A death in the late afternoon

 Twenty-five years on, I can still hear it in Darrell Waltrip's voice. It was the first clue, the initial inkling, that something had gone terribly wrong down there at the end of Daytona International Speedway's long backstretch, and that an awful vacancy had just swallowed an entire sport.

Hope Dale's OK ...

Darrell Waltrip, suddenly saying that as he gabbled on and on in the wake of his brother winning the Daytona 500.

Darrell Waltrip, who'd seen death in the afternoon before -- who'd cheated it on at least one shrieking, metal-shredding occasion himself, and never fully recovered -- belatedly sensing what had happened behind brother Mikey as the checkers flew.

Hope Dale's OK ...

Dale, as in Dale Earnhardt, who'd been blocking for Michael Waltrip entering turn three when he got bumped from behind, slewed up toward the wall, and then got turned directly into it a millisecond before impact.

It didn't look like much. A gentle nudge, as these things go at Daytona. But the angle was all wrong, and the black No. 3 slid back down the banking into the infield, and Waltrip up in the broadcast booth must have belatedly noticed nothing was moving inside the car when he looked in that direction ...

Hope Dale's OK ...

Well, Dale wasn't OK, of course. Dale was dead. Twenty-five years ago yesterday.

Physics turned that gentle nudge into a killer there in the late afternoon, and as I watched the sports shows commemorating the 25th anniversary, it all came back to me. Waltrip's odd, troubling segue. The conspicuous silence on the race broadcast about the crash. And then an aerial shot of an ambulance leaving the sprawling facility, slowly, with no lights flashing.

Final confirmation, that was. Final confirmation for those of us who've been at a million racetracks and know what it looks and sounds and feels like when it's really bad. 

Dale Earnhardt was dead, of a basilar skull fracture, which is what happens when a sudden, catastrophic stop whips the head violently forward. Earnhardt was the fourth NASCAR driver in nine months to be killed by one, and by far the most notable. The man was an icon -- hell, he was NASCAR to a significant portion of the fan base -- and his absence would dominate every NASCAR Cup race for the rest of the season.

Fans all over the country holding up three fingers on the third lap of every race. Broadcasters going silent on every third lap. That sort of thing.

Along the way, that absence would also change the sport, and for the better. The HANS device that holds the head rigid would become mandatory. Soft-wall technology originally introduced by IndyCar would come to the stock-car circuits. And the consequence?

No driver in NASCAR's top three series has died in a racing accident since.

An ironic legacy, perhaps, for a man who never gave safety issues a second thought when he climbed into that black No. 3. But the best legacy, surely, for the death of an icon in he late afternoon, 25 years on.

An outbreak of grumpiness

 Look, I don't blame Mick Cronin. It's that time of year, isn't it?

February is the month when rodents predict the future, America observes the birthdays of two presidents on neither date, and men are compelled to defy their natural state and act all gooshy and romantic. Plus, your awesome cherry-red ride turns white with salt, and winter loses whatever charm it might have had.

It's a grumpy month.

And so no surprise, really, that Cronin, the basketball coach at UCLA, did what he did last night in East Lansing. 

First, he ejected his own player for cheap-shotting Michigan State's Carson with 4:26 to play and Sparty up 27. Then, in the postgame, he got into with a reporter who asked about the Michigan State student section taunting the Bruins' Xavier Booker, an MSU transfer.

Cronin replied that he didn't give "a rat's ass" about another school's student section. Then he snidely gave the reporter his flowers for "the worst question I've ever been asked." And then he accused said reporter for "raising your voice at me."

Of the latter, my admittedly biased former-sportswriter response is to suggest Mick pull up his big-boy pants.

Of the former ... well, I'll give Coach his flowers for sending Steven Jamerson II off. The game officials ticketed Jamerson with a Flagrant 1 foul for shoving Cooper from behind, but Cronin decided the punishment didn't fit the crime. As Michigan State coach Tom Izzo joked afterward, Mick arbitrarily elevated it to a Flagrant 2.

