News from Bowlville

It's Bowl Week in college football, boys and girls, which does not mean what it used to mean back in the day, because they play the Cotton Bowl on the second-to-last-day of the year now and the College Football Playoff has co-opted the rest of the traditional New Year's Day bowls, which are down to two.

Only one of which is allowed to call itself by its real name this year.

That would be the Sugar Bowl, which is also the CFP semifinal game pitting Clemson against some team that only played six games this year. The Ohio State Buckeyes won 'em all, though, which constitutes a playoff-worthy season in stupid 2020.

And the other semifinal?

Well, that would be the Can't Call It The Rose Bowl Due To Contractual Considerations, which they're playing in Dallas this year on account of the Bastard Plague. That's why they can't officially call it the "Rose Bowl," even though it is the Rose Bowl.

Notre Dame loses to Alabama in that one.

Wait, did I say "loses to"? I meant "plays". Plays Alabama. Understandable slip of the tongue, given that everyone in America expects the Crimson Tide to pound the Notre Dames into odd shapes and sizes.

What that means, of course, is the thing will either go four overtimes, or Notre Dame will do one of those Notre Dame things and Shock The World. I can hear Tom Clements and Robin Weber chuckling already at such a deliciously obvious setup.

Meanwhile, in other Exciting Bowl News ...

* Speaking of the Cotton Bowl, Oklahoma pounded Florida last night like a railroad spike, 55-20, which it turns out wasn't much of an achievement. The Gators, after all, were missing so many players -- 25 -- they could have legitimately (and likely should have) not played the game.  But the kids still present for duty wanted to play, so they played.

Among those who didn't were the Gators' three top receivers and star tight end Kyle Pitts. Pitts and two of the receivers decided to forego the bowl game to prepare for the NFL Draft, apparently having decided they'd made enough dough for the UF athletic department. The third wideout was a Bastard Plague casualty.

Once upon a time, when the Cotton Bowl was one of the Big Four New Year's Day bowls, it would have been unthinkable for anyone to voluntarily sit it out. But the teevees and the money-grubbing schools who eagerly vacuum up their dollars made the Cotton a warmup act years ago. Now it's just another condiment bowl, and players devalue it because everyone else has.

Hoist by their own petard, I believe this is called.

* Speaking of condiment bowls ...

They played the Duke's Mayo Bowl yesterday, which happened a day after the Cheez-It Bowl. Which means all we needed was an Oscar Mayer Bologna Bowl and we'd have had lunch.

Seriously, though, the Duke's Mayo Bowl has been an integral part of the bowl scene for, I don't know, five minutes or so, and so little wonder Wisconsin was geeked to win it. The trophy, one of the most hallowed in all of Sportsball World, was passed around from one gleeful Badger to the next, until the "Lenox crystal" football on top of it broke off in quarterback Graham Mertz's hand and crashed to the floor, shattering in a million pieces.

This would never happen to, say, the World Cup or the Stanley Cup, although plenty of hockey players have tried mightily over the years to break the latter. And it was quite a shock that it would happen to the trophy for the Duke's Mayo Bowl, given that it towers like the Colossus over all the other condiment bowls.

No worries, though. The Blob hears Big Lots has an excellent return program.

Forever redeemable

Dialed up a little college buckets on the tube the other day, and there was Kelvin Sampson, basking in the glow again. The broadcast team was talking about what a great job he's done at the University of Houston, which is ranked sixth in the nation right now. They traced his coaching roots from Washington State to Oklahoma to Indiana to Houston, and you know what was remarkable about that?

Not once did anyone mention the shenanigans that got OU in hot water while he was there.

Nor did anyone mention the same sort of shenanigans that got him fired at IU, and that left a proud program in pieces for Tom Crean to pick up.

This is because the redemptive powers of winning are rarely more redeeming than they are in college basketball, where a guy can get away with pretty much anything so long as he hangs the occasional banner in Corporate Benefactor Arena and doesn't turn his hoops facility into a brothel (See: Rick Pitino). Other than that, you can be as sketchy as you want.

Case in point: The University of Arizona.

Where the head coach of one of the sketchiest programs in college hoops is still the head coach, even though his university just went into cringe mode because of shenanigans that have happened on his watch.

In October ESPN and The Athletic reported that the NCAA whacked 'Zona with nine rules violations, including five Level I infractions. All of it stemmed from the 2017 federal investigation into corruption in college basketball, in which a former Arizona assistant pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy to commit bribery  accused of accepting $20,000 from a wannabe sports agent to steer Arizona players his way.

Along the way, the assistant was caught on a wiretap telling the agent that Arizona head coach Sean Miller was slipping former player Deandre Ayton a $10,000-a-month handshake. Miller of course denied this.

Then came Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Arizona announced it was self-imposing a one-year postseason ban in response to the NCAA charges. The statement from the school said the decision acknowledged that there had been "serious lapses in judgment and a departure from the University's expectation of fair and ethical behavior" on the part of "certain former members of the MBB staff."

Of course, it said nothing about the guy under whom the serious lapses occurred. And who, again, still has his job.

That would be, again, Sean Miller. 

Who was tagged by the NCAA with failure of head coach control, but who has won 292 games in 12 seasons in Tucson, with three Pac-12 Tournament and five regular season titles and three conference Coach of the Year titles. And whose Wildcats are off to a 7-1 start this season.

Just in case you were wondering why he still has his job.

He still has his job for the same reason Kelvin Sampson is riding high at Houston now and Rick Pitino is back in the saddle at Iona, and Bruce Pearl, bounced from Tennessee for his own shenanigans, is still in the SEC at Auburn -- even though the school has self-imposed its own postseason ban in response to NCAA charges against Pearl's program.

It's because they can coach. It's because of those 292 victories at Arizona and Sampson's  637 victories in 31 seasons, and the 131 wins, two SEC titles and Final Four appearance Pearl has produced in seven seasons at Auburn.

The rest of it?

Why, take it from that broadcast team.

It's not worth mentioning.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 15

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the kicking-2020-out-on-its-hindparts Blob feature of which critics have said "Can we kick the Blob feature out on its hindparts, too?", and also, "What's more annoying than 2020? This.":

1. "Can we kick Alvin Kamara out on his hindparts? Because he WON'T STOP SCORING TOUCHDOWNS!" (The Vikings)

2. "Dammit, Alvin! STOP!" (Also the Vikings)

3. In other news, Dwayne Haskins of the Washington We've Got No Idea What To Name This Team had himself a week: He broke 'Rona protocols, played horribly and was cut from the team. But first he got benched in favor of some guy named Taylor Heineken.

4. Heidelberg.

5. OK, Heinicke, then. Yeah. That's it.

6. Maybe.

7. Meanwhile, the Colts!

8. Rolled to a 24-7 halftime lead and clinched the playoffs with a rollicking win over the  Pittsburgh Stee-

9. "Crap!" (The Colts)

10. "Crap!" (The Browns, upon losing to the 1-13 Jets)

2020. A fond reverie.

 And now the traditional look back at the year in Sportsball, which is not traditional at all because no one wants to traditionally look back at 2020, a year that drove drunk and ran over a whole bunch of people before climbing out of the car, laughing and saying, "Why, looky here! I got me one of them presidential pardons!"

The presidential pardons of baby killers and other degenerate scum, of course, being just one of the vomit-inducing things that happened in 2020.

And so instead of the traditional look back at a year which is still stealing our childhood Sportsball icons at the 11th hour -- it took K.C. Jones and Phil Niekro over the holiday weekend -- the Blob has decided not to accord 2020 a fond look back. It has decided instead to fantasize about all the ways it would like to usher 2020 out the door:

1. Strap it to a chair in a brightly-lit room and force it to watch the New York Jets play football.

2. Strap it to a chair in a brightly-lit room full of Cleveland Browns fans and force it to listen to them wail and gnash their teeth after watching the Browns lose to the Jets.

3. Strap it to a chair in a brightly-lit room and let the ghosts of Bob Gibson and Tom Seaver throw fastballs at its head for all eternity.

4. Strap it to a chair in a brightly-lit room and force it watch Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones for all eternity.

5. Dress it up as a Tampa Bay Rays executive and make it defend trading Blake Snell.

6. Dress it up as a college football executive and stick a red-hot poker in its eye until it admits it screwed Indiana out of a New Year's Day bowl just because it was Indiana.

7. Eject it into space along with Grayson Allen, on account of Grayson Allen is still a thorough-going punk.*

(*See: Tripping Trae Young in an NBA game the other day. Same old Grayson.)

