Welcome fall, Part Deux

So yesterday the Blob opined yet again on why it loves college football better than the pro version, and why it's way, way, better than the pro version.

Today we enter further evidence into the record.

It comes from South Bend, where Saturday night Notre Dame opens the season by hosting Michigan, with whom it has had a long and complicated relationship going back to the days of Knute Rockne and Fielding Yost. Huge gaps appear in the timeline of the rivalry, which seems odd until you  consider the remarkable (and deliciously petty) enmity that has seasoned their relationship.

At one point, for instance, the two schools terminated the series for almost three-and-a-half decades because Yost accused Notre Dame of using two ineligible players in the 1909 game (and later used his influence to keep the Irish out of the Big Ten.) This touched off the sort of exchange you generally see only between feuding siblings still in the Garanimals stage.

"You cheated!" Michigan said, essentially.

"Did not!" Notre Dame replied, essentially.

"Did so!"

"Did not!"

"Did so ! So we're not playin' you anymore!"

Fine!"

"Fine!"

Anyway ... the Fighting Irish and Wolverines renew all of this Saturday night, and it's nice to know some things haven't changed. This week, to commemorate the occasion, South Bend has changed the name of Michigan Street in downtown South Bend to -- ta-da! -- Fighting Irish Drive.

This because "Michigan" is not a word anyone wants to use in South Bend this week -- an attitude reminiscent of the late Woody Hayes, who famously refused to say the word "Michigan," instead referring to it as "that school up north."

Lovely. Just lovely.

Welcome fall

Touch of cool to the air this morning, after so much smothery heat. The humidity was gone, cleaned out. August finally let the arm go, after twisting it behind our backs for days like the summer bully it is.

I guess we can call that "timing."

Timing, because a touch of cool is exactly the herald for what begins tonight, when college football steps back onto the stage in full force. There are games tonight and games tomorrow night and games all day Saturday and even games Sunday and Monday, and that is a glorious thing. That is indeed a glorious thing.

Faithful Blobophiles ("Quit saying that! You just sound delusional!" both of you are saying) know college football is the Blob's favorite thing, or at least one of them. You can keep your Sundays and Sunday nights and Monday nights, for the most part, in the Blob's universe. It is too corporate and too obsessed with image and brand, to the extent that fines are routinely meted out for jaywalking crimes such as wearing the wrong-colored socks or some such thing. It is football winnowed down to numbing lockstep, with a season that stretches colorlessly across endless months.

You can have it, in other words.

But Saturday afternoons?

Those are mine.

I love those shortening fall afternoons, and the chill of the evenings that follow. I will readily acknowledge that college football on the highest level has become a largely corporate enterprise, too, with all the corruption that comes with that. All you'll need to remind yourself of that is catch a glimpse of Urban Meyer stalking the sidelines in Columbus, Ohio, sometime this fall, when he should be stalking the unemployment line.

But I love it still. In my sportswriting days I loved the morning of a big game in, say, South Bend, where I always arrived two or three hours before kickoff just so I could stroll that postcard campus and feel everything build slowly toward kickoff. I loved the homey feel of Bishop John M. D'Arcy Stadium -- watching the geese do their game-day flyover before touching down in Mirror Lake, then watching the Saint Francis Cougars stomp the life out of some poor McKendree or Olivet Nazarene.

I loved settling into the pressbox in Ross-Ade Stadium, waiting for that goofy little train to come chugging along, waiting for public-address announcer Jim Russell's weekly reminder that the Robert C. Woodworth Memorial Pressbox was a working pressbox, so no damn cheering.

(Although Jim always was much more cordial about it).

Mostly I loved the drive home from Notre Dame or Purdue or Michigan late at night, the column filed, the pressure off, some other college game muttering softly from the radio. Here was the Iowa game on a station out of Des Moines, riding some strange atmospheric eddy all the way to Indiana. Then that would be fade out, and here came a MAC game or an SEC game or an ACC game. One night, another of those strange eddies brought in the Bethune-Cookman Wildcats vs. someone, riding shotgun with me all the way from Daytona Beach, Fla.

Best hour or two of my week, those Saturday night drives.

And now it all begins again.

Can't wait for Saturday night, Michigan and Notre Dame filling up my living room with all that swaggering lore. Can't wait for Auburn vs. Washington. Can't wait for all of it, starting tonight up in Angola, where Trine and my employer, Manchester University, renew their own fine rivalry.

The beauty of it, of course, is that no one on either team will want to kick the other's hindparts less than all those Wolverines and Fighting Irish will Saturday night, 80 miles to the west. They are worlds apart in size and scope, and yet it is the same world. It is the same game, the same passion, the same sound going up to the sky.

Glorious. Just damn glorious.

Selling out

I could do this too, I suppose. Sell my hopeless attachment to the perpetually hopeless Pittsburgh Pirates on eBay. I bet I could get a buck for it easy.

This is nowhere in the ballpark (pun intended) with what Evan Perlmutter got for his fandom in the New York Knicks. Finally fed up with the Knicks' bottomless ineptitude, he auctioned off his  allegiance on eBay. A guy named James Riedel won it with a $3,450 bid.

And if you're asking here "Why would James Riedel spend $3,450 on something he could do for free, which is root for the Knicks?" you are not alone. The Blob doesn't get this, either. And it for sure doesn't get why you'd spend $3,450 on a Knicks allegiance, of all teams.

The Warriors, sure. The Celtics or Rockets or Thunder, absolutely. Heck, you could even justify bidding on a Pacers allegiance, 'cause they're fun to watch and a bunch of good guys and they're going to be a team to reckon with this season.

Perlmutter, meanwhile, will take his three grand and change and root for the Lakers this year, presumably because that's where LeBron is now and the Lake Show seems ready for a revival of some fashion. This, of course, only identifies him as a bandwagon jumper of the lowest order. And of course few things in the sporting world are more reprehensible than a bandwagon jumper.

You'd never see me abandoning my Pirates for, say, the Cubs, for instance. There's simply too much history there for me, not to say too much Roberto Clemente memorabilia (including a Clemente jersey, natch) scattered around my home. My notoriously vivid imagination conjures gruesome visions of waking up in the dead of some night and seeing Clemente standing over me glowering, having emerged whole and breathing from his picture that hangs in my den.

"Traitor," he would hiss, right before taking a home-run cut at my head.

Shudder.

Anyway ... no, I could never sell out my Pirates for the Cubs or the Indians or the Tigers or, God forbid, the Yankees or the Other Yankees, aka the Red Sox. That will never happen.

Although $3,450 might make me rethink that position.

Kidding, Roberto! Kidding!

Meanwhile, in Waco ...

Nuclear cluelessness in East Lansing, Mich., and Columbus, Ohio, has made back markers lately of the poor folks in Waco, Texas, in the race for college athletics' least coveted title: national champions of Sexual Misconduct, Schmexual Misconduct, We Got Us Football Games To Win.

One thing about those poor Waco folks, though. They will compete with ya.

Comes now a report from PR Week, and if true it puts Baylor University right back in the Money Trumps Civilized Behavior Bowl with Michigan State and Ohio State. According to the report, Baylor officials infiltrated several support groups for sexual assault survivors, a poorly conceived attempt to control their messaging and keep the university from looking bad.

So not only were the school's football players apparently assaulting any coed that moved, the university pulled out all the stops to make sure its athletic cash cow was well protected. And by "all the stops," we mean not just ignoring the program's victims, but actively trying to undermine their attempts to get justice.

I can't think of anything more epically heinous. It's one thing to facilitate criminal behavior by shielding its practitioners. It's several mighty leaps beyond that to covertly sabotage support groups designed to help victims of that behavior heal. In a very real sense, it amounts to assaulting them all over again.

And it's a clear window into why Baylor now is facing a Title IX lawsuit from 10 former students. The charge is serial mishandling of sexual assault cases over the past decade.

If this latest story is true, that charge may not go nearly far enough. Because this latest isn't just serial mishandling of sexual assault cases.

It's active participation in that assault.

Meow

It's never a pretty spectacle, watching clueless people pick up big hammers and hit themselves in the head with them. Part of you feels for them, but another, bigger part thinks "Damn, you people are stupid."

Enter the French Tennis Federation.

Whose president, Bernard Giudicelli, announced the other day the French Open would be instituting a dress code ala Wimbledon. The code was widely and accurately interpreted as a shot at Serena Williams, who wore a black head-to-toe catsuit at this year's French, partly for health reasons. A victim of multiple pulmonary embolisms, Williams donned the suit at least in part to help prevent further blood clots in her legs.

