News from steerage, or something

 So, remember a couple of years ago, when a seriously pissed Oregon player tweeted photos of the amenities (air quotes) provided for teams in the women's basketball Final Four?

Remember the one rack of dumbbells and yoga mats that were their weight room facilities? Remember the pre-packaged seventh-grade-cafeteria meals one player accurately called "like nice jail food"? 

Remember how they weren't even allowed official swag that said the Big Dance or March Madness, because only the men's tournament was allowed to use that branding?

Provoked a lot of outrage, all of that did -- including here on the Blob. Revealed for all time that the NCAA's primary function is to generate revenue, and the women's tournament doesn't generate nearly as much revenue as the men's, so ...

You could almost hear it, couldn't you?

Sorry, girls, you'll have to bunk down in steerage. Oh, and if we hit an iceberg and sink we'll lock these gates and keep you down there, because the lifeboats are ONLY FOR THE MEN.

Remember all that?

The NCAA doesn't. Because over the weekend it happened again, this time out in Las Vegas. 

What happened was a bunch of good Power 5 women's teams (including Indiana's excellent squad) went to play in the Las Vegas Invitational, only to find the organizers couldn't provide a few amenities that might have come in handy. Like, you know, an arena.

You could almost hear it, couldn't you?

Sorry, girls, we're hosting a tournament, but there's no place for you to play. So, here, you can play your games in this  hotel ballroom down in the basement. It's nice enough, right? Why, I bet the elementary schools you all went to didn't have anything NEARLY as nice!

Here's what the "venue" looked like. I'm serious, this was it.

Needless to say, this went over like a lead balloon. Among others, IU coach Teri Moren -- perhaps too diplomatically -- said the whole set up was "disappointing."

And here you're saying "But Mr. Blob, the NCAA wasn't in charge of this debacle. Why blame them?"

Because it's their product. The teams involved were operating under their sanction. Doesn't the organization stipulate minimum standards that must be met before an event can play host to NCAA athletic teams? Isn't there some sort of approval involved?

These are not rhetorical questions. I'm asking because I'm honestly wondering.

If the answers are all "yes," how could the NCAA have given the OK for this? And if the answers are "no," why is that? Is it because it's the women, so -- like the organizers of the Vegas tournament -- they just don't care?

Back in the early days of Title IX, the late Pat Summitt recalled, among her duties as Tennessee's head coach was driving the team van to and from away games and washing the players' uniforms. Well, thank God those days are gone.

Now they get to play games on makeshift courts in the basements of hotels. 

Progress!

Today in prisoner-of-the-moment-ing

 USC handled Notre Dame 38-27 on the west coast last night, and Trojan quarterback Caleb Williams  threw in a Heisman pose for good measure/insult to injury. This is because Williams did a lot of Heisman things on the national stage last night, throwing for one score and rushing for three more and, yes, probably locking up the gnarled little stiff-arming trophy.

Strangely, there were no howls about this from Domer Nation, which did not bay loudly for Irish coach Marcus Freeman's head or scream that the entire Notre Dame program needed to be stripped down to the studs and rebuilt.

I say "strangely," because apparently this is what you do when you lose a big rivalry game in convincing fashion.

Best evidence for this happened earlier in the day, when Michigan blackjacked Ohio State with one cross-country touchdown after another, and the Wolverines nearly doubled up the Buckeyes in a battle of the unbeatens. In the end, UM left Columbus on the high side of a 45-23 lamination, and the "battle" more resembled the Little Bighorn than D-Day in Normandy.

Almost immediately, embarrassed Billy Buckeyes began calling for Ohio State coach Ryan Day's head. A few especially deranged folks insisted the program was rotten to the core and needed a complete do-over.

More rational souls pointed out the Buckeyes were 11-0 going into the game, and were simply the victim of a horrendous defensive scheme at the worst possible time. Recognizing that Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh is a throwback who loves to ground-and-pound, the Buckeyes loaded the box and left their DBs to single Michigan's wideouts in man-to-man coverage.

It was a fatal undervaluing of UM's receivers, who ran like wild horses past those DBs. Cornelius Johnson caught touchdown passes of 69 and 75 yards from J.J. McCarthy, who likely couldn't believe what he was seeing. Colston Loveland caught another 45-yard bomb for a score. And when the Buckeyes bunched up even more to try to stop the Wolverines from grinding clock in the fourth quarter, Donovan Edwards exploited it with home-run  jaunts of 75 and 85 yards.

Edwards had barely completed his last overland haul when the hollering from the scarlet-and-gray faithful began.

Again, more rational souls pointed out this was one bad game, and perhaps not an indictment of the program altogether. Day, for instance, is now 45-5 in four seasons and 31-2 in the Big Ten. He'd won 23 straight conference games until Harbaugh beat him last year. And he's now 15-5 against ranked teams.

