Dear 2021

 Dear 2021:

In 15 or so hours we say goodbye, and thank God for that. All the unkind things we said about 2020 -- Get the (bleep) outta here, and (Bleep), you're still here?, and (Bleep) (bleeper) (bleeping) (bleep-bleep) -- we're now saying about you.

It's as if 2020 responded by saying "(Bleep) you, I'm going to put this 2021 mask on and stick around for another year! How you like THEM apples, (bleepers)?"

Well ... we don't.

I mean, you began, 2021, with our raving, delusional Previous Occupant sending his mob of gun-toting loonies to attack the seat of American government, a scary but pitiful attempt to overturn his blowout election loss. Some called it an insurrection, some called it a failed coup, but mostly it was just a ginormous temper tantrum -- the Previous Occupant's Beer Hall Putsch, if you will, only dumber.

A few days later, the actual winner of the election was inaugurated. And a couple of days after that, as if you couldn't stand to leave us alone for EVEN A MNUTE, Henry Aaron died.

Yeah, thanks for that, 2021. And thanks for killing Don Sutton and Elgin Baylor and Marty Schottenheimer and Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Wayne Gretzky's dad, too. And John Madden and BETTY WHITE?

That was a sweet signoff to the year. Bastard.

No, 2021, you were not the response we were looking for when we said "At least it won't be 2020 anymore." Instead, you replied, "Oh, yeah? Watch this."

To repeat myself: Bastard.

Oh, and thanks for the Bastard Plague, which stuck around and then mutated and turned the Olympics into Citius, Altius, Fortius, Emptius, and now is trying its best to ruin the NBA and NHL seasons and the NFL playoffs. 

Good stuff?

Well, we did get Helio Castroneves' fourth Indy 500 win, and Tiger Woods and his son Charlie playing golf together, and the Astros losing another World Series. Ghislaine Maxwell, sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein's pimp, got sentenced to the hoosegow for procuring underage girls to sate Epstein's pedophilia. And we finally got the hell out of Afghanistan, even if the Biden administration botched the exit.

That was good, 2021. But then, of course, you had to give us degenerates like Trevor Bauer, and crazy people like Kyrie Irving and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, and all the loony anti-vaxxers who've so helped muck up Sportsball World. Oh, and a few more mass shootings from the usual collection of psycho gun nuts.

Doesn't quite come out even, 2021. And so out the door you go.

And please DO let it hit you in the hindparts on the way out.

(Bleep) you,

The Blob

Product placement

 The coolest thing that happened in Sportsball World yesterday was not Purdue beating Tennessee in overtime in the Music City Bowl, although that was pretty cool, and epic -- come on, Aidan O'Connell threw for 534 yards and five touchdowns, people -- and the best of the Mobile Phone/Lending Institution/Tax Preparer/Chicken Sandwich bowls so far.

No, sir. The coolest thing that happened was South Carolina coach Shane Beamer bravely taking it like a man as his players dumped a vat of mayonnaise on his head.

This happened because Beamer's Gamecocks beat North Carolina in the Duke's Mayo Bowl, which is another of those awful corporate shill bowls but which actually had some fun with it by dumping Duke's product all over the winning coach. This had to be extraordinarily gross for poor Beamer, but his team won so he was able to smile his way through it.

Meanwhile, Wyoming's players dumped a bucket of french fries on head coach Craig Bohl's head after the Cowboys beat Kent State in, what else, the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. And so a trend has apparently begun that could eventually end in tragedy.

I mean, pouring a bucket of mayonnaise or french fries or, I don't know, shredded W-2s on the head of the TaxSlayer Bowl winning coach is one thing. But, good lord, what if there's someday another radial tire bowl? Or, worse, another lawn implement bowl, aka the fabled Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl?

I can see the screaming, black-bordered headlines now ...

WINNING COACH TRIMMED TO DEATH IN TRAGIC SEARS CRAFTSMAN FOUR-PLY LAWN IMPLEMENT BOWL CELEBRATION.

'At Least He Went Out With His Edges Straight,' Grieving Players Say.

Or, you know, something like that.

Bowled over

 So now we know the truth, or at least MY truth.

(Because we've all got our own truth now, apparently. It's like those personalized coffee mugs you see here and there, with BRENDEN and KATEE and CAYDEN and MADYSON printed on them. Choose the truth with your name on it and let's go!)

Anyway ... my truth says this: The Bastard Plague hates all these useless bowl games, too.

This after the Holiday Bowl was canceled because too many UCLA Bruins players showed red for the Plague, and the Bruins pulled out hours before kickoff. This reportedly annoyed their opponent, North Carolina State, which apparently really, really, really wanted them some Holiday Bowl.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 issues have also canceled the Hawai'i Bowl, Military Bowl, Fenway Bowl and Arizona Bowl. This meant eight more deserving schools, some proudly  carrying the laurels of 6-6 campaigns, did not get their postseason reward -- although one hopes the players still scored their bowl swag, which now will have added value as collector's items.

And, yes, the Blob is making light of all this, and it probably shouldn't. The schools, even the 6-6 schools, actually do relish playing in these games, even the Cricket Celebration Bowl and the PUGB Mobile New Mexico Bowl. And even if some of the 6-6 schools (ahem, the Blob's alma mater, Ball State) subsequently demonstrate they had no business being within a nautical mile of a bowl game.

Nevertheless, they consider these games a reward for an almost-successful season, so who is the Blob to make light of that. Nor should it make light of this new surge in COVID-19 cases, which have not only wreaked havoc with Sportsball World but are again overwhelming our beleaguered health-care system.

The worst of it is this new variant (known as "Omicron," or "Fresh Hell") has taken advantage of America's Bastard Plague fatigue, and the fact the anti-vaxxers and other fringe loonies appear to be winning the war for hearts and minds. They've gone full Braveheart mode over employer vaccine mandates, turning a simple work rule in the face of a national health crisis into some sort of soul-crushing tyranny.

Only people who've never known actual tyranny can do this, of course, and by God are they good at it. Meanwhile the national death toll is up over 800,000, and Cincinnati's mayor has declared a state of emergency because the Plague has so depleted the fire department.

In Indiana, meanwhile, where hospital beds are down to nothing again and new 'rona cases are at levels unseen in nearly a year, Gov. Eric Holcomb seems to have lost his patience with the loonies in his own party and elsewhere.

In the statehouse, Repubs are pushing a bill that would outlaw private employers mandating vaccinations, a mandate in itself. And Indiana, in its usual bullheaded way, continues to have one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation -- which seemed to particularly frustrate Holcomb the other day.

One could almost imagine, listening to him, that after his news conference he went off to  a soundproof room and screamed "What the (bleep) is wrong with you boneheads?!"

Goodness. It seems I've strayed down a rabbit hole here.

("No s***," you're saying)

In any case, the Bastard Plague is wrecking stuff again, even the Fenway Bowl. But at least it couldn't stop the New Era Pinstripe Bowl, where a team that went 3-6 in the Big Ten (Maryland) ball-peened a team that went 4-4 in the ACC (Virginia Tech), 54-10.

Perhaps that's a bowl game that should have been canceled. Or at least played with a running clock, please.

A coach takes his leave

 John Madden's burden was always that he was too good at his second act. It made people forget how good he was at his first act.

And that was the act that mattered most to him.

Madden, who died suddenly Tuesday morning at 85, won 16 Emmys as a broadcaster and got his name on a video game that launched an entire genre, but before all that, and mainly, he was a football coach. If you cut him, he bled Xs and Os. If you gave him access to a telestrator, he ...

Well. We all know what he did with that.

He became famous for the way he drew all over your TV screen like a toddler coloring outside the lines. If much of the world knew him as that guy, and the guy who traveled everywhere on a bus because he hated to fly, and the guy who said "Boom!" all the time with unrestrained zeal, it was the football coach in him who informed all that.

Casual observers of the Madden phenomenon might be shocked to learn he wasn't just a novelty act as a coach. In 10 years prowling the Oakland Raiders sideline, his teams won 103 games and a Super Bowl and played in seven AFC title games. His .759 winning percentage remains the best in NFL history among coaches with at least 100 games -- better than Lombardi, better than Landry, better than Shula or Noll or Walsh or Belichick.

The youngest coach in NFL history when Al Davis handed him the reins at the age of 32, Madden was just 42 when he turned in his clipboard. It left him with a whole pile of life still to live, and consequently his broadcasting career lasted three times longer than his coaching career.

So that's how the world came to know him, mainly. He was the cheerful rumpled man who explained the game in layman's terms, and who sold you beer and food and power tools on the tube, and who became, well, a celebrity.

He lived in Gilda Radner's old apartment in New York, and befriended Yoko Ono and her son, Sean Lennon, and made an NFL fan out of Elton John. 

And yet, that's not why the flags aren't at half-staff at the Pro Football Hall of Fame today.  Nor is it why all those old Raiders are mourning today.

They're mourning because John Madden was their Hall of Fame coach, and they loved him long before the rest us did. And that's his most enduring legacy.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 16

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the double-vaxxed, boosted, masked, asymptomatic Blob feature of which critics have said "I don't care! Stay away from me!", and also "You're sick! I can tell you're sick! I cast you out! Out, I tell you!"

1. "OK, who wants to play offensive line tonight? Lucky fans now eligible with negative test!" (The New Orleans Saints, who played the Dolphins Monday night missing 20 players because of Bastard Plague protocols)

2. "Woo-hoo! My first NFL start!" (Saints backup-backup quarterback Ian Book)

3. "Aaaaahhh! Aaaaaahhh!" (Ian Book, running for his life in the Saints' 20-3 loss, in which the Dolphins sacked Book eight times)

4. Saints' O-line lineup: Joe Bob, Jim Bob, Tim Bob, Tom Bob and Bob Bob.

 5. Meanwhile, the Colts!

6. Beat the Cardinals despite being depleted themselves, thanks in part to Carson Wentz's stellar outing.

7. Live look this week at Colts' quarterback Carson Wentz, who's unvaccinated on a team that now has 14 players in The Protocols. 