To that, my response is, "Good on you, Coach." And to acknowledge that his Oscar the Grouch impersonation last night was, yes, the byproduct of February, and also a nightmare trip to Michigan in which UCLA lost by 30 to the top-ranked Wolverines and by 23 to Sparty.

That'll put any coach out of sorts.  And it's not like Cronin is the only one suffering from the Februaries.

Last week, for example, Kansas State coach Jerome Tang got himself fired fo cause not only because the Wildcats are dead last in the Big 12, but because, after a blowout loss at home to Arkansas, he basically called his players a bunch of losers. Said they didn't deserve to wear the uniform, and that several of them wouldn't be wearing it next season.

A few days later K-State put him on the street, with athletic director Gene Taylor lamenting that he found Tang's comments about the "student-athletes" very "concerning."

Me, I think the term "student-athletes" went out with Victorolas and horse-drawn carriages. Get with the times, Mr. AD. The correct term these days is "paid professionals" -- which means Tang's outburst, while a violation of accepted etiquette, was not as out of bounds as it sounded.

I mean, if you're drawing a paycheck to play basketball, you need to make an effort to earn it. Otherwise, no, you shouldn't be wearing the uniform. Players in professional leagues that (unlike D-I buckets) aren't pretending to be something else get waived for less.

Tang's mistake was forgetting college basketball doesn't have a waiver wire. Or that it's still, at least nominally, college basketball.

Also, again, it's February. 'Nuff said.

That silly car race

 The Great American Race was won yesterday by a guy who'd never won it, by a team owner you might have heard of who'd never won it, and by a team that was last seen slapping an antitrust suit on the family that's run NASCAR like pashas for about 100 years.

In other words, the Daytona 500 once again did Daytona 500 things.

The aforementioned winner Tyler Reddick, led all of one lap but, as they say, the right lap. His team owner, Michael Jordan, got yet another ring to add to his collection. And his team -- 23XI, co-owned by MJ and Denny Hamlin -- is the same team that sued the France family and NASCAR last year and forced it to settle.

"Just true Daytona madness," an ecstatic Reddick observed, when it was done.

What he failed to add was why anyone would expect anything less.

Madness, after all, has been the Daytona 500 's bete noir since Day 1, a completely random deal that has blessed princes and paupers alike. The King, Richard Petty, won it seven times; seven-time Cup champion Dale Earnhardt, on the other hand, won it only once. That's the same number of times Derrike Cope won it, and also Pete Hamilton and Trevor Bayne. 

Combined career wins otherwise, for that trio? Three for Hamilton, one for Cope.

That's Daytona for you.

It's had a year when Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough crashed each other out on the last lap, then traded punches on the backstretch as Petty swept past to the win. It's had a year when Petty and David Pearson crashed each other out on the last turn, except Pearson kept the clutch in and limped to the checkers.

Sterling Marlin won Daytona twice in a row, then finished 40th the next year -- just ahead of Derrike Cope. Marvin Panch won in a year-old car in 1961, and was 44th the next year.

Yesterday?

Some old script.

As always with restrictor plate races, it was like watching the Burlington and Northern pass for 190 laps, and then for 10 laps it was utter insanity. Look, Michael McDowell's in front, going for his second Daytona 500 win!  Wait, now it's William Byron, going for the three-peat! Oops, now it's (who?) Carson Hocevar ... and now Chase Elliott and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. are drag-racing as the white flag drops and Hocevar crashes ... and now ...

Hey, where the heck did Tyler Reddick come from?

From nowhere, or so it seemed. But here he came to the front on the outside -- no, wait, the inside -- on the last lap, getting a helpful shove from teammate Riley Herbst as Elliott and Zane Smith ran nose to tail toward the finish.

Reddick squeezed between Elliott and Smith, got by Elliott as they touched, then took the checkers as Elliott and a pile of others crashed behind him.

Reddick was out front for only the last lap, and probably for less than half of that. Four or five drivers -- hell, who could tell? -- led at some point in the final four laps. All told, a record 25 drivers led at least a lap.

