To Cav not

 So I'm looking up at the TV a few skinny minutes before 9 o'clock last night, and, oh, look, it's the Cleveland Cavaliers and New York Knicks in Game 1 of the NBA Eastern Conference finals, and, wow, the Cavs are up 15 with three minutes to play in the third quarter, and this is HUGE, because they're playing in Madison Square Garden and the Knicks have just been rolling through the playoffs so far ...

I'm sorry, what?

Will this sentence eventually have a period in it?

OK, fine. Here's your period. Three of them, in fact.

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah, right: The Cavs. Rolling themselves. Moving the basketball like a metronome. About to erase homecourt advantage for the previously indomitable Knickerbockers.

And then ...

If you live in Cleveland, you might want to stop reading now.

That's because the Cavaliers' lead was up to 22 points with 8:19 to play in the fourth quarter, and now it was not just a win but a certified freaking blowout. Except ...

Except over on the Knicks' bench, head coach Mike Brown and his assistants noticed something.

What they noticed was James Harden was bouncing the ball an awful lot for the Cavs, as he tends to do. They also noticed his age (36). And they also noticed the age of their own bucket-filler, 29-year-old Jalen Brunson.

That's seven years of fresher legs, if you're keeping score at home.

And so, right about then, the Knicks told Brunson to start attacking Harden offensively. And suddenly the 22-point deficit began to melt like an ice cube on an August sidewalk. And before long the Knicks had outscored Harden and the Cavs 44-11 -- 44-11! -- the rest of the fourth quarter and overtime, and Cleveland's blowout became a shocking 115-109 win for New York.

In that same span, the Cavs shot 29.4 percent, missing six of their seven shots in overtime.

Harden was 1-for-6.

And Brunson?

Scored 16 of his game-high 38 in the fourth quarter and OT.

You could call that a choke job of epic proportions by the Cavaliers. Or, you could be nice and call it an equally epic comeback by the Knicks.

Me?

I prefer to call it a horrendous pun, as is my wont.

To Cav ... and then, to Cav not.

I'll be here all week, folks.

Dark influencers

 (Departing once more from the normal Blobosphere  to talk about non-Sportsball stuff. Standard protocols apply.)

Couple of sick f**** (excuse the potty mouth) attacked a mosque in San Diego yesterday, killing three people in a burst of gunfire, and God forgive me. My first reaction was not horror or shock or even a weary sigh at the perfidy of these days, but the following: Yep. Knew this was comin'.

Knew this was comin', because the fringiest of the lunatic fringies have been stoking the fire on antisocial media, ranting about the "Muslim horde" (hat tip to Secretary of Defense Sir Pete the Lionhearted Hegseth for that 12th-century gem) that's INVADING AMERICA and trying to turn a CHRISTIAN NATION into another Islamic hellscape ruled by Sharia Law. Lord knows from what stinking sewer lint-brains like these crawl, but they're suddenly everywhere.

It's their contention -- and even that of some of our elected boneheads, like that idiot Tommy Tuberville -- that Muslims are evil incarnate and don't belong here, and never mind that freedom-of-religion thing. The First Amendment, they claim, doesn't apply to Islam, because Islam is anathema to American culture and wants only to subjugate it. 

Even though Muslims have been part of the American fabric since the founding. Even though the Muslims I know are a lot more interested in Mohammed Salah and Liverpool subjugating Aston Villa or Arsenal than subjugating America.

No matter. Bigotry has no time for reality, and it's out there every day -- sent out into the online biosphere by beyond-hard-right webheads we've come to know as "influencers."

Being an elderly American hopelessly afflicted with terminal fogey-ism, I can't tell you what an influencer is, exactly. I can't tell you how or why certain people become influencers. From what I can tell, all it takes is a cellphone, a fondness for using it to film your every personal interaction every second of the day, and the massive narcissism it takes to do that.

After which, in some cases, you start up a website where you can share the ravings of your diseased mind with the similarly afflicted. With no consequences whatsoever, because words, apparently, are only words.

Except, in this case, three people are dead. And the two suspects, both teenagers, are dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds. 

To repeat: Teenagers.

