A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 12

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the pass-happy Blob feature of which critics have said "Enough passing! Run the ball, dummy!", and also "I'll turn this car right around if you don't start running the ball! I mean it!":

1. "Run the ball, dummy!" (Everyone in America who watched the Colts throw the ball 26 straight times in a 38-31 loss to the Buccaneers, while the best running back in the league, Jonathan Taylor, stood around going "Uh ... guys?")

2. "Hey, look! The Patriots won again!" (People in New England)

3. "Oh, no! The Patriots won again!" (People everywhere else)

4. Meanwhile, the Jets and Texans.

5. Played a football game the Jets won 21-14, in case you were wondering.

6. "We weren't." (People everywhere but Houston and New York)

7. "Can't anybody beat these guys? Rodgers has a busted toe, for God's sake!" (People everywhere but Green Bay)

8. "Hey, don't look at us!" (The once Super Bowl-bound Rams, 36-28 losers to the Pack)

9. "Dammit! Lincoln Riley beat me to it!" (Pete Carroll, after the Seahawks lost again, and Riley landed his old job at USC)

10. "Suck it, Petey!" (Lincoln Riley, presumably)

Irish 'byes

Welp. There goes Brian Kelly's statue.

Or, maybe not, given Notre Dame's irresistible urge to scratch the itch of its own history. Kelly stayed in South Bend for 12 years, long enough for N.D. to confer a certain permanence on the relationship, even if he is running off with some floozy from Baton Rouge. He stayed long enough to knock Rockne off his perch as Notre Dame's winningest coach, and to become the most successful Irish coach since Saint Lou of Holtz, and to get Notre Dame as close to another national title as a man was likely to get it.

Which goes to the relevant point here, as Kelly takes LSU's money and runs: Times have changed.

The landscape is all different now, less forgiving, more nakedly predatory. What passed for civilized behavior in college football, if such a thing existed, is impossibly quaint now, like cold bottles of milk left on your doorstep at dawn. 

Schools that used to honor a kid's commitment now keep recruiting him, if he's desirable enough. Conferences that used to honor one another's borders now routinely stage daylight raids across them, poaching lucrative programs who are all too willing to be poached, conference ties meaning less than nothing now. And it isn't just the starter schools coaches are leaving for the big money.

In the last two days, see, another earthquake again has jumbled the topography. Sportsball World had barely finished processing Lincoln Riley's revolutionary act -- Leaving one historically un-leaveable program for another? Who does that? -- when the news broke that it was happening again. 

Brian Kelly forsaking Notre Dame for LSU? What madness be this?

Rockne and Leahy and Ara and even Saint Lou never did this; in all the spangled history of football at Notre Dame, no coach ever left the Irish until he either lost too many games or got ground to dust by the job. Ditto Bud Wilkinson and Chuck Fairbanks and Barry Switzer at Oklahoma -- one of whom retired to try his hand at politics, the other two to give the NFL a whirl.

No one ever left Notre Dame or Oklahoma for some other school. The very idea was preposterous.

But Riley saw something at USC he couldn't achieve even at Oklahoma, and Kelly perhaps sees the same thing at LSU. Impossible to say, until he tells us, what exactly Kelly's motivation is, outside of the number of zeroes on a paycheck. But perhaps he figured he'd done as much as he was going to do in South Bend, and it was time, at 60, to take one last crack at the only thing he hasn't done.

Which is win a national title.

And which maybe he began to see as far back as 2012 was going to be a bridge too far at Notre Dame.

That's the year the Irish went 12-0 and came to the BCS championship game ranked No. 1, only to get curb-stomped by Alabama 42-14. Subsequent losses in the College Football Playoff -- 30-3 to Clemson in 2019 and 31-14 to Alabama last year -- perhaps signaled that Notre Dame had gained entrance once more to the elite, but not to THE elite.

Perhaps, after 12 years, Kelly realized that was as good as it was going to get. In any event, he's off to LSU, where the competition will be stiffer but the rewards -- LSU has won three national titles since Notre Dame won its last 32 years ago -- conceivably greater.

The SEC, after all, has produced the last two national champions, and four of the last six. 

Notre Dame?

Zero since 1989, when Tone Loc was still a thing.

And when the world was all different, in more ways than one.

A changing of address

 The big news out of college football Sunday was not that Indiana coach Tom Allen didn't even wait 24 hours before firing his offensive coordinator, Nick Sheridan, or that he wanted him gone so badly he's apparently paying some of the buyout from his own pocket.

No, the big news came out of Norman, Okla., where Oklahoma football coach Lincoln Riley decided to follow the Joads to California.*

(* - Cheap, lazy "Grapes of Wrath" reference)

Anyway, Riley, one of the rising young mega-coaches in college football, is going from Oklahoma to USC, which apparently is a seismic event that could potentially alter the entire landscape of the college game. OK, so that is not exactly what the interwhatsis was saying, but it was treating this like a  BIG HUGE DEAL. 

The Blob, of course, just sees this as another really rich guy changing addresses.

