Rinse. Repeat.

 Stop me if you've heard this before ...

The Indianapolis Colts handed the Pittsburgh Steelers their first ding of the season yesterday, and the backup quarterback was the guy who delivered it.

That's because the starting quarterback, and presumptive Future Of The Franchise, got hurt. Again.

Once more Anthony Richardson took off running, and when he got tackled he came up lame. Landed hard on his hip, it seems. Limped off the field. Later came running back onto the sideline looking as good as new, went back in the game ...

And the Colts brain trust (apparently missing the "brain" part) immediately dialed up another designed run for him.

At the end of which he got blown up by the Steelers' Minkah Fitzpatrick -- who, depending on one's perspective, is either a dirty-ass player or just a dude who hits really hard.

In any case, that was the end of Richardson's day. He got up hurt again, and now it remains to be seen if his hip is just your standard NFL owie, or something more serious.

And on we go, on we go, down this Yellow Nicked Road. Richardson has now started eight games in his young NFL career, and he's finished just half of them. He played five games last year and then was gone for the season with a shoulder injury. This year he made it all the way to game four before having to hobble off early. Seventy-five-year-old Joe Flacco, played by Gardner Minshew in the original version of this tale, brought the Colts home.

"Oh, come on! " you're saying now. "Joe Flacco's not 75! Why, he's not eligible for Social Security for a couple more years at least!"

OK, so I misspoke. Flacco is 75 only in NFL years; chronologically, he's a mere pup of 39. And that's aside from the point anyway.

The point being, maybe it's time now to start wondering if Anthony Richardson is a latter-day version of Robert Griffin III.

Griffin, you might recall, had a hell of a rookie season for the Washington Football Team, throwing for 3,200 yards and 20 touchdowns and completing 65.6 percent of his throws. Then he took off on a scamper one day and got hurt.

Then he got hurt again.

Then he got hurt again, and kept on getting hurt.

By the time he was 30, he was a walking trauma unit, and out of the league. After starting 28 games and throwing 36 touchdown passes in his first two seasons, he started just 14 and threw just seven sixes in the five years that followed.

Now, this is not to say AR is headed down a similar path, but the dreaded tag of "injury-prone" is waiting just offstage, and it has its lines ready. Maybe it's just bad luck, this early spate of injuries. Or maybe it just comes with the territory when your quarterback is built like a linebacker and enjoys delivering a blow like one.

Or how about this: Maybe, when he's no longer 22 with the aura of invincibility that comes with that, he'll learn to pick his spots, protect himself, and not try to throw the ball through a brick wall every time just because he has a cannon for an arm.

Maybe.

Then again, maybe he really is injury-prone. And what we're getting now is just what we'll get from him for as long as he lasts.

Rinse, repeat: Today in nightmare scenarios if you're the Colts.

Groundbreakers

 "We haven't been 5-0, evidently, for 57 years. That's a pretty long time, isn't it?"

-- IU football coach Curt Cignetti

Sure is, Coach Cig. Want to know how long?

Fifty-seven years ago, Vietnam wasn't a movie.

Fifty-seven years ago, lots of people had heard of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, but no one had heard of James Earl Ray or Sirhan Sirhan.

Fifty-seven years ago, National Guardsmen weren't yet shooting college students ... and the President of the United States was just starting to familiarize himself with "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" ... and in Bloomington, In., something weird and wonderful was going on.

Indiana University's football team was actually winning games.

A snowy-headed man named John Pont was the coach, and the stars were a trio of sophomores named Harry Gonso and Jade Butcher and John Isenbarger, and every week they managed beat someone they probably had no business beating. Isenbarger, the halfback and punter, kept running for it on fourth down and kept failing to make it. Gonso threw and Butcher caught. Guys named Terry Cole and Doug Crusan and Al Gage made occasional appearances.

The Hoosiers went 9-2 that year and played in their only Rose Bowl game, and damned if anyone could figure out how. They squeaked by Kentucky 12-10 and Kansas 18-15 and Iowa 21-17. Survived 27-20 at Michigan and 14-13 at Michigan State, and held off Wisconsin at home, 14-9. Finally, they were ranked No. 4 and No. 3 Purdue came in to what was then called Seventeenth Street Stadium, and Indiana won the Old Oaken Bucket 19-14 because Purdue kept fumbling in the red zone.