Who cruise the Great And Terrible Interwhatsis 24/7. And who, let's face, seem to be particularly drawn to "influencers."

Mind you, this is not to say all the anti-Muslim poison out there right now triggered these particular teenagers. But I'm not saying it didn't, either. Words do matter sometimes, after all. And it's not like America doesn't have a long and ugly history of hate-stoking; go back to the 1840s, for instance, and the influx of Irish from the Great Famine prompted that era's "influencers" to rail that these Catholic heathen were coming to America to turn us all into Papists.

Stroll on down the timeline, and you'll find similar hysteria leveled at every succeeding wave of immigrants. The Chinese were diseased and incorrigibly foreign; Eastern Europeans were anarchists to the man: Italians were all criminal gangsters; and so on, and so on.

Always has to be an Other in the land of the free, I guess. And now it's the Muslims' turn.

To America's shame.

The Great Inescapable

 Hey, what am I? Chopped liver?

-- Tuesday

Well, you can't blame ol' second-day-of-the-week for being miffed. The Nash-unal FOOT-ball League now has targeted every other day of the week for anointing, but not Tuesday? What's up with that? 

This upon the release of the NFL schedule last week, in which the league announced it would not only play games on Sunday, Monday, Thursday and sometimes Saturday, but on Wednesdays and Fridays, too. So that's six days out of seven the NFL will come flying off the edge into our living rooms, with only Tuesday left to sit around with its hand out.

What is up with that?

I mean, heck, you wanna flood the zone, flood the zone, dammit. If you're gonna crap on high school football by scheduling games on Friday nights, might as well take it all the way to the house, right?

Don't just schedule games on Thanksgiving Eve, a new wrinkle this year that brings Wednesday into play. Schedule a couple of Thanksgiving Eve Eve games, too. Call it the NFL Tuesday Night Two-fer or something.

After all, what's so all-fired special about Wednesday? With Tuesday you at least get tacos. With Wednesday you get ... what? Hump Day Ham Loaf? Boy, howdy.

Oh, I'm sure, in the fullness of time, the League will bring Tuesday into the NFL family of days. It is, let's not forget, the Great Inescapable, or at least aspires to be so. With an expanded European slate this season, NFL Sundays will now be a literal morning, noon and night proposition. And then Monday night! And Thursday Night Football! And now not just Thanksgiving but Thanksgiving Eve, and Christmas Day, too!

Coming soon: The NFL Presents The Night Before Christmas. Best hustle off to bed, boys and girls, or Santa will leave Jets-vs.-Titans in your stocking.

The cautionary tale in all this, of course, is that the NFL risks doing what wildly successful sports monoliths have done since time immemorial: Overreach. To be sure, it sounds silly right now to say the Shield might be perilously close to red-lining market saturation. The public's hunger for its product remains insatiable -- or at least it seems that way.

And so, for now, how-high-is-up remains an open question. And Tuesday awaits.

Pissed off. Feeling abandoned. Bearing tacos.

Palou and the pole

 So, then: Alex Palou, Alexander Rossi, David Malukas.

That's your front row, America. That's who leads the field of 33 six days from now, when the Indianapolis 500 goes off for the 110th time.

Rossi did it for Ed Carpenter with a brilliant final drive after squeaking into the Fast Six as the slowest of the Fast.

Malukas was cool beyond his 24 years in putting Will Power's old ride in a familiar place for Roger Penske.

And Palou?

Well, shoot. Palou was just Palou. Best wheel in IndyCar.

The Spaniard beat out Felix Rosenqvist, who'd been quickest around the ancient place all week until his pole run, when he unaccountably fell off and wound up fourth on the grid. That means the man who's won three of the last four IndyCar titles -- and three of the five races so far this season -- brings 'em to the green on race day.

But if you're inclined to just hand him a second straight bottle of milk and get it over with ... don't.

What, you haven't heard about the Pole Position Curse?

OK, so it's not a curse, exactly, but it might have bought a house in the same block. Since 2009, see, only one polesitter has gone on to win the race. That was Simon Pagenaud in 2019.

In the six 500s since, the guy on the pole has finished 13th, 17th, 21st, 4th, 6th and 26th.