8. Let 2020 hang around until January 20 and eject it into space along with Our Only Available Outgoing President.

9. Send Crazy Rudy and Crazy Sidney Powell along for the ride.

And last but not least ...

10. Make it spend all eternity listening to Jets' fans  bitch and moan about their STUPID FOOTBALL TEAM which decided to win a couple of worthless games NOW and blow the top pick in the draft.

The Useless Presents*

 (*A reference from "A Child's Christmas In Wales" by Dylan Thomas, one of the Blob's favorite Christmas tales for its lyricism and its wonder)

Now, where were we?

Oh, yes. Useless Presents.

This being the weekend of toting up what Santa done brung us, the Blob has decided to list a few Sportsball World gifts the giftees were definitely not happy  to see. They all play in the Coal In The Stocking Conference, some in the Socks Again? Division and some in the Well, It Said On The Box "Batteries Included" Division.

Let's begin ...

1. The 1-6 Kentucky Wildcats 

Just what every soul who bleeds blue wanted to see under the tree: A horribly dysfunctional UK team that couldn't even beat Richmond, for pity's sake. The Kats' only win so far was against a crummy Morehead State team in the first game of the season. Go Blue!

2. The 5-4 Indiana Hoosiers

Remember back when Indiana was thumping Providence by 21? Didn't that feel good, Hoosier Nation? Didn't it look like the Hoo-Hoo-Hoosiers had an abundance of talent, depth, exciting young players and the ability not to brick it up from the 3-point line?

Well, then you opened that big shiny present with the huge bow, and it was just Indiana again.

Lost to Texas by 22 the next time out. Beat Stanford. Lost to Florida State, Beat Butler. Lost at home to Northwestern. Lost by nine to Illinois. Still can't shoot threes, having made more than 40 percent just once all season.

In other words: Same-old, same-old.

3. Cam Newton

Imagine the disappointment across New England when little Jah-nny opened up his new Patriots quarterback and discovered it was the same old Cam Newton Action Figure.

"Where's the Kung-Fu Grip?" disappointed little Jah-nny complained. "Where's the Return To Super Bowl Cam option? And WHY DID TOM BRADY HAVE TO LEAVE??"

4.  Tom Brady

Who, six days after Cam and the Patriots officially were eliminated from the playoffs, emerged on TV sets all over New England on the day after Christmas to go 22-of-27 for 348 yards and four touchdowns against the poor Lions, as the 10-4 Buccaneers locked up a playoff spot.

"Dammit!" (New Englanders everywhere)

And last but not least ...

5. My Cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates

Who, when I tore open the wrapping, did NOT include Josh Bell, their best player. And why?

Because, as usual, the miserly Scrooge-like skinflints who own the Pirates did what they always do, which is trade their best player just when it comes time to pay him real money. This time they sent Bell to Washington for the usual couple of anonymous young pitchers.

Of course, should either Wil Crowe or Eddy Yean, the young pitchers, amount to anything, my cruddy Pirates will immediately trade  them for a couple more anonymous young pitchers.

Which means my cruddy Pirates are not really a major-league franchise at all, but a minor-league team that does what minor-league teams do: Develop talent and send it up the food chain.

Merry Christmas to me.

Holiday fail

I never liked holiday basketball tournaments.

I never liked the idea of giving high school kids Christmas Day off and then, on the day after, hauling them back into the gym to play a two-or-three-day tournament because why not.  I mean, who would want schoolkids to actually get a break on their Christmas break?

Now, I confess, this was not my only reasoning. Mostly my reasoning involved self-interest, as it usually does for sportswriters. Truth is, I wanted a break at Christmas, too. And holiday high school basketball tournaments righteously fenged that shui.

(I wasn't alone, either. I know of at least one area high school coach back in the day who hated the local holiday tournament. And for the same reason I did, though he framed it as a break for the kids. Didn't fool me, though.)

In any event, watching Big Ten basketball on Christmas Day yesterday brought all that back to me.

It's not that I didn't enjoy watching Michigan State and Wisconsin slug it out or Purdue beat Maryland or Minnesota get the lordly Iowa Hawkeyes up there in its icy lair and knock 'em off. And I got the argument for it: The players were all bubbled-up away from their families anyway, so why not play?

But something about it just felt wrong. And that something, of course, is what's wrong with corporate college athletics in general.

It's that the basketball players at Michigan State or Wisconsin or Iowa are a workforce that generates billions for its universities, yet their universities persist with the fiction that they're not a workforce. They're "student-athletes", silly, playing for the glory of Dear Old Whatsammatta U.

For that they get a break on their books and tuition. What could be more fair?

Well. Yesterday once again exposed the cynicism behind all that.

Yesterday the workforce was treated like any other workforce, because sometimes workers are compelled to work on holidays. And so the workforce worked, and the Big Ten made some more dough, grasping business entity that it is.

And the Big Ten, of course, is more grasping than most. It's why a Big 12 school (Nebraska) and an ACC school (Maryland) and a Big East school (Rutgers) are now part of the "Big Ten." More schools, more moolah.

Of course, the Big Ten's TV partners made all this sound like the coolest deal ever -- Christmas Day basketball! What could be better? -- and the "student-athletes" played along. They thought it was pretty cool, too, working on the holiday. Or at least they pretty convincingly said they did.

Me, I wondered what would happen to the kid who went on Zoom and said it kinda sucked having to play a game on Christmas Day. I'm guessing a few gassers might have been in his immediate future, and maybe a scooch down the bench.

On the other hand ...

Well, maybe I'm just cynical, too. Like the Bastard Plague, it tends to be contagious.

That eve

Christmas Eve now, and at last a break from Crazytown 2020. A brief pause, if you will, for those who do so to observe the birth of a Prince of Peace whose grace transcends the madness of kings and wanna-be kings.

Which is to say: Happy Merry Holidays Christmas, everyone. Health and good fortune and every other blessing to you and yours from the Blob, which occasionally can be less glib than usual if it really tries.

This being Christmas Eve, and Christmas Eve being the province of such things, here's one of the Blob's yearly traditions -- a snippet of Dickens I always recycle on this date:

"Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea—on, on—until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him."

Merry Christmas.

Hey, look, it's those hoopsters again

The NBA  season kicked off last night, and the Blob is ashamed to admit LeBron 'n' Giannis 'n' them slipped right past it unobserved. 

This is because the Blob was never aware the NBA season ever stopped.

It was just yesterday, or maybe the day before, that LeBron, Anthony Davis and the Lakers won the Weird Summer Thing, or the championship of the 2020 season as the NBA insisted on calling it. OK, so it was a couple of months ago, but it feels like it was yesterday or the day before.

See, the Lakers hoisted the trophy on October 11, and then the NFL played a few games and Ohio State played, like, one, and suddenly NBA training camps were open again. And then last night, on December 22, the season began, or resumed, or whatever.

This means, if the Bastard Plague allows the season to run its normal course, everyone will be done playing sometime in June. Which means the 2019-2020-2021 season will have lasted 20 months, with one fairly lengthy break because of the 'Rona and another not-really-a-break between last season and this season or whatever we're calling all this.

I figure Steph Curry will be a pencil stub by then, worn down from 6-1 or so to about 5-9.

LeBron and AD will scarcely be speaking because they've been around one another for nearly two years straight and GOD CAN SOMEBODY JUST SHUT THIS GUY UP ALREADY.

Kyrie Irving will become convinced Kevin Durant is the evil twin of Christopher Columbus and is sailing the Nets off the edge of the Earth, BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS IT'S FLAT, Y'ALL.

Paul George, meanwhile, will have taken to calling himself  "Pleistocene Paul" because he will feel like the last time he had a real break was in the Pleistocene Age. Giannis Antetokoumpo will feel like he's lived in Milwaukee forever because "every day is forever here." And the Indiana Pacers will have been playing for so long they'll be reminiscing about the time Roger Brown and Mel Daniels played for them "a couple of years ago."

And the rest of us?

The rest of us will have forgotten again that the NBA ever has an offseason.

I mean, I suppose people have seen it, actually. But that's what they said about Bigfoot.