Now?

Now it's 57 years later, and Curt Cignetti, who was six years old then, is 63 now. And the 5-0 team he's put together is by all available evidence a heck of a lot better than the 1967 team.

Yesterday they got Maryland down in Memorial Stadium and whipped the Terrapins 42-28 despite turning it over four times. Quarterback Kurtis Rourke threw for 359 yards and three scores, and the IU defense held  Maryland to one touchdown across the last quarter-and-a-half, and the Hoosiers went over 40 points for the fourth time in five games.

Previously, they paved Western Illinois 77-3 and ball-peened UCLA 42-13 and laminated Charlotte 52-14. And next week?

Next week they travel to Northwestern, which is 2-2 and 0-1 in the conference. Another winnable game, you would think, and a 6-0 start if so.

Shhhh. That sound you just heard, softly for now, is the ground breaking.

Milestoned

 The Chicago What Sox lost their 121st game yesterday, the Detroit Tigers beating them 4-1 to qualify for the playoffs for the first time in 10 years. The Tigers, unlike the Sox, have been tearing it up lately, going 31-11 since the 10th of August. They've also won six in a row and 10 of their last 11.

So there it is, boys and girls: Your yin and yang for today. Or perhaps more accurately, your yin and your yuck.

The yuck, of course, is the What Sox, who now have officially lost more games than anyone since 1899. That was the year the Cleveland Spiders went 20-134, a record for spectacularly crummy baseball that stands to this day.

No one has seen the like of it since, not even the 1962 New York Mets, who went 40-120. They were so legendarily wretched some of their players became household names simply for being, well, legendarily wretched. 

The names were Hot Rod Kanehl and Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Choo-Choo Coleman and Charlie Neal. They were Elio Chacon and Harry Chiti and Roger Craig -- who was the Mets winningest pitcher, even though he led the majors in losses (24) and was second in home runs given up (35).

Sixty-two years later, here are the What Sox. It's too soon to tell if any of their players will be as memorable as Hot Rod or Marvelous Marv, but they're even more memorably crummy. So they've got that not going for them.

This is a team, remember, that lost 20 straight games at one point. That's so bad they're not only 43 games out of next-to-last in their division, they're 21 games behind the next-worst team in the majors, the Miami Marlins. That's so bad if they lose today and tomorrow, they'll finish with 39 wins, which works out to six per month.

Six Ws per month! Now that is some epic fail right there.

If there's any justice in the world, or at least in baseball, it will be the CEO of this mess, Jerry Reinsdorf, who becomes the Hot Rod or Marvelous Marv of the '24 What Sox. In the same way Marvelous Marv is remembered for once being called out on a home-run trot because he failed to touch either first or second base, Reinsdorf should go down in history not only for presiding over the worst MLB team since the 1800s, but for trying to get the city of Chicago to build him a new ballpark at the same time.

Epic fail meets epic gall, in other words. Long may the infamy live.

A's minus

 Forty-six thousand and change saw the Oakland A's off to Sacramento/Las Vegas yesterday, and it was some wave goodbye. Kelly-green everywhere. Groundskeepers patiently scooping up the ballpark dirt and filling fans' empty pop bottles and plastic cups. Memories and more memories running loose on a sun-washed northern California day.

Heck, the A's even won their last game in Oakland, beating the Texas Rangers 3-2. How about that?

How about legendary A's Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson throwing out the first pitches, and Barry Zito singing the national anthem? How about fans sitting in traffic for five hours waiting to get into the Oakland Coliseum one last time? How about one last shot at carpetbagging owner John Fisher -- a banner beyond the left-field wall that read "It's Not Us, It's You"?

Because it's not them, understand. It almost never is.

You can argue that a franchise -- Connie Mack's franchise -- that moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland is just doing what it does again. But that's ignoring a lot.

 It's ignoring the 57 years the A's played in Oakland. It's ignoring 57 years of fathers passing on their A's fandom to their sons, and their sons passing it on to their sons.