8. "See? We can so win!" (The Bears)

9. "Yeah, but it was just the Seahawks." (America)

10. "Why don't THESE teams have 'rona issues?" (Also America, watching the Jets beat Jacksonville in the Relegation Bowl)

Blue echoes

 The Blob makes no claim to seeing patterns in things. Mostly I'm just an old guy who remembers stuff.

And so I see Carson Wentz make throws when he needs to and Jonathan Taylor lug it for 100-plus yards for, like, the eleventy-hundredth time, and I see the Colts outlast the Cardinals on the road for their eighth win in the last 10 games. And it reminds me of something.

It reminds me of 2006, kinda.

And, please. Pay special attention to the "kinda."

That's because the Blob is not going to go off its meds and declare these Colts are going to wind up winning the Super Bowl, the way the 2006 Colts did. But the way this team is winning games jogs my memory, kinda. And the memory it jogs is the way the 2006 Colts won that Super Bowl in the rain in Miami.

They did it, kinda, with defense and a running game.

They beat the Chiefs 23-8, the Ravens 15-6 and held the Patriots to 13 points in the second half to reach the Super Bowl. Then they held the Bears' offense to 10 points in the 29-17 Super Bowl win.

And, yes, Peyton Manning did Peyton Manning things in that playoff run. But Dominic Rhodes and Joseph Addai gave Manning a run game, too, going over 100 yards between them in each of the Colts playoff wins.

In the Super Bowl, Rhodes lugged it 21 times for 113 yards, and Addai got the call 19 more times for 77 yards. He also caught 10 passes for 66 yards.

That should have made him the Super Bowl MVP, in the Blob's opinion. But Manning was named the MVP because quarterbacks are almost always the Super Bowl MVP unless they actively soil themselves -- and besides, this quarterback was Peyton Manning.

Now, Carson Wentz is not Peyton Manning. He's never going to be Peyton Manning.

But Jonathan Taylor is Jonathan Taylor -- i.e., the best RB in the league this year -- and he's doing exactly what Addai and Rhodes did together in 2006, which is put up 100 yards every week in the stretch run. And the defense is putting the brakes on people just enough for Taylor and Not Peyton Manning to get the W. And these Colts have bounced back from a 1-4 star -- kinda (that word again) like the 2006 Colts bounced back from a 3-4 regular-season finish to win it all.

Again, the analogy isn't perfect. And this is not the Blob saying 2006 is going to happen again. 

All I'm saying is there's a resemblance -- a blue echo, if you will. And it's ... kinda  interesting.

Have a merry, everyone

 Christmas Eve now, and at last a break from Crazytown 2021. A brief pause, if you will, for those of us 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.

A Bowlful of ... Rutgers?

So, remember a month ago, when Maryland beat Rutgers in the last football game of the regular season, and the Terps were rewarded with a coveted spot in the much-coveted New Era Pinstripe Bowl, which will happen Dec. 29?

Well, the Scarlet Knights might get the last laugh on that whole deal.

See, even though they finished the season 5-7, and none of the 567 bowl games wanted them, they might still wind up in a slightly more prestigious bowl than the Pinstripe Bowl. That's because the Bastard Plague wiped out half the roster at Texas A&M, which was slated to play Wake Forest in the Gator Bowl. 

That meant the A&Ms had to pull out of the game on Wednesday. Which meant Wake Forest suddenly had no one to play, unless the Wake Forest band suited up in an all-Demon Deacons tilt.

Enter Rutgers, which apparently is the frontrunner among the 5-7 schools, whose rich heritage of going 5-7 now means they have access to bowl games. Rutgers is the frontrunner because of something called the Academic Progress Rate, which does not mean "we beat Indiana 38-3." Apparently, it has to do with book-learnin', a quaint notion in college football these days.

So, it looks like Rutgers is going to get not just a bowl game, but a New Year's Eve bowl game, simply because their kids go to class better. It almost makes you believe in Santa Claus again, or at least the equally elusive "student-athlete."

How's that for a Christmas miracle?

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 15

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the stubbornly resistant Blob feature that refuses to to go away, like the Bastard Plague, and of which critics have said "Dammit! What variant is this?", and also "Oh, great, now we got Week 15 of this thing, just in time for Christmas!":

1. "Oh, great, Monday before Christmas and we get the Bears and the Vikings on Monday Night Football! Thanks for the coal, Santa Goodell!" (America)

2. "Oh, great, it's Tuesday, and Week 15 still isn't over yet! Come on!" (Also America)

3. "Hey, wait a minute! It's Tuesday! Why are we playing on Tuesday?" (The Rams, the Seahawks, the Eagles, the Washington Football Team)

4. "And we still suck!" (The Seahawks, the Washington Football Team)

5. "And our owner is still a corrupt, misogynist a**hole!" (The Washington Football Team's fans)

6. And in other news, Jared Goff!

7. Completed 21-of-26 passes for 216 yards, three touchdowns and a passer rating of 139.7 in the Lions' shocking 30-12 upset of the Cardinals.

8. And then tested positive for the 'rona because, you know, it's the Lions and they can't have nice things.

9. But at least Tom Brady didn't get shut out at home by the .500 Saints!

10. Oh ... wait ...

A Christmas miracle!

 Once upon a time, Bill Belichick was visited by three ghosts ...

OK. So probably not.

But the Blob likes this explanation for Grumpy McHoodie actually apologizing to the media because he snapped at them after the Patriots got run over by the Colts. So we'll go with it:

Once upon a time, Bill Belichick was visited by three ghosts.

They were the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.

"Huh," said Belichick. "I thought you were my special teams coach, my video coach and my strength coach."

 But they weren't. They were there for Belichick's benefit, so there would be a hope and chance he could escape the fate of Jacob Marley, wandering through eternity wearing the chain he forged in life.

"Can't I take them all at once and be done with it?" said Belichick. "We've got the Bills on Sunday."

Alas, no. First, Belichick would get the Ghost of Christmas Past, which showed him Spygate and Deflategate and his unfortunate stint in Cleveland with the Browns. Also, old Fezziwig was in there somewhere, maybe posing as Bill Parcells.

After that, the Ghost of Christmas Present took Bill to Bob Cratchit's house, or maybe the house of one of the sports reporters he grumped at after the loss to the Colts.

"Huh," Belichick said. "They're real people with families and everything. Who knew?"

Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come appeared, whom Belichick feared the most. He showed Belichick a Super Bowl far in the future, when 69-year-old Tom Brady beat Belichick's Patriots 75-12. Then the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come showed Belichick his grave, which was in Indianapolis next to Peyton Manning's statue.

Belichick wept.

"Please, Spirit!" he cried. "I am not the man I was! Spare me this cruel fate!"

After which the Ghost vanished, and Belichick woke up in his own bed, and he threw a wad of cash at that kid to go buy the giant turkey hanging in the window in the next street but one. Then he showed up at his presser the day after being all out of sorts with the media and ... apologized.

"Look, fellas, I apologize if it seemed like I was a little short with you after the game," he said (and, yes, this is the actual quote). "Obviously (it was) a frustrating game ... Clearly we had problems in every area ...

"It's not your fault. It was a frustrating game."

Then he said he would endeavor to assist their families in any way, and that Tiny Tim would walk again.

The reporters present were astounded. They were also mystified.

"Who the (bleep) is Tiny Tim?" they said.

Do not bet the NFL. A PSA.

 Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the Blob ain't a beaucoup fuddy on the whole gambling-on-sports thing, it's a beaucoup duddy.

It has shaken its bony fist at the sky more than once over the disturbing synergy that has developed between the gambling culture and not only professional sports, but college sports. When pro and college sports become de facto business partners with online sportsbooks, can a next-level Black Sox scandal be far behind? Or a point-shaving scandal in college buckets, ala Kentucky and CCNY in the 1950s?

But I digress.

("You do," you're saying. "Like, all the time.")

What's on the Blob's radar this morning is not gambling in sports, but gambling on sports. Specifically, gambling on the NFL, which lots of people do and which is a fool's enterprise, especially this season.

Exhibit A (and today's public service announcement): Lions 30, Cardinals 12.

Which is an actual NFL score from an actual NFL game, and who the hell saw THAT coming? 

I mean, really? The Kitties, 1-11-1 coming in, beating the 10-3 Cardinals by three touchdowns? What th-?

Biggest upset of the year in the NFL, although there don't seem to be any upsets in the NFL anymore. One week the Colts crush the Bills; the next, they jack around and blow one to the Buccaneers. Then, two weeks later, Carson Wentz completes just five passes but the Colts still beat the Patriots, who hadn't lost a game since mid-October.

Meanwhile, the .500 Saints shut out Tom Brady, 9-0.

Also meanwhile, the Bengals beat the Broncos to remain tied with the Ravens atop the AFC Central at, um, 8-6. Except for the Packers, every team in the league has at least four losses. And in the AFC, three of the four division leaders are 9-5 or worse.

In other words: Nobody's automatic in the NFL right now. Which means no bet is a lock.

But you go ahead and drop some coin on the Cardinals this week.

They play the Colts, who just beat the hottest team in the league. Which means you know what's going to happen this week.

No way the Cards lose. No way.

Blue Christmas

 Now here was a Christmas present, at least if you're a member of the Horsie set.

No, not that Horsie set, with the six-story hats and the Twin Spires ("Look! There's two of 'em!") and that song by Dan Fogelberg, plus withers and fetlocks and Robitussin mint juleps and such.

No, sir. The Horsie set we're talkin' is the Indianapolis Colts Horsie set, and it doesn't get better than it did for them last night. They got the Evil New England Patriots in the house at Lucas Oil Stadium, and Jonathan Taylor left tire tracks all over 'em in a key 27-17 victory over a team that didn't look like it was going to lose another game this year.

And the best part, if you're a Colts fan?

They did it by stealing a riff off Darth Hoodie himself, aka Bill Belichick.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when the Patriots beat the Bills in a wind tunnel in Buffalo?

The wind was blowing so hard Dorothy and Toto blew past everyone and landed in Schenectady, so Darth Hoodie decided to go old school. He had his rookie quarterback throw only three passes, unheard of in the modern NFL or, really, anytime beyond the 1920s. Instead the Patriots lined up and hit the Bills in the mouth, nose, eyes and throat, grinding out 222 rushing yards in a14-10 win that looked like it came straight from the Duluth Eskimos playbook.