A few brief Christmas thoughts on NFL Week 14

 And now a very special Christmas edition of The NFL In So Many Words, which falls down the critics' chimney, gets stuck, snaps its leg like a twig and prompts the critics to say "Great!  Now I gotta get my chimney fixed!", and also "I suppose the fat man will sue me now!":

1. And what to the Rams' wondering eyes should appear, but the bleeping-bleep Jets and their bleeping reindeer ...

2. "Thanks, Santa!" (Trevor Lawrence, presumptive No. 1 pick in the draft, which now may not belong to the bleeping-bleep Jets)

3. "Thanks, Santa!" (Bears fans, upon finding an Apparently New And Improved Mitch Trubisky under the tree)

4. "What the hell, Santa? A lump of coal shaped like the Bengals? Gee, THANKS, you fat bleeping tub of goo!" (The Steelers)

5. "And who the hell is Ryan Finley, anyway?" (Also the Steelers)

6. And suddenly there was with the Skyline Chili angel a multitude of heavenly Bengals fans dressed in throwback Bob Trumpy jerseys, saying "Bwah-ha-ha-ha!" ...

7. And suddenly there was with the Polish Boy angel a multitude of heavenly Browns fans dressed in throwback Bernie Kosar jerseys, saying "Hey, look, we don't suck anymore! Woo-hoo!" ...

8. "Are you the ghost whose coming was foretold to me?"

"No, I'm Philip Rivers, The Ghost of Quarterbacks Past Now Updated For Modern Audiences."

9. All of Buffalo looked out,

On the feast of Josh Allen.

When the snow lay round about,

Deep and crisp and even ...

"Yeah, like we've never seen THAT before." (Buffalo)

10. "I said, WHO THE HELL IS RYAN FINLEY??" (Still the Steelers)

A big bowl of stupid

This is all Dennis Cremeans' fault. That's how the Blob has it figured.

Oh, not Cremeans specifically, understand. You can't hang the nation's disrespect for Indiana football solely on a running back who played for some awful Indiana teams in the mid-seventies. It's more that the nation -- hell, its own conference -- looks at IU football and sees those awful teams for which Cremeans and a whole pile of other guys played, and they assume that's what IU football is and always will be.

Most of the time they'd be right. Which is the problem, or at least the beginning of it.

Assumptions color things, see, and most of those things have to do with eyeballs and the money they bring in from TV. And that's how the second-best team in the Big Ten winds up in some What's It Matter Bowl against the seventh-best team in the SEC. That's how Indiana gets dissed big-time by all the Bowl Stupids, who in this stupidest of all years have managed to look even stupider than usual.

I mean, it's not just that an Indiana team that went 6-1 and lost by a touchdown to a College Football Playoff team (Ohio State) winds up playing 4-5 Ole Miss in the nothing Outback Bowl. And it's not just that a team that finished No. 7 in the Associated Press poll did not, for the first time ever, land in a New Year's Day bowl game.

It's that a twice-beaten and lower-ranked Northwestern team did.

And that a 6-4 Auburn team did.

And that an Iowa State team that lost three times -- including by 17 to a Sun Belt Conference team -- still finished ahead of the Hoosiers and wound up in the Fiesta Bowl against the Pac-12 champs, Oregon.

Travesty upon travesty, all of that. Stupid upon stupid.

And speaking of stupid, how about the Rose Bowl?

Whose website cannot even refer to it as the Rose Bowl because it's also a CFP semifinal game, and because it's been pulled out of California so there's some sort of branding issue.

And where did the Can't Call It Rose Bowl land?

Texas, of course!

Where the Bastard Plague is just as rampage-y as it is in California, but where, unlike California, they don't really care. And so while California has banned spectators at all its sporting events, Texas is still all "Come on down!" 

This means the parents and families and who knows who all will be able to watch Alabama put the boots to Notre Dame in person. This was a sticking point for the Notre Dames in particular, and now the Can't Call It The Rose Bowl people have solved that by putting the Irish in a state that's just as crawling with the Plague, but a lot more cavalier about it.

Meanwhile, on Jan. 2, Indiana will be in Tampa playing a team with a losing record. And Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame are in the CFP because they're Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame. And a 9-2 Army team will be staying at home, its bowl game (the Independence) having been canceled because a bunch of Pac-12 teams were too chicken to play the Black Knights.

Good news, though. At least 3-7 Mississippi State gets to play in a bowl game.

On New Year's Eve.

In the, um, Armed Forces Bowl.

Can't make this stuff up. Can't even.

Crapshoot Sunday

 The Domers used to have saying, back when Notre Dame used to win national titles often enough that people were still alive who could remember the last one. That saying was "God made Notre Dame No. 1."

Well. God apparently being busy with other matters these days, it's now Clemson that has made Notre Dame whatever it will be.

The Tigers won the Great Rematch, and the ACC title, 34-10 last night, and it wasn't really that close. What it revealed was that Notre Dame's overtime win in the first meeting was, if not fraudulent, at least sorely misleading. And it was sorely misleading because we all overlooked something we shouldn't have overlooked.

No, not that Trevor Lawrence didn't play, although he was a mighty force in last night's lamination.

It was that the Clemson D was missing some fairly crucial pieces, too, and that's why Ian Book and the Irish contrived to hang a juicy 47 on 'em.

Those pieces were all back last night, and the Irish got Real Clemsoned as a result. The Irish running game squeezed out just 44 yards. Book, sacked six times and routed from the pocket countless others, spent the night doing a serviceable impression of Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive." And the Irish receivers did a serviceable impression of Invisible.

So here we are, on College Football Playoff Sunday. Also known, because of yesterday, as Crapshoot Sunday.

Clemson and Alabama are locks. The waters get murkier thereafter.

Which is the real Notre Dame, the team that beat depleted Clemson in overtime or the team that got floor-waxed by full-service Clemson last night? Is Ohio State, with its short sample size and unimpressive 22-10 win over Northwestern in the Big Ten title game, still the fourth-best CFP option? And what about unbeaten Cincinnati and once-beaten Texas A&M?

The Bearcats beat up a lot of  Austin Peays and East Carolinas on their way to 9-0, and they squeaked by Tulsa 27-24 in their conference title game, which does not inspire confidence they'd be a formidable challenge for a 'Bama or Clemson. A&M, on the other hand, has only a 24-10 loss to the Clemsons as a blot on their record. They whupped everyone else -- including Florida, which lost 52-46 to the Crimson Tide in the SEC title game.

Which means you've got 'Bama and you've got Clemson and then some combination of Notre Dame/Ohio State/A&M, by the Blob's lights.

Probably it's going to be Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame, in that order.

Probably, if it's not Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame in that order. it will be Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Texas A&M.

Probably folks in College Station and environs are going to be way miffed today, if folks in South Bend and environs are not way miffed.

If A&M gets in, people will say, "Oh, sure, the SEC."

If Notre Dame gets in, people will say, "Oh, sure, Notre Dame."

Me?

I think it's Notre Dame because, OK, they're Notre Dame. And also because, extenuating circumstances or not, they're the only team to beat Clemson this season.

You may commence your howling, College Station.

A Rose in any other domain

First off this morning, a word: Balderdash.

As in, "Balderdash, Notre Dame is not going to boycott the College Football Playoff, no matter what Brian Kelly said the other day."

Notre Dame is not going to do that because there's too much money at stake, and money drives big-boy college athletics as surely as it does any other corporate enterprise. And that's what big-boy college athletics are, and you've all heard the Blob carry that tune before.

At any rate, Kelly's boycott threat is as hollow as a decorative gourd, and even he knows it. What isn't hollow is why he issued that threat.

He issued it because the Rose Bowl is one of the CFP semifinal games, and the Rose Bowl is in Pasadena, Calif., And California right now is in major lockdown mode because the Bastard Plague is having a merry old time there. And so the Los Angeles County health director has issued a stay-at-home order and decreed that all sporting events, college, pro and otherwise, will be spectator-free.

This means if they play the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, no one can come watch in person. And that includes the parents and families of the players involved.

This has Kelly sorely miffed, and good on him for it. 

"Why would we play if we can't have families at the game?" he said on a Zoom call previewing the ACC title game the other day. "What's the sense of playing a game in an area of the country where nobody can be part of it?"

These are excellent questions, and especially the second one. If you're going to stage your big-deal playoff games in spite of a national pandemic -- probably not a wise move to begin with -- why do it where the pandemic is the most pandemic-y? And if it's not safe in Pasadena for the parents and families of the players to be there, how is it safe for the players?

Look. We all get it. The Rose Bowl is the grand-daddy of bowl games and Pasadena builds its whole identity around it, what with the grand-daddy thing and the Kilgore Rangerettes and the President's Float, and look-the-sun-is-shining-on-the-San-Gabriel-Mountains-again. But weird times call for weird measures, and these are definitely weird times.

So why not just move the Rose Bowl out of Cali for this year? Why not play it in a less diseased location?

