A travelin' tale

 Whatever snickering gremlins shut down the American airline industry for several hours scrambled some pro and college sports itineraries but good yesterday, on account of it happened on a Friday, a major travel day for NFL and college football teams in particular.

This was especially true on the college side, where, among many others, No. 2 Utah, No. 8 Texas and No. 9 Tennessee were stranded on their way to Arizona, LSU and Texas A&M, respectively. This offered up the intriguing prospect of several Big Deal College Inc.'s weighing the option of chartering buses to get to their games on time, which apparently some did.

Presumably, those who did choose to charter buses only reserved the very best luxury rides. Big Deal College Inc., after all, has a revenue stream that could drown a horse, and thus can afford to travel first class, even when the transportation option is second class.

(Which, come to think of it, might not be any more second-class than most American air travel these days. As someone observed last night while the Clown Car Administration was trying to figure out why airport communications shut down, prompting the FAA to ground all flights nationwide: "Air travel's no different than Greyhound these days.")

At any rate, the Blob (being its perverse self) chose to imagine how opting for charter buses  would look if Big Deal College Inc. did NOT have a revenue stream that could drown a horse. I figure it would go something like this ...

Big Deal College Coach Theodore "Groin Pull" Slobberknocker: OK, men, here's our ride -- good old Bluebird bus No. 29. Everybody in, we're 24 hours from kickoff at Cletus Bodine State, and we're gonna need about 18 of 'em getting there.

Big Deal College Players: A  SCHOOL BUS? Come on, Coach, where's our Gulfstream 5?

Coach: Sorry, boys, it's grounded. Some genius tried to introduce that newfangled AI into a system that dates to 1870 or so. Shut the whole system right down. I swear these dopes could screw up a one-car parade.

Anyway, we're travelin' by bus this week.

Players: Well, fine, but why couldn't we get a dozen or so stretch limos? With snacks? I mean, what happened to all the money the athletic department made from the Gardiance/Skyrizi/Pete's Pride Pork Fritters Bowl last year?

Coach (getting annoyed): It went into your NIL fund, ya spoiled brats. Although why we're payin' some of you spazzos is beyond me. We're 1-8 and haven't crossed midfield in two weeks. And I for one am gettin' sick of watching Johnson over there fall down every time someone breathes on him. 

Johnson: But I look great in the State Farm ad, don't I, Coach?

Coach: For $1.5 million, you oughta look like Tom Cruise. And play like Tom Brady. Instead, what do we get? Tommy Boy.

(Johnson pouts. The other players grumble.)

Coach: Enough! Get on the bus. Here's your peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for the ride. And you guys in the back, don't be actin' up. When he's not pilotin' good old 29 for Dirt Clod High over in Landfill Valley, our driver has a regular route with San Quentin Prep. He'll pull this heap over and throw your asses right off.

(Pause)

Which I might be OK with, actually.

National (College) Football League

 So officially, now, the College Football Playoff Bought And Paid For By ESPN is a 24-team extravaganza, which I guess means SEC Inc. and Big Ten Inc. get what they wanted: A playoff that includes every SEC and Big Ten school with a winning record.

OK. So maybe not.

OK, so maybe a 6-6 Mississippi State doesn't get in, or a 7-5 Arkansas, or the football colossus that is, say, a 5-7 Rutgers. But if the goal of ESPN, which sort of owns SEC Inc., was to get more of "its" schools into the Big Payday, consider it mission accomplished for all parties concerned.

 ESPN gets the expanded CFP, and lame-o SEC or Big Ten schools will get to be the Mercer or Howard or Maryland-Baltimore County of the CFP — only with zero chance to pull off one of those 16-over-1s or 15-over-2s that put the Madness in March Madness.

Football, alas, is not basketball. A .500 Maryland team is not taking out, say, 9-3 Alabama in the first round. You can pencil in the 42-17 final and just move on.

This is not to say a 24-team playoff does not have its upside. Included in the package are nine-game conference schedules for the big boys, which eliminates a lot of the Puffed Rice U.'s and Lemon Meringue Techs on Indiana's, er, Power 4 teams' schedules. That's because in a 24-team field, a Power 4 can risk an early loss or two by scheduling other Power 4s and still get in -- whether it deserves to or not.

Some folks think this will force Notre Dame, finally, to join a conference, because if everyone's playing nine conference games there won't be a lot of dates left for independents like ND. But this presumes ND is still a football independent, which it isn't, really. Half its games already are against ACC opponents, of which the Irish are official members in everything but football; if they lose dates because of expanded conference skeddys, they can always fill in with a North Carolina State or Virginia or some other ACC school it doesn't already play.

