before it begins. Because even if the Mustangs win, say, 28 games this year, no final fling with March Madness awaits.

The only saving grace in this is that Brown will at least be around to watch it. When he got UCLA and Kansas dinged, he had already hit the road to the NBA when the stuffstorm came down.

He hasn't done that this time, which is no guarantee he won't. But before he does, SMU ought to do itself and the rest of college basketball a favor and show him the road.

It's the only way SMU -- and, yes, the rest of college basketball -- can retain a piece of its integrity. If only a piece.

And only until, inevitably, Larry Brown's phone rings again.






        

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 3

And now  this week's installment of The NFL In So Many Words, the Blob feature hailed by NASA as "proof that the basic building blocks of life as we know it exist on Mars" because "nothing about this would make sense to anyone but a Martian":

1. "Hey! Lateral that thing over here! I'm open!" (Eagles helmet to Jets wide receiver Brandon Marshall).

2. "Wow. The Colts are 0-3. I don't believe it." (Blue Nation with 12 minutes to play Sunday).

3. "Wow! The Colts are 1-2! I don't believe it!" (Blue Nation, 12 minutes later).

4. "Ouch! That hurts!" (Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger).

5. "Ouch! That hurts!" (Steeler Nation).

6. "Who's that playing quarterback for the Bengals?" (Normal America).

7. "That is NOT Andy Dalton. That is a cyborg dressed like Andy Dalton who's come to destroy our way of life, and also to mess with the Super Bowl by getting the Bengals in it." (Black Helicopter/Terrorist Camp/Donald Trump Is The Nation's Savior America).

8. "Cutler (bleeps)!" (Bears Nation before Cutler got hurt).

9. "Where's Cutler?" (Bears Nation after seeing Jimmy Clausen play).

And last but not least ...

10. "Ouch! That hurts!" (Chiefs Nation after Aaron Rodgers' five-touchdown night).
  

Example fail

And now some numbers, as we watch this again and reminisce fondly of the days when Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin used to have their marital spats, especially that one at Fenway Park that was the most famous dugout fight of all time until ... well, until yesterday.

But the numbers.

Here they are: 22 games, 23.2 innings pitched, 22 hits, 13 runs, four homers, a 3.04 ERA.

That's what Jonathan Papelbon was doing, or not doing, when he decided, after a month with the Washington Nationals, that he was the guy to call out Bryce Harper, the only National who's actually been worth a lick this lost summer.

Harper apparently didn't sufficiently run out a hopeless pop fly in a hopelessly lost game, and Papelbon took exception. So he got in the kid's face, the kid told him to stick it, and Papelbon grabbed him by the throat.

Papelbon, who hasn't done anything for the Nationals but feed gophers and blow saves as their alleged "closer."

Papelbon, All-American tool and clubhouse poison of the first order, whom the Phillies were only too eager to dump on the market because, like most people who've ever had to deal with the guy, they were heartily sick of him.

This is the guy to teach young Bryce how the game should be played?

Look. Maybe Harper's a bit brash and maybe there is something to be said for running out every play, even when your season is done and you're all just playing out the string. But Papelbon was demonstrably not the guy to call him on it.

To his credit, he acknowledged as much later on, publicly apologizing for his actions. Maybe, belatedly, he realized that leadership springs from what you do, not what you say. And Papelbon simply doesn't have the Do.

Harper, meanwhile, does. With a .336 average, 41 homers, 96 RBI and an on-base percentage of .467, he's carried the Nationals all season when no one else either could or would. Yet some Johnny-come-lately closer who can't close a screen door presumed it was his place to lecture him?

As if.

Update: The Nats have suspended Papelbon four games for going after Harper. Bullpen immediately improves.

Dissipating Smoke

This one you saw coming, if you had even one eye open. Winter became spring became summer became fall in 2015, and everything you saw from Tony Stewart told you the fun had gone out of something that used to be food to him.

He looked like a man who’d had all the joy wrung out of him. And he drove like it.

The day when Smoke became a back marker and didn’t openly rage about it was a day none of us thought we’d ever see, and it has been profoundly sad to watch. Whatever happened 14 months ago on that dark night on the dirt in upstate New York seemed to steal something essential from the man, and he’s never gotten it back.

And so no surprise this morning at reports that, later this week, Stewart will announce he’s stepping out of the race car, ending his NASCAR career after 48 wins and three Cup titles.

You could have retired on your winnings betting that, at 45, Stewart wouldn’t be close to being done, but that was before New York and Kevin Ward and everything that has come after. You kill a man with your race car, it has to change something inside you. Listening to the Ward family and others say you did it on purpose, or the next thing to it, no doubt only intensifies that change.

No one but Stewart can say for a certainty that's true, of course, but the circumstantial evidence is significant. Or maybe you thought you’d see a day when, eight months and 28 races deep in the endless NASCAR season, Tony Stewart would have led a total of 24 laps.

