(No Longer) Cruds Alert!

 Didja see? Didja see what happened last night in Major League Baseball?

"The Cubs lost to the Brewers again?" you're saying.

Well, yes.

"Your Pittsburgh Cruds (about whom we've heard quite enough, by the way) lost to the sorry Cincinnati Deads?" you're saying.

Uh-huh.

"Well, what else, then?"

Chicago White Sox 22, Kansas City Royals 1. That's what else.

Yes, the baseball team formerly known as the What Sox absolutely beat the brakes off those pathetic Royals, and not only that, but the Cleveland Guardians lost, too. Which means guess who's sitting atop the AL Central this morning with the third-best record in the entire league?

"The baseball team formerly known as the What Sox?" you're saying.

Correct!

They're 42-38 here on June 27th, a game clear of the Guardians. This is quite impressive, all things considering. In fact it's a damn miracle, or something close.

A year ago on this date, after all, the still-the-What-Sox-then were 26-56 and dead last in the division. And two years ago on this date, when the What Sox put on the field the all-time worst team in the modern era, they were 22-61.

That's 20 more wins and 23 fewer losses, if you're keeping score at home. And untold less suffering for fans of the Pale Hose.

And so forget the Blob's periodic Cruds Alert, at least for today. Today, it's the No Longer Cruds Alert.

Grab another Old Style, you south siders. You've earned it.

Cinderella Men

 The best story of the World Cup so far got even better yesterday, when those plucky islanders from Cape Verde played Saudi Arabia to a nil-nil tie. It was the Verdeans' third draw in three games, which means they're still undefeated, and which also means they're on to the knockout round.

You remember how they played Cup favorite Spain to a scoreless draw in their first-ever World Cup match, a stunning upset approached so far only by Ecuador, which shocked mighty Germany 2-1 the other day. ("Wait, we lost to ECUADOR??" -- Otto von Bismarck. "Great, now I gotta write another tragic opera." -- Richard Wagner). 

Well, now the Cinderella Men are on to the round of 32, just like Spain and France and all the other big boys. Led by 40-year-old keeper Vozinha, who's given up just two goals in three games, they're the smallest nation in the tournament. With a population of just 525,000, in fact, they're smaller than every one of our 50 states.

So, go, you Cape Verdeans. May we all wrap ourselves in the national flag (blue with red and white stripes and gold stars), and sing the praises of the Tubaroes Azuis ("Blue Sharks") on July 3 as they march fearlessly into their first knockout match against defending World Cup champion Argentina.

Yeah, Lionel Messi 'n' them will probably crush 'em. But July 3 is the day before America's 250th birthday, and nobody thought we'd kick British booty, either. So maybe Cape Verde will catch some of that vibe.

"We are small," Vozinha said, echoing Washington or Thomas Paine or someone. "But we have big hearts and we are fighters."

Added Cape Verde coach Bubista, echoing, I don't know, maybe Herb Brooks: "Everyone is entitled to dream, and nothing is impossible."

"Darn skippy!" shouted Ben Franklin, banging his fist on the table.

OK, so he didn't. But you get the gist.

Justice delayed

 Look, by now we all know what the WNBA is. And, no, not a bunch of black lesbian white-girl haters, which is what some people say who swear they have nothing against black or gay folk, but sure talk like they do.

Nah, nah. What the WNBA is, it's Dick Van Dyke tripping over that ottoman.

(And for you younger Blobophiles who don't get the reference, the Blob suggests you jump on YouTube and punch in "The Dick Van Dyke Show" opening. Consider it a learning experience.)

Anyway, the Can't Get Out Of Their Own Way Bunch did it again this week, after Alyssa Thomas of the Phoenix Mercury kneed Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark in the groin and pushed herself up with a fist to Clark's throat in a loose ball scrum.

Now, I have watched the video half a dozen times, and I still can't tell how much of that was intentional. When the ball comes loose and players scramble after it, stuff happens. Players catch elbows and knees and, yes, fists, in unfortunate places. So I certainly don't think Thomas should have been charged with assault, as some of the more unhinged Caitlin worshippers were hollering.