Colts head coach Frank Reich must have liked the looks of that.

Because, see, he did the same thing to Belichick and the Patriots last night. Carson Wentz only threw 12 passes, completing five for 57 yards. Taylor, meanwhile, ran all over the Pats, lugging it 29 times for 170 yards and a touchdown. As a team, the Colts ran the football a staggering 39 times for 226 yards, an average of almost six yards per attempt.

Out-Patrioted the Patriots, in other words. First time the Horsies had beaten Belichick in 12 years.

And a Merry Christmas to all.

Or at least to all who worship the horseshoe.

Plagued out

 At this rate, the last un-diseased quarterback in the NFL will be Matt Saracen.

The last running back will be Tim Riggins.

Billy Bob will be the last O-lineman. Rod Tidwell will be the last wideout. And the only guy left to tell 'em that clear eyes and full hearts can't lose will, of course, be Coach Eric Taylor.

Only TV/movie football people can save us now from the Bastard Plague, it seems. And so thanks to "Friday Night Lights," "Varsity Blues" and "Jerry Maguire."

Perhaps you've missed it in your annual revelries, but COVID-19 is making a comeback, big time, and it's wreaking havoc everywhere in Sportsball World. The omicron variant has decimated NFL rosters the league has moved three games -- Browns-Raiders, Seahawks-Rams and Washington-Eagles -- to Monday and Tuesday, respectively. Three NHL teams --- the Avalanche, Panthers and Flames -- have shut down until after the holidays.

In college buckets, meanwhile, so many games are being canceled, postponed or rescheduled, some are wondering why they don't just shutter the whole damn sport for a couple of weeks.

We all know why they haven't, of course. It's green and has pictures of presidents and the like on it.

It's what's kept the NFL stubbornly holding the line on moving games, even as more and more teams were putting more and more players into Bastard Plague protocols. Omicron (which sounds unnervingly like the evil-er twin of Megatron, chief  baddie Transformer) is apparently the most contagious variant yet -- which means, even though the vast majority of NFL players have been vaccinated, they're still contagious even if the vaccine is keeping them largely symptom-free.

The problem, of course, is the five or so percent of unvaccinated knobs still on NFL rosters. No one wants to infect them, much as they deserve it. So more and more players enter the protocols, and guys with names like Nick Mullens and Garrett Gilbert are suddenly starting NFL quarterbacks, and even retired quarterbacks are offering to step up to help out their former teams.

No, really. Remember Tim Couch?

Sure you do. He was one of the Browns' many QB busts, and he hasn't taken a real snap in 18 years. He's also 44 years old.

But, what the hell. The other day he said he'd embrace the idea of coming back to the ravaged Brownies if they needed the help. 

Which suggests that if this goes on much longer, the Browns will be reaching out to Matt Saracen. Or maybe even J.D. McCoy.

On second thought, nah. No one needs that little jerk.

Prime Time is anytime

 Or anywhere, to be more apt about it.

This upon the news that Travis Hunter, a defensive back who's the nation's top recruit according to the people who keep track of such things, has thrown over big-deal Florida State for Jackson State, an FCS school and an Historic Black College/University. This has created a great deal of buzz for some reason, because FOR GOD'S SAKE MAN TOP RECRUITS JUST DON'T DO THAT.

A few knobs have even suggested the kid's dinging his future draft status by choosing, ahem, some minor-league school. And of course there's the suspicion that, I don't know, Deion helped engineer a whopper NIL deal for the kid with Barstool Sports and Penn National Gaming.  

(A brief detour: The Blob is all for kids like Hunter gettin' it if they can after so many years of making millions for their schools as unpaid labor. But the fact one of his NIL benefactors operates a sportsbook app for Barstool smacks of Arnold Rothstein subsidizing Eddie Cicotte, Chick Gansel and the rest of the Black Sox in 1919. Maybe that's a flawed analogy, but the optics ain't great.)

Now, where were we?

Oh, yeah. Top prospect goes with HBCU school.

I honestly don't know why this is the deal it seems to be for some people. If you're a DB, why wouldn't you want to go play for the greatest DB in the history of the game? And if a sweet NIL arrangement  helped sweeten the pot, so what?

It's just bidness, boys and girls. And college football long ago became a purely bidness proposition, no matter how ludicrously it pushed the fiction it was all about education and such.

Difference now is the players are bidnessmen, too, which discomfits folks in some quarters. So there's been some elitist (and let's face it, vaguely racist) hand-wringing in those quarters that the kid's development will be hurt by going to, gasp, an HBCU school.

Gee, I don't know. Didn't seem to hurt Walter Payton's development any.

Walter Payton, who went to, ahem, Jackson State.

Didn't seem to hurt Jerry Rice, either. Who went to, ahem, Mississippi Valley State, and HBCU school.

Doug Williams, Bob Hayes, Michael Strahan? Mel Blount, Richard Dent, John Stallworth? Leroy Kelly and Steve McNair and Shannon Sharpe and Charlie Joiner?

You've heard of those guys, right?

Every one of them came out of an HBCU school. Everyone one of them went on to stardom in the NFL. Some of them even wound up in Canton. 

So Travis Hunter is in very good company, it would seem. And if his going to an HBCU means the dynamic has changed in college football -- if it means Nick Saban and Dabo Sweeney will have to compete with more than just the FBS schools for recruits -- well, competition's good, right? Isn't that what the Sabans and Sweeneys are always telling us?

Oh, and that sound you hear?

It's the playing field, getting a little more level.

A teachable moment

 I have seen some stuff, here in my advanced years. It happens whether you want it to or not.

And so I remember Disco Demolition Night in Chicago, and Ten-Cent Beer Night in Cleveland.

And I remember the night the Fort Wayne Komets handed out ice scrapers, which became projectiles for disgruntled fans not long after.

And I remember various and sundry other sports promotions that were so ill-conceived you wondered in what bar they were conceived, and how late the hour was, and how many drinks in the conceivers were.

Rarely, however, have I seen a promotion more tone-deaf than the one the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Stampede decided to put on not long ago.

The Stampede, a junior hockey team, decided it would be a swell way to support local teachers by conducting a Dash For Cash between periods. The team would dump $5,000 in $1 bills on a carpet on the ice, and 10 teachers would scramble around on their hands and knees to see how many dollar bills they could scoop up in a certain time period.

I can't imagine a more demeaning spectacle than grown men and women, educators all, groveling for dollar bills while spectators cheer them on. 

I also can't imagine a better metaphor for American public education, which has been slowly sucked dry of resources by knuckleheaded politicians, sham charter schools and various other leeches.

It's left teachers like those in Sioux Falls the other night figuratively, if not actually, groveling for money, including paying for classroom necessities out of their own pockets. It's an utter disgrace in a nation that seems to have billions, if not trillions, to spend on everything else under the sun.

What's the old saying? Trillions for defense, not one cent for a goddamn piece of chalk?

Excuse the language. But I come from a family of public-school educators, and all of this makes me see red.

Now, you might be asking yourself why the teachers in Sioux Falls would voluntarily subject themselves to such an obviously humiliating exercise. And in truth, I can't imagine any of the educators in my family doing so. I'm guessing they'd have told the Stampede to go whiz up a rope, that it was degrading and the team should be ashamed of itself.

And yet.

And yet, I can see how this was sold to the teachers -- Money for your kids! Come on, it'll be fun! -- and how the Stampede no doubt saw the whole thing. It almost certainly was not the team's intention to mock the teachers or their plight. Team officials likely really did see it as a way to help them out.

I imagine halfway through the promotion, they were thinking more along of the lines of, Uh-oh. This looks really bad.

And so the Stampede has since apologized, and offered each of the 10 teachers an additional $500. Which only makes South Dakota look bad for needing a hockey team to subsidize public education there.

That's an indictment that needs to stick. And if it shames the South Dakota lege into investing more in public education ...

Well. Maybe that promotion will not have been so tone-deaf after all.

College daze, Part the Last

 Well, that was quick.

Quicker than expected, that is.

Urban Meyer was always going to be brief about this, because putting the autocrat of all collegiate autocrats in charge of a team of grown men was a car-hits-bridge-abutment proposition from the jump. It was Nick Saban and the Dolphins all over again, Steve Spurrier and the Washington Football Team, Lou Holtz and the Jets.

Who last exactly as long as ol' Urb lasted in Jacksonville, as it turned out.

Thirteen games in and Lou quit, and 13 games in and Urb got the gate in J-ville yesterday. The Jets were 3-10 when Lou bailed; Urb was 2-11 and had apparently lost his team, alienated his coaching staff and, oh, yeah, allegedly kicked his former kicker in the leg during warmups for a preseason game.

"Don't you ever (bleeping) kick me again!" the kicker, Josh Lambo, says he told Meyer, to his credit.

"I'm the head ball coach, I'll kick you whenever the (bleep) I want," Lambo quotes Meyer as responding.

Which sounds exactly like something an autocratic college football coach would say.

That sort of thing won't fly on the pro level, where the players make more money than the head ball coach and, certainly in this case, know their game better. They're not college kids beholden to Coach for their scholarships; they're professionals who don't need to be kicked to give an effort. The very fact they're where they are indicates they've given an effort and more.

In any event, the Urban Meyer experiment is over, having dismally failed. Which makes the Blob recall what it wrote when Meyer was hired.

Enjoy him while you got him, Jacksonville. Because he could be gone before you know it.

So he is.

Business decisions

 Bowl season officially begins in two days, when Northern Illinois plays Coastal Carolina in something called the Cure Bowl, which is not short for "Curing the glut of meaningless bowl games" no matter what you think.

Speaking of meaningless bowl games ...

Well. I've got some news that's not really news, and hasn't been for a long time:

They're pretty much all meaningless.

They're exhibition games, is what they are, ATMs for the sponsors and mostly money losers for the participants. Except for the Cotton and Orange bowls, which host this year's College Football Playoff semifinal games, they're just a chance for players to score some swag the NCAA has somehow deemed legal -- but don't try to sell it, gentlemen.

And so of course players with an eye on the NFL Draft are once again opting out.

