... comes from Media Day, which the NFL is now calling Opening Night on account of it happens on Monday night instead of Tuesday midday, mainly so the Shield can further mess with newspaper grunts who still have deadlines to meet.
No, it's not Tom Brady getting choked up talking about his father, disproving the prevailing theory that he is an android from the planet Deflatia. And, no, it's not all the silly questions about hair product and What's Your Favorite Pizza and What's The Secret To A Righteous Beard.
(Although the Blob, watching all the video clips, failed to hear a question as awesomely stupid as the one someone asked Bears tight end Desmond Clark on Media Day in 2007. Which was: If Chewbacca was a football player, what position would he play?)
No, sir. The Super Bowl Moment For Today happened when someone asked Bill Belichick, aka Darth Hoodie, to smile, and he actually did.
Well, kinda.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Monday, January 30, 2017
That new car smell
... or, you know, that New Guy smell.
Chris Ballard is the New Guy in Indianapolis, and he comes with some fragrant credentials. As director of football operations in Kansas City, he's helped mold the Chiefs into a solid franchise that has won at least nine games in each of the last four seasons, and -- more importantly -- his draft picks have panned out. Which is not what anyone could say for his predecessor, Ryan Somebody.
But as with a new vehicle, New Guy smell is fleeting. What's relevant here for the Colts is what will happen when he gets a few miles on him -- i.e., what happens not quite three months down the road in late April, when the NFL Draft happens.
The draft is the true measure of any NFL GM, the three days when he earns his paycheck (or fails to earn it). Ryan Somebody failed largely because he failed, at times spectacularly, on those three days. What happened on the other 362 days of the year was pretty much meaningless.
And so we will know whether the New Guy is going to be a wise purchase in late April, not now. By then, of course, we'll also know if he can get along with the holdover head coach, Chuck Pagano. Even if they hit it off, there is now the unavoidable sense that Pagano is a dead man walking. Every successful GM, after all, wants his own guy. And if Ballard sticks the landing on those three days in April, he'll have the capital to push for it if he chooses -- which will make that dead-man-walking feel about Pagano even more acute.
Anyway ... we shall see. In the meantime, enjoy the new car smell.
It could mean you've just bought your dream ride. Or it could mean you're stuck with some sawdust-in-the-transmission beater.
Time will tell.
Chris Ballard is the New Guy in Indianapolis, and he comes with some fragrant credentials. As director of football operations in Kansas City, he's helped mold the Chiefs into a solid franchise that has won at least nine games in each of the last four seasons, and -- more importantly -- his draft picks have panned out. Which is not what anyone could say for his predecessor, Ryan Somebody.
But as with a new vehicle, New Guy smell is fleeting. What's relevant here for the Colts is what will happen when he gets a few miles on him -- i.e., what happens not quite three months down the road in late April, when the NFL Draft happens.
The draft is the true measure of any NFL GM, the three days when he earns his paycheck (or fails to earn it). Ryan Somebody failed largely because he failed, at times spectacularly, on those three days. What happened on the other 362 days of the year was pretty much meaningless.
And so we will know whether the New Guy is going to be a wise purchase in late April, not now. By then, of course, we'll also know if he can get along with the holdover head coach, Chuck Pagano. Even if they hit it off, there is now the unavoidable sense that Pagano is a dead man walking. Every successful GM, after all, wants his own guy. And if Ballard sticks the landing on those three days in April, he'll have the capital to push for it if he chooses -- which will make that dead-man-walking feel about Pagano even more acute.
Anyway ... we shall see. In the meantime, enjoy the new car smell.
It could mean you've just bought your dream ride. Or it could mean you're stuck with some sawdust-in-the-transmission beater.
Time will tell.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
Your Pro Bowl moment for today
And, yes, I know what you're saying: How did the Pro Bowl hijack an entire Blob meme?
Well, it's because we're still a week away from the Super Bowl, and the Pro Bowl is tonight, and the Blob is an enthusiastic fan of public service announcements. And so Your Super Bowl Moment For Today has become Your Pro Bowl Moment For Today, just so the Blob can offer you, as a public service, a list of things you can do tonight instead of watch the Pro Bowl:
1. Watch "Victoria" on PBS. It's really good.
2. Write that letter to Roger Goodell you've been putting off, the one that begins "So, are you going to show up at the Super Bowl, Mr. Candy-Ass?"
3. Rewrite the letter in a more respectful tone, i.e., "So, are you going to show up at the Super Bowl, Mr. Candy-Ass, sir?"
4. Watch the replay of Roger Federer's five-set victory over Rafe Nadal in the Australian Open final. That was really good, too.