Sure, I get it, it's sacrilege and there is money involved again (Excuse me: MONEY, DAMMIT!), and besides, WHAT ABOUT TRADITION? And so the CFP people refuse to move the game, no matter how much sense it would make.

Well, listen. The Blob gets the money angle, but as for tradition, what about it? The bowl people threw tradition over the side years ago. When was the last time the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton all played on New Year's Day? When was the last time the Cotton was even considered one of the Big Four (or Five, counting the Fiesta)? And if the Rose Bowl is so hot for tradition, how come Georgia played Oklahoma in it three years ago? 

Or Florida State one year? Or TCU another? Or Texas or Miami or Nebraska, for pity's sake?

No, sir. Tradition caught a train out of town a long time ago. The Rose Bowl is no longer solely the Big Ten vs. the Pac-12 anymore. It's no longer Michigan-USC or Ohio State-USC or Wisconsin-USC, and hasn't been for years.

So what's the big deal here? They could play the Rose Bowl on Mars for all tradition matters anymore. So if there are contractual matters to hash out, get the lawyers in a room somewhere and hash 'em out. And move the damn game to some less-toxic place where the players are safer and their families can safely attend.

"Maybe they need to spend a little less time on who the top four teams are and figure out how to get the parents into these games because it is an absolute shame and a sham if parents can't be watching their kids play," Kelly said.

Indeed.

News of the weak

So now we know there is a fourth Latin word in the Olympic creed, and it is not one of which any of the Caesars would have been familiar.

Citius, altius, fortius, sure. But wimpius?

That's the one that's not like the others but sticks nonetheless, with the news coming down that the Russians are up to their usual Snidely Whiplash shenanigans. It's not enough that they monkeyed with an American election four years ago and just hacked the bejeebers out of all our government agencies. Oh, no.

Seems they've also resumed pumping their Olympic athletes full of illicit go-juice.

In response, the international sporting community ... well, didn't exactly cast them into outer darkness.

No, sir. Those iron-fisted disciplinarians instead essentially sent Ivan straight to bed after supper. And no dessert for you, mister!

Again!

See, what they did was what they did the last time they caught the Russians making their athletes glow in the dark, which is ban them from using their national flag and anthem in the succeeding Olympics and attendant world championships. This was such a deterrent hardly anyone noticed, least of all the Russians. Their athletes still got to compete and still got to stand on the podium wearing gold, silver or bronze around their necks.  Officials could have raised a giant Whatsamatta U. flag and played a Taylor Swift song for all those athletes cared.

Well, now those officials have really fixed the cheaters' wagon, though. They've decreed the Russians can't compete under their flag or play their anthem in any international competition for the next two years.

That'll learn 'em!

Now, I know what you're asking here. You're asking, "Mr. Blob, why didn't these officials just kick the Russians out altogether for the next two years? And for the next two Olympics for good measure, seeing how they're shameless repeat offenders?"

The easy answer is they're all worthless and weak, to quote Neidermeyer from "Animal House." The more complex answer, built on nothing but wild speculation, is they're worthless and weak because they're familiar with Vladimir Putin's habit of poisoning people who cross him. No one wants to wind up with a spot of hemlock in their tea, or have some glowing radioactive material surreptitiously tumble down their necks ala Homer Simpson.

On the other hand, this being the IOC and various other international sports organizations, perhaps there was some bribery involved. It would hardly be the first time.

In any case, off Ivan goes to bed after supper, and without dessert.

Rolling his eyes, no doubt. Snickering, no doubt.

Touching home at last

I met Buck O'Neil once in a minor-league ballpark that doesn't exist anymore.

It was, I don't know, 20 or so years ago, and Buck came to the Fort for an appearance at Memorial Stadium, which is a parking lot now. The team that played there, the Fort Wayne Wizards, is now the Fort Wayne TinCaps.  This is how it works, with time and baseball. Teams and ballparks appear and have their day and then disappear, and the years roll on.

And so here came Buck, speaking of years rolling on. He was a star in the old Negro Leagues, which had their own day and disappeared, and then Ken Burns found both Buck and the Negro Leagues and made TV stars out of them in his epic "Baseball" doc. 

Buck smiled his way into America's hearts in that doc, and he smiled his way through our interview, as thoroughly delightful a gentleman in person as on camera. And so it takes no gift at all to know he was smiling yesterday, too, in heaven or some great celestial cornfield in the sky.

Yesterday, you see, the Negro Leagues finally touched homeplate.

Major League Baseball officially welcomed them home at long last, announcing it was re-classifying the Negro Leagues as a major league on the 100th anniversary of their founding. This means Negro Leagues records between 1920 and 1948 will now be incorporated into MLB's official record book.

It was a day far too long in coming, and it was for all of those shut out of the bigs for decades by that crusty old racist Kenesaw Mountain Landis. It was for Buck O'Neil and Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, for Oscar Charleston and Cool Papa Bell and Buck Leonard. It was for Martin Dihigo, and for Judy Johnson. And it was for Bill "Plunk" Drake and Floyd "Jelly Roll" Gardner and Walter "Steel Arm" Davis, and also for Roy Campanella and Larry Doby and Monte Irvin and Willie Mays, who played in the Negro Leagues before Jackie Robinson, another Negro Leagues graduate, broke the color barrier and opened the bigs to players of color.

That happened in 1947, and that was long overdue, too. Because, yes, time may pass in baseball as in all else, but in baseball it passes at a glacial pace. 

Maybe that's why Buck O'Neil was always smiling, and why he never seemed bitter at coming along too early for Jackie. Maybe he understood, better than any of us, the nature of baseball -- and that eventually baseball, epic foot-dragger that it is, would get where it needed to go.

College Football Put-on

We begin this morning with a bit of welcome news in these parts, and that welcome news is THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET GAME IS BACK ON AGAIN!

OK, so it's not. OK, so we're big liars, here at the Blob. 

But the Bucket game was back on again for awhile, and now it's off again, so who knows? It's not like it couldn't happen, college football being the bollixed-up mess it is in this Year of the Bastard Plague.

You've got some teams playing five games and some teams playing 11 games, and other teams playing any number of games between. And there aren't any rules anymore, unless you count the rule that says Thou Shalt Protect Our Teams With Really Ginormous National Followings, Because God Knows We've Gotta Recoup Our Losses From This Bollixed-Up Mess Somehow.

And so, in the Big Ten, at first you had to play a certain number of games and then you didn't.  And over the ACC, the pashas decided Notre Dame and Clemson needn't finish out the regular season, because they'd already locked up spots in the conference championship game.

In other words: We don't want you guys to jack around and lose that last regular season game, and it's a weird year, anyway, so guess what? We'll just make those games disappear! Poof! Covid, baby!

All of this, oddly, has provided a bit of cover for the College Football Playoff folks, who have been even more blatant about brand-naming than usual. It's not so much the top four that's the problem; it's pretty hard to argue with Alabama-Notre Dame-Clemson-Ohio State. But if you're undefeated Cincinnati or even more undefeated Coastal Carolina (8-0 vs. 11-0), forget about it. 

Cincy sits behind one-loss Texas A&M, two-loss Iowa State, two-loss Florida and two-loss Georgia in the College Football Put-on polls. Coastal Carolina is a distant 12th. And Indiana, because its name is Indiana and not, you know, Texas A&M or Florida or Georgia or two-loss Oklahoma, checks in at 11th, behind all of the aforementioned. 

This despite its ranking of 7th in all the other polls. This despite the fact its only loss is by a touchdown, on the road, to No. 4 Ohio State.

Florida, meanwhile, just got knocked off at home by 4-5 LSU. Georgia lost by 17 to 'Bama and by 16 to Florida. And Oklahoma lost to Iowa State and 4-6 Kansas State.

So, there it is, as Emperor Joseph II was fond of saying in "Amadeus." Brand names win again. We can only hope now that 11th in the College Football Put-on will be enough to land IU in a New Year's Day bowl. 

But, again, it's the Year of the B.P. So maybe they wind up getting thoroughly hosed, and land in some Radial Tire/Moving Van/Root Vegetable bowl, with some 4-6 Big 12 lame-o as the opponent.