Star running back Kyren Williams and All-American safety Kyle Hamilton from Notre Dame have already said they'll skip the Irish's date in the Fiesta Bowl, the better to protect their draft status. So has Oregon defensive end Kayvon Thibodeaux, a potential No. 1 pick who's decided the Valero Alamo Bowl just isn't worth risking that.

This has evoked the usual outcry from the usual suspects, mostly coaches and specifically Mississippi State coach Mike Leach, who said skipping bowl games was "selfish," "ridiculous" and "the most bizarre thing in the world to me."

As usual when coaches say this stuff, Leach is the last person in the world who should be criticizing players for acting in their own interests. Coaches act in their own interests all the time, after all. Brian Kelly and Lincoln Riley are the most recent examples, Leach himself has done a little extracurricular flirting -- interviewing for the Washington job while he was still at Texas Tech, then leveraging it into a five-year extension from Tech worth $12.7 million.

Of course, that wasn't selfish. That was just bidness, like Kelly telling his Notre Dame players "Later, dudes," and then peeling out for LSU, where he'll now make $10 million a year. 

Needless to say, he didn't stick around for the Fiesta Bowl, either.

And Williams and Hamilton, among others?

Well, they came to Notre Dame for an education, and it appears they got one. If coaches fancy themselves as educators, Williams and Hamilton learned Brian Kelly's lessons well.

Games are just games, in other words. But bidness is bidness.

College daze

 Time now to check on the wheres and what-fors of Urban Meyer, the latest college icon to burst into flames in the NFL, although Urban says those aren't flames we're seeing, and that's not smoke, either, and he'll fire anyone who says otherwise.

This after word leaked out that life in Urbanville, aka Jacksonville, ain't exactly copasetic these days. According to the leaker, old Urb has alienated his coaching staff by calling them a bunch of losers, and lost his locker room because (a consistent theme among autocratic college coaches) he can't seem to treat them like grown-ass men.

Urb's defenders say this is all just part of his trying to "change the culture" in J-ville, which makes the Blob laugh like it hasn't in who knows when. Yeah, he's trying to "change the culture," all right. He's trying to turn the Jaguars into Ohio State.

This never works for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that Urb isn't dealing with college kids or underpaid assistants who'll endure all manner of abuse to keep climbing that coaching ladder. A whole pile of guys have gone that route and failed; Steve Spurrier, Lou Holtz, Nick Saban, Chip Kelly, on and on. 

College coaches of that stripe run their programs like private fiefdoms. The NFL, with a few notable exceptions, doesn't do fiefdoms. It's a totally different culture, speaking of changing cultures.

So, the education of Urban goes on, though it doesn't seem to be taking. His response to the leaks was to say it's all a bunch of lies, and that he would find the leaker and fire him, like, yesterday.

 Unfortunately for him, he'll find that a hell of a lot harder to do than he did in his old college fiefdom. And it's pretty comical to paint it all as malicious falsehoods after that 20-0 laydown against the Titans, which featured eight rushing yards for the Jags and four interceptions from prize rookie quarterback Trevor Lawrence.

That dropped the Jags to 2-11 on the season. And right now they look like nothing so much as a bunch of guys who just want to get this nightmare over with.

Culture be damned.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 14

And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the un-newsworthy Blob feature that just goes on and on and on, kind of like the NFL season, and of which critics have said "God! It just goes on and on and on!", and also "Kind of like the NFL season!":

1. And in other news, Aaron Rodgers threw four touchdown passes and the Packers beat the Bears 45-30.

2. "That's not news!" (America)

3. "Come on, get to the real news!" (Also America)

4. OK, so, in OTHER news, the Lions lost, the Jaguars lost, the Jets lost, and the Texans lost.

5. "That's not news either! Come on!" (America)

6. The Vikings, who'd just lost to the Lions, beat the Steelers, who'd just beaten the Ravens one week after getting crushed by the Bengals, who lost to the 49ers Sunday?

7. "No! Not news! Everyone knows the only consistency this season is inconsistency!" (America)

8. The Seahawks actually won a game?

9. Bill Belichick might have smiled?

10. "Better!" (America)

Script perfect

In Abu Dhabi yesterday, Max Verstappen tore the Formula One world championship out of Lewis Hamilton's hands on the last lap of an amazing and boisterous season, and now my inner conspiracy theorist stirs.

"F1 couldn't have scripted it any better!" I say.

Inner Conspiracy Theorist smirks.

"Exactly," he says.

And into the dark places we go.

Oh, surrrre. Think F1 wanted Lewis Hamilton to win AGAIN? Think again, Gullible Boy. They managed to make it come down to the last race of the season, so why not the last lap? And Verstappen on fresh rubber? That's why race director Michael Masi, after Nicholas Latifi's crash with four laps to go, allowed the lapped cars between Hamilton and Verstappen to pass the Safety Car, putting Verstappen right on Hamilton's rear wing on the restart. Because F1 WANTED Verstappen to win.

For the record, the Blob does not believe any of that.

What it does believe is F1 did want there to be a dramatic finish to an ultra-dramatic season. And that's just smart business.

So Masi made, let's face it, a NASCAR kind of move, and let the purists howl. Really, you'd rather it come down to Hamilton merely puttering away to the checkers with a cushion of lapped cars to protect him? After a season in which he and Verstappen had staged such a riveting battle for the title?

How much more fun was the way it ended, with the season coming down to one last desperate lap?

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "The last desperate lap was completely orchestrated, mostly by Red Bull boss Christian Horner, who kept hectoring Masi to do what he did. In fact, if you really want to get conspiratorial, you could say the orders actually came down from Netflix, because it wanted the Hollywood ending to next year's season of Drive To Survive. And F1 went along with it, because how good has Drive To Survive been for F1?"

Well ... pretty darn good. This is true.

 But Gullible Boy here prefers to believe F1 simply wanted to give the fans a properly thrilling ending to an incredibly thrilling season. And what's wrong with giving fans what they deserve?

Because let's face it, F1 so often doesn't. So bravo for doing it this time.

A star departs

 And now comes word that the greatest player ever to turn a blade for the Fort Wayne Komets has died, but that's not how I remember Len Thornson. I remember him for a certain phone call years ago, when he kept poke-checking my attempts to write a feature about him.

I'd ask a question; he'd parry with his usual impenetrable humility. About the most I could wring out of him, in speaking about his prowess, was "Well, I could always see the ice," or words to that effect.

This was not Lenny's fault, mind you. It was simply part of his weave not to talk much about his abilities as a hockey player, immense though they were. You'd never know, unless you knew, who he was or what he'd done if you met him somewhere.

I got the feature anyway, mind you. There were plenty of other people more than willing to talk about Lenny, about his deft stickwork and his ability to see plays develop before they developed, and his deceptive speed.

He skated with the Komets until he caught a stick in the eye and had to retire at 36, and he was with the Komets only because of the times. Coming out of Winnipeg as a young player, Lenny's rights were owned by the lordly Montreal Canadiens, and there were only six teams in the NHL then. Which meant a limited number of roster spots.

So Lenny would go to training camp with the loaded Habs and hang around to the last cut, and then the Canadiens would say, "Have a great season in Fort Wayne, Len."

He always did, of course, He played on a team with a bunch of guys who, had they played in a different era, might have been legends in the NHL. There was Lionel Repka and Reg Primeau and John Goodwin and Norm Waslawski; John Ronson and Chuck Adamson and Eddie Long and Merv Dubchak. 

Lenny was the best of them all.

By the time he hung up the skates, he'd played 763 regular-season games in Fort Wayne and scored 412 goals and 1,219 points. His 53 goals and 74 points in 92 playoff games remain team records; in 1997, he was voted by the Hockey News the greatest player in the history of the International Hockey League.

I got to know Lenny after all that, when he'd became part of that greatest generation of Komets who settled here and raised families and exemplified the best of the Komet tradition by the way they lived their lives. In the years since, a pile of other Komets have also settled in Fort Wayne, and it's hard to believe the Originals's example didn't somehow influence that.

In any event, the Komets continue on, 70 years old now, as some of those who built their tradition keep watch. Lenny was always one of those, of course, and I'd run into him every so often. We lived on the same side of town, after all.

And so one night I was in my neighborhood hang and Lenny came over, wanting to talk not hockey but basketball, of all things. I don't remember the gist of the conversation, but we chatted awhile, and then he left.

"There goes the greatest hockey player in the history of the Komets," I told the people next to me.

"Really?" they said.

I looked at them.

"Really," I said.

Rivalries

 They'll play a football game in Green Bay tonight, which only proves the NFL didn't do enough flexing in its flex scheduling, or it still thinks it can sell out-of-date merchandise.

The game, see, is the Packers vs. the Bears. The NFL, or someone, still thinks it's a rivalry game, although the NFL doesn't really have any of those. But Packers-Bears gets passed off as one mainly because they've been playing one another since the dawn of time.

Thing is, the Packers, with few exceptions, regularly pound the Bears like a man pounds a railroad spike. Aaron Rodgers is 21-5 lifetime against the Middlings of the Midway, and the smart guys all say he's going to do it again tonight. In fact, the smart guys say this is going to be a wretched Sunday Night Football offering, given that the Packers are probably the best team in the NFC right now, and the Bears, well, are not.

The Bears are the Bears, in other words. They have a possible gem in rookie quarterback Justin Fields and a dead-man-walking coach who refuses to tailor his offense to his possible gem's strengths. Their only win in the last two months came on Thanksgiving, when they wheezed past then-winless Detroit 16-14 -- and then acted as if it was an Everest win instead of a Pyrrhic one.

So, not much of a rivalry these days. And what makes that especially stark is Packers-Bears will follow by 24 hours perhaps football's premier rivalry.

That would be Army-Navy, which the Blob never misses because to the Blob is epitomizes everything college football should be but no longer is. Army and Navy have been playing one another since 1890, when Benjamin Harrison was in the White House and Navy won 24-0. Yesterday the Middies won again, 17-13, even though they came into the game 3-8 while Army came in 8-3.

This happens more often than you'd suppose in their annual tussle, because it's a game awash with emotion and love and desperation and both mutual enmity and mutual respect. And pageantry, of course -- the long gray line of the Corps of Cadets on one side of the field, the white hats of the Brigade of Midshipmen on the other.