This cut zero ice with Guidicelli, who said the catsuit would "no longer be accepted."

""One must respect the game and the place," he said.

Excuse me?

And just what the hell does that even mean?

That the premier women's tennis player in history lends prestige to the game and the place simply by showing up -- cat-suited or otherwise -- should be abundantly obvious to anyone unencumbered by the stuffy self-reverence of tennis. Saying Serena Williams, of all people, was not respecting the game and the place by wearing an outfit that was at least partly functional ... well, if there was a more tennis thing to say, I can't imagine what it would be. It's the sort of thing you say when your mailing address is 1885.

Unfortunately for the Defenders of Respect, it's 2018, not 1885. In this century, folks really don't care if Serena Williams is wearing a catsuit. This is because it's her athleticism and artistry they come to see, not her choice of wardrobe. Only the Bernard Giudicellis, with their Victorian notions of propriety where women in particular are concerned, become exercised over such paltry matters.

In so doing, they only show how out of touch they are with modern sporting audiences. And, by extension, how out of touch their game and their place are.

Nice goin', Bernie.

The sins of the father

And so we come to another day of the irrational in America, a country that has come to a place in which a particular madness has eradicated common sense.

No, we are not talking about the gibbering creature in the White House, whose rationality hourly seems to be jittering apart like a badly made toy.

This time we are talking about a word. It starts with "N." You know the rest.

It is a word no one with any manners should utter, but particularly no white person, for reasons that are too obvious to explain. Suffice it to say that the weight of its history is great and that history should be respected by white people in particular. This is not "political correctness," which in most cases simply describes behaving like you were raised right. No. Refraining from using that word, especially if you're white, is nothing more than common decency.

That said, what has happened to Conor Daly in regard to that word is as irrational as the latest spew from the creature in White House.

The back story is this: Last week long-time Colts play-by-play man Bob Lamey, who is pushing 80, announced his abrupt retirement. Very soon after that, it was revealed that Lamey had dropped the Word In Question in front of an African-American co-worker, who protested to management. Lamey knew he shouldn't said it, because he asked first if the mics were off. So he's got no cover here.

However ...

However, context does matter.

In this case, the context was that he was repeating a story from his days covering the Indianapolis 500, in which a driver fresh off the boat from Ireland used The Word In Question in an interview. So it wasn't Lamey using that word. It was Lamey describing someone else using that word.

Still. He knew better.

But it wasn't over there. A couple of days later, it was revealed that Derek Daly, former driver and now racing reporter for a TV station in Indy, was the source of the story. It happened in the early 1980s, more than 30 years ago. Daly was summarily fired. He protested that he'd used the word not knowing it had a different connotation than it did in his native Ireland, and he was "mortified" to learn otherwise and never used it again.

This might be true. On the other hand, the etymology of the word in Ireland is much the same as it is in the U.S. Which is to say, it's a slur there, too. The British used to call the Irish "White The Word In Question" back in the days when the British thought it was cute to do things like deliberately let the Irish starve during the Great Famine. So maybe Daly isn't being quite so forthcoming after all.

This brings us to Conor Daly, Derek's son.

Who was a little boy when his father used a word he shouldn't have.

Who has Type 1 diabetes.

Who was therefore about to make his NASCAR debut in an Xfinity series stock car sponsored by Lily Diabetes.

Not so fast.

A couple of days ago, Lily Diabetes announced it was dropping its sponsorship of Conor Daly. Its reasoning was no more rational nor defensible than anything in this tale. Somehow it thought sponsoring the son of a man who (perhaps unknowingly) used a racial slur almost four decades ago would distract the company from its core message of raising awareness about diabetes treatment.

Which of course is absurd.

But there you have it: Conor Daly lost his sponsorship not because of something he did, but because of something his father did (again, perhaps unknowingly) a long, long time ago. It had nothing to do with him. It has nothing to do with him. And yet he is being punished for it.

Irrational. Totally, incomprehensibly irrational.

And so very American these days.

Makeup call

So remember the other day, when the Blob (and most of America) gave Ohio State less than stellar marks for the way they handled WifebeaterGate -- especially the part where no one, not athletic director Gene Smith nor head football coach Urban Meyer, bothered to even mention the only real victim of it all, Courtney Smith?

Well. Meyer finally got around to doing that yesterday. Forgive the Blob (and most of America) for thinking it sounded almost as insincere as Meyer's original statement at the presser the other day, given the timing.

Because, sorry, but I can't read Meyer's apology without hearing the proper background music.

That would be this, of course..

Punishment haze

Three games.

This is what Ohio State deemed acceptable, in the matter of Urban Meyer coddling an apparent serial wife beater. This is what it spent two weeks working up to, using as cover the story that they needed that time to thoroughly investigate whether or not Urban Meyer was properly forthcoming in reporting a 2015 incident in which former assistant coach Zach Smith was again accused of tooling up on his wife, Courtney.

Assuming Ohio State keeps records of such things (and it must, considering the proper procedures are surely documented to make sure the university complies with the law), this "investigation"  should have taken about five minutes. So, yes, this was about finding a publicly palatable way to maintain their credibility while avoiding firing a football coach who A) won a national title at a school where football is all, and B) in so doing, makes that school piles and piles of cash that largely fund the rest of Ohio State athletics.

The bad news for Ohio State: Two weeks wasn't nearly long enough to pull that one off.

In suspending Meyer for three games at the beginning of the season -- three games Ohio State is going to win anyway  -- Ohio State essentially said lying to the media and o school officials is not a fireable offense. That coaches have been fired for less apparently didn't matter.

As for the lying to the media part ... well, coaches lie to the media all the time. Although this was somewhat more serious than lying about who your starting quarterback is going to be.

In any event, presumably Ohio State was OK with all this, opting to hand out the faintest of slaps on the wrist. That's as big a victory as Urban Meyer is going to see this year, even if he delivers another national title.

Unfortunately for OSU, it's not so big a victory for the university as a whole.

Like it or not, see, what yesterday did not do was separate Ohio State from its tarnished brethren at Penn State and Michigan State. If they're Those Schools That Enabled Pedophiles And Sexual Predators, OSU is now That School That Enabled An Apparent Serial Wife Beater. Or that at least didn't take Courtney Smith's repeated pleas for help seriously.

This was jarringly evident from the tone of the news conference after the decision came down. No one -- not athletic director Gene Smith, not Meyer himself -- even uttered Courtney Smith's name. They apologized to the fans. They talked about how difficult this has been for the university. But there was nary an acknowledgment of how tough this has been on the only real apparent victim in all this, nor any breath of apology for how they all let her down.

This is not how you convince people you take domestic violence seriously. And it makes Urban Meyer, who has a history of coddling miscreants, someone whose word you should never believe without raising an eyebrow.

That includes one of the "core values" Meyer has on the wall in the Buckeyes locker room: Treat Women With Respect.

For Urban Meyer, and for Ohio State, that's nothing but a punchline now.

Not sure if that's the W they were all looking for yesterday. I'm guessing not.

An icon passes

"Sing turkey." Is that what the man said?

And so again I go over my notes, on this high school basketball evening decades gone. I squint hard at the squiggles. I flip the pages of my reporter's notebook.  OK ... OK ... Yep ... Got that ... 

Ah. There it is.

We had a chance to make 'em sing turkey ...

So said Anderson Madison Heights basketball coach Phil Buck, sitting up here in the bleachers at Shelbyville High School on this night 35 or 40 years ago. He passed this week at the age of 90, a man whose life was truly lived to full measure and beyond. A member of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, he came out of tiny Rossville to star at IU and then coach high school basketball in Indiana for nigh-on 40 years, winning 495 games, 13 sectionals, four regionals and a semistate. Along the way, he also coached a few folks: 1977 Indiana Mr. Basketball Ray Tolbert, Harry Morgan, Winston Morgan, Stew Robinson, Bobby Wilkerson -- all of whom went on to star on the major college level themselves.

On this night in Shelbyville, though, a lot of that resume remained to be filled. Buck stared out at the empty floor. He thought about the almost-win his young Pirates had almost pulled off against the hometown Bears. And then ...

Sing turkey.

No, I had no idea where that came from, or what was its etymology. It was just a Buck-ism, roughly equivalent to "cry uncle" (or so I guessed).  It was just classic Phil Buck, hard-nosed coach and folksy kid from little Rossville all balled up together.

