If at first you don't succeed ...

 All summer long you rooted for him, if your soul was right with God. Cheered him when it looked like ... no, not this time. Muttered "Dammit!" under you breath when it again looked like ... no, not this time, either.

Because Tommy Fleetwood -- not "Tom", not "Thomas", but "Tommy", which fits him like a lambskin glove -- was, oh, my goodness, right there. And also because he was absurdly easy to root for, with his hockey-flow hair and his easy manner and the obvious joy he took in being able to swing a golf club for a living.

Even though the guy hadn't won a PGA Tour event in 163 starts.

Even though he'd finished in the top five 30 times in those 163 starts, the most top five finishes without a win in a PGA event in a century.

Ah, but then came Sunday.

When Tommy Fleetwood came to the last round of the Tour Championship tied for the lead.

When the golf gods looked down, looked at each and other and said "OK. I think we've tortured this guy enough."

And they waved their magic wand or magic 2-iron or whatever it is golf gods wave, and Tommy Fleetwood finally got his first Tour win. And not just his first Tour win, but the Tour win.

Timing is everything. Also perseverance, because If At First You Don't Succeed is Tommy Fleetwood all day long, so is Try, Try Again.

So he went out and put up a 68 in the last round, clearing him by three strokes from the field. He finished 18-under for the tournament. And at day's end, it wasn't some Greater Tire Barn Open trophy he was holding up, but the Fedex Cup itself.

Which only goes to show you that in golf, karma may be a bitch, but occasionally even it gets tired of being so.

Fleetwood's first and most providential win, see, came on the heels of two crazy near-misses this summer. Back in June he was leading the Travelers Championship by a stroke with one hole to play, but then he three-putted the 18th green and a shocked Keegan Bradley ended up posing for the holding-up-the-trophy photos. And then, just two weeks ago in Memphis ...

There Fleetwood was again, on the precipice of victory at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the first leg of the playoffs. Led by two shots with three holes to play. Finished tied for third after going par-bogey-par on those last three holes -- part of a ruinous endgame that included four bogeys in the last seven holes.

Well, not this time, boys and girls. This time, Tommy Fleetwood brought that puppy home.

"I never really felt like it wouldn't happen," he said later, of his first Tour win. "But there's always doubt there."

Or was.

A media Event

 I once saw a drunk fan get outed by one of my media colleagues.

(And, yes, you could tell the difference. Smartass.)

It was a postgame football presser at Notre Dame, where the Irish had just dispatched West Virginia. Per usual, the visiting coach and a select player or two went first. On this particular day, the player in question was Mountaineers' running back Amos Zereoue, who'd had a big day. And here was Drunk Guy, asking Amos, a darkhorse Heisman candidate, if he thought he should win the thing.

Now, we're not always a perceptive bunch, we media folk. But we immediately knew Drunk Guy wasn't one of us. Somehow he'd slipped past the diligent ND gendarmes, and he stuck out like a sore thumb.

The aforementioned media colleague -- a Notre Dame grad who'd been covering the Irish for decades -- promptly commenced with the outing.

"Who are you working for?" he demanded.

Drunk Guy mumbled something about the student newspaper.

"Bullshit," our hero said, or words to that effect. And then called over the gendarmes to remove the clown.

I bring all this up because of something I saw on the website Awful Announcing the other day, which made me both remember Drunk Guy and struggle not to retch.

Out in Norman, Okla., it seems, Oklahoma football has hit on a new way to pick the pockets of its fan base, as if it's not vacuuming up enough of its dollars already. For the low, low price of $692.11, fans will now be allowed to sit in on head coach Brent Venables' postgame pressers. Drunk Guy has gone legit, in other words.

I can't tell you how wrong that is. I mean, I can, but I'm not sure you'd get it.

So let me begin by pointing out the line between sportswriter and fanboy has always been the third rail of our profession, and woe betide anyone who crossed it. A poop storm of contempt from his or her colleagues is the reward for doing so.

