North Dallas farewell

 And now the weird part, as Seth Maxwell would say.

Seth Maxwell is dead.

Rather, the man who breathed life into him, Mac Davis, is dead. He passed this week at 78 following heart surgery, and this is hard stuff to take on top of all the other hard stuff 2020 has sent down the river to us, being the year of thumbscrews and eyeball-gouging and bastard plagues and all.

Most people know Davis as the country singer/songwriter who wrote "In The Ghetto" for Elvis and a bunch of other songs for himself, but here in the Blobiverse he'll forever be known as the quarterback of the North Dallas Bulls, Seth Maxwell. That's who he played opposite Nick Nolte in "North Dallas Forty," which might not be the best football movie ever made but sure doesn't have to stand in the line very long.

It's always been the Blob's favorite because of the way it accurately portrays professional football players as disposable parts in a corporate threshing machine, and also because it's got a pile of great lines. And a lot of those belong to Seth Maxwell, who is both quarterback and gridiron Buddha.

"You had better learn how to play the game, and I don't mean just the game of football," he tells Nolte's buck-the-system character, Phil Elliott, at one point.

Of course, Elliott never does and winds up getting kicked out of the league for essentially being too much a square peg in a round hole. And then says as much to Football Buddha at the end of the film.

"They want too much," Elliott says.

"Too much ain't enough. Not for them," Football Buddha replies.

Forty-one years ago Mac Davis' character said that. Still just as true today.

RIP, Seth Maxwell.

Debatable

Decided not to watch Churchill and Gladstone last night, on account of I like my TV and wasn't  ready to fling my shoe through it yet.  But I heard there were some deep-concept policy exchanges, and Churchill and Gladstone didn't actually start throwing poo at each other, so that was good.

Although someone really needs to tell me where I can get a "Will you shut up, man?" bumper sticker.

And maybe one that references Churchill saying he saved Big Ten football, while you're at it.

Yes, that's right, America. President Donald J. "Flea Flicker" Trump gave the people Ohio State-Northwestern all by his lonesome. He saved Indiana's season and Purdue's season and Michigan's season and even Nebraska's season. He even saved Rutgers' season, though God knows why.

Anyway, it was good ol' Flea Flicker who did all that, with his magical deal-making skills. The players' parents raising a ruckus and the players themselves banding together unnervingly union-like and Nebraska's players dropping a cascade of lawsuits on the Big Ten didn't have a thing to do with it.

It was Flea Flicker and Flea Flicker alone. Just like it was Flea Flicker who saved us all from the pandemic and used his trusty rake to keep the West Coast from burning up and wants to keep us all safe from the Godless Antifa Democrats and scary brown and black people, and also from voting by mail.

Yeesh. I am so glad I didn't watch that.  The Big Ten brag alone would have caused my head to explode like all those guys in "Scanners."

And my TV would have been toast.

Instead, it's just fine this morning.

Well. Except for the way it weirdly keeps saying "Thank you for watching 'Hidden Figures' last night."

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 3

And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the quietly subversive Blob feature of which critics have said "Ha! Antifa! Found you!", and also "You can't fool America with your quiet subversion, you vile infiltrator from the Anarchist Jurisdictions!":

1. Did that guy on TV just call Patrick Mahomes "Pat"? Anarchist!

2. You think Russell Wilson could be this perfect if he weren't a vile infiltrator?

3. Speaking of infiltrators, the not-especially-3-0ish 3-0 Chicago Bears.

4. Speaking of the 3-0 Chicago Bears, Falcons head coach Dan Quinn.

5. Nick Foles thanks you for giving a brother's job status a boost.

6. Speaking of Dan Quinn, Texans coach Bill O'Brien. Also Eagles coach Doug Pederson. Also Jets coach Adam Gase.  Also that guy who coaches the 0-3 Vikings, what's-his-name, Mike Zimmer.

7. Aka, this week's cast of The Walking Dead.

8. "Ha! Not me yet, beeotches!" (Lions coach Matt Patricia, after knocking off the Cardinals on the road)

9. Speaking one last time of Dan Quinn, if you gave his Falcons a 25-mile head start in a marathon, where would they finish?