It was like "Wheel of Fortune," only faster and louder. And when the wheel stopped spinning, Reddick and Team Jordan were your grand prize winners.

That silly car race, the Blob's better half always calls Daytona.

Silly's a bit harsh, I always say. But after yesterday?

Not by much.

A Big(ger) MAC

 I know I am old now, because there is so much I can't get my head around. And, no, I'm not talking about America's losing fight with its own sanity, which these days moves me more to hysterical laughter than existential angst.

If you don't laugh you'll cry, in other words. Or take a long walk off a short pier.

Anyway, that's not what I can't get my 70-year-old head around this morning. It's a news item I saw on the Great and Terrible Intertoobz that made me yelp "What th-?", followed by a lot of standard old-man grumbling.

The Mid-American Conference is going bi-coastal, you see. I kid you not.

Comes now the news that it's adding Sacramento State out in California as a football-only member, and as a proud Ball State grad who remembers when a road trip meant Kalamazoo or Toledo, the ground just shifted beneath my feet. Again.

Bad enough that the Big Ten is now USC at Rutgers and Maryland at Oregon; now my alma mater's far humbler conference is warping the accepted verities. The dainty footprint that once stretched only from DeKalb, Ill., to Athens, Ohio, suddenly is bigger than Bob Lanier's legendary hooves. Now,  at least in football, it will cover all of flyover America and then some, from Amherst, Mass., to central California.

Sac State (can we call it Sac State?) has been bucking for entry to big-boy football for some time, though God knows why. It's going to cost it $23 million to do it, for one thing. For this it will get skyrocketing travel costs, presumably, and the right to be a farm team for the Alabamas and Ohio States and, yes, Indianas of the football world.

This is more and more what Group of Five conferences like the MAC are fast becoming in the age of NIL and unrestricted transfers, with the consequence that hardly anyone's playing for the glory of dear old Directional Hyphen State. Like beer, no one's buying Stud Hoss anymore; they're just renting him. And no one's renting the way the Group of Five circuits are.

A close-to-home example: A few years back Ball State lured a running back named Carson Steele to Muncie, where for two years he tore up the MAC. Then, like a hot baseball prospect going from, say, Fort Wayne to San Diego, he jumped to UCLA. 

From there it was on to the NFL, where he played a couple seasons in Kansas City and last month signed a deal with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Mind you, I don't begrudge Steele any of this. He didn't invent the current system, after all; he just did what it allowed him to do. It's where we are now: The MACs of the world as the minor leagues, hemorrhaging money the way minor leagues often do.

Which is why it made sense for the MAC to bring Sacramento State aboard, because Northern Illinois jumped to the Mountain West and the conference was short a dues-paying football member. That $18 million of Sac State's $23 mill bill goes to the MAC as the conference's entry fee likely didn't cause anyone to shed a tear, either.

In other words, we know what the MAC gets out of its Bigger MAC. But what does its new member get out of it?

A lot more dealings with Expedia and Travelocity, one imagines.

And the chance to groom more Carson Steeles for the real big boys, of course.

A brief pause for poimes

 ... or, in the proper vernacular, "poems."

Yes, it's Valentine's Day again, and you know what that means: It's time once more for all real men to do their manly duty. So get out there, boys! Buy the flowers! Buy the candy! Buy the gooshy cards expressing love and eternal devotion in iambic pentameter!

And for the Blob?

It's rhymin' time!

"Aw, gee, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Do we hafta?"

Yes, you hafta. Let us proceed, shall we?

* The Daytona 500 appears tomorrow like the first robin of spring, with a hoot and a holler and three 19-car pileups in the last ten laps. William Byron has won the last two Great American Races, but will he three-peat? Will Denny Hamlin win his fourth? Will Kyle Busch become the first polesitter to win since Clyde "The Glide" McBride back in 19-ought-6?

Beats me. But here's a poime about it:

Daytona, Daytona,

To you we're true blue.