This is not because we're mean, heartless creatures who love to make fun of everyone and everything. I mean, we are, but that's not why fanboy "journalists" in particular draw our wrath.

It's because we're a tribe, and the tribe has standards, believe it not. You don't cheer in the pressbox (although derisive laughter is permitted when Coach Slobberknocker runs his fullback up the middle on third-and-12). You never refer to the team you're covering as "we". You try to maintain at least a modicum of professionalism, even if you're wearing a Burgville Bugler shirt so old the mustard stains qualify as an exciting archeological find.

Now, I get it. It's all different these days. You've got Blobs and podcasts and fan sites that have so blurred that aforementioned inviolate line you can barely see it anymore. The tribe may still be the tribe, its standards may still be standard, but the barbarians are no longer at the gates. They're inside the damn things, running amok.

So, sure, why not let fans into the inner sanctum of a postgame presser, especially if you can soak the hell out of  'em for the privilege? Why not turn a workplace -- our workplace, dammit -- into just another piece of the Complete Sooner Experience? Everything else is an Event these days, why not this?

I'll tell you why: Because we're not dancing monkeys, here to entertain the paying customers. Because no one sells tickets to open-heart surgery ... or lets Joe Blow From Kokomo, for a nominal fee, drive a backhoe on a construction site ... or gives Buddy Bill From Hooterville (for a nominal fee) a chance to hover over a bomb squad guy while he defuses an IED.

"Gee, Mr. Overreaction," you're saying now. "Little sensitive, aren't you? None of those are the same thing and you know it."

No, they're not. And perhaps I am a bit sensitive. But it's the principle, see.

The only saving grace?

The price tag, of course. What damn fool is going to shell out almost $700 to watch us ask Brent Venables questions? 

Ooh, look, Martha. The guy from the Burgville Bugle just asked Coach if he was a tree, what kind of tree would he be? What a stupid question! And just look at how the Burgville Bugle guy is DRESSED!

Why, I bet that mustard stain is older than Grover Cleveland. Goodness.

A silly (greedy) idea

 College football opened up this weekend with Iowa State beating Kansas State in Ireland, Hawaii beating Stanford in Hawaii and various Kansases, UNLVs and Western Kentuckys winning in other locales. We're off and sorta running.

Guess that means it's time for the Blob to address the Big Ten's latest harebrained scheme, which is to more than double the size of the College Football Playoff and make the entire deal even more of a joke than it might already be.

The Big Jon And Kate Plus 8 rolled out a plan recently to take the current 12-team CFP to as many as 28 teams, which is both silly and -- hello -- greedy. This is because under the Big Ten's construct, guess who would get the most automatic qualifiers?

Thaaat's right, class: The Big Ten. Oh, and the SEC, the other Godzilla of college football. 

The visionaries in the Big Ten see a field comprised of seven automatic qualifiers apiece from the Godzillas; five apiece from the sorry-ass ACC and Big 12; two for cruds like the MAC and the Mountain West; and two at-large teams (i.e., Notre Dame, and Notre Dame). To cram in all the extra games, conference championship tilts would be cast into outer darkness.

"But that only eliminates one weekend of games, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "What are they gonna do, play 'til Washington's birthday?"

Nah. My guess is they'll make a whole lot of previously undistinguished bowl games Official College Football Playoff Games.

The Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl? Playoff game! SERVPRO First Responder Bowl? Playoff! Radial tire bowls, lawn implement bowls, the Scooter's Coffee Frisco Bowl?

Playoff, playoff, playoff. It's a veritable Playoffpalooza y'all!

Of course, most of the extra 16 teams the Big Ten wants to add to the CFP won't remotely belong there, but, hey, it's all about the Benjamins for the Power Four. The Big Ten and SEC in particular already sit on entire mountain ranges of cash, but when has more ever been enough in the corporate era of college football?