The losers sing their alma mater when it's all done, and then the winners, who always go second, belt out theirs. It's a hell of a thing, and one of the great moments in sports television.

Yesterday the cameras kept zeroing in on Navy's defensive captain, Diego Fagot, playing his last game for the Midshipmen and, as if according to some celestial script, leading a pile of his brothers in stopping Army quarterback Christian Anderson two feet short of a first down with 90 seconds or so left. 

It banked the W for Navy, and it was exactly the way you want to see Army-Navy end: With two men who'll soon serve their country colliding at the point of attack with the issue in the balance.

That, boys and girls, is what a rivalry is supposed to look like.

Tonight?

Even if the Bears would miraculously find a way to win (and this being the 2021 NFL season, who knows), it'll just be a football game. Nothin' to see here.

Big Al, remembered

 They're all going now, one by one by one. Mortality is undefeated in these matters, surprise, surprise. Not even speed junkies who spend the greater chunk of their lives dancing every dance with it get away forever.

And so there awhile back went Dan Gurney, racer and car builder, who built his own legendary  American Eagle brand and took it to Europe to do battle with Ferrari and Lotus-Ford and the rest.

And a little later went Bobby Unser, who won the Indianapolis 500 three times and used to talk as fast as he drove, but no one minded because he was Bobby Unser and he'd seen so much worth talking about.

And now it is a December morning a few months later, and his little brother Al is gone.

Al Unser Sr. died Thursday in his beloved New Mexico, after a 17-year fight with cancer. And once again the memory vault opens, and the years roll away.

Remember when he was 31, 32 years old, and his ride was that gorgeous, iconic Johnny Lightning Special, deep blue framed by jagged yellow lightning bolts? 

Won Indy back-to-back in that seat, Al did, in 1970 and '71. Fifty years on, only Helio Castroneves has done it since.

Or how about 1987?

Al was 48 years old and a three-time Indy winner by then, but that May he was strolling around Gasoline Alley without a sponsor and, consequently, without a ride. Roger Penske found him, stuck him in a year-old show car and sent him out to replace the injured Danny Ongais.

You know what happened next. Al started in the middle of Row 7, patiently picked his way to the front the way Al always did, and won the damn thing. Biggest upset in Indy history, some people say. 

Thirty-four years have erased what Al said about that, but that's not surprising. As stingy with words as his brother was generous, he was never one for the succulent quote. He held your attention with the shrewd, meticulous way he drove, and with this still-waters demeanor -- call it New Mexico Zen -- with which he carried himself.

There was a time, for instance, one May when Al was coming to the end of his racing life, when he was sitting at a table in a tent back by the motorhomes somewhere. A few reporters were sitting there with him, asking him questions. The subject of his age came up.

Al answered the question with a question.

"Well," he said, or words to that effect. "If you took all ages away, and nobody knew how old anybody was, how old would you be?"

Pure New Mexico Zen, that one. And likely the best quote those of us who were there ever got from Al Sr.

Now he's gone, at the age of 82. 

Or however old you want him to be.

The asphalt of wrath

You gotta hand it to those folks in Oklahoma. They know how to keep their mad on.

It's almost two weeks now since Lincoln Riley abruptly said goodbye to Norman and headed west for all those swimmin' pools and movie stars in El Ay, and Oklahoma fans are still grinding their molars to dust. How do you leave a perennial College Football Playoff contender (and a tradition so storied it requires several leather-bound volumes to hold it all) for USC?

Man, USC hasn't had any tradition since Pete Carroll left. Why, the Trojans can't even give Notre Dame a fight anymore.

In any case, a certain Oklahoma state rep has decided to do something about it all.

What state Sen. Bill Coleman has proposed is a bill that would designate a stretch of remote Oklahoma road the Lincoln Riley Highway in the departed coach's honor. Not that it would actually be an honor. See, Coleman wants to name three inches of the westbound lane of State Highway 325 after Riley -- and not just any three inches, but the last three inches before it exits Oklahoma.

Yeah, it's silly. Yeah, the Oklahoma lege should be concerning itself with matters of more import, like protecting Oklahoma schoolkids from any American history that makes white people look bad.  

But come on, now. State leges do stuff like this all the time. Indiana, for instance, the lege once famously tried to legislate the value of pi. In Pocatello, Idaho, it's illegal not to smile. And so on.

Coleman's Asphalt of Wrath measure fits neatly into this tradition, and the Blob salutes him. His proposal is not only inventive, but it's a neat little dig besides. Shame on you if you didn't chuckle.

Of course, you're safe if you didn't. As far as the Blob knows, there are no ordinances in America that require citizens to have a sense of humor.

Although there should be.

Questionable

 The dumbest question I ever heard a reporter ask happened in the run-up to the Fiesta Bowl in 1989, when Notre Dame won its last national title and dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

It was a question for Major Harris, West Virginia's star quarterback, and I don't recall who asked it. Nor do I recall the exact wording. But it was something about what "percentage" of the "Notre Dame mystique" would be a factor in the game.

Harris looked at the reporter like she had two heads, as well he should have. Hell, a lot of us did.

This comes back to me now because of something that happened after the Buffalo Bills lost Monday to the New England Patriots 14-10 on a windblown night in Buffalo. The Patriots threw just three passes, a concession to the foul conditions. Afterward, a reporter asked Bills safeties Micah Hyde and Jordan Poyer if they were embarrassed to lose to a team that threw just three passes.

Hyde and Poyer looked at the reporter -- a TV guy from some local station -- like he had two heads. As well they should have.

"I mean, what kind of question is that?" Poyer said. "I think we allowed seven points. Fourteen."

"Yeah, 14-10, was that the final score?" Hyde added.

"We made big stops when we had to, they had one big run, I mean, they've got good backs," Poyer went on. "They kept coming back to a couple of runs. I mean, I don't know how you want us to answer that question."

Mind you, none of this came out angry and defensive. Mostly Poyer's and Hyde's tone was honestly bewildered. They handled it about as professionally as you could expect them to.

Of course, sports blab radio took this and ran off the usual cliffs with it, saying dumb questions like this wouldn't happen if the NFL abolished postgame pressers. Champion blowhole Colin Cowherd even went so far as to smear the entire sports reporting profession, saying being a reporter isn't that tough a job.

Which is about what you'd expect from a guy who isn't one. And whose own job is, what, yapping on the radio for three hours every day?

Lord give me strength.

Also, give me the ability to explain the rationale behind postgame interviews. 

It's true catching players and coaches in the raw minutes after a win or loss will not generally get you sober analysis. From the coaches especially, it will get you a lot of "I'll have to look at the tape." That's fine, because sober analysis is not what you're expecting in most cases anyway.

What you're looking for are eyewitness accounts of a crucial play or sequence of plays, imperfect as those accounts often are. It's why you ask "What did you see on that play?" The answer, even if it's "Not much," lends context to your account. And sometimes brutal  honesty instead of TranscriptSpeak.

Without that, your game story is simply a stat line gussied up with verbs and nouns. 

The goal, if you're at all serious about your job, is to give the reader as full a picture as possible. And so you ask your questions in the postgame presser, even if some of them are dumb. Or if they're not dumb but your interview subject thinks so, as frequently happened with Bob Knight.

In any event, it's all about story. And story is more than just the aforementioned stat line.

Back in the day, for instance, before Knight closed the IU locker room to media, there was a certain night when the Hoosiers played abysmally and lost to Illinois in Assembly Hall. After the usual cooling off period, the locker room door swung open, and in we trooped.

The players were all sitting in front of their lockers like toy soldiers, their heads down, their slump-shouldered postures identical. I was working for the late great Anderson Daily Bulletin then, and so I sidled up to hometown guy Ray Tolbert. Usually an exuberant soule -- no one ever loved playing basketball as openly as Ray Lee did -- his handshake this time was listless and limp, and his answers were whispered monosyllables.

Nothing better illustrated the lowness of the night for Indiana. And I'm pretty sure it all went into my gamer.

As would have the bewilderment of Jordan Poyer and Micah Hyde, after a game the Bills fought hard and lost.

Who? Number what?

 John Wooden never did this.

Terry Dischinger didn't, Rick Mount didn't, Walter (Jordan) and Eugene (Parker) didn't, the Triplets (Troy Lewis, Todd Mitchell, Everette Stephens) didn't.

Joe Barry Carroll wasn't Joe Barry enough. The Big Dog (Glenn Robinson) wasn't Big enough. Brian Cardinal wasn't even Brian Cardinal enough.

But this Purdue team?

Jaden Ivey and Trevion Williams and Zach Edey and Caleb Furst and all the rest?

They're No. 1, y'all. 

No Purdue men's basketball team had ever been ranked No. 1 in Purdue's 124 seasons until this week, when the Purdues ascended there after Ohio State beat Duke and the Boilermakers dispatched Iowa. It remains to be seen if the Boilermakers can stay there -- the Big Ten is far too brutal a slog to make that likely -- but what you can say is this looks and plays the way a Final Four team should.

Which is something Purdue hasn't been in so long (42 years) it feels like it's never happened before.

This team?

You never want to traffic in absolutes in these matters, because absolutes are fragile things. But this might be the best basketball team Purdue has ever put on the floor.

You reserve the right to call the Blob out if it's proved wrong about that. Doesn't feel like it so far, though.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 13

And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the easily predictable Blob feature of which critics have said "Do you think he'll mention the Lions? You know he's gonna mention the Lions", and also "Of course he'll mention the Lions, because he's easily predictable!":

1. "Dammit! Why didn't somebody cover that guy?" (The Vikings, after the winless Lions beat them on a touchdown pass on the last play of the game)

2. "Woo-hoo! They didn't cover that guy!" (The Lions)

3. "Hey, they didn't cover me!" (That Guy)

4. Meanwhile, the Colts!

5. Shut out a team on the road for the first time in 29 years.

6. Of course, it was only the Texans, who are so bad they give Bad a bad name.

7. "We love Coach Harbaugh! He went for the win!" (Ravens fans, after coach John Harbaugh went for two points and the win against Pittsburgh and failed by inches)

8. "We love Coach Harbaugh! He went for the win!" (Also Steelers fans)

9. "Woo-hoo! We won again! And we only threw the ball three times on account of it was so windy in Buffalo the flyover was Dorothy and Toto flying over the stadium!" (Patriots fans)

10. "They only threw the ball three times and THEY STILL WON?? Dammit!" (Everyone else in America)

Let's go bowling!