What I do think is it shouldn't have taken a whole day to slap Thomas with a Flagrant 2, and it should have resulted in far more than a puny one-game suspension. The WNBA, tripping over the ottoman again.

The league's officiating has faced a well-deserved tsunami of criticism since Clark's star power turned a spotlight on the WNBA, and it bought another wave with this latest hoo-ha. Thomas, you see, not only was NOT charged with a Flagrant 2 on the spot, she wasn't even assessed a regular old garden-variety foul. Apparently the officials didn't see nuthin'.

How that could be when four players -- Thomas, Clark and two other Mercury players -- were wrestling on the floor for the ball is a mystery undreamt of in your philosophy, as the Bard would say. What were the on-court officials looking at? Freddy Fever, the Indiana mascot? Some superfan up in section Triple Ought Z?

Beats me. The upshot, though, was the WNBA's delayed justice ("Oh, crap! We're getting crap! We need to do something!", you can almost hear league officials saying) further stoked the narrative that the league isn't doing enough to protect its golden goose. And there's more than a little truth to that.

It is not, however, as neat a storyline as it seems. Or so it says here.

Yes, there's no question Clark gets knocked around a lot. But while some say it's jealousy (and stupidity, considering how much money Clark has made for everyone in the league), it's also that opponents have figured out that aggressive defense throws Clark off her considerable game. 

That's not jealousy or stupidity. That's just strategy.

And, listen, Clark plays into it, to an extent. There is, let's face it, more than a little thespian in her: The exaggerated flying backward at the slightest bump; the blatant selling of the foul; the theatrical pleading her case to the officials.

She is, in other words, a Bill Laimbeer Class flopper on occasion. Defenders also shove, trip, elbow and beat on her like a guy pounding out dents in his '85 Corolla. Both things can be true.

This also is true: After the Mercury shoved, tripped, elbowed and beat on her the other night, she left the floor with a sore back. 

And not from carrying an entire ham-fisted league, either.

Little big man

 So Braden Smith is an Indiana Pacer now, and go ahead, tell him he's got no chance. He's 5-10 and 166 pounds and his quicks are decent, but he's not exactly a streak of fire. Why, the NBA will chew him up and spit him out to the G-League, where he'll play for whatever they're calling the late, great Mad Ants these days.

Or so some people undoubtedly will say.

They'll say he's an undersized guard who's not, say, Allen Iverson or Jalen Brunson, or even Nate Archibald. Whom everyone called "Tiny" even though he was a full three inches taller than Braden Smith.

So what will they call Smith?

How about "survivor"?

Because, listen, he's been too small and not quick enough to make up for it his entire life, and all he's done is stick out that stubborn Hoosier chin and say "Oh, yeah, smart guy?" He was Indiana's Mr. Basketball as a senior at Westfield High School, and the only major college coach who offered him was Matt Painter. Know who else offered him?

Appalachian State. Belmont. North Texas. Montana. Toledo. Not exactly Duke or UConn.

So he headed up the road to Purdue, grew a funky Amish beard and became ... well, you know what he became: The best point guard in America. He started all four years for Painter, and when he was done he, Fletcher Loyer and Trey Kaufman-Renn had won more games than any trio in Purdue's decorated basketball history. Oh, and Braden Smith also wound up as college basketball's all-time career assists leader.

Knocked Bobby Hurley off that mountaintop, God bless him.

Yesterday the Chicago Bulls took Smith with the 38th overall pick in the NBA Draft, the eighth in the second round. Then they traded him to the Pacers, who really, really wanted the hometown kid. And now we'll sit back and see what happens.

He'll back up T.J. McConnell at the point, or so the gurus say. And, yes, opposing will begin drooling uncontrollably when they bring the ball up against him. And, yes, he could -- could -- wind up spending time in Noblesville with the Pacers' G-League team.

Me?

I think Braden Smith is going to read that and say, "Oh, yeah, smart guy?"

And then prove us all wrong again.

Because, yeah, he may be a little man, as these things go. But he's the biggest little man you'll ever see.