So, sure, let's invite, um, Minnesota to the big spellin' bee. The Golden Gophers finished seventh in the Big Ten last year, which means, under the Big Plan, they'd get in, even though they barely finished above .500 (5-4) in the conference. But they crushed Nevada and Rhode Island, so they're worthy, right?

Ay-yi-yi. 

You can see now why practically everyone has been bashing this notion as stupid and unworkable -- including Rece Davis on ESPN's College Football Countdown, who the other day called it "absurd." Proponents (i.e.: The Big Ten) might argue that the 68-team NCAA basketball tournament includes a lot of un-worthies, too, but basketball is not football. In the former, two or three players on a given night can level the playing field between a Little and a Big; in the latter, the enormous resources required to field a powerhouse make that virtually impossible.

In other words, a Fairleigh Dickinson ain't beatin' a Purdue in the CFP. Or, say, a Toledo beatin' an Alabama.

"Well, what about Northern Illinois beating Notre Dame last year?" you're saying now. "Or all those MAC schools who regularly beat Big Ten schools every year?"

They do that in September. In January, in the CFP? Not a chance.

But, hey. Think how much money the Big Ten will make off Minnesota's 35-12 loss to Georgia in the first round. Cha-ching, baby!

Domain change

 The lord of all creation is surveying his domain this morning from the roof of our car, and never mind that his domain is the parking lot of a Ramada Inn. You take what you get when the rising sun is scattering jewels across the Straits of Mackinac, and making giant's shadows of pickups and SUVs and even our humble Hyundai Sonata.

On a morning this glorious, what you get is more than enough. Even if you're, you know, a seagull.

There he stands, looking regal and very white against the dark blue of our Sonata, and not a little disdainful. Trudging earthbound humans pack-mule their luggage around and past him, and his beady little eye misses none of it. His silent judgment: What sad creatures these are.

I can't say I'm thinking the same this morning, although I could. There are sad creatures  everywhere in the land these days, and we all know where the saddest (and strangest) abide.

No, what I'm thinking about are domains, and if a seagull on the roof of our car is a damn tortured segue into that, so be it. I never claimed to have a linear mind, or even one that works more than intermittently. 

So let's talk domains. Specifically, the shifting of one to another.

It's been coming for a few weeks now, but last night and this weekend are the official handoff. The season that belonged to baseball and motorsports and golf is going away; the season of football is upon us.

It struck me when I went online this morning and checked out what happened Friday on green fields beneath a Broadway blaze of lights, and realized I hadn't done that in nine months. That's because high school football in Indiana officially began a new season last night, and today Kansas State plays Iowa State in Dublin, Ireland, and here we go, here we go.

Fall is here, defying the calendar as brazenly as ever. Summer is down to the dregs. . The domain of baseball and car racing and golf has become the domain of football's Goliath, and it has happened, as it always does, literally overnight.

And so here I am, cruising the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette website to see how my New Haven Bulldogs did. Oh, great, crushed 41-0 by Northrop at home. And, look, Leo beat Bishop Luers 14-7 in the marquee game of the night. Carroll, Bishop Dwenger, Concordia? 

All lost to stinkin' Indy schools, doggone it.

What else? Oh, here's East Noble paving Wayne 42-0, signaling the Knights are done yet after their state finals run last year. Bellmont and Norwell got ball-peened by Heritage and Mississinewa, perhaps signaling more losses to come in the thorny Northeast 8. And defending 2A state champ Adams Central got past Garrett 7-0 down in Monroe, because ... well, because they're Adams Central.

And today?

Week 0 in college football. Prelude to opening weekend. Kansas State vs. Iowa State in Dublin -- a damned odd place for two corn-belt schools to wind up, but what the hey. Go get 'em, you lads from Kansas. Have at it, you boyos from Iowa. May the rains fall gently on your fields of waving grain, even if the Iowa Staters will have to explain all this Cyclone business.

Domain change, too, perhaps. But not here, by golly. Not here.