5. Start planning your Super Bowl menu.
6. Start planning your Daytona 500 menu.
7. Work on a marketing plan that will make the Pro Bowl seem more than just a meaningless exercise in something that vaguely resembles football. Suggested themes: The Greatest Spectacle In Groin Pull Avoidance ... Hey, Look, Palm Trees! ... and, If We Bring Back Former Stars (Peyton Manning? Brett Favre?) And Let Them Play, Will You Watch? You'll Watch, Right?
8. Send annoying texts to your friends whom you know are watching the Pro Bowl ("Ur watching the Pro Bowl, rnt u? Loser!")
9. Review your Super Bowl and Daytona menus. Scratch out "fruit salad," add "more brats."
And last but not least ...
10. One word: macramé.
Well, it's because we're still a week away from the Super Bowl, and the Pro Bowl is tonight, and the Blob is an enthusiastic fan of public service announcements. And so Your Super Bowl Moment For Today has become Your Pro Bowl Moment For Today, just so the Blob can offer you, as a public service, a list of things you can do tonight instead of watch the Pro Bowl:
1. Watch "Victoria" on PBS. It's really good.
2. Write that letter to Roger Goodell you've been putting off, the one that begins "So, are you going to show up at the Super Bowl, Mr. Candy-Ass?"
3. Rewrite the letter in a more respectful tone, i.e., "So, are you going to show up at the Super Bowl, Mr. Candy-Ass, sir?"
4. Watch the replay of Roger Federer's five-set victory over Rafe Nadal in the Australian Open final. That was really good, too.
5. Start planning your Super Bowl menu.
6. Start planning your Daytona 500 menu.
7. Work on a marketing plan that will make the Pro Bowl seem more than just a meaningless exercise in something that vaguely resembles football. Suggested themes: The Greatest Spectacle In Groin Pull Avoidance ... Hey, Look, Palm Trees! ... and, If We Bring Back Former Stars (Peyton Manning? Brett Favre?) And Let Them Play, Will You Watch? You'll Watch, Right?
8. Send annoying texts to your friends whom you know are watching the Pro Bowl ("Ur watching the Pro Bowl, rnt u? Loser!")
9. Review your Super Bowl and Daytona menus. Scratch out "fruit salad," add "more brats."
And last but not least ...
10. One word: macramé.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
A valid excuse
Remember a couple of years back, when Jonathan Toews of the Blackhawks was suspended for a game by the worst commissioner in sports, Gary Bettman, because he was sick and skipped the NHL All-Star Game?
It violated the NHL's dopey rule that no All-Star can skip the All-Star Game for any reason without incurring a penalty. So even though Toews was apparently legitimately ill, he got suspended.
The Blob wondered aloud then if perhaps Toews should have produced a note from Epstein's mom, of "Welcome Back, Kotter" fame.
Or maybe he should have just brought a dog into it.
That's All-Star coach John Tortorella's excuse for giving this All-Star game a miss, and it's a darn good one. It seems his son, who's deployed overseas, has a 10-year-old dog, and the dog is ill. So Tortorella is staying home to care for it.
Whether Bettman will punish him -- or whether coaches are even subject to the same penalties, which they should be -- remains to be seen. But I can't imagine even Bettman would be so cotton-headed as to tick off two such powerful constituencies as dog-lovers and supporters of Our Troops.
Besides, if push came to shove, Tortorella could always bring a note from Epstein's mom, too. And what it would say is this:
Please excuse John. He had to stay home to care for his son's dog.
It got sick because it ate John's homework.
It violated the NHL's dopey rule that no All-Star can skip the All-Star Game for any reason without incurring a penalty. So even though Toews was apparently legitimately ill, he got suspended.
The Blob wondered aloud then if perhaps Toews should have produced a note from Epstein's mom, of "Welcome Back, Kotter" fame.
Or maybe he should have just brought a dog into it.
That's All-Star coach John Tortorella's excuse for giving this All-Star game a miss, and it's a darn good one. It seems his son, who's deployed overseas, has a 10-year-old dog, and the dog is ill. So Tortorella is staying home to care for it.
Whether Bettman will punish him -- or whether coaches are even subject to the same penalties, which they should be -- remains to be seen. But I can't imagine even Bettman would be so cotton-headed as to tick off two such powerful constituencies as dog-lovers and supporters of Our Troops.
Besides, if push came to shove, Tortorella could always bring a note from Epstein's mom, too. And what it would say is this:
Please excuse John. He had to stay home to care for his son's dog.