 The College Football Playoff people announced their College Football Playoff lineup yesterday, and it was pretty much what everyone thought it would be.  It's Alabama vs. Cincinnati and Michigan vs. Georgia, and the only upset is the committee didn't find a way to screw the Bearcats so it could get Notre Dame in there.

Notre Dame instead will play Oklahoma State in the Consolation, er, Fiesta Bowl. So it's all good. 

Know what else is all good?

The holiday bowl schedule has been released! 

There are 42 of these things now, which is pretty hilarious if you think about it, and more evidence that the times are indeed changing, no matter how much we shake our bony fists and splutter. Remember when the only Mid-American Conference school to go bowling was the conference champ, and it played in the lame-o Tangerine Bowl?

Well, no more!

This year there are eight MAC schools in bowls, including the entire MAC West. Even the Blob's alma mater, Ball State, is in a bowl, proudly lugging its 6-6 record with it. The Cardinals will play Georgia State in the TaxAct Camellia Bowl on Christmas Day, so don't forget to tune in. What else have you got to do on Christmas Day?

Until then, let's contemplate some of the other bowls, which have even more ridiculous corporate names than ever. There's the LendingTree Bowl and the PUBG Mobile New Mexico Bowl and the RoofClaim.com Boca Raton Bowl. You've got your Tailgreeter Cure Bowl and your Tropical Smoothie Cafe Frisco Bowl and your Frisco Football Classic, which apparently are not the same thing.

There's an EasyPost Hawai'i Bowl. A Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl AND a Military Bowl Presented By Peraton. A Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, a Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl and a SERVPRO First Responder Bowl.

There's even a Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl, which is not nearly as cool as the greatest bowl name of all time, the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl.

Me?

Well, I have always wondered what a bowlful of first responders would look like. So the SERVPRO First Responder Bowl is for me.

That one goes off in Dallas at 3:15 p.m. on December 28, and pits Air Force against Louisville. I can't wait.

The rest of you?

You'll just have to make do with the Wasabi Fenway Bowl. Sorry.

Luck(less) of the Irish

 OK, so maybe God did not make Notre Dame No.1.  Or No. 4, for that matter.

No, Georgia likely kept the Irish out of the College Football Playoff yesterday, whizzing down its leg again in the SEC title game against -- hey, what a surprise! -- Alabama. Same-old, same-old, in other words. Kirby Smart looks across the way, sees Nick Saban and starts screaming like Jamie Lee Curtis being chased by Michael Myers.

The final was 'Bama 41, Georgia 24, and that means the Crimson Tide is in, and probably the No. 1 seed. And it means Georgia is probably still in because they're 12-1, too.

Meanwhile, Michigan and Cincinnati took care of business to (probably) lock up the other two spots. So the Irish will likely finish fifth in a four-horse race.

Or ...

Or, who knows. The CFP has done some wacky things before, so maybe they decide Notre Dame is Notre Dame and Cincinnati is Cincinnati, and, well ... well, it's a bidness, as the Blob has noted many times before. The only thing keeping it from happening is the fact Cincy handed the Irish their only loss, which would make kicking an undefeated non-Power 5 school in its tender parts too egregious even for college football.

Domers would probably say a better case would be dropping Georgia to No. 5 and inserting Notre Dame ahead of the Bulldogs, but that's unlikely to happen, too. They love them some SEC, the folks who make these decisions. Even when one of them gets exposed as, well, kind of a fraud

So, sorry about that, Irish. Georgia screwed you and Michigan screwed you by toying with Iowa like a kitten with a ball of string in the Big Ten championship game. Better luck next time.

When, perhaps, trying on a southern accent would help. Like, you know, that one guy.

What's his name again?

Southern fried

 I suppose next Brian Kelly will be saying, "And add a side o' grits to that, darlin'."

I suppose next he'll be elbow-deep in beignets and etouffee, and sayin' Robert E. Lee woulda whipped 'em all if he'd had what Grant had, and refusin' to celebrate Memorial Day, because that-there's a Yankee holiday.

I suppose next William Faulkner will be crawling out of his grave to deal with this ... this ... carpetbagging sack of you-know-what.

Because here Coach Carpetbagger was the other night, addressing the crowd at an LSU basketball game with the thickest southern accent this side of the toothless hillbilly in "Deliverance." Grew the damn thing in a day, Coach Carpetbagger did. Went all Foghorn Leghorn as soon as he crossed the Mason-Dixon Line.

Give it a listen. Not bad for a (checks notes) Boston guy, right?

Look. It's one thing for Brian Kelly to look out for No. 1, because college football is a business and that's the ethos. It's even one thing for him to bail on an 11-1 possible College Football Playoff team in the rudest way possible, saying so long to players he allegedly cared about in a cool 11 minutes.

Two minutes later he was peeling out of South Bend as fast he could peel. The only upset is he didn't turn a few donuts in the parking lot on his way out.

But that's neither here nor there. As long as timelines are what they are for coaching hires, the leave-taking is always going to be ill-timed and awkward, if not quite as crass as Kelly made his. Perhaps the NCAA could rouse itself from its stupor long enough to institute a rule forbidding coaches from leaving for a new job until the bowl games wrap up, but it's hard to see how that would even be legal.

Still. You don't have to be as phony about the whole business as Kelly has been.

I mean, really. A fake southern accent? 

Yeesh. What do you suppose would have sprung on the fan base if he'd taken, say, the Texas job?

My money's on Robert Duvall in "Lonesome Dove." 

Thunder rolled

 I suppose now is as good a time as any to bring up that basketball mercy rule.

No, not for high schools. For the NBA.

The high school mercy rule, that's already been done, at least in Indiana. The IHSAA just enacted one for this season, ruling that if a team is leading by 35 points or more after halftime, the game will be played with a running clock.

And the NBA?

Well, somewhere in Oklahoma City this morning, someone undoubtedly just said this: "Thirty-five points? Golly, if only we could have gotten that close!"

Don't know if you saw this or not, since it's December 3 and it's the NBA and no one much pays attention to the NBA until, like, April. But last night the Oklahoma City Thunder did something no NBA team has ever before done. 

They lost an official NBA game by 73 points.

The final was Memphis 152, Oklahoma City 79, a butt-whipping of not only epic but historic proportions. It, the largest margin of victory in NBA history, and it illustrates that not everyone in the league has a rent-a-star.

Oklahoma City has Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who's averaging a team-high 21.2 points per game, but he was out with a concussion and three other key players were out as well. Of course, Memphis was playing without its star, Ja Morant, so that sort of evened the scales.

Well, OK. So you can't really use the term "evened the scales" when you're talking about a 73-point blowout.

It was so lopsided nine Memphis players scored in double digits -- including former IPFW standout Jon Konchar, who got meaningful minutes off the bench (26) and responded with a 17-point night in which he hit 7-of-8 shots. His steal and dunk with 3:02 left put the Griz up 145-67 and established a franchise record for points in a game.

Memphis shot 62.5 percent, made 19-of-36 threes and outrebounded the Thunder 53-26. The Griz led by 15 after a quarter, by 36 at halftime and by 51 at the end of three quarters.

The most amazing stat of all?

They aren't the Phoenix Suns or the Golden State Warriors, exactly. Going into last night, the Grizzlies were a barely-.500 team (11-10) and stood fifth in the Western Conference, seven games adrift of the Suns.

Running clock, anyone?

Stability 1, Splashability 0

 I know what you're thinking, Domer Nation, on this second day of December. You're thinking Santa just brought you socks instead of that cool new virtual reality game you wanted.

You Domers, or some of you anyway, are thinking Notre Dame opted for stability over splashability, the hometown hire over the Vegas hire. Those of you who've been down a few paths with the Irish before might even be thinking this:

OH MY GOD WE JUST HIRED BOB DAVIE AGAIN.

Because, listen, there are similarities, as the elevation of Marcus Freeman to Notre Dame's head coach becomes an all-but-done deal. Davie was the defensive coordinator for an immensely successful head coach; Freeman was the defensive coordinator for an immensely successful head coach. Neither had ever been a head coach before Notre Dame promoted them.

Davie went on to win a few games and lose a few games and not be the answer in South Bend, which is why Notre Dame fired him five years later.

Freeman, on the other hand ...

Well. Let me tell you why this is not Bob Davie again, and why this is the hire that makes the most sense right now.

First of all, Davie inherited a flabby-for-Notre-Dame program, one that went 6-5-1, 9-3 and 8-3 in Holtz's last three seasons. Freeman inherits a program that's won 54 games in the last five seasons, is 44-6 in the last four, and, at 11-1 this year, could still shoehorn into the College Football Playoff if all the tumblers fall right.

You want to keep that going, you hire Marcus Freeman, who was Kelly's baller recruiter and whom a pile of choice commits have already said is the guy they're coming to ND to play for.

Ditto a whole bunch of players already in the program, whose loyalty to Freeman is absolute and who, thanks to the transfer portal, had easy access to other programs had Jack Swarbrick decided to go with the splashy hire.

A lot of folks seem to think that would have been Luke Fickell of unbeaten Cincinnati, the latest Hot Prospect. Notre Dame could have poached Fickell the way LSU poached Kelly, because that's just how it's done now. After all, Kelly came to ND from Cincinnati, and Freeman came to ND from Cincy, where he was Fickell's DC. So it made a certain amount of sense.

Here's the thing, though: If somehow Freeman doesn't work out (and most Notre Dame observers think he's the perfect guy to replace Kelly), Fickell will still be get-able. No matter where he is. 

That's the lesson of Kelly-to-LSU, see. It is a new day now, and just because a coach lands at Notre Dame and stays for 12 years and is hugely successful, it doesn't mean he's going to be there until he dies and they bury him next to Rockne. 

It means he stays there until LSU, awash in tradition itself, pulls a wad of cash out of its pocket and a bunch of incentives and oh by the way, Coach, did you know we've won three national titles in the last 20 years? When's the last time Notre Dame won one?