In 109 runnings, the polesitter has won 21 times. 

Which is not nothing, admittedly, but it still means the race winner comes from the pole just 19 percent of the time. And that's taking into account the first decade of this millennium, when the polesitter won four times in eight years, including three in four years between 2006 and 2009.

So, just 17 times in the other 105 Indy 500s. Hardly a lock.

"Yeah, but all those guys who didn't win from the pole?" you're saying now. "None of 'em were Alex Palou."

Oh, really?

Well, one of 'em is A.J. Foyt, the greatest American racer not named Mario Andretti, who won the 500 four times but never from the pole. And one of 'em is Andretti, the greatest American racer not named A.J. Foyt, who started second in 1969 in his only win. And one of 'em is ...

Hey, look at this! It's Alex Palou!

Who, yes, started on the pole in 2023. And finished fourth. So ...

So, don't make him Mr. Automatic yet. It's Indy. No one's automatic, nor ever has been.

Eighty-eight polesitters would agree.

The rain cure

 The mission was a total scrub down in Indianapolis yesterday, as rain washed away what was to have been the setup day of qualifying for the Indianapolis 500. So what happens now?

Well ... a bit of simplification.

Instead of the new Rube Goldberg deal it was scheduled to unveil, IMS is going back to the old ways, or least the less-new ways. Qualifying will begin at noon, with the top 12 qualifiers making four-lap runs for the Fast Six at 4 p.m. and then the Fast Six run for the pole a bit later.

"Gee, Mr. Blob," you're saying now (or should be). "How come they just didn't do it that way in first place? Seems a lot easier to follow."

Weelll ...

That is a very good question. With a variety of answers.

See, the original, brand-spanking-new plan, if you read the Blob a couple of days ago ("Why would we do that?" you're saying) was to fill the field on Saturday, lock in places 16-33, and roll out the top 15 qualifiers for further qualifying on Sunday. 

The deal was, all 15 would make another four-lap trip to winnow it down to 12. The quickest nine from that session would be locked into spots in that 12. The slowest six would all run again to determine positions 9-12. 

Then those 12 would run again to determine the Fast Six. After which the Fast Six would run YET AGAIN in the race for the pole.

No, I don't know why. Oh, wait, yes, I do.

One reason for the revised skeddy is because there's no last-row qualifying as in the past, on account of this year there are only 33 entries. Which means no bumping, and thus no last-row drama to milk.

Consequently, the Speedway needed something to keep the fans from nodding off mid-afternoon. So, presto, let's add another couple layers to the process!

All of this, of course, springs from the fact qualifying in May ain't what it used to be. Perhaps spooked by the death of polesitter Scott Brayton in practice in 1996, the Speedway has engaged in a three-decade campaign to keep all its rocket ships reasonably sub-orbital. It started with the the fledgling Indy Racing League's move to a normally aspirated engine formula in the late 1990s (a move that didn't last) and has continued right up to today.

The consequence is the track record Arie Luyendyk set 30 years ago still stands. And with no track record in play, a good bit of the drama of 500 qualifying went winging off with the angels.

And with no bumping now either ...

Well. There went the rest of the drama.

(A radical notion: If you want to revive bumping and spice up everything else in May, open up IndyCar's closed Honda/Chevy/Dallara shop. Invite Toyota and Ford and, I don't know, Audi or Ferrari inside the gates. Porsche and Mercedes? Sure. Aston Martin? Why not? Hell, let Pratt & Whitney bring back the turbine. Couldn't hurt.)

Anyway ...

Anyway, we're back to a simpler time today, aka, back to last year. Some might call that the rain curing a few ills. IMS, of course, would characterize it as the rain being a pain again, as it so often does in May.

I know which side of that fence I'm on. You?

The Mav!

 So remember, I don't know, a month or  so ago, when the Blob wrote it was going to root for a guy named Maverick McNealy in the Masters? Mainly because "Maverick McNealy" sounded like the kind of name you'd give the hero in a golf movie?

(Or the villain. Works either way.)

"No," you're saying now.

Well, I DID. What, you don't remember this:

 And speaking of random ...

I'm putting my dimes on Maverick McNealy.

