The (late) winter of their discontent

 The best motorsport series in America launches its 2024 season today down in St. Petersburg, Fla., and, no, NASCAR fan, I don't want to hear "Yeah, but we still have more eyeballs," or "Yeah, but what about that finish in Atlanta?"

That finish in Atlanta was great. NASCAR is great, even if it's not what it was before the corporate money rolled in and Dale got killed and Jimmie and Jeff and Dale Jr. 'n' them retired.

And yet ...

And yet, the Blob is an IndyCar guy. The Blob has always been an IndyCar guy. So you're not gonna win this argument no matter how hard you try.

Even, mind you, as I acknowledge that IndyCar has been crapping where it eats for the last going-on-30-years. And continues to do so to this day.

Case in point: St. Pete this weekend.

Down there today, defending Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden sits on the pole and Felix Rosenqvist  sits next to him, and not far behind them sit Pato O'Ward and Colton Herta and Romain Grosjean and Marcus Ericsson. That's five different teams represented in the top six spots on the grid, from Penske to Andretti to McLaren to relative non-powers like Meyer Shank (Rosenqvist) and Juncos Hollinger (Grosjean).

Lurking a bit further back, meanwhile, are Alex Palou and Scott McLaughlin and the grand old men of IndyCar, Scott Dixon and Will Power.

The sport is healthy, in other words. It's as healthy and competitive as it's been since Tony George and CART staged their big greedfest showdown and blew it up 28 years ago. There's more talent on the grid now, much of it still young, than there's been since the early 1990s.

So why is everyone coming into the weekend pissing and moaning?

Michael Andretti started it off by complaining that the Penske conglomerate, which owns the series, wasn't spending the money to properly promote it, and if Roger Penske wasn't willing to do so he should sell the series. Juncos Hollinger co-owner Brad Hollinger then backed Michael's play, favorably comparing IndyCar's competitive product with Formula One's Max Verstappen/Red Bull Tournament of Roses parade.

"We have by far the best product, the racing is spectacular," Hollinger said in an Associated Press piece. "It's phenomenal. Just compare it to what's going on literally right now in Saudi Arabia (where Verstappen and Sergio Perez made it two 1-2 finishes in a row for Red Bull to start the F1 season) ..."

"Here you can have 15 to 20 guys fighting for the top position," Hollinger went on. "But the way it is packaged and promoted needs to be dramatically enhanced. And the way to do that is to get more money into the program."

None of this is new, of course, and predates Penske's ownership by years. IndyCar's marketing of IndyCar has been ham-handed since the Split, lowlighted by the time it tried to cash in on Danica Mania by making Danica Patrick, a one-time career IndyCar winner, the face of the sport.

It was hugely unfair to Patrick, and served only to alienate everyone else in IndyCar. Now everyone's pissed off again -- and once more it adds up to IndyCar not being able to get out of its own way.

That's because, while Andretti and Hollinger and whoever else might have a legit point about Penske's handling of the series, this weekend was not the time to bring it up. This weekend should have been about celebrating what IndyCar is, not griping about what it isn't. Yet the very people dinging the series leadership for not promoting the product better chose opening weekend to ... not promote the product better.

Instead they've spent their time publicly running it down, or at least running the leadership down. And this when, according to Penske Entertainment, merch sales are up 30 percent and attendance for St. Pete is expected to be the largest ever.

To be sure, there's a hint of self-satisfaction in that, and it perhaps lends credence to the criticism that the current leadership is a tad complacent. But how cotton-headed do you have to be to choose now to pick that fight?

Or to put it another way: Does IndyCar always have to IndyCar?

Cold discomfort

 I once watched two NFL teams wallow around in the mud for three hours.

It was Thanksgiving Day and 1968 and I was 13 years old, and end-of-the-world rain had turned the Detroit Lions' field into the world's largest tuna noodle casserole, minus the tuna. And the Lions and Eagles mucked around in it until the previously winless Eagles prevailed, sort of. 

The final score was 12-0. All the points came on four Sam Baker field goals. Although it might have been the Lions who kicked four field goals, because by the end of the game you literally couldn't tell the teams apart.

They were both dressed exactly the same: Liquified Mother Earth. Came in any color you liked as long as it was brown.

Anyway, it was horrible football. And it was glorious football. It was football exactly the way God and Knute Rockne 'n' them intended.