A sham end to a sham year, that would be. So count on it, probably.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 13

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the festive Blob feature of which Scrooge-erly critics have said "I hate festive!", and also "Aieee! All this festive is HURTING MY EYES! TURN IT DOWN!!":

1. "Look at our Bills, by golly! They're so festive!" (Bills fans)

2. "Yeah? Well, check out our Colts! Talk about festive!" (Colts fans)

3. "Josh Allen!" (Bills fans)

4. "Philip Rivers!" (Colts fans)

5. "Mitchell Trubisky!" (Bears fans)

6. "What?" (Bills, Colts fans)

7. "Well, he didn't suck this week. That's kinda festive, right?" (Bears fans)

8. In other news, the Giants went back to being the Giants after their brief excursion into non-Giantness; the Jets continued to Jets it up; the Washington Football Team took control of the NFC East.

9. "Festive!" (The Washington Football Team, now 6-7)

10. https://media.tenor.co/images/03a73afb6523f7e3536afbca880a7711/raw (All the other NFL teams)

Naming wrongs

 This is some winning streak the native inhabitants are on right now. And that's saying something, considering how the losses have piled up on them across the last 400 years.

First white Europeans killed them with white European diseases, and then their French allies got run off, and then it was Anthony Wayne and Andrew Jackson and Phil Sheridan and Custer (though the Native Inhabitants fixed his wagon). Pretty soon they'd been smallpoxed, swindled or slaughtered out of the whole darn country.

But they've sure been winning a lot of nickname fights lately.

A few years back they got the Cleveland Indians to drop the clearly racist Chief Wahoo caricature, and then they got Daniel Snyder, idiot owner of the Washington Native American Pejoratives, to drop the Pejorative (Redskins). Now the Indians have announced they will no longer be the Indians, either.

As it was with the Washington Football Team, this likely was a financial consideration rather than a crisis of conscience. A whole bunch of sponsors, and their sponsors, told Snyder they'd be shutting off the money tap if the team didn't do the decent thing and change that damn name. And suddenly, surprise, surprise, Daniel Snyder got religion.

You can bet something along those lines has happened in Cleveland, too. Money talks; offensive racial stereotyping walks.

Of course, this has provoked the usual howls of outrage from the usual mostly white folk -- including Our Only Available Outgoing President, who tweeted that the decision was "cancel culture." This has become the latest fetish term for folks like OOAOP, "political correctness" having become rather shopworn.

Nonetheless, it all amounts to the same thing: How dare they tell us we can't offend certain people anymore?

All the arguments this crowd advances, after all, essentially boil down to that. They just try to dress it up by saying we're Erasing History or, yes, Canceling Culture, or that naming athletic teams the Redskins or Braves or Indians was meant to honor them -- although in a remarkable number of instances, no one bothered to ask the native inhabitants what they thought about it.

Some would have been, and are, OK with it. But a whole heck of a lot more are not.

This being Trump's America, of course, that's their fault. In Trump's America, deliberately offending people is not a character flaw, nor does it mean you're a flaming horse's ass. It means you're strong and principled, and those who take offense are weak blubbering snowflakes.

In which case, the weak blubbering snowflakes just won another one.

Replacement names for the Indians are already out there, and range from the Spiders (the original Cleveland baseball team) to the Sockalexis (the native inhabitant in whose "honor" the Indians were originally named). Meaner suggestions would include the Fiery Cuyahogas, the Gosh Darn It When Will It Be Our Turns and, in honor of Cleveland's loss to the Cubs in the 2016 World Series, the Fightin' Rain Delays.

Excuse me. Make that the "Fightin' Bleeping-Bleep Rain Delays".

One thing's for sure. Whatever the Cleveland baseball honchos come up with, certain people will hate it.

And then they'll go out and buy the hats, the jerseys, the giant foam fingers.

God bless America.

Coachin' 'em up. Not.

 I once saw a high school basketball coach puts his hand on a girl and shove her down on the bench.

It was in the girls state finals one year and the coach's team was losing, so he grabbed this young lady by the arm and plopped her on the bench, and then he screamed in her face. He screamed a lot that day, I seem to recall. I guess that's what you do when you can't coach.

What I remember most about that, besides thinking "Who is this maniac?", is how the fans of one of the schools that wasn't even playing in the game (They were fans from Huntington North, the school I was covering) booed This Maniac lustily and shouted at him to get his hands off the girl. And I remember the maniac's scorekeeper turning around and scowling at them, shaking his head and saying something to the effect that they "don't get it."

Wrong, Mr. Scorekeeper. You're the one who didn't get it.

The Huntington North fans got it completely, which gave me a fleeting hope that there were at least a few people out there in Sportsball World who still had some perspective. In truth, I ran into a lot of people like that in 38 years as a sportswriter. Many of them were coaches who, surprise, surprise, were some of the most successful in Indiana.

Which brings me to this youth football "coach" you've all been reading about by these past few days.

By now you've no doubt watched the video from the American Youth Football National Championships in Kissimmee, Fla., and were properly appalled. It's one thing, after all, for a grown man to punch a 9-year-old child in the head. It's an even worse thing when he does it again and knocks him down, then yells at him as he stands over him.

If I'd have been that child's father, I'd have been hunting down this "coach" in the parking lot postgame. Just as I'd have been hunting down the aforementioned basketball "coach" for putting his hands on my daughter.

Thankfully, other people with perspective (and cooler heads) took care of it. They booted "Coach" out of the Georgia league he was in, and the Osceola County (Fla.) Sheriff's Office filed child abuse charges against him. He also lost his job back in Georgia.

His job?

He was a counselor in the Chatham County Sheriff Office's detention center.

You can't make this stuff up. You really can't.

A brief pause for rightness

Once again this afternoon they'll play one of the only college football games worth playing, and they'll play it in an utterly appropriate place. And, at last, 2020 will let us off the mat.

At last it will behave like a year that was brung up right, and not like some snorting pig that never learned table manners or any of the other social graces. At last it will act, you know, semi-normal.

You see, today is the Army-Navy game.

And for the first time since 1943, they're playing it at West Point, in a venue (Michie Stadium) named for Army's first football coach, who died in the Spanish-American War.

And if there isn't some sense of rightness to that -- something sane and clean in a year of madness and pestilence -- then perhaps I'm being melodramatic again. All I know is, for three hours, we'll be reminded of what America used to be before crazy people tried to tear it apart because things didn't go their way.

But they won't be doing that today. Not today.

Today, the Corps marches fog-gray into Michie, and the white-capped Brigade marches in, and the Black Knights and Midshipmen will commence having at it on the football field.  Actual students will block and tackle and claw at each other, and if none of it will look exactly the way it does at Clemson Football Inc. or Ohio State Football Inc., no one watching will miss the difference.

Or at least I won't.

The Blob, see, makes Army-Navy appointment viewing every year, and as much I love college football I can't say that about any other game. That's because I'm a history nerd of the first water, and something of a gooey sentimentalist because of that. And so I watch Army-Navy because Dwight Eisenhower once played in this game, and because Omar Bradley did, and because Bull Halsey did. 

I watch it because, sometime soon, those playing in it are going to be defending the nation, and sometimes dying in the process. And somehow that seems a tad more important than watching a bunch of Buckeyes or Clemson Tigers who, sometime soon, will be signing chunky NFL contracts.

So it will be the Corps and the Brigade and Michie for me today, and a football game that dates all the way back to 1890. 

Benjamin Harrison was President of the United States, the day of that first meeting. Sitting Bull was a little more than two weeks away from an assassin's bullet. Teddy Roosevelt was 32 years old, eight years away from San Juan Hill and 11 from the Presidency; Jefferson Davis had been dead less than a year; Douglas MacArthur was a 10-year-old schoolboy already dreaming of military glory.

Before the decade was out, he would be at West Point himself. And the last time Army and Navy played football there, he was in New Guinea, overseeing the grinding campaign to expel the Japanese from their key base at Rabaul.

Now MacArthur's been dead for 56 years, and the Army-Navy game is back in Michie Stadium.

Rightness. Yeah. That's the word.

Cold comfort

I can hear the Mikes and Sullys tuning up already, even from halfway across the country. They've got their pah-kas on while they w-ahm up the c-ah in the y-ahd, and they're laughing/sneering at T-ahm Brady because the poor guy's blood is too thin to handle a man's winter anymore.

This is because Brady, California born and bred and now playing football in Florida, said the other day he's never liked cold weather, and you couldn't pay him enough to live where the four seasons are winter, mud, fall and winter.

"I've loved being outside every day," TB 12 said the other day, via Boston.com. "... I was a native Californian for a long time in my life and I went away from it for about 25 years, and you won't catch me dead living in the Northeast anymore."

To which the Mikes and Sullys no doubt responded, "Yeah? Well we don't want ya heah anyway, turncoat. Suck it, loser."