No, the schools that really get rogered in all this are the Group of Six schools, which in the expanded structure get tossed a crumb or two from the Power 4 tables. There's a reason your Woffords and Ball States and Kenesaw States volunteer to get ball-peened by Georgia or Ohio State or Indiana every year; it's because they need the cash and those games are a a healthy payout. A couple million in guarantee dough plumps up cash-strapped small school athletic budgets in fine style.

Now, the big shooters don't need to schedule cupcake guarantee games anymore -- and with expanded conference slates and a mandated number of Power 4 games, they don't have room for them in any case. So buh-bye, money train.

(Also, buh-bye conference title games. No loss. They were never anything more than cash grabs for the conferences anyway. Same goes for conference tournaments in basketball, for that matter. As John Wooden once told me.)

What else?

Well, with another round or two added to the CFP festivities -- and with all the extra revenue those rounds will bring in -- what happens to the presumption that the kids upon whose backs that extra revenue will be made are, you know, actual college students?

Well, sorry, folks, but that went out with raccoon coats, sis-boom-bah and the groves of academe. It was gone the first time some stud transferred from Whatsamatta U. to Whatsittoya U. for a million-dollar bump in NIL green. And the first time the same stud transferred from Whatsittoya U. to Getthefuggouttahere U., and then to Whatareyoulookinat U.

Now?

Now, in exchange for their NIL paychecks, the scholars who play for the two teams that wind up in the CFP title game will be playing a schedule as long as the NFL grind. Indiana, for instance, went 16-0 last season to win the national championship. Now you're adding another game or two? For, in many cases, not grown men but 19, 20-year-old kids?

The season, for the two best teams, will now run from Labor Day weekend to the middle of January with scarcely a break. And, yeah, the players get paid now, and, yeah, that essentially makes them professionals, but where does the "college" in college football come in anymore?

Might as well call it what it is now: The National (College) Football League. A wholly owned subsidiary of ESPN, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS.

Shame. I kinda liked my raccoon coat.

Pod people

Aaaand the beat goes on, despite America beating it briskly about the head and neck in the mid-terms a week ago.

Down in Mississippi, where the state just elected a black United States Senator for first time in 145 years, a couple of dopey white sorority girls got caught on a ring camera making monkey noises outside the apartment of three black women,  and now the usual suspects are raising thousands in defense of their inalienable right to be racist nitwits.

Meanwhile, in Indiana …

Some podcaster dude podcasting for a podcast covering Center Grove High School athletics (but which has no affiliation with the school) thought it would be cute to indulge tired racist tropes about black people ahead of this week’s regional football game between predominantly white Center Grove and predominantly black Warren Central.

Joked that a lot of the Warren Central kids were ignorant sumbitches who couldn’t read, the Pod People did. Said some of the football players were actually 20 or 21 years old.  Said there are young kids in the school system who aren’t as young as they should be for the grade they’re in.

Yeesh. You’d think these people could come up with some new material after all this time. But, nah.

Now, those sorority girls down at Ole Miss, that’s just a case of kids not being raised right. Ditto whoever’s defending them — seriously, the Magic Intertoobz are crawling with their defenders right now — and whoever’s giving them Go Fund Me money because, doggone it, the little darlings are being persecuted for their beliefs.

Or some such thing.

But those podcasters in Indiana?

The main guy broadcast a public apology/non-apology that somehow made things worse, saying, aw, shucks, fellas, we were just trash-talking a little.

Holy schnikies. And they were questioning the Warren Central kids’ intelligence? 

‘Cause it takes a special kind of stupid to spew not only racist garbage, but painfully unoriginal racist garbage. And then semi-defend it. It’s as if the Pod People portaled back to 1866 or ‘67, listened to some sheet-wearing unreconstructed Confederates, and said “Boy, this is great stuff! Can’t wait to use it on the podcast!”

And, OK, so maybe that’s being a trifle overreactive, and thus plays into America’s current fondness for overreaction. But you know something?

The kicker to all this is Warren Central already beat Center Grove in the regular season. And the Warriors are unbeaten and ranked No. 2 in Class 6A. And Friday’s game is at Warren Central.

All of which means it takes a REALLY special kind of stupid to hand an unbeaten team that’s already beaten you bulletin board material a couple of days before you play them again.

Makes you want to give the Pod People a reading comprehension test, doesn’t it?

Also makes you wish Center Grove’s coach, who cannot be happy about this, would haul them out to the practice field and make him run gassers until his tongue’s painting the turf.

Oh, yeah.