All those Kyles, and Ryans, and  ol' Bubba -- him, too.

Look out! It's Chastain!

Driving just like a fool.

Put Chris Bell in the wall.

Man, that guy is a tool.

* The NBA All-Star Weekend kicked off last night with the Rising Stars games, and Team Vince (Carter) won the whole shebang on a free throw by VJ Edgecombe with a second to play. Afterward VJ made a big deal about how hard everyone played, a revealing bit of pushback to the largely accurate narrative that everyone goes through the motions in these All-Star games, which is why the final score is always eleventy-hundred thirty-seven to eleventy-hundred twelve.

Hence, a poime:

All hail to the All-Stars,

Playing wild and free.

Running and jumping,

And diving with glee.

Oh, wait.

That's just Wemby,

Taking a knee.

* The Winter Olympics continue to astound and amaze, even if some of the skaters and skiers and even curlers have been accused of cheating. Not so the U.S. women's hockey team, however, who steamrolled Italy 6-0 yesterday in their seemingly inexorable march to the gold medal.

A rhyme in tribute ...

Poor Italy lies flattened,

Like a pancake sans jelly.

They could not have won

E'en with Wayne Gretz-anelli.

* And speaking of the Winter Games ...

A moment of stunned silence for U.S. phenom Illia Malinin, a favorite to win the gold in men's figure skating. Alas, Malinin flubbed his dub big time, falling twice in his long program and finishing eighth after leading going into it.

Hence this lament:

Oh, Illia, oh, Illia,

What a horrible fate.

No quads in the finals,

And your Salchows weren't great.

And one last detail,

We are sad to report:

Your grand triple axel

Was two axels too short.

* And last but not least ...

Pitchers and catchers reported to spring training this week.

Which means the Blob gets to recycle its annual poime about the glories of returning baseball, with a modification or two:

Baseball is back!

And my thoughts are all radical.

Could this be the year

Pittsburgh's Cruds turn piratical?

And the reply:

Some numbskull just asked

If his Pirates would win.

To which we all say,

"Good lord, is he dim!"

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

An HOF rant

 It's been a few days now since Kansas State basketball coach Jerome Tang went Full Mike Gundy on his own team, but the nation's ears are still burning. Well, maybe not the nation's ears, but at least the ears of those of us with an appreciation for Hall of Fame rants.

The aforementioned Gundy, of course, springs to mind for his epic "I'm a man, I'm 40" rant about a newspaper columnist allegedly trashing his quarterback back in the day at Oklahoma State. And you can't talk rants without mentioning Jim "Playoffs?" Mora, and the Tom Brady/MJ/Babe Ruth of all ranters, Lee "My (Bleeping) Ass" Elia.

Tang?

He's right up there, America. If only because the target was, again, his own damn team.

After his Wildcats got smoked at home by Cincinnati the other night, 91-62, Tang called out his players by calling them ... well, gutless douchenozzles, essentially. Said they didn't deserve to wear the uniform. Added that very few of them will be wearing it next season.

"I'm embarrassed for the university," he said, after the Wildcats fell to 1-10 in the Big 12 in front of a student section wearing paper bags on their heads. "I'm embarrassed for our fans and our student section. It's just ridiculous ...

"It means something to wear a K-State uniform. It means something to put on this purple, and everything this is university is about and why I love this place. They don't love this place, so they don't deserve to be here."

Goodness. Can you say "I hate my team" without actually saying "I hate my team"?

Got to wonder what K-State's next practice was like after all that, and what K-State's next game will look like. If Tang's players weren't already giving up on the season, they surely might be now -- or, who knows, Coach might have finally managed to light a fire under them.

Could go either way. Either Tang's outburst was the method in the madness, or just madness, and I'm guessing it's 50-50. Or maybe 60-40 the latter.

Clearly, Coach was disgusted with his team's listlessness, as well he should have been.  But I'm wondering if Purdue coach Matt Painter wasn't similarly disgusted with the way his Boilermakers failed to finish at Nebraska the other night, needing a timely bucket by Oscar Cluff and a providential slip and fall by a Nebraska ballhandler to escape in overtime after blowing a 22-point lead.