First time I saw him he was standing in the lane in the Madison Heights gym on a January afternoon in 1977, waving a broom aloft. It was his way of trying to distract Tolbert, who stood 6-foot-9 and remains, all these years later, the best high school dunker I ever saw. There was whimsy to it, Buck waving that broom around, but there was also purpose. In that sense it was very much like Buck himself.

The man terrified me at first, truth be known. I wasn't yet 22 years old, a kid sportswriter who still had much to learn. Buck was already a legendary coach; on this day in 1977, he was only six years away from his Hall of Fame induction. And he was old school before anyone invented the term.

Which is what terrified me.

Later I learned the gruff coach who could peel you like an orange if you asked the wrong question at the wrong time also possessed a big laugh and an immunity to grudges. I learned, after a time, to give him his space after a tough loss. Usually this meant waiting until he finished pacing, which he often did when agitated. Then you asked your questions, and he would answer them.

Well. Unless you asked something really stupid. And God knows I did, on more than one occasion.

Here's the thing, though: By the time I called him the next week to preview Heights' upcoming game, he'd forgotten the whole thing. He was back to calling me "Benny," which I've always hated coming from anyone but Buck.

And then Friday night would roll around. And at some point, from somewhere in the vicinity of the Heights bench, there would come this curious sound.

Slap ... slap ... slap ...

It was Phil Buck, stomping his foot on the floor.
    
Slap ... slap ... slap ...

It was Phil Buck, trying to get the attention of Ray Lee or Winston or Stew or any of the hundreds of young men he guided through all those cold winter nights across the years.

Slap ... slap ... slap ...

It was Phil Buck. Doing what few men in the long and spangled history of high school buckets in Indiana ever did better, or with more passion.

Coaching his boys. Coaching 'em right the hell up.

Grim reminder

Maybe you missed it Sunday, it being Sunday and this being IndyCar, which vanishes off America's radar once May is over. But the boys were at treacherous old Pocono, Alexander Rossi won his second straight race, and ...

And this happened.

Seven laps in. Tore a huge hole in the fencing. Red-flagged the race for a good space of time.

And on Monday, Robert Wickens, the sensational rookie who tore out that fencing in a crash frighteningly similar to the one that killed Dan Wheldon in Las Vegas seven years ago, underwent spinal surgery.  In addition, he suffered injuries to his lower extremities, right arm and had a pulmonary contusion, which is essentially a bruised lung. So if he is lucky to be alive, that luck came with some extremely weighty qualifiers.

In total, it was a grim reminder that this remains a dangerous pursuit for those who pursue it, and unrelieved disaster is never more than a twitch away. On Sunday, Ryan Hunter-Reay and Robert Wickens both twitched at the same time at 220 mph, and Wickens paid the price. That price is always out there, and it's always weighted toward the terrible. Sometimes, in an era when safety innovations have lulled us into thinking racing is no longer the hard gamble it was, we tend to forget that.

The terrible is always out there, however. True, this is not the 1950s, when drivers died in such appalling numbers 13 of the 33 starters in the 1955 Indianapolis 500 eventually were killed driving race cars, and the politicians called it blood sport and howled for its banishment. And it's not the 1960s, when more men died and the first rear-engine cars were essentially bathtubs of gasoline with really huge tires. How anyone survived those years is far more a wonder than how those who died did so.

Still ...

Still, the men who strap into today's sleek rocket ships are as fully understanding of the risks involved as those who came before them. Because sometimes a Dan Wheldon or a Justin Wilson still happens. And sometimes a Robert Wickens still happens, which is certainly terrible enough.

Something they're all thinking about this week, no doubt. Even more so than usual.

Throwback Sunday

Down in the dugout on a Sunday afternoon in summer, the man and the boy sit side-by-side, tied to one another by deep history and the most ordinary of objects.

A small white ball with red stitching: And how many ageless echoes does that insignificant knick-knack stir? Across how many years and decades and generations do those echoes travel, and how is it the man and the boy can hear them exactly the same?

Because here is the boy now, holding up his pitching hand, showing the man how he grips the baseball. And here is the man holding up his pitching hand, showing the boy how he grips it.

The boy is 12 years old or so, and baseball has taken him here, to Williamsport, Pa., and the Little League World Series. The man is Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard, and he is here to show the kid that sometimes the journey only begins here.

Such an odd thing, watching the two of them together. Such an odd thing watching the Mets and the Phillies mingle with the Little Leaguers on Sunday afternoon, signing baseballs for all these young kids with their old dreams, seeing in them what they once were -- and not so many years ago, as the game measures these things.

The game, after all, has been around for more than a century-and-a-half, catching hold just before the Civil War and becoming an American obsession shortly thereafter. That kid showing Noah Syndergaard how he grips the baseball? He's speaking the same language soldiers both Union and Confederate spoke when they played the game between slaughters. A direct and unbroken line of succession stretches between one and the other.

So much is wrong with baseball these days, so out of step so often is it with the America of 2018, that sometimes we forget that long line of succession. Watching the boys and the former boys commune over it was a pleasant reminder of that; at bottom, baseball is a child's game, and even the men who play it professionally are still children caught in its spell to some degree. It may be cold business now to them, but the thrill of getting solid wood on the ball or feeling it settle into the deep pocket of your glove with a comforting thunk after a long run across the grass in pursuit of it ...

Well. Those things allowed young men to be children again in 1863, if only for a moment. And they allow young men to be children in 2018.

That was the takeaway from yesterday, and the irony, of course, is that the game being played in Williamsport this week is no longer the kids game it once was. Television has turned it into an event, with the inevitable result that some of its core essence gets stripped away. Giving 12-year-olds the full ESPN treatment has always made the Blob uncomfortable. And as the coverage has spread even to the regional level, that discomfort has only deepened.

That's because more exposure always dilutes a thing, and watching Little Leaguers play the eternal game -- and often play it impeccably -- is not something that should be diluted. And yet the more games that wind up on the TVs at your local watering hole, the less special they become. And that's a shame.

Because it is special, you see. It is a unique culture, and that culture has become global, cutting as easily across national boundaries as it does across time.

Man and boy. Comparing grips. Sitting side-by-side in a dugout, on a Sunday afternoon in summer.

Speaking the only language that has ever mattered, then and now.

Broadcast news-less

First of all, it's not because it's Duke. Well, OK. Maybe it is. A little.

No, it's not the school that has the Blob in full Get Off My Lawn mode right now, or even that it's playing basketball at a time when its basketball players should be, you know, enjoying life in a way that doesn't involve back-cuts and halfcourt traps. Lots of college teams take summer exhibition trips out of the country. It's a bonding thing, like summer camp -- plus a sneaky way to get in even more basketball in a season that already seems wall-to-wall.

That's not the problem.

The problem is, Sportsball Media is acting like this matters.

And so here are the clips popping up on ESPN of Duke freshman Zion Williamson -- the most electric player ever to come out of high school, apparently -- throwing down crazy dunks. And R.J. Barrett, Duke's other insanely talented freshman, doing the same. And, for just a few pennies, you could even subscribe to ESPN+ and watch all of Duke's exhibition games in Canada, plus an eight-episode documentary.

Say that again, slowly: An eight ... episode ... documentary.

And if you're wondering here how giving Duke basketball 11 instances of free advertising does not constitute an impermissible benefit -- how it's not the very sort of unfair advantage upon which the NCAA built its 500-ton rulebook -- then your mind is right. And if you're wondering if things haven't gotten completely out of control when ESPN is airing college travel exhibition games ...

Well. Then your mind is even righter.

Seriously, what's next? Wall-to-wall coverage of the NBA summer league?

Oh, wait. We've already got that.

No, I suppose next ESPN will be going LIVE to Camp Stashyourkidaway for its summer camp basketball. Watch out for those kids from Cabin 12! They can throw down like ... like Zion Williamson!

Look. I get it. Everybody wants a first look at those stud recruits they've heard so much about. And Duke apparently has cleaned up in that department this time. But what do you think you're really going to see on one of these trips? Duke tooling up on a bunch of Canadian jamokes who were brought in specifically to get tooled up on?

I mean, it's not like a bunch of  Dream Teams they're playing. That I might actually watch.

No, these trips are what Blob acknowledged a few paragraphs back: Team-building exercises. The coaches and players might also take them seriously as basketball games, but no one else should. They're exhibitions. They're meaningless. Zion Williamson dunking over the McKenzie brothers doesn't mean the Dukies are gonna go undefeated and win the national title.

If that's the case, then why even play the upcoming season? Why not just end the eight-part documentary by handing Mike Krzyzewski the Big Trophy?