Sacrifice and honor

I wrote the following several years back, and now I re-post it every other Veteran's Day or so. I do it for the same reason I pull Joseph E. Persico's "11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour" off the shelf and re-read chunks of it, because before today was Veteran's Day it was Armistice Day, and for me I suppose it always will be in some sense. The Great War, after all, lit the fuse for all the fun and frivolity that came after, from World War II to Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and right on up to Fearless Leader's military hijinks in Iran. 

Besides, it expresses everything I feel about the men and women who have borne the burden for all of the above, so you and I wouldn't have to.  So I offer it again.

And if you see a vet today, thank him or her for their service. It's the least you can do.

 Every year on Veteran's Day I go back there, in my mind. It's been 21 years now since my wife and I toured the American sector of the Western Front, but on this day it always feels like I can reach out and touch it. It feels as near as my next breath.

It's why November 11, the day the guns fell silent, will always be Armistice Day as much as Veteran's Day to me. It ended a war that is mostly forgotten to us now, even though some 54,000 Americans died in six months there, and countless others brought nightmares home from it that would last a lifetime. 

These days, in that place where American boys fought and died in the summer and autumn of 1918, there are neat green cemeteries from the Argonne to Thiaucourt, row upon row of white crosses arrayed in the geometry of remembrance. And, amid fields of wheat and the crumbling remains of ancient pillboxes, there is an immense dome of gleaming white marble.

Built in 1931 atop an escarpment called Montsec, it commands what was the old St. Mihiel salient, and now is just quiet French farmland. But though it commemorates the first major American operation of the Great War, hardly any Americans ever visit, or perhaps even know it exists.

I always wonder why that is so, when I think of that place on Veteran's Day. And I always will. 

It's an old bromide that we can never thank our veterans enough for their service, and yet somehow we always fall short. If we remember what they did for us in Normandy or Fallujah or on Iwo Jima or Okinawa, we just as readily forget sometimes what they did in Belleau Wood or Frozen Chosin or the killing fields of the Ia Drang Valley. And, more shamefully, we especially forget when they return home.

I met my share of war veterans, in my four decades as a journalist. I met Korean veterans and Vietnam veterans and, once, almost 30 years ago now, a vet who survived both Tarawa and Okinawa in World War II. And I met a man who, when he was 23 years old, was shooting down Nazi jets over Europe in a P-51 Mustang.

That particular gentleman's name was Chuck Yeager. Perhaps you've heard about what he did later on, something involving the sound barrier.

In all cases, they were men who'd seen and done things no human being should ever see or do, and they will talk about those things only with the most extreme reluctance. It is not that they don't remember. It's that they are unfailingly polite, and don't wish to burden us with old fantastical tales. It feels too much like bragging about things no one should ever brag about.

Everyone who has ever experienced war in closeup knows that last. They leave the bragging to fools and charlatans who, when it was their turn to serve, hid under their beds. One of them, a vile gasbag of no particular merit, once mocked a decorated Vietnam War POW for being captured. But of course now Fearless Leader has only the greatest of respect for our veterans.

I won't think about him today. I'll think instead about the no-big-deal humility of Chuck Yeager, and the quiet dignity of the Korean War vets I met almost 30 years ago, and of so many other men and women of so much more quality and consequence.

Thanks, all of you. Thank you for you service, and your example.

Worst. Fan. Ever.

 Comes now news out of the hoity-toity section of Detroit, and, listen, if this isn't the all-time king of the intermittent Blob feature Fans Behaving Badly, there will never be an all-time king.

It seems a visiting Bedford High School fan, apparently distressed that the boys were getting ball-peened 42-0 by Grosse Pointe South in a football game, walked into the Grosse Pointe school building and ... well, and ...

Pooped in the hallway.

"He did WHAT??" you're saying now.

Pooped. Defecated. Left a calling card. Choose your description.

Now, I have to admit, the Blob has been sitting on this (OK, bad choice of words) for several days, because I was extremely suspicious of its provenance. This is generally the Blob's standard social media policy in the age of artificial intelligence and political hack sites both right and left, and it's served me well. Otherwise I really might have believed Lauren Boebert had landed a job as a server at Hooter's (check out the meme!), or that Bill and Hillary Clinton had a marriage unblemished by cheating or scandal.

Anyway, I held off until I saw numerous legit news organizations in the Detroit metro area had picked up the story. So, yeah, I guess it's true, and now come the one-liners, which don't exactly  write themselves but don't require a lot of outside assistance, either. 

Why did the Beford High football fan poop in a Grosse Pointe South hallway?

Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

He just wanted to put the "gross" in Grosse Pointe.

He could only find the girls restroom and he didn't want to be accused of being one of those transgenders.

And last but not least:

Those three chili cheese dogs he ate before coming to the game were exacting their natural revenge.

Me?