10. A) Second. B) Third. C) Behind Nick Foles.

The NBA Finals, or something

 Timeout now for a few words about the NBA 2020 Coda/2021 Preview Finals Or Whatever, which will pit the Miami Heat against LeBron James and Anthony Davis.

Doesn't seem like a fair fight, a whole team against two guys. But nobody can still handle LeBron even at his advanced age, and A.D. is pretty much unstoppable anywhere on the floor, so mayb--

I'm sorry. What was that?

Oh, right, it's not just LeBron and A.D. vs. the Heat. It's the Los Angeles Lakers against the Heat, even if you'd be excused for thinking of the Lakers as LeBron, A.D. and Them Others.

Conventional wisdom probably says Them Others will get rings because of LeBron and A.D., but I wouldn't put the whole wad down on CW. This Heat team is exactly that, a team, and they can hurt you anywhere on the floor you want to play, and if you start thinking they're just Jimmy Butler everywhere and Bam Adebayo defending the rim, they'll bring a Tyler Herro off the bench to light you up from the arc.

Herro did just that to the Celtics in Game 4, when the 20-year-old shooting guard came off the bench to score 37 points and put Boston down three-games-to-one in the Eastern Conference finals. So the Heat have that going for them and Jae Crowder and Andre Iguodala and Goran Dragic and an all-for-one, one-for-all locker room culture -- plus a head coach, Erik Spoelstra, who has never gotten his due in the Blob's humble opinion.

I don't know if all that's enough to keep LeBron's mitts off his fourth title. But I sure wouldn't sleep on 'em at this point.

Your weekend media highlights

 The Cubs just wrapped their third division title in the last five seasons, But you know they say about the Cubs. No matter how consistently successful they are, vestiges of Essential Cubness still cling to them like barnacles on a whaler.

And so we come to the first of our Weekend Media Highlights, in which athletes either channel ghostly figures from the past or reveal that no matter how old they get, they'll always be tantrum-y toddlers who throw their Cheerios on the floor when things don't go their way.

First, the former, which involves Cubs stalwart Kris Bryant and a long-ago Cubs manager named Lee Elia.

Elia became immortal for his profanity-laced trashing of Cubs fans after a game in 1983 in which the fans had booed his Cubs. Bryant performed a less-expansive homage, sort of, when asked what he thought of criticism.

“I don’t give a s***,” Bryant said. “I really don’t. That’s a good answer. I’m over it. Sometimes I go out there and go 4-for-4 and it’s not good enough for some people so I DON'T GIVE A S***."

Awesome. Didn't have the nuclear meltdown qualities of Elia's rant, nor its poetic cadence of the repetitive "My (bleepin') ass" with which Elia punctuated his, um, thoughts about Cubs fans. But it was a good effort nonetheless.

Equally good was Kyle Busch's performance after the NASCAR race the other night, 

He's been petulant even for him most of this season, but Saturday night he got into the back of lapped traffic due to spotter mixup, and he wasn't happy about it. So he took it out on the media afterwards with a succession of pouty one-word non-answers punctuated with the admission that he was only talking to them because he'd get fined if he didn't.

In other words, it was Kyle Busch being his essential jackwagon Kyle Busch self. Here's the clip.

In these profoundly altered times, it's good to know some things never change.

One Saturday in the fall

Okey-dokey, class, one last time: Why does Professor Blob regard Saturdays in the fall to be much, much more fun than Sundays in the fall?

Because a mad scientist named Mike Leach, who may or may not be completely crazy, can take Mississippi State into Baton Rouge and introduce to the SEC his sacrilegious notions about football by knocking off defending national champion LSU.

Because the Nos. 3 and 6 teams in the nation can lose on the same day, and the No. 8 team can almost lose, and the No. 4 team has to change quarterbacks on account of it was losing to unranked Arkansas.