Now, the Blob can get behind that sentiment, having once been a fan of the Baltimore Colts, whose entire team abandoned their city in its hour of need. But I've also been in Gillette Stadium in the middle of January, so I get where Brady is coming from, too.

The last time was 2004, and what the Blob remembers about that is a lot of cold and gray and geared-up military types, because it was just two-plus years after 9/11 and America was fighting a misbegotten war in Iraq. So lots of ordinance and security checkpoints and grimness out there in the wilds of Foxborough, which sits halfway between Boston and Providence, R.I. and is roughly the size of Bluffton down in Wells County.

In all that cold and gray, the Patriots beat up on Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts, 24-14. And I walked away thinking, What a dreary place. Thank God it didn't snow.

So, yeah, I can understand why Brady was practically giddy about practicing outside in actual sunshine in December. And I can also understand why the Mikes and Sullys are sneering, because no one likes to be abandoned by your forever GOAT and have to face a New England winter on top of it.

And to make it even worse, the Patriots are 6-7 and Cam Newton is proving to be, well, Cam Newton.

But you know what?

Tampa Tom's Buccaneers are trudging along at a so-so 7-5 themselves, three distant games behind the Saints in the NFC South. So at least they've got that goin' for 'em up there in the Northeast.

Plus snow blowers, of course. Lots and lots of snow blowers.

Some questions

 Maybe it takes a Mike Krzyzewski to ask how they got that elephant in this room. And maybe it takes Duke basketball behaving in a distinctly un-Duke-ian manner for him to ask it.

So you can thank Illinois, sort of, for getting Coach K to wonder why the hell we're playing these games, because the Illini thumped the Dukies by 15 the other night and that led to Coach K wondering the aforementioned. Which of course sounded a mite self-serving, or at least like a guy who'd rather not be watching his team play right now. 

To his credit, Krzyzewski acknowledged as much in his comments. To his further credit, he wondered what he wondered anyway. 

"I would just like for the safety, the mental and physical health of players and staff to assess where we're at," is how he put it.

Also: "We're just plowing through this."

Also, also: "Not sure who leads college basketball."

All of this, of course, is in response to whoever runs major college buckets deciding to jump right into the season, and damn the pandemic. The Bastard Plague is rampaging, but college buckets would go on even though the Plague has reduced college football to a lunatic ball of canceled games and inconsistent edicts.

(A word about that: Of course the Big Ten eliminated its former edict about teams having to play six football games to get into the conference title game. This is because Ohio State is clearly the league's best team, and also because it's 2020 and there are no edicts worth the name. And no whinging about that, Indiana fans. You had your shot at the Buckeyes and missed.)

Now where were we?

Oh, yeah. College buckets.

It's games-games-games there, full speed ahead, and now the 'Rona is creeping into the basketball programs, too. And Coach K, the man most qualified to do so, is all but asking about that damn elephant.

Because, see, when he wonders "What the hell are we doing?", he already knows the answer, The answer is "Making cash while we can in a cash-poor year on the backs of our unpaid workforce."

Krzyzewski would never say that, of course. But one question naturally leads to others these days.

What the hell is college basketball doing?

Why are they flying student-athletes all over the country in the middle of a raging pandemic?

And if the "student" actually came before the "athlete," would they be doing it?

And how do you therefore claim, with a straight face, that they are not a workforce in everything but name?

A workforce generates revenue for whom it works. It does so, sometimes and to varying degrees, at the risk of its health and well-being. Because it's bidness, and that's how bidness works.

How is that dynamic any different than that between "student-athletes" and college athletics?

And is that a question the people who run college athletics run away from as fast as they can? And why the NCAA was adamantly silent in response to Krzyzewski's comments?

So many questions. So many sharp points in them on which to impale oneself. 

A royal clusterstrophe

So here we are now as the Bastard Plague tracks mud all over the Big Ten "football" "season," now staggering to a pratfall finish in an empty stadium near you:

The Michigan-Ohio State game is officially off, no doubt to Michigan's secret relief and Ohio State's horror because, oh my God, the Buckeyes are short of the six games the conference ruled a team must have to be eligible for the Big Ten championship game.

The Old Oaken Bucket game is all but off, as both Purdue and Indiana have been hit with COVID-19 outbreaks this week.

Ohio State is ranked fourth and in the College Football Playoff for now. Indiana is ranked 12th and could possibly play in the Big Ten title game if the Big Ten follows its rule and bars the Buckeyes playing, which it probably won't because the Buckeyes are its only shot at getting a seat at the CFP table, with all the fabulous cash prizes that entails.

"But what about Indiana, Mr. Blob?" you're saying. "If the Big Ten follows its own rules, the Buckeyes are out and Indiana is in. And if the Hoosiers beat Northwestern for the conference title, and a whole pile of folks lose in front of them, they could wind up in the CFP!"

The Blob's answer: Look at you, being all hopeful and stuff. Bless your heart.

Look. Indiana has zero chance to get in the playoff. Zee-ro. Should they be ranked higher in the playoff standings? Of course. Are they being punished because they're Indiana and not, say, Oklahoma or Georgia, both of which have thinner resumes but are ranked ahead of the Hoosiers because they're Oklahoma and Georgia?

Again of course.

Now, you can say that's unfair, and you can say it will be unfair when the Big Ten accommodates Ohio State and waives its rule, on account of it's 2020 and way weird and therefore there's no road map for any of this. And therefore no "rules".

And so fair or not, the Big Ten ADs can do what they want. And will.

They can push the Big Ten title game back a week so Ohio State and Michigan can play on the 19th and give Ohio State the "required" six games (and six victories, no doubt). Or they could let Ohio State cut a rumored deal to play Texas A&M this weekend -- even though  they wouldn't let Nebraska step outside the conference to play when the Cornhuskers had a game canceled on them earlier in the season. 

Bottom line, they'll do whatever they have to do to get the Buckeyes into the CFP. Because no one else in the conference has a prayer in hell of getting there.

"You know," you're saying now. "You could be wrong, Mr. Blob. Like you said: It's 2020."

OK. So you got me there.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 12

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the jaw-dropping Blob feature of which critics have said "I couldn't keep my jaw from dropping!", and also "Dammit! This jaw thing is so annoying!":

1. "Well, isn't this just jaw-dropping!" (Seahawks fan, Bears fan)

2. "You lost to the LIONS?! Nobody loses to the Lions!" (Also Bears fan)

3. "Hey, at least we didn't lose to the Giants like the Seahawks did!" (The Bears)

4. In other news, the Steelers continued to roll along unbea--

5. Oh.

6. "You lost to the WASHINGTON FOOTBALL TEAM?! No undefeated team loses to the Washington Football Team!" (Steelers fan)

7. "Now those stupid '72 Dolphins are gonna drink champagne again!" (Also Steelers fan)

8. Hey, is that the Browns?

9. When did they get to be 9-3?

10. "You lost to the BROWNS?!" (Tennessee Titans fan)

Rocket man

I have met a few folks, because of what I did for nearly four decades. Sports is entertainment, and entertainment confers celebrity. And if celebrity is mostly empty calories -- if, as Patton said, all fame is fleeting -- it still affords you grand opportunities to lord it over your buds by saying "Guess who I met the other day?"

On one of those days it was Muhammad Ali, sort of.

On another it was Arthur Ashe.

On still others it was John Wooden or Gale Sayers or A.J. Foyt or Billie Jean King or Eric "Butterbean" Esch, upon whom fame landed because he was a five-time Toughman national champ and once lost a 10-round decision to 52-year-old Larry Holmes, the former heavyweight champion of the world.

And one day, the best of all the days, it was Chuck Yeager.

Chuck died yesterday at 97, and if you didn't know who he was you either never saw "The Right Stuff" or weren't a space-program fanboy in the '60s, which I was. Who Chuck Yeager was, see, was a platinum-grade, hot-damn American hero. One day in October 1947 he climbed into a contraption that wasn't much more than a seat strapped to a bomb, and a few minutes later he became the first human being to break the sound barrier.

But it wasn't just that that made him a platinum-grade, hot-damn American hero, or all the Nazi ME-262 jets he shot down in his prop-driven P-51 Mustang when he was barely 22 years old. It was the style with which he did it all.

He was a West Virginia boy with a lollygagging drawl straight up from the hollers, and there was nothing he couldn't nonchalant. The day he broke the sound barrier, for instance, he announced it on his radio by joking that his machmeter had gone screwy on him. This was after he had to use a sawed-off broomstick to slam shut the hatch on his orange Bell X-1, on account of he'd broken a couple of ribs in a fall from a horse the day before.