I bring this up because reports are coming out of a Missouri hospital that dozens of people have been treated for frostbite and at least a dozen had to have fingers or toes amputated because of a brutal cold snap in January. At least some of those treated were fans who attended the Kansas City Chiefs' playoff win on January 13, when the temperature was minus-4 and the wind chill was minus-27.

This has prompted scattered cries in some quarters for the NFL to do something about extreme-weather games -- although as long as the Great Monolith insists on scheduling its entire playoff schedule in the dead of winter, extreme weather will happen. That's why some NFL media is insisting every new NFL stadium from here on out should either be roofed or have a retractable roof.

The Blob's crotchety-old-man take on this is if that's the case, the NFL should stop calling it football and start calling it arenaball in the interests of truth in advertising.

The Blob's take is football, like baseball, is an outdoor game and it should be played outdoors, and if that means you wind up with a playoff game in minus-27 windchills, then shorten the season so you're not playing games in the dead of winter. But since the NFL is never going to do that -- hell, they just recently went to a 17-game regular season, and already they're lusting after an 18-game season -- then live with the consequences.

Yeah, I know. This sounds heartless given that no mere game should cost someone an extremity or two. But if you take the elements out of football, it's no longer football. It's just Patrick Mahomes and Brock Purdy pushing aside the furniture and spending a Sunday afternoon rough-housing in the living room.

Besides, you lose a big chunk of what makes football (or baseball, for that matter) memorable, if you take nature out of the equation. It's no accident that an inordinate number of the most memorable football games in history are memorable because of the conditions in which they were played..

Michigan and Ohio State playing in a blizzard in 1950. That Lions-Eagles Casserole Bowl. The Bengals and Chargers having it out in the cryogenic chamber that was Riverfront Stadium in January 1982, when the game-time temperature was minus-9 and the windchill was minus-59.

Coldest game in NFL history, that one was. Second-most iconic to the Ice Bowl in Green Bay six days after Christmas in 1967, when the game-time temperature was minus-13 and the Packers beat the Cowboys 21-17 on what was literally frozen tundra.

I don't know how many fans suffered frostbite at those two games, or if any fingers or toes were lost. I do know the fans dressed for the weather; in my memory, the stands in Lambeau Field were a vast sea of parka-ed up Michelin Men and ski masks. The only clue they were actually alive were the plumes of frosted breath that chuffed out of them like smoke from a power plant.

Conversely, I just saw a crowd shot from that Refrigerator Bowl in K.C. Lots of fans in Chiefs jerseys over several sweatshirts and stocking caps, bare faces hanging out beneath them. One guy in the photo wasn't even wearing gloves.

This is not to say people in Green Bay in 1967 were smarter than people in Kansas City are now. OK, maybe it does say that.

In any event, when Jim Cantore or whoever says it's so cold out there exposed skin will freeze in minutes, believe him. Unless you want Roger Goodell to swoop in and decree that Arrowhead Stadium be transformed into another charmless, sterile NFL living room.

 Mother Nature sold separately.

Those de-commit blues

 Poor old Mike Woodson. Guy just can't catch a break.

Here he is, after a season of fits and starts, finally getting his Indiana basketball team to resemble an actual basketball team, with the Hoosiers having won three straight, including two on the road. Xavier Johnson, back in the lineup, has been the catalyst Woody's been saying he was all along. Trey Galloway has become a real boy at point guard; Kel'el Ware and Malik Reneau are killing it on the low blocks; Mackenzie Mgbako is playing like the blue-chip recruit he was.

And what happens?

A day after absolutely dismantling an 18-win Minnesota team on the road, Woodson's lone prize recruit for next season de-commits.

That would be 6-7 Liam McNeeley from Montverde Academy, who Thursday reopened the floor to potential suitors. This happened a day after not only the Minnesota win, but the announcement that Woody would be back in the coach's chair next season.

You can speculate cause-and-effect between that news and McNeeley's de-commit if you like. Me, I'm wondering if the unending torrent of discontent from the chronically discontented fan base might have had something to do with it.

It's been a gusher of negativity all season from the Chronically Discontented, and truthfully a lot of it's been warranted. (Mea culpa: The Blob hasn't exactly been sunshine and roses on the subject of Woodson and IU buckets, either.) But when you've got long-time fans saying the team is trash, the coach is trash and they've stopped caring about IU basketball, why would you expect Liam McNeeley to care about it?