The Boilers still led by 14 with 2:41 to go. And then, well, they didn't. But thanks mostly to Cluff, they could spin it as a gutsy road W over a top-ten team, and Painter wisely chose to focus on that.

Even if one suspects he might have been thinking this: "What the HELL, guys? Are you TRYING to kill me off?"

No word on whether or not that's what Kansas State's players were trying to do to Tang the other night. But after his HOF rant, it might cross their minds.

Today in "Well, duh"

 Caught a little of the skeleton competition last night in the Winter Olympics, and once again I was of two minds.

("Only two? We thought you had four at least, and none of them functional," you're saying now).

One mind was saying, "How do they steer with their arms tucked under them like that? Are they completely nuts?"

The second mind was saying, "Of course they're nuts. They're going 70 mph headfirst on what looks like a piece of Styrofoam. But, hey, at least they've got some really tricky helmets."

Anyway, the three minds left me in the perfect frame of, uh, mind to consider two completely disparate entities at once, and find the connection between them. That connection is the phrase, "Well, duh."

One entity is the ice dancing competition at the Winter Games, which ended with a lot of folks thinking the longtime U.S. pair of Madison Chock and Evan Bates got thoroughly rogered out of the gold medal by a corrupt judge.

The other entity is the National Basketball Association, which today through Sunday celebrates whatever its All-Star Weekend is now and is up to its neck in charges that teams are blatantly tanking to get in on what promises to be a talent-rich draft.

Altogether now: Well, DUH!

Because, first of all, a judging controversy in Olympic figure skating is not not exactly news. It's practically a tradition. The sport has always been prone to sketchy scoring, with the East German judge (at least in legend) always seeming to figure heavily in the shenanigans.

Well. This time around the role of the East German judge is being played by Jezabel Dabouis of France.

Who consistently gave Chock and Evans glaringly low scores in deference to the French pair of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron, who beat out Chock and Evans for the gold by a mere 1.43 points. Dabouis helped this along by scoring Chock and Evans a ridiculous eight points lower in the twizzle portion of the program, and 7.7  points lower in the free dance event.

First of all: I love that ice dancing has a segment called "twizzle." I have no idea what it is, but it sounds way cool.

Second of all, the French judge's name is Jezabel. I mean, come on. What did you think was going to happen?

And in like fashion ...

What did Adam Silver and the rest of the NBA capos think was going to happen when their season lasts longer than the Ming Dynasty?

Silver fined the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers for leaving star players on the bench in recent games, a violation of the NBA's Player Participation Policy. This states that team's must play their stars unless those stars are deemed sufficiently banged up to sit out.

The goal of the policy is to prevent exactly what a whole pile of teams are doing right now. And why wouldn't they?

After all, the season that began as the leaves fell in October still has three full months to run. It doesn't end until April 13. And the Jazz and Pacers?

The former is 18-38, 24 games out of first in the West and nine games out of even the play-in portion of the playoffs. The latter is 15-40 and 26 games out of first in the East, 9.5 games out of the play-in round.

This doesn't even take into account the Washington Wizards, New Orleans Pelicans and Sacramento Kings, who are even worse than the Jazz and Pacers. What the hell are they supposed to do for the next three months, if not position themselves for the draft?

The obvious remedy to this is to shorten the season, but of course the only people who can do that -- Silver and the owners -- will have none of it. Everyone else agrees the season is just too damn long, and the product would be much improved by taking a meat axe to it. The Blob would personally lop 15 to 20 games off the schedule, which would lend more urgency to the play and put a serious crimp in the tanking. 

Fewer games, after all, mean fewer teams will be out of the playoff hunt with a third of the season to play. If you've still got a shot with a month or less to go in the season, you won't be as inclined to tank. Or so it would seem.

Me, I'm going to watch some more skeleton. No crazier than anything else these days.