Even measured against his fall-off in 2013 and ’14 -- when he won once, had eight top fives and led a mere 239 laps – that is a precipitous tumble.  Some inner fire (and there has always been fire where there was Smoke) has gone cold, or at the very least seems to have. It’s been a hurtful thing to watch, considering this was a man whose idea of a vacation, deep into his decorated NASCAR career, was to jump into a midget car and tear around Memorial Coliseum with kids half or even a third his age.

The man lived to go fast. He lived for the combat.

A for-instance: When the word came down this morning that he’s going to hang ‘em up, I flashed back immediately to the late stages of the 2007 Brickyard 400, when Stewart was closing in on Kevin Harvick. Lap by lap, corner by corner, that orange Home Depot No. 20 got closer, reeling in Harvick at a place not notable for such occurrences. And at one point, Stewart’s delight in the chase spilled over onto his radio feed.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Stewart was heard to say as he crowded Harvick’s bumper, a bit of snark that was pure unfiltered Smoke.
 

That’s the Tony Stewart I’ll remember this week. As should we all.

Update: Stewart announced Wednesday he would run one more season in 2016 and then step out of the car.

Hoosier moment

Sunday morning, and a cool early-fall breeze is sifting through the open windows, moist earth and fading summer glory on its breath. These are the quiet hours between college football Saturday and its pale Sunday imitator, the imperial but somehow less satisfying National Football League. Time to hit the pause button, catch a breath, sift through the papers forming their usual Sunday morning drifts on the floor.

Time, for a moment, to consider this: Your Indiana football Hoosiers.

Quietly, they hung on to beat Wake Forest yesterday, 31-24, a road win for a program not noted for rampaging success on foreign soil. It wasn't Utah crushing Oregon or TCU stealing one from Texas Tech or Texas and Tennessee blowing games in spectacular fashion to Oklahoma State and Florida, but it was notable in its own way.

It lifted the Hoosiers to 4-0 on the season. And that hasn't happened since 1990.

It also marks the arrival of something even more rare in Bloomington: A home football game that actually matters, sort of, on a national scale. Next Saturday, after all, the Hoosiers get the defending national champions, Ohio State, a clash of unbeatens that might attract America's wandering eye,  
or at least its fleeting glance.

The Blob would go further than that, except for one gnawing suspicion: Ohio State seems a lot more unbeaten than Indiana at the moment.

Yes, the Hoosiers have won four straight, but they haven't, you know, won.  FCS opponent Southern Illinois raked them for 47 points in their opener, a game Indiana narrowly escaped by scoring 48. Then they beat Florida International 36-22. Then they survived Western Kentucky 38-35, and then, on Saturday, they eluded Wake Forest.

Not exactly Murderer's Row. And not exactly a case of Indiana murderin' 'em.

It's more a case of Indiana doing what Indiana always does, which is pile up a lot of points and give up a lot of points. In the Hoosiers' four wins, they're averaging 38 points while getting dinged for 32. Three of their four victories have come by a total of 11 points. And except for Western Kentucky, which is 3-1, this hasn't happened against teams that are rolling opponents of distinction themselves.

Wake, for instance, is 2-2, and the victories have come against Elon and Army. Florida International has beaten the mighty likes of Central Florida and North Carolina Central. And Southern Illinois' only victory was yesterday against Liberty.

Suddenly 4-0 doesn't look quite so shiny. Suddenly, you're looking ahead  to the clash of unbeatens, and seeing a great big reality check looming on the horizon -- even if Ohio State has pretty much gone through the motions since taking a two-by-four to Virginia Tech in its opener.

Perhaps the Buckeyes will do some more sleepwalking come Saturday. Perhaps Indiana will rise up and give them the same kind of stubborn they gave them in Columbus last year, only more of it. Perhaps the clash of unbeatens really will be a clash.

If not ... well, Indiana will always have this.

This moment. This 4-0 record. This fine Sunday morning, bright with possibility.

Falling sky

Tomorrow night we'll be treated to a super moon lunar eclipse, a confluence of celestial events that happens once in a, well, blue moon. Or at least not terribly often.

Last time it happened? 1982.

This is the Blob's way of reminding everyone that stuff eventually happens, even if it doesn't happen every day.  And that brings us, by a torturously circuitous route, to the Indianapolis Colts, who wheeze into Nashville tomorrow with large chunks of plaster falling off them and their captain and first officer fighting among themselves.

All of this has led to an 0-2 start that doesn't feel like last year's 0-2 start, because last year Andrew Luck was not dead last in QBR among the NFL's starting quarterbacks, with five interceptions and just three touchdowns. The only saving grace, everyone seems to agree, is that the Colts now enter the AFC South portion of the program, which helped them get better last year and is presumed to have the same curative effect this time around.

I'm not sure about that. Because, Super Moon Lunar Eclipse.