Just a theory, but I'm sticking it. Mainly because the irony of it would be so delicious.

As The Wrench Turns, Part Deux

 So the other day the Blob harrumphed at some length about the ongoing soap opera that is Formula One racing, in particular Formula One racing at its current dominant team, Red Bull.

Well, here's some exciting news, sportsball fans: There's a new episode out now!

In this chapter Red Bull, having "investigated' a female employee's allegations that team principal Christian Horner was sexually harassing her, not only cleared him but -- on the day before International Women's Day, no less -- decided to suspend his accuser for accusing him. 

Or, in so many words: How dare you accuse Christian, you lying trollope! You're suspended. backstabbing witch! Don't ever say anything about him again! And that goes for you, too, other women employees! Stay in your lane! Know and appreciate your place!

Ay-yi-yi. Do these people not have a public relations staff? Have they never heard of the concept of optics? And what does Max Verstappen think of all this?

Mercedes must be looking better and better to him.

To mention another rumor that's being floated by the drooling European media, busily stoking (inventing?) all the drama they can. They didn't particularly need any more help, but, gee, thanks, guys!

Stay tuned for our next episode.

Timeout for OT

 Liberty Center, In., is a humble little place that like a lot of humble little places used to be less humble and not quite as little, though it was never what you could call a thriving metropolis down there in Wells County. These days it's a four-way stop and a gas station/convenience store and the Methodist church and a weedy railroad crossing, and that's about it, that's all y'all.

Once upon a time, though, a high school stood where the church parking lot is now.

The teams that played in its tiny bandbox gym were called the Lions.

And one weekend in March -- 60 years ago this week, in fact -- the Liberty Center Lions made themselves immortal.

Went down to Marion, the Lions did, to play a regional game against the Swayzee Speedkings, themselves now long vanished. The Speedkings had a kid named Jack Saylor who did a lot of their heavy lifting; the Lions countered with a kid named Dick Harris. And that afternoon they played and played and played some more.

Eventually, Saylor and Swayzee prevailed. 

In nine overtimes.

That's still a record in the freighted history of  the Indiana high school basketball tournament, and it's why Liberty Center (and Swayzee) will forever be remembered though both schools were swallowed by consolidation decades ago. I know about it because I have family down that way; my mom grew up on a farm three miles south of Liberty and went to high school there, and a longtime family friend, Bruce Stanton, actually played in the nine-overtime game.

That's not why I'm bringing this up today, however.

I'm bringing it up because this week the young man who coached the Liberty Center Lions in that epic game passed, and God bless him.  His name was Richard Butt, and he went on to coach high school basketball in Indiana for years and years, including a good stretch of time at Leo High School here in Allen County. 

That he passed during regional week exactly 60 years after that regional week lends a symmetry to his life not often seen, a circularity that takes you from here to that long-ago afternoon in Marion and back again. If the end of a long and fruitful life can ever be described as somehow appropriate, Coach Butt dying at this particular time in this particular year fits the description.

I can't remember if I ever talked to Coach about that singular day -- surely I did, but time does cruel things to the memory -- but I know I talked to Stanton and several others who were there. It's how I know Dick Harris fouled out in the waning seconds of regulation, and after that whoever got the tip in overtime simply held the ball for one shot.

Shot; miss. Shot; miss. That's how it went as every nerve in the place was stretched thin and my granddad (or so family lore goes) kept leaving the gym and coming back because he couldn't stand the tension.

Finally, in the ninth OT, the staredown ended and Swayzee hit a couple of shots and that was it. It's unlikely there will ever be another game like it, especially if the forces pushing for a high school shot clock in Indiana get their way.

In the meantime, there's a wide spot in the road in Wells County that forever will be remembered in Indiana high school basketball history. As will the young coach who was there for it.

Rest well, Coach Butt. May you discover nine overtimes only seemed like eternity, and that the real thing is infinitely better.

The worm. Turned.

 (Well, maybe)

So, remember just a couple of weeks ago, when we were all wondering if this Indiana basketball team might actually lose the rest of its games, and if this Indiana basketball team lost the rest of its games, AD Scott Dolson might have to make the difficult decision to pink-slip favorite son Mike Woodson after just three seasons?

Ah, nostalgia.