The problem, of course, is the two Big Ten losses have both come against Michigan. This is THE unforgivable sin in Columbus, especially considering Day's predecessor, Urban Meyer, never lost to Michigan. Day, on the other hand, has never gotten his ass kicked by Iowa or Purdue, as Meyer did. 

But Meyer won a national title and always beat Harbaugh, so he's worthy of statuary. Day, on the other hand, is worthy of a pink slip and a plane ticket out of town.

From that, you can be tempted to believe Ohio State fans wouldn't care if their Buckeyes went 7-5 every year as long as they beat Michigan. This is an exaggeration, of course, but it's probably not much of one.

In any event, yesterday there was a whole lot of hair-pulling and prisoner-of-the-moment-ing, which those of us not wearing scarlet-and-gray found amusing at the very least. You wanted to tell them the sky really wasn't falling and they needed to pump the brakes, but that of course would have fallen on deaf ears.

After all, Michigan didn't pump the brakes once all day. Why would you expect Billy Buckeye to?

A Bucket of history

 They could have Purdue-ed it up. Let's begin there today.

 Let's start with the acknowledgement that yesterday was all set up for the Boilermakers to drop history spang on their foot, because (take it from a guy who grew up in a Boiler household) that would have been so Purdue of them. As soon as Nebraska whipped Iowa, you could almost see it happening: The Boilers coming to Bloomington needing only a win against sadsack Indiana to reach the Big Ten championship game for the first time, and the Hoosiers kicking their bitter rivals in the cherries to ruin it all.

But you know what?

That didn't happen.

Know what else?

It didn't happen because Purdue is just that good.

At 8-4, the Boilers are what their record says they are, which is a solid football team that wasn't going to let history slip away. Oh, they futzed around for a half and trailed 7-3 at the break (uh-oh!), but then they rolled in the second half, outscoring the Hoosiers 24-3 until Indiana scored a garbage-time TD on the last play of the game. 

So, 30-16 at the end, and if you're an IU fan you can indulge in your what-ifs. Like, what if quarterback Dexter Williams, who beat Michigan State on the road last week and was giving Purdue fits early, hadn't gone down with a knee injury?

Well ... then it would have been a 30-20 final. Or 30-24, to be generous.

Bottom line, Purdue was Purdue and Indiana was Indiana, and that was that. Jaylin Lucas ripped off a 71-yard touchdown to put Indiana up early, but after that he gained 29 yards on eight carries -- a mirror held up to Indiana in general, because the Hoosiers went almost as quietly once Williams went down.

Purdue, meanwhile, got 290 yards and two touchdowns from Aidan O'Connell, and breakout freshman Devin Mockobee ran for 99 yards and another score, and most of that that happened in the second half. And the Boilers had both the Bucket and a bucket of history as the Big Ten West champs.

Next Saturday, they'll be in Lucas Oil Stadium, playing for the conference title.

On the opposite sideline will be unbeaten Michigan, which embarrassed Ohio State in the Horseshoe in what the Wolverines and Buckeyes like to call The Game, but which turned out to be The Beatdown instead.

Just about everyone thinks next Saturday will be Beatdown Two. But maybe not.

Because in a season where Purdue didn't Purdue it up, who knows?

Losers! Again!

 In London, they were throwing beer around and cursing, because they knew what this was. Those damned colonials had beaten the Empire again. They were losers, again.

And, OK, so in reality it was a nil-nil draw in the World Cup, but nil-nil felt like win-win for an American side that is achingly young, and was expected to roll over and show its belly to mighty England. Only soreheads like me grumbled that once the hour got late the U.S. played wuss soccer, simply trying to possess the ball instead of attacking the English goal to get the "W."

Playing not to lose is no fun, the soreheads said. And it's been known to backfire.

But this time it was the right play, and the Americans exited with a point no one believed was possible. So call it a win for U-S-A!, U-S-A! Those disgruntled Brits wasting beer across the pond certainly will.

England is, after all, one of the finest sides in the world, dropping a six-pack on Iran in a 6-2 blowout (Adjusted NFL Score: 59-7) in its World Cup opener. But U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter put together a crafty, irritating defensive strategy, and the Brits didn't drink a drop against. Came close a couple of times, but couldn't cash.

And now?

Now the U.S. men, who weren't good enough even to make the show in 2018, need only beat Iran on Tuesday to advance to the knockout round. 

Iran! And how sweet would that be?

The Islamic Republic already has its hands full trying to suppress a revolt among Iranian women who are fed up with being treated like dirt. But then to lose to the American infidels ...

Yes, sir. That would be one bad week indeed. 

Heh.

Time warped

 By now you may have seen the photo, which comes to us from a time forever stained with  shame. It's 1957 in Little Rock, Ark.; the good old boys are out in force, and the news cameras, too, because it's the day six black students are supposed to desegregate North Little Rock High School.

Two of them are in the photo, surrounded by the good old boys and the cameras. In the front row, two of the GOBs stand out; one, a cigarette dangling from the left side of his mouth, glares at one of the black kids with a try-me look on his face. Next to him another is laughing and taunting. You can almost hear him saying "Where you think you're goin', (n-word)?"