It got sick because it ate John's homework.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Racing toward oblivion
We're now less than a month away from the Blob's traditional first sign of spring, the Daytona 500, which revives again what's become an annual debate: What Do You Do When The Thrill Is Gone?
This is, of course, a reference to NASCAR itself, which once was big enough to fancy itself the fourth major sport in the U.S. and now is leaking oil like an '82 Ford Escort. Attendance is down, TV numbers are down, interest in the product is down: It's a trend now. And has been for almost a decade.
NASCAR's solution to this was to announce this week more sweeping changes to its format, which as near as we can tell is Sweeping Change No. 342 in a series. This time the NASCAR poobahs have decided essentially to turn every race on the schedule into a series of sprints, dividing all races into three segments. At the end of each, the caution will come out, cars will pit and drivers will be available for interviews.
How this will do anything but prolong races that are already too long to hold the public's interest is an excellent question. As is how, by doing so, it will improve the quality of the racing.
It's been noted in this space before that NASCAR's continual tweaking and tinkering is less a product of reality than perception. The sport's outlandish (and unrealistic) success in the 1990s-early 2000s has become its own worst enemy; though it remains, and will remain, far and away the most successful racing series in America, NASCAR continues to chase the unicorn of its glorious but unrecoverable past.
Contrivances such as the Three Races In One plan are unlikely to help much. Far more sensible are the proposals put forth here by the Blob's colleague and fellow racing writer Justin Kenny.
Everything Kenny says here is absolutely on the mark. The fields are too bloated with hopeless back markers. Races are too long, and there are too many of them, with the consequence that NASCAR's playoffs wind up getting lost in the immense shadow of the NFL.
No one's going to pay attention to the Showdown at Homestead in November. But a Showdown in late August or early September, before the NFL truly gets ramped up, stands a far more likely chance of being noticed.
And the Brickyard?
The Blob would only add that, in addition to running it every three or four years instead of every year, you move it to the road course. It's hard to believe that wouldn't be a better show than what we're getting now on the oval.
Or so NASCAR could only hope.
This is, of course, a reference to NASCAR itself, which once was big enough to fancy itself the fourth major sport in the U.S. and now is leaking oil like an '82 Ford Escort. Attendance is down, TV numbers are down, interest in the product is down: It's a trend now. And has been for almost a decade.
NASCAR's solution to this was to announce this week more sweeping changes to its format, which as near as we can tell is Sweeping Change No. 342 in a series. This time the NASCAR poobahs have decided essentially to turn every race on the schedule into a series of sprints, dividing all races into three segments. At the end of each, the caution will come out, cars will pit and drivers will be available for interviews.
How this will do anything but prolong races that are already too long to hold the public's interest is an excellent question. As is how, by doing so, it will improve the quality of the racing.
It's been noted in this space before that NASCAR's continual tweaking and tinkering is less a product of reality than perception. The sport's outlandish (and unrealistic) success in the 1990s-early 2000s has become its own worst enemy; though it remains, and will remain, far and away the most successful racing series in America, NASCAR continues to chase the unicorn of its glorious but unrecoverable past.
Contrivances such as the Three Races In One plan are unlikely to help much. Far more sensible are the proposals put forth here by the Blob's colleague and fellow racing writer Justin Kenny.
Everything Kenny says here is absolutely on the mark. The fields are too bloated with hopeless back markers. Races are too long, and there are too many of them, with the consequence that NASCAR's playoffs wind up getting lost in the immense shadow of the NFL.
No one's going to pay attention to the Showdown at Homestead in November. But a Showdown in late August or early September, before the NFL truly gets ramped up, stands a far more likely chance of being noticed.
And the Brickyard?
The Blob would only add that, in addition to running it every three or four years instead of every year, you move it to the road course. It's hard to believe that wouldn't be a better show than what we're getting now on the oval.
Or so NASCAR could only hope.
Your Super Bowl moment for today
... or, in other words, it's time for the return of a Blob hardy perennial, which blooms intermittently in the run-up to the Super Bowl and then disappears for another year.
("Thank God!" you're saying)
At any rate, today's Moment takes us to a gas station in Gainesville, Georgia, where the proprietor has declared he will stop selling Sam Adams beer until after the Super Bowl. This of course begs the question of how much Sam Adams they actually sell anyway in Gainesville, a town of 35,000 souls northeast of Atlanta. But never mind that.
What's interesting here is the proprietor is doing this in response to a column by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who wrote the other day that it was hard for Patriots Nation to get fired up to play, ahem, Atlanta. Mainly this is because Atlanta is notorious for not being a great pro sports town.
Which, sorry, Gainesvillians, is actually true.