Because heartbreak looks like Texas Tech leading the aforementioned No. 8 team, Texas, by 15 points with 3:40 to play, only to have Texas QB Sam Ehinger channel Texas quarterbacking legend James Street to pull it out for Texas in overtime.

In order words: Professor Blob regards Saturdays in the fall to be much more fun than Sundays because the empirical evidence says so.

After all, you're not gonna see the mix of heroics and pain in a Dolphins-Jets clash like you saw in Lubbock, Texas, yesterday, where it was 100 degrees and Tech looked like a lock after the splendidly named SaRodorick Thompson raced 75 yards to Six City with 3:40 left.

That made it 56-41 and Texas was taking on water in alarming fashion, but it still had Ehinger. He started throwing and Joshua Moore and Brennan Eagles started catching, and Texas recovered an onside kick in there somewhere. And the Horns hooked 'em.

That was also about the same time No. 3 Oklahoma was blowing a three-touchdown lead in Norman and losing to Kansas State, 38-35. This despite the dazzlement of OU freshman Spencer Rattler, who threw for 387 yards and four touchdowns and was at times as awesome as his name, which is exactly the sort of name a big-deal college quarterback ought to have.

If he was named John Smith you wouldn't have been nearly as impressed. Trust me on this.

Trust me, too, that Mike Leach is the most interesting possibly deranged individual in college football. He has this weird pirate fetish, and he's prone to bizarre soliloquies at times, and he plays this loony offense that throws the football a promiscuous amount of the time.  And yesterday he took it into Baton Rouge and beat LSU with it.

Stacked up 44 points, Leach's boys did, which might be about average for Mississippi State this year. The Bulldogs quarterback, a grad transfer with the suitably quarterback-y name of  K.J. Costello, threw the ball 60 times and shattered the SEC record for passing yards right out of the chute. Threw for 623 yards and five touchdowns and left the LSUs gasping for air. 

Remember when people said you can only do that in Big 12, where defense is just a rumor?

Well. Hmm. Costello threw for five touchdowns, and Florida quarterback Kyle Trask threw for six in a win at Ole Miss in which the teams combined for 86 points, and I guess the SEC is just the Big 12 with a snootier rep now.

Of course, it now also has Mike Leach.

And can the Dolphins or Jets say that?

The Stanley Cuppa This Ain't Right

 Sometimes the weirdness just blindsides you, like reality's purse-snatcher or that scene in "The Usual Suspects" where Keyser Soze stops limping. 

You think you've got this new usual figured out. You think it seems perfectly normal to you now that the Indianapolis 500 is in August and the Kentucky Derby is in September and the NBA, NHL, MLB and college and pro football are all going on at the same time ...

And then it happens.

Then you see that the Tampa Bay Lightning, up three-games-to-one in the Stanley Cup Final, could be parading around the ice with Lord Stanley's hardware tonight.

You say it like that, of course, and it doesn't seem all that weird. But say it like this:

A hockey team from Florida is about to beat a hockey team from Texas for the Stanley Cup.

In Edmonton, Alberta, 2,000 miles away from either Tampa or Dallas.

In an empty building.

On September 26.

Now that is weird, boys and girls.

Also weird: The Reds, Padres and Marlins have all clinched spots in baseball's postseason. 

The Reds haven't seen the postseason in eight years. The Padres haven't in 22, or before Fernando Tatis Jr. was born. And the Marlins lost 105 games just last season.

Of course, the Fish are in only because MLB is letting everybody and his brother into the playoffs now, which is weird in itself. Eight teams in both the AL and NL will make the playoffs. If the poobahs had been any more lenient, even my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates might have made the playoffs. 

Well, OK. So the Cruds were never going to be there.

But you take my point.

Point is, Sportsball World gets more bizarre every day. And you really can't predict when its bizarreness is going to hit you. About all you can do is follow the lead of Emperor Joseph in "Amadeus," whose standard way of ending a conversation (particularly a contentious one) was to say "Well. There it is."

So when Weber State winds up playing Army for the national title in the Our Boys Didn't Get Sick Bowl, you'll know what to say.

Well. There it is.