One pooch, screwed

 At some point you hurt for the kid, if you're at all human. A little, anyway. A ... smidge.

You do this because Brendan Sorsby is 22 years old and has a gambling jones that wrecked his college career, which doesn't even take into account he's 22 years old and prone to doing the dumb stuff 22-year-olds do. Like, for instance, listening to the wrong people. 

Surely he did that. Sued the NCAA when it told him he couldn't play college football anymore, because he gambled on college football like ... well, like a hooked-through-the-gills addict. Won an injunction to play for Texas Tech from some local Go Red Raiders judge. Decided, nah, never mind, when the NCAA's lawyers came after him again.

He'd enter the NFL's supplemental draft instead. Yeah, sure. Perfect. Why, that's just what he'd d--

Oops.

Turns out he won't be entering the NFL's supplemental draft, because the other day the NFL said, "No, you won't be entering our supplemental draft." That's on account of the NFL announced it wouldn't be conducting a supplemental draft this year.

Sooo ...

So, Brendan Sorsby is a football player without a football, so to speak.

He can't go back to college. No NFL team will be rolling the dice (pun, well intended) on him for the 2026 season. He can't even head north to hook up with a Canadian Football League team, because it's June and the CFL already is well into its season.

So he sits until next April's draft, where there's no guarantee any team will risk a pick on a chronic gambler. In fact it would be an upset of any team did, given how hinky NFL front offices are about players with baggage, and especially quarterbacks with baggage.

That means Brendan Sorsby would come to training camp as a free agent, if he comes to an NFL training camp at all. Likely he will, because he's a quarterback with skills, and if you're a quarterback with skills someone will give you a look. Heck, someone would have given Pablo Escobar a look if he could throw the deep out, on the off chance he was the next Kurt Warner.

This does not mean Brendan Sorsby isn't the latest 22-year-old who's screwed the proverbial pooch. He is. At least for now.

Youth is wasted on the young. Home truth.

American History 1, England 0

 Underdog Ghana beat the mighty Three Lions of England 0-0 yesterday (because a draw is a win, in this case), and it happened in Foxborough, Mass., which prompted a fellow Civil War/history nerd friend to make an especially witty observation on Facebook.

He said the British not being able to handle a big underdog in Massachusetts seemed vaguely familiar.

Absolutely.

In fact, if you watched Ghana repeatedly blunt one scoring chance after another from Harry Kane and the Brits, you wondered (or at least I did) if Thomas Gage was looking on from the great infinite. 

Gage, for the history-challenged in the audience, was the commander of the British occupation forces in Boston. He's also the guy who lost Boston thanks to his disastrous search for weapons on Lexington and Concord Day, and to Henry Knox hauling Fort Ticonderoga's artillery over the Berkshires to George Washington, who placed them on the Dorchester Heights and put Gage literally under the gun.

"Gee, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "That's a lot of history. Now my head hurts."

Well, TOO BAD. 'Cause the Blob's famously twisted imagination has been working overtime again, and it's conjured up a juicy scenario: Gage, King George and a bunch of ordinary British soccer fans sitting in a working-class pub watching the last ten minutes or so of England-Ghana, when Kane and Co. should have scored multiple times but did what England always does in the World Cup, which is ... well, choke, not to put too fine a point on it.

Hit the crossbar and post a time or two. Booted the ricochet off one of those high, from point-blank range. Got robbed by Ghana's keeper a couple times, then robbed again when a Ghana defender, at the very last split second, headed clear a ball bound for the top corner.

In the end, England outshot Ghana 19-2 in the match. And couldn't find the back of the net with a single one of those 19 shots.

And so to that imaginary pub we go ...

George III: "Nineteen shots! For God's sake, I could have scored if you'd given me 19 shots. This is all your fault, Gage."

Gage: "MY fault? How can it be MY fault, your Majesty? I've been dead for 200 years!"

George III: "Because if you hadn't screwed up and lost us Boston, America would still be ours, which means Christian Pulisic, Alex Freeman, Folarin Balogun and that lot would be playing for us. And maybe THEN that choking dog Kane could have scored."