Well ... maybe because everyone was ready to do that with Kentucky a few years back. And we all what happened that time.

Wisconsin happened. And Kentucky didn't even get to the championship game.

This Duke team?

Yeah, maybe they will run the table. But first Coach K will have to convince them they're not the Greatest Team Ever Assembled. Because that's surely the message these kids are getting right now with all the cameras following them around three months before the season begins.

Good luck with that, Coach. Oh, and good luck against the McKenzie brothers.

Not that it matters or anything.

The lights of autumn

My gray Skechers are darkening slowly, six feet beneath the drumming umbrella. Little by little, they go from the color of ash to the color of coal as the rain soaks them, as sheets of water beat down from a leaden sky and the first Friday night lights of autumn pierce the gloom a good hour before official sunset.

High school football. Back again, come hell, high water or the celestial calendar, which says summer goes on for another month.

Nonsense. Summer is done. That was autumn out there, wearing water wings.

At Zollner Stadium, where I showed up just because, the rain came down before kickoff and then after it, and yet I stayed for a bit. I am out of the sportswriting biz for keeps these days, but these Friday nights still exert their pull. And so there I was at Zollner as a civilian and not a working stiff, my feet and eventually pretty much all of me getting soaked.

It was damn glorious.

Out there on the field, Wayne and Bishop Dwenger were churning 100 yards of sodden turf into mud lasagna, the Saints eventually prevailing 22-0 on a night when the conditions were the only real winners. Rain fell. The lights pierced it dimly. The Generals' white uniforms gradually turned the color of earth, and for a moment I felt a twinge of sympathy for my former brethren in the pressbox.

Nights like this were a bitch for trying to keep track of uniform numbers, I remembered. You pretty much wound up guessing who that was plunging into the line more times than you cared to admit.

Everything else, though ...

It's strange. You get away from it for awhile, and you forget some things. You forget the way the Dwenger players make their entrance, running through the gate single file and making a sharp right turn as they hit the sideline, a maneuver executed parade-ground crisp. You forget the way the ball looks as it tumbles out of the sky on a kickoff, forget the way the young man left back there all by his lonesome gathers it in, forget the muffled whump and thwack of contact as he churns his way upfield through shoals of grasping tacklers.

A football arcs through the twilight, skittering off the hands of a receiver who's been left wide open on a wheel route. A sure six goes with it, but the same receiver will get it back a few plays later.

Here comes the Wayne quarterback, weaving, darting, finding slivers of daylight in the murk. Here comes a Wayne running back, legs churning, pushing a pile of navy Dwenger shirts backward ... oops, out pops the wet football, in swoops one of the navy shirts to scoop it off the grass, there he is collapsing into the end zone for another six.

The Dwenger side of the field erupts. The extra point cartwheels through the uprights. One of the ballboys, blonde as butter and no bigger than a minute, goes tearing after it, then comes tearing past with it in his arms, delivering it breathlessly to a grinning Saints assistant.

"I'm the ballboy coach tonight," he says.

A few minutes later, off tears another kid after another football. His eyes are round and wide, like saucers. It's the thrill of his lifetime -- or will be until a few years down the road, when he's the one out there scooping up a fumble and collapsing into the end zone with it.

Close your eyes, and you can see that moment. You can see it clear as day.

Open your eyes, and there again is the Ballboy Coach.

He's watching the kid race away from him down the sideline. His grin is ten lanes wide.

Wardrobe malfunction

Devoted Blobophiles ('What?" you're saying) know its long-standing ambivalence toward novelty uniforms in college football. Sometimes they're OK, and even outstanding -- i.e., the helmets Navy wore for the Army game one year. Most of the time, though, they're those hideous candy-stripe helmets IU occasionally wears, the ones that make the Hoosiers look like the love children of Santa Claus and Yuri Gagarin.

Or they're Oregon, which has so many novelty unis it doesn't have any definable look at all.

And top college programs should have a definable look. They just should.

If you're Penn State, that means you wear plain blue-and-white threads with plain white helmets. Michigan should always wear that winged business on their helmets. And Alabama should never, ever, ever wear anything but solid crimson helmets with the numbers on the side.

And then, of course, there's Notre Dame.

Which has taken to breaking out novelty threads for the Shamrock Series, a practice the Blob finds distasteful but occasionally can live with. The one year they had the leprechaun on the side of the helmet, that was kind of cool. The all-green look, OK, I guess I could live with that.

But come November the Irish play Syracuse in Yankee Stadium. And so to commemorate the occasion, they've come up with this.

And also this.

Sorry, but no. No, no, a gazillion times no.

First of all, a might-as-well-be-black navy helmet?

No. You are Notre Dame. You do not wear black helmets. You wear gold, dammit, with actual gold-flake paint. Black'navy makes you look like stupid posers trying to keep up with the cool kids. It makes you look as goofy as Ohio State looked when it broke out black helmets. It's like Penn State breaking out black helmets.

It's just wrong, in other words. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

And that uniform?

OK, I get it: The pinstripe sleeves are an homage to the insufferable asses who usually inhabit Yankee Stadium. But look at those things, for God's sake. They're not football jerseys. They're company softball jerseys. You might as well go out there with the name of some software supplier on the front.

The Skynet Business Solutions Fighting Irish. The South Bend Federal Credit Union Fighting Irish. Something.

Oh, and while you're donning those lovely things?

Don't forget these, lads.

Today's Backing Up The Truck Moment

Remember the other day, when the Blob praised Maryland President Wallace D. Loh for doing what so many public figures don't do these days, which is take public responsibility for their actions?

Well ... looks like this is why he did that.

If true, shame on this grandstanding jackwagon. Shame on his disingenuousness. Shame on his phony sanctimony. He's not only the sorry equal of every craven public figure who ever followed the advice of his suits and ducked accountability. He's worse.

The Blob apologizes for giving him undue props.

Oh, and Wally?

That tie is horses**t, too.

Breath of honesty

The Jalen Ramsey Quarterback Rating System got a lot of run in the interwhatsitsphere yesterday, with some people thinking the Jacksonville Jaguars defensive back was a raging megalomaniacal jackwagon of the first order, and other people not thinking he was a raging megalomaniacal jackwagon of the first order.

The Blob tends to lean toward the latter opinion.

I mean, yeah, Ramsey is a raging megalomaniacal jackwagon of the first order. But at least he says what he thinks, which is what media always says it wants from public figures until it gets it.

Besides, if you're a Packers or Patriots fan, you should be fine with Ramsey. I mean, he did say both Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady "didn't suck."

Which is not what he said about Joe Flacco, in an interview with GQ. What he said about Flacco (accurately, by the way) is that he does suck. He said Andrew Luck isn't that good, Ben Roethlisberger is "decent at best" and Matt Ryan is "overrated." He said high-dollar draft pick Josh Allen of the Bills is "trash." He said (again, pretty accurately) that Odell Beckham "makes" Eli Manning.

 Deshaun Watson and Carson Wentz are future MVPs. Russell Wilson is good. Dak Prescott is "okay." Kirk Cousins -- Kirk Cousins! -- is "a winner." On and on.

(Personally, I think calling Cousins a "winner" is probably the most controversial thing Ramsey told GQ, at least from the media's standpoint. Never seen a quarterback who's put up the numbers Cousins has put up get so consistently downed by the sports-talk poodles. For that reason I'm rooting for the Vikings to win the Super Bowl and Cousins to win MVP. Although I suppose the poodles would still find a way to diminish him.)

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. Jalen Ramsey. Layin' it out there.

There have always been athletes who've been willing to say what they think, and they've almost always drawn adverse reactions. This has been especially true of African-American athletes, for reasons too obvious to bear explaining. And yet Ramsey is just a kinda-sorta flip side of Our Only Available President, who gets routinely cheered by his followers for not being "politically correct" when he lapses into Raging Megalomaniacal Jackwagon mode.

And Ramsey?

Well, he's not politically correct, either. Or at least he wasn't in the GQ piece. And yet somehow I'm guessing the same people who love OOAP for that wouldn't exactly raise a cheer for Jalen Ramsey.

Just a feeling, you know.

How you do it

And now, the mea culpa.

Which experience tells us is usually pretty vague on the "mea", and avoids the "culpa" like it's radioactive.

Public entities, see, hardly ever cop to anything, because the suits take over and the suits are horrendously bad at public relations. The suits are worried about legal ramifications. The suits are worried about punitive damages. They see the trees, but they never see the forest, which is the long-term damage being disingenuous and weasel-y does to the credibility of said public entity.

In other words ... good for the University of Maryland.