As a former journo, I wanted someone to follow Jimmy Breslin's lead, sort of, when he interviewed the guy who dug John F. Kennedy's grave. 

I wanted to see an interview with the janitor who had to clean up the mess. Yikes.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 9

 And now this week’s edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the injury-prone Blob feature of which critics have said “I feel an injury coming on every time I read this thing”, and also “I got an injury that’ll leave you prone right here, pal”: 

1. “Oh, no! We’ve gotta play Carson Wentz again!” (Minnesota Vikings fans, after backup QB Wentz  started for injured Kyler Murray against the Buffalo Bills on Monday night)

2. “Oh, no! I’ve gotta play again!” (Wentz, before going 8-for-25 passing for 81 yards, two picks and a QBR of 2.3 in a 23-6 loss)

3. “Oh, no! We’ve gotta play Daniel Jones again!” (Indianapolis Colts fans, after starting QB Jones was not injured and therefore started in the 2-7 Colts loss to the miserably inept Dallas Cowboys)

4. “Oh, no! I’m not injured, which means I’ve gotta play for these miserably inept Cowboys again!” (Cowboys QB Dak Prescott)

5. “Oh, no! Jerry Jones still owns this team!” (Cowboys fans)

6. In other news, Jalen Hurts is still out for the season in Philly, and the Eagles lost again; ditto Lamar Jackson, backup QB Tyler Huntley and the Baltimore Ravens; Deshaun Watson missed Cleveland’s loss  to New Orleans with a concussion; and Justin Herbert remains hobbled by a dislocated offensive coordinator (Mike McDaniel) in Los Angeles.

7. “No, it’s just an owie. Mike and Justin will are getting closer to shouting distance of the same page every week.” (L.A. Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh, after the now 0-8 Bolts lost 44-22 to Houston and Herbert threw another pick, was sacked eight times and finished with a QBR of 11.8)

8. “Deshaun, Mashaun.  I did OK!” (Browns backup QB  Shedeur Sanders, who threw for 297 yards and two touchdowns, but couldn’t quite make the two-point conversion in overtime as the Browns lost 23-22.)

9. “Oh, no! All our defensive backs must be injured!” (New England Patriots fans, after watching Green Bay wideouts Christian Watson and Matthew Golden flame-broil the Patriots secondary for a combined 17 catches, 335 yards and two touchdowns in the Packers’ 45-27 win in Foxborough)

10. “Nah, we’re fine. We just suck.” (The Patriots secondary)

King Kyle

 Most of America likely missed this because it was too busy watching the New England Patriots poop the bed in Foxborough (and in front of Tom Brady, no less!). But Kyle Larson wrapped up his second straight NASCAR Cup title yesterday in the season's last race, although it didn't exactly come down to the wire.

Larson had already taken the drama out of things by coming to Homestead, Fla., with a 67-point lead. All he needed were nine points to clinch the thing, and he got one of them just for showing up.

The other eight he had by the end of the first stage of Sunday's race, which meant all he had to do the rest of the way was stay awake. He cruised to a 12th-place finish while race winner Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick and William Byron fought it out up front.

Larson celebrated standing atop his car with his three young children, one of whom held up a single finger to let everyone know who was No. 1 while the other two threw confetti at each other. It was a charming scene.

It also begins one of those legacy debates, on account of Larson's back-to-back titles are the first since 2010, and the 2026 crown is his third since 2021. 

This puts him up there in some rare air, as one of his Hendrick Motorsports bosses, Jeff Gordon, put it. The only drivers in NASCAR history ahead of him now are Gordon (four titles), and seven-time champs Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson, the last driver to go back-to-back.

And among those Larson joins with three?

Lee Petty, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip and Tony Stewart. That's some fast company.

It also makes the 34-year-old Larson the king of this latest NASCAR generation, as Petty was of his and Earnhardt was of his and Gordon and Johnson were of theirs. And hardly any of them excelled in as many different racing disciplines as Larson.

Over the years, he's raced twice in the Indianapolis 500, qualifying fifth and winning Rookie of the Year in 2024. He's won three Chili Bowls and four Knoxville Nationals in a sprint car. And one year he climbed into a sports car and won the Rolex 24 at Daytona.

This season, he turned the Chase into a parade, winning three of the 10 races and finishing in the top ten eight times.

"His natural, God-given talent is off the charts," Blaney said of him Sunday.

"I think he's got to be looked at as one of the all-time greats," agreed Larson's team owner, Rick Hendrick.

And Gordon?

"It's hard to pick the most impressive thing that he does because he gets in an IndyCar, he goes fast, sprint car ..." he said. "There's just so few guys that are capable of doing that."

Or almost none.