And then there's the boy at the back of mob, behind the cameras, clearly younger than the others. He's not doing or saying anything. He's just watching the whole deal, rubbernecking, a look on his face that at worst can be described as curious.

That boy owns the Dallas Cowboys now.

Jerry Jones was just a 15-year-old boy then; he's an 80-year-old mega-mogul now. He's not a racist, by any reasonable assessment. He's just an old man who owns the most saleable product in the National Football League, mostly with little noticeable success outside the financial ledger.

Now he's being compelled to apologize for a 65-year-old photo that hit the interwhatsis the other day and got a bunch of folks riled up, as the interwhatsis tends do with matters both great and small.

Color this one small. As in "microscopic."

The Blob holds no brief for Jerry Jones and never has, but to call him to account for getting caught up in an eddy of history 65 years ago is patently absurd. He was a white teenager who grew up in the South in the 1950s. It's therefore hardly shocking that he was watching black kids get harassed. Hell, given the place and times, it showed admirable restraint that he didn't get in on the "fun."

But he didn't. He wasn't the guy with the cig in his lip. He wasn't the guy next to that guy. He didn't bully anyone that day, or on any other day to the best of my knowledge.

Which still hasn't stopped some folks from wondering why he hasn't apologized yet.

The Blob's response to that is this: For what, exactly?

Just for being there? For being alive in Little Rock, Ark. in the 1950s? Or for not suddenly jumping in a time machine, traveling to 2022 to borrow some of its sensibilities, and then traveling back to 1957 to step in and stop the bullying?

Patently absurd, as noted.  

Look. Sixty-five years is a long damn time, and people change. Jerry Jones surely has. I suspect he's no more what he was in 1957 than he is a Rottweiler. Even George Wallace, America's pre-eminent race baiter, eventually repented in the fullness of time. By the time he died, he was a far different person than when he was running for president in the 1960s on the tried-and-true White Resentment platform.

So, no. The photo circulating on the interwhatsis is just a moment from a dark time when America betrayed itself. It's not an indictment of an 80-year-old football team owner, but a time warp that's now being time warped by people who should know better.

Or so it says here.

Thanks, and stuff

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, aka Turkeycide Day, aka When Do We Eat Day. So I guess this is the part where the Blob gives thanks for various and sundry blessings, like pie and deliciously beheaded turkeys and pie, and also pie.

This being mostly a Sportsball Blob (except when it's not), let us commence with the (mostly) Sportsball Stuff For Which We Are Thankful:

* We are thankful for Indianapolis Colts head coach Jeff Saturday, because without him we might never have realized playing armchair quarterback every Sunday could actually lead to a lucrative turn as an NFL head coach. Or at the very least an offensive coordinator.

* Which is why we're also thankful for Patriots OC Matt Patricia, because, my God, if THAT guy can be an offensive coordinator ...

* We are thankful for Kyrie Irving, because without Krazy Kyrie we never would have known the earth was flat, or about the Secret Jewish Cabal That Rules The World, or about the evil Dr. Fauci and his plot to kill all of us with the Covid vaccine -- which is why Kyrie ain't gettin' that shot, uh-uh, no way.

* We are thankful for the New York Jets, because, in a world gone mad, we can still count on them to lose to the Patriots every year, all the time.

* We are thankful for FIFA, because, in a world gone mad, we can still count on international soccer's ruling body to be corrupt and tone-deaf every four years, all the time.

* We are also thankful for, among others, the German starting side, who all pointedly put their hands over their mouths during introductions today because FIFA has threatened any World Cup player with a yellow card if he shows up wearing a rainbow One Love armband -- which promotes diversity and, you know, love, two concepts that apparently deeply offend the host Qatari government.

* We are thankful, finally, for all the MAGA election-fraud hucksters, and “cancel culture” "victims," and Critical Race Theory/pronoun/fetanyl-is-in-my-kid's-Halloween-candy hysterics. And all other inhabitants of rubber-room rabbit holes. 

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. You've provided us a valuable baseline for crazy, and for that we are grateful.

Happy Thanksgiving, Blobophiles!

Your World Cup update

 When last we left the World Cup in Qatar, the host country was going back on its word by banning beer sales outside the stadium, the head of FIFA was engaging in epic whataboutism to defend Qatar's hideous human rights record, and journalists were already being hassled for doing their jobs.

But, hey, we got futbol!

And so on to England 6, Iran 2, which was about what everyone expected. And then the U.S. men's team doing what it does, which is blow a dominant performance by fouling Gareth Bale in the penalty area and giving up the free-kick goal for a 1-1 draw with Wales.

Later, Saudi Arabia shocked Lionel Messi and Argentina 2-1. Grief-stricken Argentines called in sick to work so they could overturn cars and set them on fire.

OK. So that didn't happen.

As far as I know.