It's ignoring Reggie and Catfish and Sal Bando and Joe Rudi. Rollie Fingers and his Snidely Whiplash 'stache. Vida Blue and Bert Campaneris and Fingers, A's manager Dick Williams and catcher Gene Tenace suckering Johnny Bench into a strikeout in Game 3 of the 1972 World Series.

That was the first of three straight World Series titles for the A's, and then Charlie Finley all but liquidated the club. A half-century later Fisher essentially liquidated Oakland, deciding to move the A's (after a layover in poor Sacramento) to a city so unenthused by their coming even the mayor of Vegas begged Fisher to find a way to keep the team in Oakland.

He didn't, of course. He let the Coliseum rot, he let the team go to hell, and finally, in this last week of the Oakland A's existence, he sent out a  letter that was a masterwork of disingenuousness, thanking the fans he crapped on for their support and shedding crocodile tears over having to leave Oakland.

Rarely has there been such a load of sheer horse pucky. Or gall.

Rarely has baseball been more tone-deaf to the history it clings to so tenaciously, nor to its own longstanding principles.

Once upon a time, remember, baseball banned eight Chicago White Sox for life for consorting with gamblers, even though some of the eight really didn't. And once upon a time it banned Pete Rose for life for betting on his own team when he was managing the Reds.

Now there are online betting kiosks outside major-league ballparks, and MLB is a couple seasons away from officially  welcoming the capital of American wagering into the family.

Somewhere Joe Jackson and Connie Mack weep.

Co-opted

 The Indiana Fever lost to the Connecticut Sun again last night, which means the Fever's season is over, which means Caitlin Clark's season is over. Now maybe everyone can stop using her as a fulcrum for their various agendas/theories/twisted worldviews.

Clark never asked to be co-opted like that, never asked to be held up as some sort of persecuted martyr to reverse racism. That this was a construct as phony as a three-dollar bill didn't matter. The goal was to absolve those who advanced it, even as they engaged in their usual look-at-those-black-animals-picking-on-our-Caitlin narrative. 

All of that got out in the open again after the first playoff game between the Sun and the Fever, when the Sun's Dijonai Carrington, who is black, lunged to block a Clark pass and poked her in the eye on the follow-through. The not-racist racists immediately swore Carrington did it on purpose ("Look at that black animal deliberately poking Clark in the eye!") and flooded social media with the usual gusher of vileness. Some of them even showed up for Game 2 to mock Carrington in person.

This despite the fact Clark herself, once again the only grownup in the room, said the eye-poke was not intentional and frankly no big deal.

This despite the fact you have to slow the video waaay down to even halfway make it look intentional.

In any event, here Clark was again, a lightning rod for knuckle-dragging lowlifes indulging all the worst instincts in American society. For someone who's only ever wanted to play basketball -- and who did it amazingly, even stunningly, well in her record-shattering rookie season in the WNBA -- it was a disgusting way for her season to end.

And when the evening was done, pretty much everyone said as much.

"In my 11-year career, I've never experienced the racial comments from the Indiana Fever fan base. It's unacceptable, honestly," the Sun's Alyssa Thomas said. "There's no place for it. We've been professional throughout the whole entire thing, but I've never been called the things I've been called on social media.

"Basketball is headed in a great direction, but we don't want fans that are just going to degrade us and call us racial names ... We don't want to go to work every day and have social media blown up over things like that. It's uncalled for."

Amen, said Fever coach Christy Sides.

"It's a lot of hurtful, hateful speech out there that's happening, and it's unacceptable," she said.

Indeed.

What's been wrought

Watched an old ESPN doc called "Pony Excess" the other day, and, man, it was refreshing. It was about the Wild West days at SMU in the 1980s, when the good ol' boy alums bought themselves a juggernaut football team with cars and cash and what-not, and even a Texas governor (Bill Clements) was complicit in the deal.

Eventually, because SMU wouldn't stop paying its players, the NCAA slapped the school with the only death penalty it's ever handed down. 

So what was refreshing about all that?

Even the cheaters had lines they wouldn't cross then.

One of 'em was, if you promised to pay a kid, you paid the kid -- which was how SMU wound up getting the death penalty, because when the NCAA told them to stop paying kids, they still felt duty-bound to honor their existing contracts. So they kept paying 'em, and the NCAA dropped Thor's hammer on 'em.