Because last night Your Hoosiers won their third game in a row and second straight on the road, poleaxing an 18-win Minnesota team by 12 in ancient Williams Arena, and again doing all these things they hadn't been doing all season, like shooting the lights out (even from the 3-point line!) and distributing the basketball for points.

No, really. They did that.

Trey Galloway, for instance, who looks more and more like a real point guard every game now, dished 11 assists. Xavier Johnson dropped five more dimes and Anthony Leal four. Indiana as a team had 28 assists on 30 made baskets.

Oh, yeah, and Kel'el Ware put up another double-double (26 and 11), and he and Mackenie Mgbako (15 points) were a combined 5 of 7 from behind the arc, and Indiana was 5 of 8 total from Threeville, which is 62.5 percent, which is ridiculous.

Also, the Hoosiers shot 54.5 percent overall. Also, they were 5 of 7 from the stripe.

I don't know how much any of this had to do with reports that Mike Woodson would indeed be back in the coach's chair next season, even though no one with a working brain cell ever thought otherwise unless the Hoosiers lost out. 

Of course, they didn't. Of course, they look like a real basketball team, suddenly.

And, of course, this encourages the Blob to more and more think he might be right about what he wrote the other day, which is Indiana as it's currently playing could be this year's Penn State in the Big Ten Tournament a week hence.

A tough out, in other words. A dangerous lower seed the higher seeds might not want any part of if the Hoosiers show up on their line in the bracket.

Of course, this being Indiana, that "maybe" still applies.

Of course, even though it sure looks as if the worm has turned for Your Hoosiers, it might yet be an optical illusion.

Guess we'll, um, see.

Soap opera time!

 (Formula One edition)

(In which three-time reigning world champion Max Verstappen's Sports Dad From Hell, Jos, says Red Bull team principal Christian Horner should step down because he either was or wasn't shtupping/sexually harassing a female employee, prompting Red Bull to "investigate" and then exonerate him, and now the overheated European media is howling that Max is leaving and Red Bull is falling apart, even though Max just won Bahrain by 22 seconds and Red Bull finished 1-2 same as always ...)

Whoa. Whew. Lemme catch my breath here for a second.

Now lemme say there's always drama like this in F1, which is why the "Drive to Survive" series is so endlessly compelling, not to say the best long-running soap opera since "Days of Our Lives" or "As The World Turns." But when I say "drama like this", I'm not talking about drama like this.

That's because this drama involves the most dominant team in F1, a team so machine-like it's turned the actual on-track product into a parade at the top of the grid. Max wins pole, Max wins race, everything interesting happens back in the pack. Rinse and repeat.

That sort of dominance makes the dominating force, if not complacent, at least arrogant. And thus confers a sense of entitlement in areas where entitlement should never go.

That's the story here with Horner, and, listen, let me say right up front I have no idea if he did what he's been accused doing. If he did, then he's Horner the Horndog and worse. If not ...

If not, then you've got to wonder how much of this kerfuffle is real, and how much of it is a bored press corps pumping it full of helium to keep itself from falling asleep. 

A sex scandal involving the Lord of the (Nurburg)Ring, and every other F1 venue? Trouble in paradise? The BEGINNING OF THE END OF RED BULL??

Yes, please!

Helping along this wistful hysteria, of course, is that, like all hysteria, there are kernels of truth buried within. Jos Verstappen did indeed call on Horner to quit, because he does indeed dislike the man. That's gotten Formula One chief Mohammed Ben Sulayem -- himself the target of allegations that he jimmied the results of the 2023 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix -- taking the unseemly action of inserting himself into the inner workings of his sport's dominant team. 

He even pulled Max Verstappen aside last weekend (with the standard caveat of "allegedly") and chastised him for not publicly supporting Horner as Sulayem requested. Verstappen, to his credit, basically told him to buzz off -- or, failing that, to investigate Horner himself.

Meanwhile, the whole Horner/Jos Verstappen rift has stoked rumors (with Jos allegedly doing the stoking) that Max will leave Red Bull for another team, even though he's under contract until 2028 and any team he'd go to at this point would be a step down. And as for Max himself ...

Well. All he wants to do is race, or so it seems.

Publicly diplomatic, he leaves you wondering what he's thinking privately.

"Dad, will you please just shut the hell up?" would be one educated guess.

"Overheated European media, will you please just shut the hell up?" would be another good one.

Either way, Max seems to be the only one behaving like a grownup in all this. Which means he wins again.

Big surprise there.