Atlanta has never had the rep for being a rabid pro sports town, seeing how they were lukewarm even about the Braves back in the '90s, when the Bravos were winning their division every year and going to the World Series every other year. As for the Falcons and Hawks, Atlanta fans get something of a pass considering most years there hasn't been much about the Falcons and Hawks to get excited about.
The former always seemed to fail spectacularly when the Big Spotlight went on. The latter, until the last couple of years, were simply an NBA face in the crowd that yearly reminded you how long it's been since Dominique Wilkins played for them.
So Shaughnessy was pretty much on point. And there'll be no Sam Adams sold in a certain Gainesville, Ga., gas station. And the Blob eagerly awaits some gas station in Massachusetts to retaliate.
Sorry, folks. No pork rinds until after the Super Bowl.
("Thank God!" you're saying)
At any rate, today's Moment takes us to a gas station in Gainesville, Georgia, where the proprietor has declared he will stop selling Sam Adams beer until after the Super Bowl. This of course begs the question of how much Sam Adams they actually sell anyway in Gainesville, a town of 35,000 souls northeast of Atlanta. But never mind that.
What's interesting here is the proprietor is doing this in response to a column by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who wrote the other day that it was hard for Patriots Nation to get fired up to play, ahem, Atlanta. Mainly this is because Atlanta is notorious for not being a great pro sports town.
Which, sorry, Gainesvillians, is actually true.
Atlanta has never had the rep for being a rabid pro sports town, seeing how they were lukewarm even about the Braves back in the '90s, when the Bravos were winning their division every year and going to the World Series every other year. As for the Falcons and Hawks, Atlanta fans get something of a pass considering most years there hasn't been much about the Falcons and Hawks to get excited about.
The former always seemed to fail spectacularly when the Big Spotlight went on. The latter, until the last couple of years, were simply an NBA face in the crowd that yearly reminded you how long it's been since Dominique Wilkins played for them.
So Shaughnessy was pretty much on point. And there'll be no Sam Adams sold in a certain Gainesville, Ga., gas station. And the Blob eagerly awaits some gas station in Massachusetts to retaliate.
Sorry, folks. No pork rinds until after the Super Bowl.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Unpaid help alert
So here is what is happening now in the groves of academe, where big-ticket college football is not at all incompatible with the mission of the universities it represents, oh, no, not at all ...
The University of Michigan just became the nation's first public institution to pay three assistant football coaches $1 million a year each.
Three assistant coaches.
One million each.
Meanwhile, the two coordinators, defensive coordinator Don Brown and offensive coordinator Tim Drevno, have been retained with contracts worth more than $10 million over the next five years. That's north of $2 million a year, if my math's right.
And as for the players who make it possible for those coaches to pull down such hefty paychecks, and who serve as unpaid human billboards for their universities' chunky apparel deals, and who enrich their athletic departments by winning the games and putting their programs in high-dollar bowls?
They're still constrained by the old fiction that constrains no one else: That this is an amateur enterprise fueled by earnest scholar-athletes who needn't worry their pretty little heads about how much their schools are making off their uncompensated labors. After all, they're getting a free education!
(Which is only half-true itself much of the time, as it turns out. But never mind that)
No wonder some of the unpaid help tried to unionize not long ago. No wonder "scholar-athletes" in a position to do so choose money over "loyalty" and "team" by sitting out bowl games in preparation for the draft. Like everyone else in this shabby theater of the absurd, they're just maximizing their future earning power.
Which means college did teach them something after all.
The University of Michigan just became the nation's first public institution to pay three assistant football coaches $1 million a year each.
Three assistant coaches.
One million each.
Meanwhile, the two coordinators, defensive coordinator Don Brown and offensive coordinator Tim Drevno, have been retained with contracts worth more than $10 million over the next five years. That's north of $2 million a year, if my math's right.
And as for the players who make it possible for those coaches to pull down such hefty paychecks, and who serve as unpaid human billboards for their universities' chunky apparel deals, and who enrich their athletic departments by winning the games and putting their programs in high-dollar bowls?
They're still constrained by the old fiction that constrains no one else: That this is an amateur enterprise fueled by earnest scholar-athletes who needn't worry their pretty little heads about how much their schools are making off their uncompensated labors. After all, they're getting a free education!
(Which is only half-true itself much of the time, as it turns out. But never mind that)
No wonder some of the unpaid help tried to unionize not long ago. No wonder "scholar-athletes" in a position to do so choose money over "loyalty" and "team" by sitting out bowl games in preparation for the draft. Like everyone else in this shabby theater of the absurd, they're just maximizing their future earning power.
Which means college did teach them something after all.
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