Which yesterday did see the forest for the trees, clearly and in sharp relief, and did not insult the public's intelligence by pretending otherwise. Mistakes were not made at Maryland, to use the weasel words usually associated with the standard non-mea culpa mea culpa. Oh, no. In the death from heatstroke of Terrapins football player Jordan McNair, Maryland screwed up. And Maryland said so.

That was Wallace D. Loh, the university president, saying the university "accepts legal and moral responsibility" for the mistakes, both willful and otherwise, that led to McNair's death. Maryland, Loh said, broke the covenant every university makes with the parents of every student.

"They entrusted their son to us, and he did not return home," Loh said.

The suits, a lot of them, would probably cringe at that. They'd probably say it was a mistake for Maryland to take responsibility for its actions, because the family's suits will surely use it against the school when the lawsuit comes down. And maybe that's true.

But you know what?

Those are just the trees. It's the forest that matters.

It's probably too obvious to say, first of all, that the lawsuit was going to come down even if Loh had lapsed into customary Public Entity Weasel Mode. It will. It always does. And going Weasel Mode was not going to alter that an iota.

Here's what it would have altered: The public's perception of Maryland as an institution of higher learning that can be trusted.

Perhaps not every parent would react this way. But if this parent of a prospective student heard Maryland trot out the "Mistakes were made" dodge in the matter of a student death, this parent would no more send his child to Maryland than he would send him or her to the dark side of the moon.

This is because taking responsibility for the welfare of its students means something if you're a university that wants to maintain a reputation worth maintaining. It means damn near everything, in fact, because so much of that reputation is about trust. And if you forfeit that trust simply to cushion the blow from a lawsuit, how do you ever gain it back?

And in the long view, how is that not more important?

O('s) my

So, you think your summer is over? (And, OK, if your kids are already going back to school, I guess it is.) Think your prospects for future advancement are as hopeless as a fly's chances for advancement against a 90-mph headwind?

Well. At least you're not the Baltimore Orioles.

Checked in with the un-mighty O's today, and, really, they're not as bad off as you think they are. Oh, no. They're worse off.

See, with roughly six weeks left in the baseball season, they have been officially eliminated from the AL East race. This is because, with 43 games to play, they are now 49 1/2 games behind the front-running Boston Red Sox. Which means they could win every one of their last 43 games, and Boston could lose every one of its last 42, and the Red Sox would still finish seven games ahead of them.

Think about it: Fifty games out, essentially. With six weeks still to play. Why, they could wind up finishing half a season out of first if everything broke right -- or wrong, as the case may be.

Not that all is lost, mind you.

There is, after all, still a chance the un-mighty O's could escape the cellar. There's still a chance they could emerge, blinking and shielding their eyes, from the pitch darkness at the bottom of the East. There's still a chance the sunlight of next-to-last could warm their weary faces.

I mean, come on. It's not like they're 18 games out of it or anything.

They're only 17 1/2.

Beer me

The Blob loves its gimmicks, mainly because it operates under a certain conceit. That conceit is it never sees a gimmick it believes it couldn't gimmick better.

 Which brings us to Bud Light and the city of Cleveland, which has not known a glut of gridiron success lately. In fact, the Browns, The Corpse That Walks Like An NFL Franchise, have won exactly one game in the last two years. And, as everyone who pays attention to the NFL knows, they didn't win any last year.

That would be "any" as in "zero." And that would be "zero" as in "zero-and-16."

This gave the folks at Bud Light a brilliant marketing idea: Why not offer Clevelanders free beer when the Browns win their first game this season? The city, after all, is surely thirsty for a W, or at least the Bernie-Kosar-jersey-wearing portion of it. And so Bud Light came up with the idea of "Victory Fridges": Special refrigerators stocked with Bud Light that will remain under lock and key until the Browns win one, at which time smart technology will unlock them. And then ... free beer!

This of course assumes the Browns will win a game this year, something everyone for some weird reason is taking for granted.  After all, they just drafted a franchise quarterback (Baker Mayfield), and everyone knows that's the key to turning everything around, especially in Cleveland. Why, look how many times drafting a franchise quarterback has turned things around for the Browns in the past!

(And, no, Tim Couch, Brady Quinn, Johnny Manziel and DeShone Kizer don't count. They're the exceptions that prove the rule, you see. Besides none of them were Baker Mayfield. How could Baker Mayfield possibly fail, especially surrounded by all that one-win-in-two-years talent?)

So, yeah, at some point, Clevelanders will be drinking for free, an unnerving thought for those of us who've witnessed first-hand how Clevelanders drink not for free.  The Blob, however, would take Bud Light's idea a step further. Because of course it would.

And so, instead of "The Victory Fridge," here are a few other Fridge ideas:

1. The Pick Six Fridge: It unlocks the first time Baker Mayfield throws a pick six, allowing Browns fans to slam down eleventy-hundred Bud Lights while muttering "Bleep bleep-it, I KNEW he was Tim Couch."

2. The Bleep Bleep-It They Lied To Us Again Fridge: Unlocks in Week 15 out of pity for the Browns fans still waiting for that first victory. And also because the sell-by date is about to expire.

3. The Mayfield Meltdown Fridge: Unlocks the day Mayfield finally loses patience with the Browns organization and launches into an epic rant that features the multiple use of words like "horses**t", "morons", "bleep-bleeping ball-dropping CFL rejects" and the phrase, "My bleeping high school team could have beaten this bunch of bleeping bleep-bleep turds."

4. The Mayfield Suspended Fridge: Unlocks the day after the Mayfield Meltdown Fridge unlocks.

And last but not least ...

5. The Good God Tyrod Taylor Sucks, Too, Fridge: Unlocks the Sunday after the Mayfield Suspended Fridge, when Browns fans discover Tyrod Taylor can't win with their horses**t team, either.  

Malevolent ghosts

The heat and the dust and the suffering, they still echo down the years. A man wrote a book about it, turning cruelty and madness into something just this side of noble. Hollywood made a movie from the book. It was a bizarre, massive nostalgia wallow for a time even those who lived it say was insane, and whose architect, a Rushmore coaching legend, admitted later was plain damn stupidity on his part.

The year was 1954. The place was Junction, Texas. And the Rushmore legend was Bear Bryant, who dragged his Texas A&M football players into a nowhere spot in the middle of a heat-seared countryside dying of thirst, and put them through 10 days of hell so brutal 80 of his 115 players quit and one almost died.

The survivors have been memorialized ever after as the Junction Boys, and celebrated as ultimate old-school avatars. It's just how things were done then, the litany goes. And, boy, ain't it a shame you can't treat your players like that anymore.

Yeah, well. Maybe those people ought to ask Jordan McNair's parents what a shame it is. 

Jordan McNair was a 19-year-old offensive lineman at the University of Maryland, which hired a man named DJ Durkin as its football coach last December. DJ Durkin in turn hired an apparent sadist named Rick Court as his strength and conditioning coach, and together they allegedly did their damnedest to bring back 1954 whole and breathing.

Unfortunately, they weren't as lucky as Bear Bryant, who only had a young man named Bill Schroeder almost die on him. McNair actually did die.

He died of heatstroke two weeks after a May 29 workout in which he collapsed after running 110-yard sprints. The accounts of his last moments before collapsing are an eerie doppelganger of Bill Schroeder's last moments before collapsing in Junction 64 years ago: Signs of extreme exhaustion, difficulty standing, soaring body temperature. McNair, for instance, arrived at the hospital with a body temp of 106 degrees.

A subsequent ESPN report alleges that running players until they collapsed -- which, understand, is not conditioning but actually counterproductive to it -- was only the tip of a particularly cruel iceberg. Maryland players were regularly subjected to bullying both physical and psychological; Court reportedly had a habit of throwing small weights and other objects at players who displeased him, and in one incident a player having trouble losing weight reportedly was forced to gorge himself on candy bars while watching his teammates work out. Others were forced to eat until they vomited.

And apparently that wasn't the half of it.

The upshot is, Durkin and his staff are on the griddle now at Maryland. If there's any justice in the world, they'll be checking into a Graybar Marriott sometime soon. And meanwhile, the old-school types who romanticized the Junction Boys and continue to confuse sadism with toughness in a tough game -- one of them South Carolina coach Will Muschamp, who lashed out at ESPN for using anonymous sources -- will no doubt say it's a rotten deal coaches can't abuse their players anymore the way ol' Bear did, and bemoan the "sissification" of America.

In the meantime, Jordan McNair lies in the ground somewhere.