The other thing was, if you bought a kid, the kid tended to stay bought.

Well ... not anymore, apparently.

See, buying players is perfectly above-board now -- and let's face it, that's what the NIL structure amounts to -- but because the NCAA completely botched the NIL rollout, the Wild West is even Wilder than it was in the under-the-table days. Which is to say, there are no rules whatsoever, and therefore no lines that can't be crossed.

Enter Matthew Sluka, who's quarterbacking UNLV so well the Rebels are off to a 3-0 start.

Make that, was quarterbacking UNLV so well.

Sluka, see, announced this week he won't play another down for UNLV this season. A fifth-year senior, he's going to redshirt instead and then (presumably) transfer portal himself to another sucker, er, school to play next year. And it's apparently because UNLV didn't come through with the NIL money it promised when Sluka transferred there from his last school.

Which was FCS school Holy Cross, where in four years he finished first in career pass efficiency, second in career rushing yards (3,583), second in career rushing touchdowns (38), fifth in career passing yards (5,916) and fifth in career touchdown passes (59).

The kid's damn good, in other words. Good enough that in UNLV's 3-0 start, he's thrown for 318 yards and six TDs and run for 286 yards and another score.

But now he's quitting, right in the middle of the season. And if want to ask "What kind of person quits on his teammates in the middle of a season because he thinks he's not getting his?", you'd be absolutely correct to do so.

Except.

Except the unregulated transfer portal and NIL has turned young men like Matthew Sluka into nothing but studs for hire, and studs for hire by definition are loyal only to themselves. No pay; no play. That's how the marketplace works, and college football is nothing but a marketplace now.

And as for teammates ... 

Really? Does a kid who jumps from one school to the next two or three times even think in those terms? Does he even stick around long enough to learn all his "teammates'" names?

I'd bet cash money right now there are players on the UNLV roster Sluka doesn't know from Adam, and never will. And I rarely bet cash money on anything.

Understand, this is not to single out Sluka in particular or any kid looking for the main chance these days. True, college athletics are a purely mercenary enterprise for them, but they've been a mercenary enterprise for a long time. You can't very well ding Matthew Sluka, after all, if you're not also willing to ding Brian Kelly or Lincoln Riley or virtually any other marquee coach these days.

Like Sluka, they, too, are mercenaries. They, too, prioritize their own interests. And, yes, they, too, quit on their teams in pursuit of greener pastures for themselves.

Young people learn from their elders, surprise, surprise. And now they're utterly free to follow their lead and sell themselves to the highest bidder.

Pardon me if I miss the days when they had to do that on the sly. Seemed cleaner, somehow.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 3

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the stroll-down-memory-lane Blob feature of which critics have said "I wish this was a memory," and also "Remember when the internet was a force for good and crap like this?":

1. "Remember when we were supposed to be good?" (Joe Burrow, after his Bengals fell to 0-3 with a loss to Jayden Daniels and the Washington Commanders -- aka, "Yet another home loss that shouldn't have have been a home loss.")

2. "Remember when people said Caleb Williams was the best quarterback in the 2024 draft?" (Jayden Daniels)

3. In other news, the Saints!

4. Put their Super Bowl reservations on hold after the Eagles held them to 12 points and beat them in New Orleans, 15-12.

5. "Remember when we scored, like, nine gazillion points against the Panthers and Cowboys? Good times, man. Gooood times." (The Saints)

6. "Remember when this was OUR year? Again?" (The Cowboys after losing at home to the Ravens to drop to 1-2)

7. "Remember when I played defense and gave up 36 points to the crummy Panthers?" (Raiders QB Gardner Minshew, whom head coach Antonio Pierce hinted might be benched because the Raiders defense gave up 36 points to the Panthers in a 36-22 loss.)

8. "Remember when everyone said I was terrible and the Bears had to move on from me? Good times, man. Gooood times." (Justin Fields, after quarterbacking the 3-0 Steelers to another win)

9. "Remember when everyone said I was a-maaaazing?" (Texans QB C.J. Stroud, after the Vikings warped the Texans 34-7)

10. "Remember when everyone said I was NOT a-maaaazing?" (Vikings QB Sam Darnold, who threw four touchdown passes as Minnesota stayed unbeaten)