This assumes USC will throw money at Riley like confetti, which undoubtedly it will. The Trojans haven't really been the Trojans since Pete Carroll blew town, but there still is a certain amount of prestige that attaches to the program, and Riley likely will be compensated accordingly.

He also will get to live in sunny SoCal, and get to use that as a recruiting selling point, and maybe get to pal around with some movie stars. A few of them might even ditch their currently-chic UCLA gear for a throwback Marcus Allen or Anthony Davis or Reggie Bush jersey.

Those sorts of things aren't going to happen in Norman, which can't even say it's L.A. without the traffic. How do you compete when the best tout you've got is you're, I don't know, The Cooler Omaha?

Other than that, though, Riley-to-USC doesn't seem so much seismic to me as simply swapping one prestigious program for another used-to-be prestigious program (which, granted, rarely happens). Football-wise, it seems like a lateral move at best; you can say Riley will be able to land the choicest recruits in glittery L.A., but he was already doing that in decidedly un-glittery Norman. 

 Of course, if Riley can at least make USC competitive again, that demonstrably would be good for the college game. It loses some shine when USC becomes a semi-automatic W for, say, Notre Dame; page back through history, and you can still hear the thunder of all those epic collisions between USC and the Irish or USC and UCLA or USC and Michigan or Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.

Maybe Riley can restore some of that thunder. Or at least find a way to beat Oregon, the Pac-12's new USC. 

A big, huge deal that might not be. But big enough, surely.

 

Party crashers, Part Deux

Old Bo, he would have loved this business. The Big House, snow coming down all squall-y on an iron gray afternoon. Michigan vs. Ohio State. The Wolverines hitting the Buckeyes in the mouth like this were, say, 1970, and not 2021.

Beautiful stuff, if you were old Bo. You watched the Wolverines line up and fire off the line ... you watched Hassan Haskell take it straight through the Buckeyes' grill time after time ... and you knew a spectral Bo was in Jim Harbaugh's ear, saying "Here, dummy. THIS is how you beat Ohio State."

And so Michigan 42, Ohio State 29 -- first win over the Buckeyes in a decade, and the first win for Harbaugh against them in six tries. Apparently you really can't lose 'em all.

This one they won, finally, without bells, without whistles, without a lot of winking chrome or spinner hubcaps. No, sir. Michigan's stat line for this one was your daddy's sensible Buick: 297 rushing yards on 39 attempts, with Haskins lugging it 28 times for169 yards and five touchdowns. Haskins gashed the Buckeyes for six yards a tote; the Wolverines averaged a gluttonous 7.6 yards per rush as a team.

It doesn't get much more elemental than that. And it again reminded us what a wonderful, crazy thing college football is, because every week's a new page and what happened on the previous page regularly don't mean nuttin'.

I mean, how many of us geniuses out here were saying, after Ohio State turned Michigan State into a smoking crater last week, that it was going to be the Buckeyes and Georgia for the national title, no question about it?

("You?"  you're saying)

Well, yes. Me. Just the other day.

("Try yesterday," you're saying)

OK, so yesterday, then. When I wrote I didn't think the Buckeyes were "beatable by anyone but Georgia right now."

That sound you hear is 111,156 people in Michigan Stadium saying "Ahem."

And now it's Michigan vs. Iowa for the Big Ten title, and if the Wolverines win they're in the CFP. And Ohio State, with two losses, suddenly not only will not be playing Georgia in the national title game, they won't be in the playoff at all. 

Cincinnati will, if it beats Houston next week. Notre Dame -- 11-1 after putting away Stanford 45-14 last night -- might, if Oklahoma State loses to Baylor in the Big 12 title game and Alabama loses to Georgia in the SEC title game.

That would make both the Cowboys and the Crimson Tide two-loss teams. And considering the Crimson Tide almost became a two-loss team yesterday, rallying from 10 points down in the second half and needing four overtimes to beat Auburn in the Iron Bowl ...

No. The Blob will not go there. It will not make that mistake again, assuming one page holds the key to what happens on the next page.

Lesson learned.

Party crashers

 You know who the usual suspects really like right now, in college football? 

They like the Houston Cougars.

The Notre Dames and Oklahomas and Michigans and Oklahoma States, they're all about the Coogs. They're buying the gear and waving the pennants and saying please-please-please-please, Houston, beat Cincinnati next week in the American Athletic Conference championship. Laminate 'em, flambe 'em, beat 'em on a bank-shot field goal off the post, but just beat 'em. The how doesn't matter.

Cincinnati, you see, is unbeaten and un-liked by college football's old money, because they're crashing the Members Only party. They're that annoying guest who somehow got through the door and is underdressed and oh my God, look what he's doing now, Martha, he's eating the foie gras WITH HIS FINGERS! 

Plus he just won't leave.

No, sir. The Bearcats keep winning and keep hogging the fourth and final College Football Playoff spot, and the only way to evict them is for Houston to beat them next Saturday. Houston is pretty darn good itself, 10-1 and about to be 11-1 after the Coogs flatten 1-10 UConn today. It's whomped its A AC foes about as badly as Cincy has, and its only loss was to Texas Tech by 17. 