Well, now. There's a big W over "sissification," right, boys?

Second to one

Well, alrighty, then. Color me officially convinced.

If age and infirmity don't catch up with him first, Tiger Woods is going to win another major. Or should. Or ... you know, something.

He came to Sunday needing to chase down four other majors winners and a pile of the best golfers in the deepest PGA Tour field in four decades, and, at 42, he damn near did it. A 64 on Sunday does not mean he is the Tiger Woods of a decade ago, but it does mean he's enough of him. And it means golf has become a huge deal in America again.

The man became Almost The Man again by putting up two 66s and that peerless 64 in the last three rounds of a major-tournament pressure cooker, and I don't know how you play golf better than that. It's trite and a bit false to say he's back, because it implies he really is the Tiger who was the greatest golfer of his generation in the Aughts. He's not. But, again, he's enough of him.

He's enough of him to be more than just a face in a perhaps historically impeccable crowd, and if you think that doesn't have golf officials turning cartwheels in their wood-paneled enclaves, you've deeply underestimated how limber a golf official can be. All this, and Tiger, too? Yes, please!

The only downside to Tiger's re-emergence -- and I don't know what you call a top-five finish in the British Open and a second-place finish in the PGA if not a re-emergence -- is that once again that aforementioned deepest PGA field runs the risk of being overshadowed. And that's a shame. Sunday, after all, was so much about Tiger Woods and his 64 that Brooks Koepka and his 66 to win it was nearly reduced to an "Oh, yeah, and this happened, too" footnote. And that should not have been.

Koepka, after all, has now won three of the last seven majors and two of the four this year. No matter what he does from here on out, Brooks Koepka is the Golfer of the Year for 2018.

Except, of course, in the public mind, which hands-down will think Tiger Woods and his Not Dead Yet Tour make him the Golfer of the Year.

And the Blob?

The Blob can't really think about that right now. The Blob is too busy leaning on its shovel, digging up the Tiger Woods it so confidently buried on multiple occasions these last few years.

Damn. I really threw a lot of dirt on there.

Sitting semi-pretty

OK, OK. So maybe he'll do it. Maybe. Just ... maybe.

Remember that one?

From, like, three weeks ago?

Yes, that was the Blob, all right, eating crow, or at least nibbling at it. That was the Blob -- after Tiger Woods finished fifth in the British Open and actually led on Sunday for a nanosecond -- conceding that maybe the guy wasn't done, maybe the dirt nap could wait, maybe he actually, well, might win another major before his back gives out again, thereby making the Blob look like a big ol' windbaggin' goober.

("Like that's hard," you're saying.)

And now ...

Well. Now, here we are.

Sunday, again. A major, again. And here is Tiger Woods laying out his Sunday red, because he's right there again, four strokes back with 18 holes to play, back-to-back 66s in his pocket giving notice that the man still has a bit of golf in him yet.

Maybe this is the day that'll be enough, and he wins the PGA, his 15th major, wins it almost a full decade after he won No. 14.

Or, not. Probably not. Although who knows.

Here's the difference, see, between a decade ago and now: Cringe Mode is dead. By which I mean, no one flinches anymore ("Oh, God, it's HIM!") when they see Tiger leading or within striking distance on Sunday. A decade on, golf is stuffed with great young players whose experience with Tiger Woods is vastly different, because he himself is vastly different. To them, he's a 42-year-old guy with a bad back and a great name who's just another quality stick they have to climb over to grab the big prize. He's not TIGER WOODS anymore. He's just Tiger Woods, a golfer with game among many.

Coming to Sunday, after all, he's tied for sixth, but there's a pile of sharp objects around him. One guy he's tied with is Justin Thomas, who shot a 65 yesterday. Another is Jason Day, whom no one could beat for awhile not all that long ago. There is Shane Lowry, who shot 64 yesterday. There is Charl Schwartzel, who shot 63.

Up ahead, meanwhile, Adam Scott sits at 10-under, having scorched the joint with back-to-back 65s. Jon Rahm and Rickie Fowler are a stroke back at minus-9. And the leader, at 12-under, is Brooks Koepka.

All he's done is win the last two U.S. Opens.

That's an awful lot of quality to have to wade through for our aforementioned 42-year-old. And none of them is scared of him, not the way everyone was a decade ago. He's a contender, but, hell, they're all contenders. Four of them have won majors, and Day and Fowler have long been considered the next most likely to.

So maybe this is their day instead.

Or, you know, not.

All the news that sits

I watched "The Post" again last night, just to remember how it used to be in America. There was a time when people still gave a damn, it tells me. There was a time when they had ink in their veins and a reverence for the mission in their hearts, and not just a cold eye for the bottom line.

There was a time when the caretakers of the free press were actually the caretakers of the free press, and they put that responsibility above all else. They were people like Katherine Graham, who risked everything -- risked her newspaper, her company, even her freedom -- because it was the right and essential thing to do for the country.

There are still people out there like that, doing what reporters and editors have always done. And God bless every last one of them.

But the Katherine Grahams?

Few and far between anymore.

By now everyone in Fort Wayne knows its days as a two-newspaper town, even virtually, are over. Ogden Newspapers, which owns the News-Sentinel and is run by people as far from Katherine Graham as Our Only Available President is from the truth most days, killed it off yesterday. Nine months into the News-Sentinel's run as a digital-only model, Ogden pulled the plug, laying off the entire staff of the afternoon paper except for one person.

Among those it laid off were people who had for decades put in the newsperson's customary insane hours to do the newsperson's noble work: Keeping us informed and  holding our public officials' accountable.

For the latter especially, Our Only Available President now labels the free press the "enemy of the people." Coming from a wanna-be despot, it's a label the free press should wear especially proudly.

But I'm getting off track here.

What I want to say is that among those laid off yesterday were friends of mine, and people whose work I respect. Because I was a sportswriter myself for 38 years, it was the jettisoning of my brothers-in-arms in sports that cut deepest. Two of those dumped on the street were Reggie Hayes and Blake Sebring, both Hall of Fame journalists who had been with the News-Sentinel for decades , and who in that time had sold God knows how many papers for it with exemplary work. That they are also good people who represented their newspaper and their community in the best possible fashion -- and whose heroic output for their paper's digital product was so faithlessly betrayed yesterday -- only makes this lunacy more apparent.

Only it isn't lunacy, of course. It's bidness. And it's happening everywhere.

The painful reality is, at some point the free press in America passed from the hands of the Katherine Grahams. At some point, it became the property of mere moneychangers, empty-eyed bean counters who no more understand the sacred trust they keep than a gnat understands quantum physics.

The widespread assumption about Ogden's curious move, for instance, is that keeping one reporter on maintains the fiction of a news product, and that's essential to maintaining a JOA (Joint Operating Agreement) that outrageously favors Ogden. Simply bailing on the entire enterprise would violate that agreement. And that would cost Ogden what we can assume would be a hefty sum.

 If this bit of spitballing (and that's all it is) is true, it would be very much in line with Ogden's reputation as a company that traditionally wrings every last drop of blood from every last stone before folding the tent and fleeing the premises. Fair or not, spitballing or not, that process certainly seems to be in motion in Fort Wayne.

Point is, as it does everywhere, it's the best people who get hurt by it. People who did the work while Ogden raked in the cabbage. People who did the work even as their company made it increasingly difficult for them to do so.

I watched "The Post" again last night, just to remember how it used to be in America. And now?

Now I wish Ogden would back all its pretty nonsense about how it was committed to still giving the citizens of Fort Wayne comprehensive news coverage. I wish it would put its money where its mouth is, so to speak, when that mouth is telling us the News-Sentinel can still be counted on as a vibrant and viable news entity.

That's great, boys. Know how you can make that happen?

Sell. Sell to someone who still gives a damn.

The Luck report

The news from Seattle this a.m. is that the Indianapolis Colts won the first preseason game of the Frank Reich regime, 19-17, which means they are probably not going to the Super Bowl because when they did go to the Super Bowl, they usually went winless in the preseason or some such thing.

So, there's that.

There's also this: Andrew Luck played two series and did not break.

Which is to say, the Black Knight's arm did not come off, or his other arm, or his legs. Instead, Luck complete 6-of-9 passes for 64 yards and led the Colts to a couple of field goals. He was sacked once and no appendages remained on the ground when he got up, so that was good.

The Blob has no clue what any of this means. Probably nothing. Or something. Or very little of something.

In any case, on this night at least, to quote the Black Knight, "None shall pass."

Well, except Luck. Nine times. For whatever it's worth.