So off Kelly went, for $10 mill a year and (to him anyway) a better chance at a ring. You can slam him for that, and you can dust off outmoded concepts like loyalty and honor, but college football is what it is and has been for awhile: A culture as thoroughly corporate and professional as the NFL, in which looking our for No. 1 is the driving market force.

As Scrooge said when one of his business partners complained that his practices weren't fair: "No. But it's business."

True as true. Like it or not.

A basketball team grows in B-town

 Indiana University lost a basketball game last night, which did not used to qualify as news but might in these fresh new days.

See, it's not that the Hoosiers lost, on the road, to Syracuse, a real ACC basketball team. It's how they didn't lose.

They didn't lose by 30 after trailing by 14 at halftime.

They didn't lose by throwing in the towel after playing like goofs in the first half, instead choosing to throw down the gauntlet.

They didn't lose until a couple of free throws with a sliver of a second showing in the second overtime made the final Syracuse 112, Indiana 110.

They also didn't lose because they threw bricks at the rim all night; Tennessee-Martin transfer Parker Stewart scored 18 of his 20 points on 6-of-12 shooting from the 3-point line, Northwestern transfer Miller Kopp was 4-of-9 from there on his way to 28, and the Hoosiers shot a respectable 40 percent (11-of-27)  from Arcville -- which would have been 11-of-23 had Tamar Bates not missed all four of his attempts.

They didn't lose because their north star didn't show up, either. Trayce Jackson-Davis dropped 31 and 16 on the Orange, hitting 11-of-16 shots. Race Thompson added 17 points, 12 rebounds and eight assists, and Xavier Johnson added nine dimes from the point.

As a team, Indiana had 26 assists. The Hoosiers outboarded the Orange 46-31, which is quite an outboarding. They also turned it over 25 times, which is quite a lot of turning it over.

Still.

Still, after going 7-0 against the pastry course of their schedule, they did what Indiana teams haven't done in awhile: Fought to the end against a big-league opponent in circumstances where, in the very recent past, they might have just said "Ah, screw it."

This Indiana team, Mike Woodson's Indiana team, didn't do that.

Instead, they regrouped at halftime, shifted Stewart to a place on the floor where he was more comfortable, and clawed their way back into it.

I know you can't gussy up an L enough to make it a W. But you can use to illustrate that maybe, just maybe, the Ws won't be so hard to come by from now on.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 12

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the pass-happy Blob feature of which critics have said "Enough passing! Run the ball, dummy!", and also "I'll turn this car right around if you don't start running the ball! I mean it!":

1. "Run the ball, dummy!" (Everyone in America who watched the Colts throw the ball 26 straight times in a 38-31 loss to the Buccaneers, while the best running back in the league, Jonathan Taylor, stood around going "Uh ... guys?")

2. "Hey, look! The Patriots won again!" (People in New England)

3. "Oh, no! The Patriots won again!" (People everywhere else)

4. Meanwhile, the Jets and Texans.

5. Played a football game the Jets won 21-14, in case you were wondering.

6. "We weren't." (People everywhere but Houston and New York)

7. "Can't anybody beat these guys? Rodgers has a busted toe, for God's sake!" (People everywhere but Green Bay)

8. "Hey, don't look at us!" (The once Super Bowl-bound Rams, 36-28 losers to the Pack)

9. "Dammit! Lincoln Riley beat me to it!" (Pete Carroll, after the Seahawks lost again, and Riley landed his old job at USC)

10. "Suck it, Petey!" (Lincoln Riley, presumably)

Irish 'byes

Welp. There goes Brian Kelly's statue.

Or, maybe not, given Notre Dame's irresistible urge to scratch the itch of its own history. Kelly stayed in South Bend for 12 years, long enough for N.D. to confer a certain permanence on the relationship, even if he is running off with some floozy from Baton Rouge. He stayed long enough to knock Rockne off his perch as Notre Dame's winningest coach, and to become the most successful Irish coach since Saint Lou of Holtz, and to get Notre Dame as close to another national title as a man was likely to get it.

Which goes to the relevant point here, as Kelly takes LSU's money and runs: Times have changed.

The landscape is all different now, less forgiving, more nakedly predatory. What passed for civilized behavior in college football, if such a thing existed, is impossibly quaint now, like cold bottles of milk left on your doorstep at dawn. 

Schools that used to honor a kid's commitment now keep recruiting him, if he's desirable enough. Conferences that used to honor one another's borders now routinely stage daylight raids across them, poaching lucrative programs who are all too willing to be poached, conference ties meaning less than nothing now. And it isn't just the starter schools coaches are leaving for the big money.

In the last two days, see, another earthquake again has jumbled the topography. Sportsball World had barely finished processing Lincoln Riley's revolutionary act -- Leaving one historically un-leaveable program for another? Who does that? -- when the news broke that it was happening again. 

Brian Kelly forsaking Notre Dame for LSU? What madness be this?

Rockne and Leahy and Ara and even Saint Lou never did this; in all the spangled history of football at Notre Dame, no coach ever left the Irish until he either lost too many games or got ground to dust by the job. Ditto Bud Wilkinson and Chuck Fairbanks and Barry Switzer at Oklahoma -- one of whom retired to try his hand at politics, the other two to give the NFL a whirl.

No one ever left Notre Dame or Oklahoma for some other school. The very idea was preposterous.

But Riley saw something at USC he couldn't achieve even at Oklahoma, and Kelly perhaps sees the same thing at LSU. Impossible to say, until he tells us, what exactly Kelly's motivation is, outside of the number of zeroes on a paycheck. But perhaps he figured he'd done as much as he was going to do in South Bend, and it was time, at 60, to take one last crack at the only thing he hasn't done.

Which is win a national title.

And which maybe he began to see as far back as 2012 was going to be a bridge too far at Notre Dame.

That's the year the Irish went 12-0 and came to the BCS championship game ranked No. 1, only to get curb-stomped by Alabama 42-14. Subsequent losses in the College Football Playoff -- 30-3 to Clemson in 2019 and 31-14 to Alabama last year -- perhaps signaled that Notre Dame had gained entrance once more to the elite, but not to THE elite.

Perhaps, after 12 years, Kelly realized that was as good as it was going to get. In any event, he's off to LSU, where the competition will be stiffer but the rewards -- LSU has won three national titles since Notre Dame won its last 32 years ago -- conceivably greater.

The SEC, after all, has produced the last two national champions, and four of the last six. 

Notre Dame?

Zero since 1989, when Tone Loc was still a thing.

And when the world was all different, in more ways than one.

A changing of address

 The big news out of college football Sunday was not that Indiana coach Tom Allen didn't even wait 24 hours before firing his offensive coordinator, Nick Sheridan, or that he wanted him gone so badly he's apparently paying some of the buyout from his own pocket.

No, the big news came out of Norman, Okla., where Oklahoma football coach Lincoln Riley decided to follow the Joads to California.*

(* - Cheap, lazy "Grapes of Wrath" reference)

Anyway, Riley, one of the rising young mega-coaches in college football, is going from Oklahoma to USC, which apparently is a seismic event that could potentially alter the entire landscape of the college game. OK, so that is not exactly what the interwhatsis was saying, but it was treating this like a  BIG HUGE DEAL. 

The Blob, of course, just sees this as another really rich guy changing addresses.

This assumes USC will throw money at Riley like confetti, which undoubtedly it will. The Trojans haven't really been the Trojans since Pete Carroll blew town, but there still is a certain amount of prestige that attaches to the program, and Riley likely will be compensated accordingly.

He also will get to live in sunny SoCal, and get to use that as a recruiting selling point, and maybe get to pal around with some movie stars. A few of them might even ditch their currently-chic UCLA gear for a throwback Marcus Allen or Anthony Davis or Reggie Bush jersey.

Those sorts of things aren't going to happen in Norman, which can't even say it's L.A. without the traffic. How do you compete when the best tout you've got is you're, I don't know, The Cooler Omaha?

Other than that, though, Riley-to-USC doesn't seem so much seismic to me as simply swapping one prestigious program for another used-to-be prestigious program (which, granted, rarely happens). Football-wise, it seems like a lateral move at best; you can say Riley will be able to land the choicest recruits in glittery L.A., but he was already doing that in decidedly un-glittery Norman. 

 Of course, if Riley can at least make USC competitive again, that demonstrably would be good for the college game. It loses some shine when USC becomes a semi-automatic W for, say, Notre Dame; page back through history, and you can still hear the thunder of all those epic collisions between USC and the Irish or USC and UCLA or USC and Michigan or Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.

Maybe Riley can restore some of that thunder. Or at least find a way to beat Oregon, the Pac-12's new USC. 

A big, huge deal that might not be. But big enough, surely.

 

Party crashers, Part Deux

Old Bo, he would have loved this business. The Big House, snow coming down all squall-y on an iron gray afternoon. Michigan vs. Ohio State. The Wolverines hitting the Buckeyes in the mouth like this were, say, 1970, and not 2021.

Beautiful stuff, if you were old Bo. You watched the Wolverines line up and fire off the line ... you watched Hassan Haskell take it straight through the Buckeyes' grill time after time ... and you knew a spectral Bo was in Jim Harbaugh's ear, saying "Here, dummy. THIS is how you beat Ohio State."

And so Michigan 42, Ohio State 29 -- first win over the Buckeyes in a decade, and the first win for Harbaugh against them in six tries. Apparently you really can't lose 'em all.

This one they won, finally, without bells, without whistles, without a lot of winking chrome or spinner hubcaps. No, sir. Michigan's stat line for this one was your daddy's sensible Buick: 297 rushing yards on 39 attempts, with Haskins lugging it 28 times for169 yards and five touchdowns. Haskins gashed the Buckeyes for six yards a tote; the Wolverines averaged a gluttonous 7.6 yards per rush as a team.

It doesn't get much more elemental than that. And it again reminded us what a wonderful, crazy thing college football is, because every week's a new page and what happened on the previous page regularly don't mean nuttin'.

I mean, how many of us geniuses out here were saying, after Ohio State turned Michigan State into a smoking crater last week, that it was going to be the Buckeyes and Georgia for the national title, no question about it?

("You?"  you're saying)

Well, yes. Me. Just the other day.