A brief interlude

 EMPIRE, Mich. -- Up here at the top of the bluff, the sun is warm and the breeze is cool and the views are pure Monet, or perhaps Winslow Homer. Lake Michigan is as blue as it has been in my dreams, as Red says at the end of "The Shawshank Redemption." This morning it's a looking glass giving back the color of the sky, and it stretches on forever.

So, yeah, I will sit here for awhile, gorging my senses. Straight west, beyond the horizon, is Wisconsin and Door County. Off to the north is the low rise of Manitou Island, and the bone-white incline of Sleeping Bear's mountainous dune, tumbling down to all that blue.

I'd say "Ahhh" if it wouldn't make me sound totally dorkazoid. So maybe I just say it to myself.

And also: I needed this. All of this.

I needed me some northern Michigan, my favorite place on earth and a thing of the blood, because my parents loved it first. Built a home on Lake Huron when they retired, and lived there for 25 years. My dad, a history nerd and master woodworker, even got a job with the Mackinac State Parks Commission at Old Mill Creek, site of an 18th century British sawmill.

Every day he'd drive into Mackinaw City and mess around with wood all day, using 18th-century tools. Getting a leg up on heaven, pure and simple.

But my dad is gone now and so is my mom, and their house on Huron is up for sale again. And I'm just sitting here filling my lungs with air that smells like pine and clean water, and which I can sometimes ... almost ... smell back at home when the wind's right.

This is the real thing, however. My wife and I fled the dryer-vent heat of Indiana a couple of days ago for a week in God's country, and already northern Michigan is working its magic. For a blessed while I can forget about the world and how utterly mad it's become.

I can forget, for instance, that the nation I love is in the hands of a pack of loony meatheads in thrall to a half-mad old man with delusions of emperorhood. Nero, you might say, without the violin lessons. 

His latest bright idea -- enthusiastically endorsed by his Homeland Security czar Magda Gerbils (aka, Kristi Noem) -- is to paint the Big Beautiful Border Wall black to heat it up and thwart climbers. This won't stop all the folks who choose to go under the Wall rather than over it, but never mind that. Magda thinks it's the latest swell idea from the mind of a genius.

Yeesh. Calgon, take me away.

Or rather, northern Michigan, take me away.

Take me to the top of this bluff on a glorious bluebird day, and then, after a time, back down the trail into the cool woods. Down there the sun is doing its dapple thing through the leaves, and you meet other trekkers and their dogs making the not-so-long slog up toward the bluff. They say hi to you and you say hi to them and their puppers, and then you're alone under the trees again and the quiet is bone deep.

Which is to say, unless something momentous happens, the Blob is checking out for a day or two. You may talk among yourselves, but no gum-chewing.

Me?

I'll just take another deep breath. Ahhh.

The future is nah

 So, then: Daniel Jones.

Which I guess means the Era of "Meh" continues in Indianapolis.

Which I guess also means the Colts are throwing in the towel on Anthony Richardson.

Which I guess also means, unavoidably, that Chris Ballard and the rest of the Horseshoes' brain trust are admitting they blew the Big Draft Pick, because the erstwhile future of the franchise is now holding a clipboard with third-stringer Riley Leonard behind Danny Dimes -- who's frankly little more than a placeholder until the next Big Draft Pick (cough, Arch Manning, cough) shows up.

Beaten out of a job by Daniel Jones.

Who saw that coming back in the palmy days when the Colts made AR the fourth pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, and everyone was raving about the kid's stratospheric ceiling?

I'll take "no one" for $200, Alex.

Anthony Richardson was an effervescent kid with a big arm and jaw-dropping athleticism, and so everyone sort of forgot he was also barely two years out of high school when he was drafted and had started just 13 games as a quarterback in college. They sort of forgot, subsequently, that his big arm was still in the prototype stage, and that he did not come to Indy fully charged and ready for use?