Yes, that's right, folks. Chuck Yeager didn't just bust the sound barrier, he did it with busted ribs.

So of course when Chuck came to Indianapolis years later to drive the pace car for the 500, I had to meet him.

Now, I'm not particularly proud of how I shenanigan-ed my editor into letting me do a feature on the pace car driver. It wasn't entirely professional of me. Bottom line, I was still a fan-boy, and if there actually was a semi-legit story there, the real reason I wanted to do a feature on Chuck Yeager is because I wanted to meet Chuck Yeager. 

And so one afternoon I was ushered into an empty garage at the Speedway, and there sat Himself in a folding chair, a small rumpled man with a gunfighter squint and a lopsided grin. He was in his late 60s then, and when he opened his mouth and all that West Virginia fell out of it, I was instantly mesmerized. I half-expected him to ask if he could borrow a stick of Beeman's, as he famously used to ask his engineer Jack Ridley before a flight.

We talked mostly about the then-revolutionary head-up display in the pace car, technology with which Yeager was familiar from all those years punching holes in the sky testing jet aircraft. We spent five or 10 minutes together, and the only question I remember asking is whether or not he ever felt fear when climbing into aircraft that like as not used to kill their pilots.

He'd likely been asked that question a million times before. But he just grinned and said, no, not really. It was just his job. That's how he saw it.

I came perilously to asking for his autograph then, the cardinal sin of all cardinal sins for a sportswriter. But I didn't.

All these years later, I'm still kinda proud of that.

And now Chuck Yeager is gone, and damn 2020 thoroughly for that.

Godspeed, sir. Punch a hole in eternity for us.

A few brief thoughts, Special Jets Edition

And now a very special edition of The NFL In So Many Words, because this just won't wait, and never mind the Bears fans who are saying "Hey, no fair! We stink, too!", and also "We lost to the doofus Lions in the most doofus-y way possible! Come on!"

Yeah, but you didn't lose like the 0-12 Jets did. Nobody loses like the 0-12 Jets lose, on a 46-yard bomb with five seconds left, a play that never would have happened if the 0-12 Jets' brain trust hadn't done a really brainless 0-12 thing.

And so: 

1. "Crap! I just did a really brainless 0-12 thing!" (Jets defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, who dialed up the blitz Derek Carr and Henry Ruggs III burned for the winning score)

2. "Crap! I NEVER get the benefits I deserve!" (Jets icon Joe Namath)

3. "The hell, Jets???" (Jets fan in Queens)

4. "The hell, Jets??" (Jets fan in Passaic)

5. "The hell, Jets??" (Only other Jets fan besides legendary Jets fan Fireman Ed)

6. "Jets-Jets-Jets! J-E-T-S Jets!" (Fireman Ed)

7. "Please don't draft me, please-please-please-please!" (Trevor Lawrence)

8. "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" (Former Jets quarterbacks Richard Todd, Ken O'Brien, Chad Pennington et al laughing at Trevor Lawrence)

9. "The hell, Jets??" (Because you can't repeat that too many times)

10. "Wow, it's the most Jets thing EVER!" (America)

Where the road leads. Maybe.

Football players are jumping on Tom Allen up there in frigid Wisconsin, where the windchill  Saturday was Holy Crap It's Cold. They are slinging their arms around Allen's shoulders, here in one end zone. They are interrupting him on NATIONAL TV.

Here's what they're saying: Best coach in America right here.

And Tom Allen laughs and claps them on the back and says, golly, he just loves these guys, special group, all that. Which is not what Bear Bryant or Bo Schembechler or Woody Hayes would have done in this situation.

No, sir. Bear or Bo or Woody would have made 'em run laps until they were tripping over their tongues -- or, in Woody's case, maybe just punched someone.

But Allen laughed and loved his guys and, later, led them in a victory dance in the visitors locker room in splendid old Camp Randall Stadium. And now you get why his Hoosiers are 6-1 and beating people they haven't beaten in decades, and damn near beating other people for whom they would normally be kibble. 

Yesterday they took down Wisconsin, 14-6. It was their first win over the Badgers in 11 meetings, and their first win in Camp Randall in 19 years. Their only loss was to No. 4 Ohio State, 42-35, the Buckeyes hanging on for dear life at the end as Indiana dominated after halftime. 

Next week the Hoosiers will keep the Bucket against Purdue, and finish this Bastard Plague-shortened season 7-1.

They're a good football team, in other words. They're a good football team because his players love Allen and Allen loves them, and because of that he's built a culture that works. And in a week something could well happen to them that would be a damn shame.

What could happen is Michigan, forced to cancel its game against Maryland yesterday because of an outbreak of the Plague, could fail to get the outbreak under control. In which case the annual grudgefest against Ohio State would be off.

If that happens, the 5-0 Buckeyes would be one game shy of the agreed-upon six-game minimum required to make them eligible for the Big Ten title game.

Now, the Buckeyes are pretty clearly one of the top four teams in the nation. They're pretty clearly a College Football Playoff team. But if they're barred from playing for their conference championship, there's a chance -- a chance -- the committee that selects the CFP might be disinclined to include them.

Which means the Big Ten athletic directors would have a decision to make: Follow the agreed-upon rules, or say well, the rules aren't really rules (that's just something we said, you know). So we're gonna let Ohio State -- the conference's best shot at a national title -- play in the Big Ten title game anyway.

You know who gets screwed if that happens?

You guessed it. Indiana.

Because if Ohio State were to come up a game short of the minimum, Indiana would play for the conference title. Unless the ADs change the rules, of course. Which they likely would.

Now, admittedly, that's a lot of "ifs" to unpack. What's probably going to happen is the Michigan-Ohio State game gets played, and the Buckeyes laminate the sadsack Wolverines like they always do, and it's on to the CFP. And Indiana goes off to some high-end Chicken Sandwich/Loan Sharking Institution bowl. 

After which his players would again jump on Tom Allen.

Which would be OK, of course. More than OK.

The human face

Long, long ago, months that seem like years ago now, the Blob settled on a name for the pandemic that has ravaged our nation for most of 2020.

The Bastard Plague. That's what I call it.

In hindsight this might have sounded like the Blob was trying to trivialize it, as our Our Only Available Outgoing President and so many other alleged national "leaders" have. This was never intended to be the case. The Blob calls it the Bastard Plague because of a commitment to accuracy. It's a Plague, and it is one righteous Bastard.

No one knows this better than Karl-Anthony Townes of the Minnesota Timberwolves.

On a Zoom media availability yesterday he painfully described what hell on Earth looks like, because he's been on an unwitting tour. Seven family members, he said, have died of COVID-19 or complications from it this year. The Bastard Plague killed his mother in April; it killed an uncle just the other day.

You want a human face for what irresponsibility, straight-up deception and fringe-wacko blathering about "freedom" have cost America this year, Townes will serve quite well.

That's important, because as the numbers continue to spiral they also numb us. Yesterday there were a record 216,548 new cases documented in the United States. The Plague's total death toll is now nearing 300,000. And every one of those 300,000 had a name, a face, husbands or wives or sons or daughters or any number of others who loved them.

And yet there are still state governors out there -- Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, come on down! -- who refuse to admit a public health crisis is actually a public health crisis, and to take appropriate measures to address it.

There are still rabid anti-maskers who say it's their inalienable right to assemble however and wherever they want, and who hurl "tyrant" at any public official who dares to put in place emergency measures to deal with the aforementioned public health crisis. 

And there are still ninnies out there who quibble over the Plague's death toll, splitting hairs over whether or not someone died of COVID-19 or simply with COVID-19. As if that makes a farthing's difference. If you died with the Plague, you died of it. Because whatever pre-existing condition you had would likely not have killed you at this particular time without the Plague to push you over the edge.

In any case, the imminent vaccine, and a President-elect who actually recognizes a public health crisis for what it is, cannot arrive too soon. They're the only things that can inoculate us from the idiots in our midst.

One of them, a Fort Wayne sports bar owner, got his place shut down by the board of health the other day. The Blob will not identify either the owner or the establishment, but when word came down that his place had been shuttered, a lot of folks in these parts nodded and said "Of course." That's because too many anecdotes were out there about the owner's militantly cavalier anti-mask stance. He was notorious for it.

And all of this happening against the backdrop of Indiana, and Allen County in particular, becoming one of the worst Plague hotspots in the nation, with case levels exploding and the availability of hospital beds dwindling by the day.