But it hasn't handed Notre Dame its only loss, like Cincy has, and it needed overtime to beat East Carolina while Cincy cruised past the Pirates 34-13 yesterday. So, there's that.

There's also this: The old money's chances to evict the party-crashers at this point are pretty much zero if what happens today likely happens.

What happens is Michigan (No. 5 in the CFP) will get beat again by Ohio State today -- I know, everyone's making this the Big Game of the season, but I don't think the Buckeyes are beatable by anyone but Georgia right now -- and that will take the Wolverines out of it. Notre Dame (No. 6), after it flattens Stanford tonight, will be finished at 11-1 and can only sit and wait.  And of course Oklahoma will do what Oklahoma does in its annual rivalry game with Oklahoma State, which is beat the Cowboys (No. 7) and knock them out of it.

This means if Cincinnati takes care of its business next week against Houston, it's in. It's hard to see any scenario where the committee jumps Notre Dame or Oklahoma over an unbeaten Cincinnati team without revealing that the whole system is as rigged as everyone thinks it is.

Especially if Alabama loses to either Auburn or Georgia and still stays in the club as a two-loss team.

Logic says that shouldn't be likely, which opens a spot for the Irish or the Sooners and keeps the Bearcats around. But logic and college football rarely run in the same social circles, so who knows. 

In the meantime, in South Bend and Ann Arbor and Stillwater and maybe Norman and Tuscaloosa, the watchword is this: Go Cougars.

Today's Rabbit Ears alert

 Look, I get it. You get old, you get cranky.

And so here the other night was the aging LeBron James, leader of the rest-home Lakers, going into full Get Off  My Lawn mode. In the middle of a Lakers win in Indianapolis, he called over the game officials to have a couple of fans in the courtside seats ejected because they were being big ol' pottymouths, which hurt LeBron's feelings.

Now, the Blob is generally a LeBron-friendly precinct. But ... for God's sake, LeBron.

One wonders how the man managed to find time to strap 39 on the Pacers that night, given his decorum-monitoring duties. It's not the first he's assigned such duties to himself, either; he also got some fans kicked out in Atlanta on another occasion.

Here's what the Blob thinks about that: Lebron, you need to put away the rabbit ears. It's not a good look.

And listen: This is not the Blob holding a brief for the fans here. Fans are frequently douchenozzles, particularly the entitled asshats who sit in the courtside seats. The more money you make, the more you think the sun hunkers down for the night on your hindparts, in a lot of cases. The bigger the bank account, the less some folks think the rules, or even behavioral norms, apply to them.

However.

However, someone with the appreciation for the game's history LeBron has should do some digging. 

If he does, he'll come across Reggie Miller, whose by play with celebrity Knicks taunter Spike Lee became legendary. Spike would say something; Reggie would bury another three and then make the choke sign at him. At no time did he ever consider having Spike ejected for saying hurtful stuff about him.

And if LeBron wants to go back further, perhaps he should travel to Fort Wayne in the 1950s, where the Pistons used to play in the old North Side gym and old ladies in the courtside seats used to stick opposing players with hatpins. As far as I know, none of the opponents demanded the old ladies be removed. They just considered it part of playing a game in Fort Wayne.

Imagine if someone today jabbed LeBron with a hatpin.

He'd have that someone arrested for assault, probably. Because, well, it ain't just the courtside fans who feel entitled these days. 

Defining success down

 I can't tell you how much the win means today to me.

-- Bears coach Matt Nagy

Well, sure. After all, the Bears did shake off all the "distractions" surrounding Nagy's job status to BEAT THE DEFENDING SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS.

Wait ... they didn't?

OK, so they shook off the distractions to BEAT THE DIVISION LEADERS.

Wait ... so that's a no, too?

OK, OK. So they, um, beat the Lions.

The 0-10-1 Lions.

The doomstruck Lions.

The snakebit, God Hates Us, Bleepity-Bleep It, How Many Times Do We Have To Get Beat On a Last-Second Field Goal Lions.

Because, yeah, it happened again on Thanksgiving Day, because, yeah, the Lions. They trailed 13-7, then they wandered downfield to score a touchdown (It's a Thanksgiving miracle!) and take a 14-13 lead.

And then, of course, as morning follows night, they lost (It's the same old crap!) when the Bears' Cairo Santos kicked a game-winning, 28-yard field goal as the clock hit zeroes.

In Nagyland, this counts as a momentous victory. 

In Nagyland, you can be worse than the only winless team in the league until the very last second, then WIN THE FREAKING SUPER BOWL because your kicker didn't fail on a chippie.

Aye-yi-yi. If this isn't an indictment of what a sorry franchise the Bears have become under Nagy's hand, what is?

Yeah, at 4-7 they're not as bad as the Lions or the Jaguars or the Jets, although maybe they are. Nagy rushed a rookie quarterback into the fray without the tools he needed to succeed, stubbornly provided him with an offense that didn't give him a chance to succeed, and brought a team to Detroit that hadn't won since the middle of October. But, hey, they beat the team everybody beats, so it's all good!

Right?

Um ... right?