He's a 30-year-old pro out of Stanford who's 41st on the PGA money list right now, and I'm not picking him just because his name is Maverick McNealy. OK, so, that's mostly why I'm picking him.

 I mean, come on: Has there ever been a better golfer name than Maverick McNealy? ...

See?

Well ... today, I have some further Maverick McNealy news. And it's very exciting.

Guess who's got a piece of the 36-hole lead at the second major of the year, the PGA Championship?

Yes! The Mav!

(Which is what I'm calling him now)

Shot a 67 yesterday that could have been a 65 if he hadn't  messed up a couple of closing holes, and is tied for the lead with Alex Smalley, who's playing in only his fifth major. They're at 4-under 136 on the tricked-up Aronimink layout outside of Philadelphia, the highest 36-hole total for co-leaders in the PGA in 14 years.

But big whoop! The lead is the lead, right? And not only that, but The Mav's younger brother is caddying for him, and you know what HIS name is?

Scout.

Scout! Scout McNealy! What, you think I could make up something that way cool?

So it's Scout and The Mav in the lead in the freaking PGA, and, listen, if you think it'll be cake taking it away from  them, you're in for a rude awakening. 'Cause you losers ain't never BEEN in a rodeo like this before. 

(Or so The Mav would say in the movie, I figure.) 

The Narcissism Bowl

 We're now in week whatever of America's new favorite game show, "The Pittsburgh Steelers Held Hostage," and what have the Steelers won, Johnny Olsen?

"A NEW CAR for driving around looking for Aaron Rodgers!" Johnny cries.

Uh, no.

"A TWIN-ENGINE BEECHCRAFT AIRPLANE for flying around looking for Aaron Rodgers!" Johnny warbles.

Try again.

"A DELUXE STEEL-TOED BOOT to kick Aaron Rodgers' ass when he finally shows up!" Johnny serenades.

Now you're gettin' warmer.

Now you're gettin' what the Steelers must be feeling but not saying these days, with minicamps underway and the NFL beginning its long post-Draft run-up to more minicamps, and then training camp, and then, at last, the Hall of Fame Game between a bunch of future NFL cuts against a bunch of other future NFL cuts.

So where's A-Aron, that rascally old drama king?

Well, still unsigned. Still MIA. Still a 42-year-old whisper in the wind after not showing up in Pittsburgh last weekend despite all the chatter that he was going to. More smoke without fire, while the Steelers insist everything is fine, no worries, Aaron's going to be here and WHAT THE (REALLY BAD WORD) IS ITWITH THIS (DIFFERENT REALLY BAD WORD) GUY?

Well ... the Packers could have told you. Ditto the Jets.

This is Aaron making it about him, as usual. He's the MVP of the Narcissism Bowl, and the Narcissism Bowl is a semi-yearly event.

He'll play. He won't play. He'll sign. He won't sign. He'll show up ... eventually.

Word on the street this time (according to Mike Florio Pro Football Talk) is that Rodgers wants an out clause that would free him to go to a quarterback-needy team of his choosing should the Steelers decide he's had it. In other words, he wants a guarantee that the team would simply release him if it ever decides to bench him.

This would apparently safeguard him from being picked up by any old team on the waiver wire, if the benching happened before the trade deadline. 

In any event, the Steelers' quarterback room is now Will Howard, Mason Rudolph and rookie Drew Allar of Penn State, whom the Steelers drafted all of three weeks ago. Mike McCarthy's new coaching staff is working hard with all three, just in case A-Aron decides to hell with it and retires. He is, to reiterate, 42 years old.

In the meantime, Aaron continues to be, well, Aaron. Only difference from all the other times he was Being Aaron is he's not really Aaron anymore, but just an old guy trying to play the same games without the status he used to have.

Oh, he had a decent season last year, throwing for 3,322 yards and 24 touchdowns against just seven interceptions. But he threw 16 of those sixes in the first seven weeks; in the last 10, he threw just eight. His season QBR of 44.4 ranked 23rd in the league.

So, yeah. Not the Aaron of old; just the old Aaron.

Playing the same young man's games with management he used to be able to play with some justification. Now, it's just annoying.

Or, you know, just Aaron. Same diff.