It doesn't happen often, but it does happen, which means the Colts (and their fans) would do well to exercise some caution before putting tomorrow in the win column. Like the SMLE, Tennessee rarely beats the Colts, either. But that doesn't mean it can't happen, even if the Titans have beaten Indy only once since October 2008.

This Colts team, after all, seems profoundly more vulnerable than previous teams. And you can lay at the feet of both GM Ryan Grigson and head coach Chuck Pagano, the aforementioned feuding captain and first officer.

Grigson, for his part, has put together a horribly flawed team, and his gem, Luck, has paid the heaviest price for it. For some reason Grigson didn't draft an offensive lineman until the seventh round back in April, even though the O-line clearly was the Colts' most critical area of need. And he didn't do much in the offseason to help out a defense that couldn't stop anyone when it counted last year, either.

And so the Colts are what they are: An odd mix of young players and aging veterans, some of whom are aging more rapidly than others. The O-line is a forest fire; you could see that in the preseason game against the Bears, whose awful defensive front was still able to pressure Luck against the first-team Colts OL. Anyone who saw that could hardly have been shocked by what the Bills and Jets did to them.

That said ... Pagano hasn't held up his end, either. If he's the one who must make do with the mess he's been given, the making do has yet to commence. Against the both the Bills and Jets the Colts looked ill-prepared, sloppy and unmotivated -- the latter a shocking turn of events given that Pagano is one of the game's great motivators.

And so, on to Tennessee, which has its own issues but has a budding star in Marcus Mariota. Faced with a Colts D that has no real playmakers, he should continue his so-far encouraging progress. And that does not bode well for the Colts, whose issues on the offensive side of the football are starting to look chronic.

In other words: 0-3 looks possible. And then the bailing -- and the throwing over the side of the parties judged most guilty -- will begin in earnest.




    

Legal beagles

Lawyers get paid fat sums of money to advocate for their clients. Everyone understands this.

But sometimes they make you want to pull their Armani suit coats over their heads and start feeding them knuckle hoagies, kind of like Dave “The Hammer” Schultz used to do to all those poor dopes from Winnipeg and Buffalo.

Maybe you missed it, more likely you didn’t, but the other day a man named Mack Breed resigned his position as assistant football coach at John Jay High School in San Antonio, a school which may sound vaguely familiar. Mostly that’s because two of its players, Michael Moreno and Victor Rojas, starred in the most viral of videos, in which a high school official named Robert Watts was viciously attacked from behind at the snap of the ball.

 Moreno and Rojas were the perpetrators. Breed was the assistant coach  who allegedly put them up to it, although he claims now he never expressly told them to hit Watts.

If you stop right there, this is still one of the more disgusting things you’ve ever heard. But it doesn’t stop there.

Now come the lawyers, or lawyer: James Reeves, retained by Breed to make him look like good by any means necessary. And when we say “by any means necessary,” that’s exactly what we mean. Reeves’ solution was to absolve his client, the alleged grownup in this whole business, and pin the entire mess on the kids, Moreno and Rojas – particularly Moreno. In Reeves’ version the two kids (particularly Moreno) are miserable little creeps who threw his client under the bus by saying, quite
reasonably, that, hey, he’s the coach. And Coach knows best.

Reeves was having none of it.

"During his media tour, Michael Moreno resorted to the historical defense of  'I was just following orders’,” Reeves said. “However, we are all responsible for our own actions, and his defense will fail in this situation as it has failed in the past. Moreno paints himself as a saint on television while withholding the truth that shows how out of control he was in that game. Moreno fails to mention that he was not ejected after striking the referee. He stood by while an innocent black player, Trenton Hobdy, was wrongfully ejected for Moreno's hit on the referee. Moreno followed the hit on Watts by committing another flagrant foul on the very next play. The Marble Falls High School quarterback kneeled in a victory formation, the whistle was blown, and then Moreno hit the kneeling quarterback. His behavior is exactly what one would expect from a rogue player blaming a coach for the player's actions.”

In other words: This kid’s a sociopath. He’s a thug. He’s a goon. He’s a crime spree waiting to happen.

Only one thing wrong with that.

If Moreno was so out of control, why didn’t the grownup in the situation – Breed – try to calm him down instead of inciting him?

That’s what grownups are supposed to do, but Breed didn’t do it. In fact, he was apparently as out of control as the kids, shouting at Watts from the sideline, setting the tone for everything. Even if he didn’t expressly tell Moreno and Rojas to hit Watts, he certainly gave the impression he wouldn’t
have a problem with it.

Yet what happened is all on the kids, not the grownups.

In a word, nonsense. No matter how enthusiastically Reeves picks on a couple of children, they were following orders, or at least what they perceived to be the orders. And that is a legitimate defense, given the power  high school coaches wield over their charges. And so the greater responsibility falls on Breed, whose primary job as a coach is to set the proper example.

In the end, he failed at that.

Shame on his lawyer for trying to turn that around. Speaking of, you know, disgusting.