Power play

That was some white flag the NCAA seemed to wave the other day, conceding it can no longer pass off  high-end college buckets as this wholesome amateur enterprise whose only goal is to help earnest young men earn a college education.

No, sir. It is bidness, is what it is, an entirely corporate enterprise driven by corporate imperatives. And so at last the NCAA came out with its hands up, unveiling a sweeping set of future rule changes that will properly reflect that reality.

Hey, kid! You want an agent? You can have one now!

Wanna enter the NBA draft, go to the combine and still come back to college basketball if it doesn't work out? You can do that, too!

Wanna come back and finish your education on our dime, as long as you do it within 10 years? No probs! We got your lecture hall seat all warmed up!

And so on, and so on. What a grand sea change this is, what sweet surrender at last to common sense.

Except ...

Well, except it's not really a surrender at all. It's a power play is what it is.

Those sweeping rule changes are the NCAA's attempt to control aspects of college basketball last fall's FBI investigation revealed it wasn't yet controlling, and don't be fooled into thinking otherwise. Yes, "elite" players will be able to hire agents, but only agents certified by the NCAA, and only players ranked as "elite" by USA Basketball (which has already said it's not on board with doing this). A provision that extends the number of approved high school events through June, and limits apparel companies to one sponsored event in July, is an attempt to wrest control of a kid's summers from the AAU. And letting ex-players come back for their degrees on the colleges' dime, and letting underclassmen come back who opt to test the NBA draft waters?

What's that except a way to entice and hang onto marketable properties a bit longer?

This is not to say  the rule changes proposed by the NCAA are entirely self-serving. They're not. Any proposed rule that can cut into the influence of the AAU and its shady apparel-company street agents should be applauded, for instance. And who could argue against not slamming the door on young men who opt to chase that NBA unicorn? Or allowing them to avail themselves of a free education?

Nothing wrong on its face with any of that. The problem is the nature of college buckets itself, which isn't going to change. High-end basketball institutions, after all, still operate under the same parameters as any professional business, and are just as susceptible to corruption. They still maintain devil's pacts with the same apparel companies whose influence the NCAA is trying to lessen in the summertime. Which means the same black-market dynamic the FBI exposed is going to continue, if perhaps in a different form.

When the product is as lucrative as high-end NCAA buckets, there will always be people looking to game the system. Different rules just mean different rules to find a way around. Not designated as "elite" enough to hire an NCAA-approved agent? Lemme take care of that for ya, kid. I'll pass some money under the table to bump up your status a bit; you pay me back by signing with this apparel company I just happen to represent. Deal?

And so it will go.

As Luck would have it

Andrew Luck will throw a football in anger tomorrow night for the first time in more than 500 days, and yet he's never looked more joyous. The Mystery Shoulder Disease is gone, apparently. He's flinging the ball well, finding the deep seams he used to find, making all the throws. He professes to be both giddy and nervous about tomorrow night, which is exactly the way a kid should be on Christmas morning.

Because this is Christmas morning. And because he admits that sometimes he never thought he'd see another.

This week he said there were times these last 20 months when he came close to giving up the game, which accounts for the giddiness now. Football is a strange creature, after all. Very few sporting endeavors exact such a grievous toll on the human body and brain. And yet very few sporting endeavors have its pull.

Even a man of Luck's celebrated smarts seems helpless against it, and so he is back for more at the age of 28. That so many players are now leaving the game at Luck's age or near it attests to the damage it does. That Luck rejected that option attests to its irresistible attraction.

Cooler heads would have looked at the beating he's taken in a Colts uniform -- which includes not only the Mysterious Shoulder Disease but a lacerated kidney and assorted lesser damages -- and concluded his first impulse was the right one: Hang it up, walk away while you still can. But cooler heads are helpless against the sort of passion football evokes.

It is a game for gladiators. It is a game for masochists. And it is a game for incurable romantics.

It's why you can sit in the hotel lobby in Canton on Hall of Fame weekend and watch all manner of football's human wreckage drift past, and yet very few of those proud men in their gold jackets would tell you it wasn't worth it. That's frequently used as an argument against player lawsuits over CTE, the brain disease inflicted by frequent blows to the head.

These guys knew what they were getting into, the argument goes. Therefore they have no basis for legal action.

This is both true and not true. The ravages of the body, sure, everyone understands that's the hard price football exacts. But the brain damage that has helped put so many in the ground before their time?

No one who played knew that could be the end game. And the reason they didn't is because the people running the game told them it wasn't, long after it became apparent otherwise.  Nope, nuh-uh, nothing to see here. You got nothing to worry about, Dave Duerson and Junior Seau and Andre Waters.

Hence the lawsuits.

And Andrew Luck?

Who knows where 500-plus days off have left him? We likely won't know that until the first time some edge rusher comes flying in and lays the wood to him. How many more of those hits can he take before he can no longer make the throws he used to make? And can he even do so now, in game mode, when the ammunition is live?

At 28, on the far side of the Mystery Shoulder Disease and so much else, is he still the Andrew Luck he was at 23? Or 24? Or 25?

Luck says he feels better now than he has in years, so maybe so. If football will have him, he'll have football again. And maybe the Colts will finally reward his loyalty to the game with loyalty to him, instituting better schemes and a better O-line that better protect their most important investment of the last decade.

In the meantime, all over Indiana, high school football starts up again a week from Friday.

On the practice field, the pads are cracking. Footballs are sailing or wobbling or spinning across the  summer sky. Whistles are screeching through the thick air.

And before the TV cameras, the players -- some of whom look alarmingly small -- take off their helmets and grin and say they're ready. They are joyous. They are giddy. They say they can hardly wait for August 17 to get here.

They are kids on Christmas morning.

Business decisions, Part Deux

And now, while The Ohio State University tries to figure out how to retain Urban Meyer without looking crass, inconsistent and more concerned about keeping its cash cow football program intact than being serious about domestic violence issues ...

Here's some news from the University of North Carolina.

Yes, that's right. Entrepreneurial initiative gets punished again.

Because we can't have football players selling their shoes and making dough off their school's fat apparel deal; only the school is allowed to do that. So 13 of 'em are suspended for four games for, heaven's to Betsy, trying to cash in on that aforementioned cash cow.

Guess they should have just enrolled in a false-front class designed to keep them eligible. The NCAA, and North Carolina, wouldn't have laid a glove on 'em for that.

Business decisions

The Ohio State University, an institution of higher learning and professional football franchise of some repute, has given itself two weeks to decide either to fire the chief architect of that franchise, Urban Meyer, or figure out how to retain him without looking really bad.

This is deeply, deeply cynical, the Blob realizes. But there is little about this sad affair that isn't cynical.

Begin first with Meyer himself, who said one thing at the Big Ten football media day ("I don't know nothin' about Zach Smith hittin' his wife, even though he'd done it several times before on my watch") and then something entirely different on Friday ("Oh, yeah, I knew about Zach Smith and duly sent it up the chain of command, so this ain't on me, brother"). So either he lied at the Big Ten media day or he's lying now to cover his own hindparts. At this point it would be hard to believe him if he declared the sky a fine shade of blue.

And The Ohio State University?

If Meyer was telling the truth the second time, it's hard to fathom what's going to take the investigators two weeks to unravel. If Meyer did go through proper channels, the OSU authorities clearly would already know that. Just as clearly, they had no issue with Meyer keeping Smith on his staff even though he was a multiple offender going back to 2009, and Meyer knew it. So what exactly are they investigating?

This is where the cynicism comes in. This is where, if you understand that college football on OSU's level is a completely corporate enterprise, you also understand that this is about OSU covering its hindparts, too. It no doubt wants to keep the money train rolling, and retaining Meyer would ensure that. But how do you do that and still make people believe you take domestic violence seriously?

Meyer, after all, has indicated by his actions, and some pretty unfortunate words, that he merely talks a good game about it. Add to that the fact he himself has said he should be fired, because he told a radio show last fall that if a coach lies about these sorts of matters he needs to be gone. And we know he's lied about this, because he said so on Friday.

So this is a tough nut indeed for The Ohio State University. No wonder they need up to two weeks to figure it out.

Here's the thing, see: Ultimately, this is all about winning, and putting the best possible face on that naked ambition. It's why the Houston Astros are in full PR blitzkrieg mode after signing top reliever Roberto Osuna, despite the fact he's coming off a 75-game suspension for violating Major League Baseball's domestic violence policy. It's why Meyer abruptly reversed course on Friday. And it's why Ohio State is taking so long to come up with a strategy that will make it look like something more than just a money-grubbing football factory.