"Hell, just look at him!" the brain trust cried, or so it seemed. "He's a heat-and-serve superstar-to-be! Coupla OTAs and training camp and he'll be good to go!"

And so the very first NFL official game Anthony Richardson played in, he started.

And then, four games into the 2023 season, he got hurt and was done for the year.

And then, in 2024, he got hurt a couple more times, and was benched for awhile, and took a powder in the middle of a game. He wound up his second season completing just 47 percent of his passes, which is quite a trick considering the NFL is so tilted in favor of the passing game Uncle Rico could complete half his throws just by showing up.

In other words, AR played exactly like a green-as-grass kid who'd barely taken a snap since high school. And who consequently never, ever, ever should have been thrown directly into the fire. 

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Who else did the Colts have? The quarterback room was Anthony Richardson and the ghost of Sammy Baugh. They really didn't have a choice."

Perhaps. But whose fault was that? 

Truth is, the Future Is Now has become the Future Is "Nah," and the people most at fault for that are the people who were entrusted with Richardson's development. They utterly failed him, and now Richardson is damaged goods who'll likely be traded down the road for whatever the Colts can get for him.

And the QB roulette that's been spinning madly since Andrew Luck decided he still wanted to walk by the time he was 30 will spin on. Danny Dimes is no answer, but he's the only one the Colts have left themselves for now. Head coach Shane Steichen said the other day he's their starter for the season -- which, given the Ballard regime's handling of quarterbacks, no doubt means exactly what you think it means.

Riley Leonard, start warming up.

A most immodest proposal

 Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred tossed a hand grenade into the bouillabaisse the other day, and, no, it wasn't admitting the whole ghost-runner-in-extra-innings thing was a lint-brained idea. Although it was.

No, sir. This time Rob let it slip that perhaps it was time to turn the entire game upside down, dump all the pieces and radically rearrange them.

He said -- perhaps -- the day would soon come when MLB completely re-organized itself along geographical lines, changing the entire landscape the way an 8.5 quake would change the landscape of, say, L.A. In other words, the Cubs and White Sox would be in the same division. Ditto the Mets and Yankees. Ditto, I don't know, the Guardians and Reds, the Royals and the Cardinals, the Orioles and Nationals, the Rangers and Astros.

"Hey, what about us?" the Seattle Mariners might ask. "We're up here all alone in the Pacific Northwest."

"And what about us?" the Colorado Rockies might chime in. "The Front Range gets mighty lonely at night."

The answer could be, MLB will add a team in Eugene and perhaps a team in Puyallup (Hey, look, it's the Puyallup Fightin' Polyps!) to keep the Mariners company. The Rockies, meanwhile, will be sent back to Triple A where they belong.

Anyway, this is a radical notion Manfred let run free, even more radical than the ghost runner. Whether or not it would be as unnecessary and stupid -- well, who knows? 

What we do know is it would completely bumfuzzle the geezers who still watch baseball, provoking the usual consarn-its and shaking of bony fists. On the other hand, as Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay pointed out on his radio show the other day, if it made interleague play superfluous, it might be worth all the chaos.

Interleague play, Kay believes, has ruined the All-Star Game, and also the World Series. This is an undisputable fact, at least in the Blob's estimation. When everyone plays everyone all the time, the intrigue is gone. And the intrigue -- whose style of baseball is superior, the AL's or the NL's? -- is a lot of what made the All-Star Game and World Series worth watching.

Now, the All-Star Game and Series are just a bunch of players who've already played against one another half a dozen times. Takes all the fun out of it.

So, what the hell. Let Manfred's most immodest proposal become reality. Baseball probably isn't so far gone it requires such a complete teardown, but let's face it: The joint is looking pretty shabby these days.

I say go for it. I mean, as a geezer myself, I still think the Astros are in the National League and the Brewers are in the American half the time. So the bumfuzzlement train has already left the station where I'm concerned.

Besides, I like shaking my bony fist and shouting "Consarnit!" every so often. It's one of life's pleasures in these advancing days.