Now comes Karl-Anthony Townes to remind us that in every one of those hospital beds is a human being who loves and is loved. To remind us that the Bastard Plague is not a political hobby horse or a rallying point for kooks who mistake licentiousness for freedom, but merely a filthy serial killer using humanity for fuel.

God help us if we can't see that.

A big Lou to-do

John Wooden.

Pat Summitt.

Dean Smith.

Bear Bryant.

Lou Holtz.

Which of these things is not like the others?

Which sticks out, not like a sore thumb, exactly, but like a mildly owie thumb?

If you're an impartial observer you'd have to say Lou, on account of everyone else on the list is a Rushmore giant. Lou, who was honored by Our Only Available Outgoing President yesterday with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is not. Lou was a Notre Dame giant -- there's a statue of him outside Notre Dame Stadium and everything -- and he's revered there because he brought home Notre Dame's last football national title 32 years ago. Plus he was hella entertaining with his corny jokes, and all that University of Navy and I'm-scared-to-death-of-Rice business.

Everyone loved Lou. Heck, I loved Lou, having covered pretty much the entirety of his term at Notre Dame. He was funny and quotable and he loved Zagnut bars. Plus he had a sketchy side,  which only made him more interesting.

And yet ...

And yet, all the others on the aforementioned list had the Presidential Medal of Freedom draped around their necks because, like almost every one of the 37 coaches or athletes upon whom the honor's been bestowed, they meant something beyond just Ws and Ls. 

Wooden was college basketball in the '60s and '70s, just like the Bear was college football. Pat Summitt, through the sheer force her success and her example, put the women's game on America's radar. Dean Smith was the greatest college basketball coach in history whose name wasn't Wooden or Bob Knight.

Lou?

Lou was a hell of a football coach who won a bunch of games. Most notably at America's most iconic football school.

Also, he's a famously staunch supporter of OOAOP -- which might have had more than anything to do with why OOAOP was hanging the medal around his neck yesterday.

Look. Presidents have been giving out the Medal of Freedom since JFK came up with the idea, and there is no criteria for it. So it's entirely OK for OOAOP to award it to whomever he likes, even if he's Rush Limbaugh.

Or, you know, Lou. What the hell, why not?

The distinction here is that while the Medal of Freedom has always reflected a sitting president's sensibilities, it's never been as blatantly political as OOAOP occasionally has made it. Previously, if an athlete or coach was awarded the medal, it was not only because of the political leanings of whoever was bestowing it, but because that athlete or coach had merit that transcended those leanings.

See: Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Arthur Ashe, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Willie Mays, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, etc., etc.

This is not to say OOAOP hasn't gotten it right on occasion. You can't argue with Roger Penske, for instance. Or Alan Page. Or Jim Ryun.

Lou Holtz?

Maybe politics had nothing to do with it. But it sure looks like they did.

And appearances matter.

Un-killable rivalry

And you thought this couldn't get crazier.

But now we have Bastard Plague outbreaks at both Michigan and Ohio State, which has compelled Michigan to cancel all team activities plus its last home game against Maryland this weekend,. And which in turn has put the annual Michigan-Ohio State lovefest in peril.

Which, if Michigan still has diseased people in its camp, would leave Ohio State shy of the six games it needs to qualify for the Big Ten championship game.

Oh, it's a perfect hash now, this ball of mess they're calling the Big Ten football "season." And it's going to get even hash-ier if Big Ten athletic directors bend the rules and let Ohio State go ahead and play for the title anyway -- which is what Wisconsin AD Barry Alvarez hinted could happen because the Buckeyes are a lock for the College Football Playoff right now, and how could the CFP committee let a team that didn't even play in its conference title game play for the national title?

Holy schnikies. Maybe they should have just canceled the season.

That said, not everything looks like a Twilight Zone episode these days. I mean, Michigan and Ohio State still don't like each other.

And so you let's bring in ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit, who played quarterback for the Buckeyes long ago in the Before Time. Herbie, the other day, suggested Michigan might use their Plague outbreak as a way to worm out of the showdown with his Buckeyes, on account of the Wolverines were likely to get ball-peened again by the mighty Scarlet and Gray.

In other words: Michigan's chicken, boys and girls. To put a rather fine point on it.

This seems unlikely given that Jim Harbaugh, a Michigan Man, would never back down from a fight with those Ohio degenerates, even if he is 0-5 against them and has lost the last two meetings by 23 and 29 points, respectively. He's a regular Black Knight when it comes to The Rivalry, shouting "Right! I'll do you for that!" even though the Buckeyes have hacked off all four of his limbs.

But a Buckeye is a Buckeye forever, and so of course Herbie would imply cowardice on the part of those Michigan degenerates. He apologized, but come on. Does anyone think he means it?

Besides, there could actually be a more sinister plan at work, the Wolverines being the Wolverines.

Anyone given a thought to the notion the Wolverines -- 2-4 with nothing to lose -- were intentionally infecting themselves to get the Ohio State game canceled? Thereby potentially screwing the Buckeyes out of the Big Ten title and the CFP?

I mean, it is The Rivalry. Surely more spiteful things have happened.

Perspective sighting

So apparently the Ravens and Steelers are going to play tonight ... no, wait, this afternoon ... no, wait, on the second Tuesday of the Month When Pigs Fly And Chickens Quote Shakespeare. Or something like that.

This is how it goes these days with the NFL, desperately trying to keep its season afloat even if it has to get ridiculous about it (See: Denver Broncos). So Ravens-Steelers will happen, yes, this afternoon, on a Wednesday.

And now you're asking "Mr. Blob, why are they playing on Wednesday afternoon instead of Wednesday night?"

As a proud graduate of a Mid-American Conference institution (Chirp-chirp, Ball State Cardinals!), the Blob would like to assume it's because the NFL was afraid of going head-to-head with the MAC tonight. I mean, I would be if I were them.

Alas, no. It's because NBC is airing the the Christmas tree lighting in New York tonight, and it wasn't going to bump that for some silly NFL game.

So, Christmas over football.

I have to say, the Blob finds this refreshing.

This may be especially true if you were a sportswriter for four decades, but sometimes it's easy to forget there is life outside the sports bubble. You spend all that time structuring your life around game times, you can't conceive there are whole piles of folks out there who couldn't care less that IU and Purdue are playing basketball on a given night. They're too busy with arguably more noble pursuits than spending two hours watching dudes with over-active thyroids try to put a ball through a hoop.

My wife, Julie, is one of those folks. She loves her some IU buckets and Red Sox baseball, but outside of that, she's got nothin'. Oh, she knows who LeBron and Steph Curry are, and she knows Patrick Mahomes because she watched the Super Bowl last year, and she knows, weirdly, IndyCar driver Will Power because one year her husband got her a pair of Will Power socks as a joke. But other than that?

Static, mostly. Radio silence. And one of her most endearing qualities, frankly. 

This is because sometimes you need a little perspective, and nothing provides more of it than saying "Did you see what Luka Doncic did the other day?" and hearing "Who's Luka Doncic?" in response. Or Lewis Hamilton or Dak Prescott or Fernando Tatis Jr. -- even if, in Julie's case, she actually saw Fernando Tatis Jr. play when he was a Fort Wayne Tincap.

And now we have NBC opting for seasonal tradition over Just Another NFL Game. 

So much for that War on Christmas you've heard so much about.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 12

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the versatile Blob feature now available on fine days anytime, anywhere, dressed as anything, and of which critics have said "What day is it? What time is it? MY GOD IS THAT A WIDE RECEIVER PLAYING QUARTERBACK?!":

1. "Why, yes. Yes, it is." (The Denver Broncos)

2. "Is this really Week 12? Or is it Week 11.9 because the Steelers and Ravens haven't played yet? And when do they play, again? Is it Wednesday now? What day is it? MY GOD IS THAT A WIDE RECEIVER PLAYING QUARTERBACK?!" (America)

3. "Gosh, I wish I could throw a football like a wide receiver." (Patrick Mahomes)

4. "OK, so no. No, not really." (Also Patrick Mahomes)

5. "If Kendall Hinton can play quarterback, can I be all-time center?" (Anonymous Bronco)

6. Meanwhile, Mitchell Trubisky!

7. Played quarterback for the Bears again, was "meh" again, Bears lost again.

8. "Hey, Coach Nagy, can I play quarterback next?" (Some kid named Vern from over in Winnetka)

9. "Weeellll ..." (Matt Nagy)

10. "Nah, just kiddin'. I'd rather be all-time center." (Vern)