The Blob would suggest that ship has already sailed. But enough cynicism for one day.

Your IQ test for today

I've been thinking about intelligence, on this Sunday morning. Apparently it's the thing to do now in the White House.

I've been thinking about a man who's using his wealth and influence to start a school for at-risk children that provides free tuition, uniforms, meals, transportation within two miles, bicycles and helmets, access to a food pantry for students' families, guaranteed tuition for all graduates to the University of Akron and a STEM-focused, hands-on curriculum put together by experienced educators.

I've been thinking about another man, also of great wealth and influence, who spends his time sending out grade-school tweets assailing the intelligence of men like the one mentioned above.

I've been thinking about a man who, rightly, criticizes the President of the United States for using sports (and pretty much everything else) to divide us, and who turns athletes peacefully protesting injustice into a fraudulent and hypocritical referendum on patriotism.

I've been thinking about another man, whose thoughtful response to all this was, essentially, "Oh, yeah? Well ... well ... you're just dumb!"

One man started a school into which much thought and planning has clearly gone.

The other doesn't know the difference between the United Kingdom and Great Britain, considers a raving lunatic (Alex Jones) a solid source of information and thought it was a good idea to stare directly into the sun during a solar eclipse.

One man is a successful businessman as well as the greatest basketball player of his generation. The other is a gold-card Lucky Sperm Club member who couldn't make a go of a casino in Atlantic City, for God's sake; who almost singlehandedly brought down an entire professional football league in a nation that worships pro football; and who hosted a popular game show in which he was basically required to memorize a single line.

One man is LeBron James.

The other is Our Only Available President.

I'll let you decide which one's the smart guy.

The ghosts of words

The Blob is not generally one for tooting its own horn ("Oh my God, you have a horn now?" you're saying). But with Urban Meyer now on the griddle for possibly coddling an alleged serial wife beater  and then quite likely lying about it, the Blob is reminded of something it wrote several months ago, when Meyer went on a radio show and got all hardline-y about the latest college basketball scandal.

"If you intentionally lie about committing violations, your career is over," Meyer said during a radio call-in show in Columbus back in September. "You're not suspended for two games (or) some of the silly penalties you have, you can't talk to a recruit for a week and a half or something like that. No. You're finished. That will clean up some things."

A little warning klaxon immediately went off in the vicinity of the Blob ...

Here's the thing about tough talk, I wrote then. It very often comes back to bite you.

This is not to say Meyer is going to wind up getting caught lying to the feds someday. Not at all. But his allegiance to zero tolerance in this case has a few holes in it, because he's not always been so fond of it. When some 30 players get arrested on your watch while at Florida, and several more have at OSU, whatever message you're sending about keeping your nose clean in Meyer's program would seem not to be getting through. Or at least isn't being delivered with the kind of tough zero-tolerance talk Meyer used yesterday.

And now?

Now, if he out-and-out lied about Zach Smith at the Big Ten media day last week, Ohio State must fire him. And the school must fire him because Urban Meyer himself said so.

Chomp.

Urban blight

This time it is not Michigan over on that other sideline. It is not Michigan State or Penn State or Wisconsin or even Alabama, whom Urban Meyer beat not so long ago on his way to bringing a national title home to Columbus, Ohio, establishing himself as at least No. 1A in the hierarchy of college football CEOs.

But this time it's not Nick Saban, ol' No. 1, that Urban Meyer is up against. This time it's precedent.

His own. Ohio State's. That of corporate collegiate athletics itself.

This time it is Meyer's own resume he's up against, a resume that includes six years in Gainesville, Fla., where he won two national titles and gave the lie to the notion that he was some sort of mega-disciplinarian. In six years at Florida, some 30 Gator football players wound up on police blotters on Meyer's watch. This does not suggest he ran a particularly tight ship -- and it certainly doesn't help his case now that the now ex-wife of one of his now ex-assistants has come forward with allegations that all the wives on the OSU coaching staff -- including Meyer's -- knew her husband knocked her around back in 2015.

In other words, if Shelley Meyer knew, Urban Meyer knew, too. And yet he kept quiet and retained the assistant, Zach Smith -- even though Meyer already knew Smith had a history of domestic violence, because the Meyers staged something of an intervention at Florida when Smith, then a Gator graduate assistant, knocked his pregnant wife Courtney around there, too.

In any event, this would be a direct violation of the terms of Meyer's contract at OSU, which includes language requiring him to report any staff violations of Ohio State's sexual misconduct policy. This on top of the fact that, as a supervisory university employee, he is required to report knowledge of domestic violence by any university employee.

Instead, Meyer, who's been placed on paid administrative leave by the university, said he didn't know nothin' 'bout nothin' last week when the subject came up at the Big Ten's media day. Which, if OSU's investigation indicates he did know something, means he's a liar, too.

And if that investigation does bear out Courtney Smith's allegations?

Well, Meyer is done. Ohio State's precedent virtually guarantees it.

This is the same university, after all, that fired another national championship-winning football coach over some free tattoos. Jim Tressel's ouster involved transgressions far less grave than domestic abuse. There is a vast gulf of difference between a few football players getting 'tatted up in violation of some picayune NCAA reg and a man beating on his wife. The former is never going to land you in criminal court, for one thing.

And so Ohio State's hands are pretty much tied here. And if there is any wiggle room, the fact all of this is taking place against the backdrop of a widening sexual abuse scandal virtually eliminates it.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed against OSU by former wrestlers who claim the school looked the other way while Dr. Richard Strauss sexually abused them during their time in Columbus. In other words, OSU now has its very own Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar.  As the victims in those two cases did, the former wrestlers allege Ohio State had "a culture of institutional indifference" about student safety.

Indifference about student safety, indifference about spousal safety ... you sense a theme here, right? And it's one Ohio State is surely desperate not to encourage. Who wants to be tagged as Wife Beater Coddler U., especially in the wake of Penn State and Michigan State? And if that's what happens, how much harder do you think it will be for the university's suits to defend against the Strauss lawsuits, even if one doesn't technically have anything to do with the other?

Perception, after all, is 9/10ths of the law, or something like that. And the perception, suddenly, is that the folks at The Ohio State University are no different than those awful people in State College and East Lansing.

A mere football coach would seem an easy sacrifice to erase that perception. Wouldn't it?

Delayed entrance

Eight men will don the yellow jacket this weekend in Canton, Ohio, although not really, because one of them will be in Tennessee for some inexplicable reason, although not really because it's Terrell Owens and we all know how that guy is.

In other words, the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducts the class of 2018 on Saturday.

This is always a highlight of the NFL season, and not because of the Hall of Fame game, which annually pits two teams of schmucks who are about to be cut. It's a highlight because an entire century shows up in Canton that weekend, and you can literally sit in the hotel lobby and watch it parade (or limp, usually) past you.

Once upon a time I went to Canton for that weekend, to cover Fort Wayne native Rod Woodson's induction. It was a great weekend. When I checked into the hotel, Fred Biletnikoff was standing right behind me. Mel Renfro hobbled past, leaning on a cane. The great defensive end of the Lombardi Packers, Willie Davis, made his way gingerly through the lobby. It was living history, the glory and ruin of pro football all wrapped up in one bittersweet package.

Speaking of which, one of the eight men who goes in this weekend is Jerry Kramer.

That he should have had his Canton moment decades ago is so patently obvious it scarcely needs mentioning, but the Blob will mention it anyway. Kramer was, after all, one of the linchpins of those aforementioned Lombardi Packers, the dominant team of the decade (the 1960s) when professional football first became an American obsession.

He was the pulling guard who led Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor on all those fabled Packer sweeps. He (along with center Ken Bowman) made the most famous block in NFL history, plowing aside Jethro Pugh in the walk-in freezer of Lambeau Field so Bart Starr could squeeze through for the winning touchdown in the Ice Bowl. And he was the guy who gave us all a peek inside with his diary of that season, "Instant Replay," which not only demystified the game but made it accessible to the average fan -- whose attachment to it is now total in a way no one from Kramer's generation could possibly have envisioned.

In short, Jerry Kramer was the best O-lineman on an iconic team that lived off its O-linemen like few others, and that more than any other team sent the NFL out into the wider world it so completely inhabits today. And yet for years, he was the guy in the waiting room paging through all those 2-year-old magazines over and over, watching Regis and Kathie Lee and wondering when the hell they were going to come get him.

Well. This weekend, they'll finally come and get him. And a glaring hole in Canton at last will be filled.

Applause, applause.