Ordinary British Soccer Fan (dressed in a Kane jersey and wearing a St. George's flag like a cape): "'Ey, 'ey, 'ey now, your Majesty. 'Arry's our man. He just had a spot of bad luck today, like all the boys."

George III: "And I had a spot of bad luck when I sent Gage to Boston to quell Adams and Hancock and that rabble."

Gage: "I'm SORRY, OK? How many times do I have to say I'm sorry?"

George III: "As many times as we hit the bloody crossbar today. For the love of the resurrected Christ, it's as if Ghana had two extra players manning the pitch for it. I could almost see Adams and Hancock sitting on top of the Ghana goal swatting away our shots."

Ordinary British Soccer Fan: "Yeah! Up those colonials!"

George III: "And that's another thing. Not only did we lose -- OK, drew, but still -- we drew with another bunch of colonials. And Ghana wasn't even OUR colony. It was a French colony. Which I suppose means those idiots will think of this as payback for the Seven Years' War or some such thing."

Gage (hopefully): "So this is FRANCE'S fault now? Does this mean I'm off the hook?"

George III: "Nah, this is still on you. I shoulda sent Johnny Burgoyne to Boston instead."

Gage: "But ... but your Majesty, didn't Burgoyne lose his entire army at Sarato-"

George III: "Ah, crap. You're right. What a lame-ass empire. Why couldn't I have been king of Ghana? At least they can play this bloody game."

Pros to pros

 You know how it used to be, back in the Before Time. Some NBA team threw a wad of cash at some big-deal college coach, and the big-deal college coach went off to wrangle the paid professionals, and, ah, geez, how did THAT work out?

Not well, usually.

Usually Rick Pitino would fail with the Knicks. Or John Calipari would fail with the Nets. Or a Billy Donovan or P.J. Carlesimo would do well enough to stick around, but would never be confused with, say, Phil Jackson or Pat Riley.

That's because coaching kids in college and pros in the NBA were two utterly different dynamics, requiring two different mind and skill sets. Authoritarianism worked in one world; it rarely did in the other.

Now?

Now comes the news that Dusty May is headed to the Dallas Mavericks from the University of Michigan, where in two seasons he took the Wolverines from 8-24 to 37-3 and a national title. Went 64-13 in those two seasons overall.

No wonder the Mavericks wanted him.

And no wonder, by the way, it's not nearly so much a leap of faith as it used to be.

This is because Dusty May has one huge advantage over those who followed this path before him:

He's not going from college to the pros. He's going from the pros to the pros.

That's because the virtually unregulated Name, Image and Likeness money and wide-open transfer portal has transformed the college game into the NBA without guardrails. Kids chase the money now as avidly as the grownups do, and with fewer restraints. So the dynamic between the college game and the pro game, in terms of how a coach manages both the Xs-and-Os and the human beings charged with executing them, isn't much different.

Oh, you can still be a my-way-or-the-highway hardass, in college buckets. But with few exceptions -- Matt Painter's Purdue springs to mind, and Tom Izzo's Michigan State -- your players more than likely will choose the highway.

Because the highway's wide open these days. Plus it pays more.

That's why, in more and more places, rosters turn over almost entirely every year now. Even May, after winning a national title, was going to be bringing in a whole raft of newbies he would have had to integrate with the holdovers. But with the Mavericks?

He'll still have Cooper Flagg, the NBA Rookie of the Year. He'll still have, barring any trades, Kyrie Irving and Khris Middleton and Klay Thompson. None of them will be entering the transfer portal.

In that sense, then, the NBA actually offers less chaos and more control now for a head coach.  That's the polar opposite of  the Before Time, which is why so many prominent college coaches (Paging Mike Krzyzewski ... Paging Bob Knight ...) chose to stay at Western Northeastern Tech State rather than take the NBA's money and run.

Or as a longtime friend and former sportswriting colleague texted me when the news came down: "Who could have guessed five years ago that in 2026 the NBA would provide coaches with a more predictable, stable and desirable work environment than college basketball?"

Indeed.