("Try yesterday," you're saying)

OK, so yesterday, then. When I wrote I didn't think the Buckeyes were "beatable by anyone but Georgia right now."

That sound you hear is 111,156 people in Michigan Stadium saying "Ahem."

And now it's Michigan vs. Iowa for the Big Ten title, and if the Wolverines win they're in the CFP. And Ohio State, with two losses, suddenly not only will not be playing Georgia in the national title game, they won't be in the playoff at all. 

Cincinnati will, if it beats Houston next week. Notre Dame -- 11-1 after putting away Stanford 45-14 last night -- might, if Oklahoma State loses to Baylor in the Big 12 title game and Alabama loses to Georgia in the SEC title game.

That would make both the Cowboys and the Crimson Tide two-loss teams. And considering the Crimson Tide almost became a two-loss team yesterday, rallying from 10 points down in the second half and needing four overtimes to beat Auburn in the Iron Bowl ...

No. The Blob will not go there. It will not make that mistake again, assuming one page holds the key to what happens on the next page.

Lesson learned.

Party crashers

 You know who the usual suspects really like right now, in college football? 

They like the Houston Cougars.

The Notre Dames and Oklahomas and Michigans and Oklahoma States, they're all about the Coogs. They're buying the gear and waving the pennants and saying please-please-please-please, Houston, beat Cincinnati next week in the American Athletic Conference championship. Laminate 'em, flambe 'em, beat 'em on a bank-shot field goal off the post, but just beat 'em. The how doesn't matter.

Cincinnati, you see, is unbeaten and un-liked by college football's old money, because they're crashing the Members Only party. They're that annoying guest who somehow got through the door and is underdressed and oh my God, look what he's doing now, Martha, he's eating the foie gras WITH HIS FINGERS! 

Plus he just won't leave.

No, sir. The Bearcats keep winning and keep hogging the fourth and final College Football Playoff spot, and the only way to evict them is for Houston to beat them next Saturday. Houston is pretty darn good itself, 10-1 and about to be 11-1 after the Coogs flatten 1-10 UConn today. It's whomped its A AC foes about as badly as Cincy has, and its only loss was to Texas Tech by 17. 

But it hasn't handed Notre Dame its only loss, like Cincy has, and it needed overtime to beat East Carolina while Cincy cruised past the Pirates 34-13 yesterday. So, there's that.

There's also this: The old money's chances to evict the party-crashers at this point are pretty much zero if what happens today likely happens.

What happens is Michigan (No. 5 in the CFP) will get beat again by Ohio State today -- I know, everyone's making this the Big Game of the season, but I don't think the Buckeyes are beatable by anyone but Georgia right now -- and that will take the Wolverines out of it. Notre Dame (No. 6), after it flattens Stanford tonight, will be finished at 11-1 and can only sit and wait.  And of course Oklahoma will do what Oklahoma does in its annual rivalry game with Oklahoma State, which is beat the Cowboys (No. 7) and knock them out of it.

This means if Cincinnati takes care of its business next week against Houston, it's in. It's hard to see any scenario where the committee jumps Notre Dame or Oklahoma over an unbeaten Cincinnati team without revealing that the whole system is as rigged as everyone thinks it is.

Especially if Alabama loses to either Auburn or Georgia and still stays in the club as a two-loss team.

Logic says that shouldn't be likely, which opens a spot for the Irish or the Sooners and keeps the Bearcats around. But logic and college football rarely run in the same social circles, so who knows. 

In the meantime, in South Bend and Ann Arbor and Stillwater and maybe Norman and Tuscaloosa, the watchword is this: Go Cougars.

Today's Rabbit Ears alert

 Look, I get it. You get old, you get cranky.

And so here the other night was the aging LeBron James, leader of the rest-home Lakers, going into full Get Off  My Lawn mode. In the middle of a Lakers win in Indianapolis, he called over the game officials to have a couple of fans in the courtside seats ejected because they were being big ol' pottymouths, which hurt LeBron's feelings.

Now, the Blob is generally a LeBron-friendly precinct. But ... for God's sake, LeBron.

One wonders how the man managed to find time to strap 39 on the Pacers that night, given his decorum-monitoring duties. It's not the first he's assigned such duties to himself, either; he also got some fans kicked out in Atlanta on another occasion.

Here's what the Blob thinks about that: Lebron, you need to put away the rabbit ears. It's not a good look.

And listen: This is not the Blob holding a brief for the fans here. Fans are frequently douchenozzles, particularly the entitled asshats who sit in the courtside seats. The more money you make, the more you think the sun hunkers down for the night on your hindparts, in a lot of cases. The bigger the bank account, the less some folks think the rules, or even behavioral norms, apply to them.

However.

However, someone with the appreciation for the game's history LeBron has should do some digging. 

If he does, he'll come across Reggie Miller, whose by play with celebrity Knicks taunter Spike Lee became legendary. Spike would say something; Reggie would bury another three and then make the choke sign at him. At no time did he ever consider having Spike ejected for saying hurtful stuff about him.

And if LeBron wants to go back further, perhaps he should travel to Fort Wayne in the 1950s, where the Pistons used to play in the old North Side gym and old ladies in the courtside seats used to stick opposing players with hatpins. As far as I know, none of the opponents demanded the old ladies be removed. They just considered it part of playing a game in Fort Wayne.

Imagine if someone today jabbed LeBron with a hatpin.

He'd have that someone arrested for assault, probably. Because, well, it ain't just the courtside fans who feel entitled these days. 

Defining success down

 I can't tell you how much the win means today to me.

-- Bears coach Matt Nagy

Well, sure. After all, the Bears did shake off all the "distractions" surrounding Nagy's job status to BEAT THE DEFENDING SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS.

Wait ... they didn't?

OK, so they shook off the distractions to BEAT THE DIVISION LEADERS.

Wait ... so that's a no, too?

OK, OK. So they, um, beat the Lions.

The 0-10-1 Lions.

The doomstruck Lions.

The snakebit, God Hates Us, Bleepity-Bleep It, How Many Times Do We Have To Get Beat On a Last-Second Field Goal Lions.

Because, yeah, it happened again on Thanksgiving Day, because, yeah, the Lions. They trailed 13-7, then they wandered downfield to score a touchdown (It's a Thanksgiving miracle!) and take a 14-13 lead.

And then, of course, as morning follows night, they lost (It's the same old crap!) when the Bears' Cairo Santos kicked a game-winning, 28-yard field goal as the clock hit zeroes.

In Nagyland, this counts as a momentous victory. 

In Nagyland, you can be worse than the only winless team in the league until the very last second, then WIN THE FREAKING SUPER BOWL because your kicker didn't fail on a chippie.

Aye-yi-yi. If this isn't an indictment of what a sorry franchise the Bears have become under Nagy's hand, what is?

Yeah, at 4-7 they're not as bad as the Lions or the Jaguars or the Jets, although maybe they are. Nagy rushed a rookie quarterback into the fray without the tools he needed to succeed, stubbornly provided him with an offense that didn't give him a chance to succeed, and brought a team to Detroit that hadn't won since the middle of October. But, hey, they beat the team everybody beats, so it's all good!

Right?

Um ... right?

Thankful for ... suits

 Today is America's day to commit turkeycide, and to fall asleep watching wretched NFL football, and to recognize, as we should on all days, that most of us have it pretty damn good in spite of all the madness in our midst. And so allow the Blob to join in.

I am thankful, today, for my health and my family and my parents, God bless their memory, and a life far too blessed than I deserve. This year in particular, I'm thankful I married the daughter of a great soul named Dr. Jean Arthur Creek, who passed last week at the full and fruitful age of 93, and whose obituary filled half a page in his hometown paper in Bloomington, In. -- as befits a man who was the personal physician for four presidents of Indiana University, and whose insatiably questing mind was matched by an insatiably compassionate heart, and who was a trumpet player and a lover of Mozart and Jefferson and traveling the world, and also of photography and fishing and the outdoors.

Rest well, Jean. I've known few others, nor will I ever, whose life was so full to the top.

Know what else I'm thankful for, on this day?

Lawyers. 

Wait, before you exit laughing ... let me expand on that.

Let me add that the suits I'm thankful for in particular are the suits who kicked some fairly notorious bullies in the teeth this week, and it was about damn time. They were the attorneys who brought suit against a pair of vandals, Rams owner Stan Kroenke and the National Football League, on behalf of the city of St. Louis.

It was Kroenke, remember -- and his accomplice, the NFL -- who decided St. Louis didn't deserve a franchise in their precious league, and stole it at gunpoint or something like it. They did this because the NFL desperately wanted to tap the lucrative Los Angeles market, and was too lazy to do it through expansion. So the league allowed Kroenke to move the Rams to L.A., adding insult to injury by trashing St. Louis on the way out the door.

Well. On Wednesday, St. Louis got a measure of justice for all of that.

Kroenke and the NFL settled the city's lawsuit for $790 million, which is couch cushion money for both but at least an acknowledgment that they did St. Louis dirty. A more equitable settlement would have contained 10 or 11 figures in it, not just nine, but something's better than nothing in these deals.

So thanks to the suits, at least in this case. But be wary of the check bouncing.

After all, remember who you're dealing with. 

Your turkey of the week

 I know what this is, this epic clash between the winless Lions and the playing-like-they're-winless Bears. This is NFL Tryptophan.

On Turkeycide Day, see, we're going to get Andy Dalton vs. either Jared Goff or, more likely, someone named Tim Boyce. We're going to get a team that can't win for losing (the Bears) vs. a team that can't win, period (the Lions). If this turkey were your Thanksgiving dinner, it would look like this.

NFL Tryptophan, yes, sirree. Start of the second quarter, everyone in the house is going to be stacking zzzz's higher than an elephant's eye.

I don't know why the NFL insists on punishing like this on a day we're supposed to be thankful, except that it's a combination of inertia and tradition. They've been foisting the Lions on us on Thanksgiving for decades now, and, because it's the Lions, it's mostly been six flavors of ugly. I guess it's the NFL's way of making us thankful for college football, and also that it's now hockey and college basketball season as well.

Me, I don't exactly mark my Thanksgivings by the Lions vs. whoever, but I do remember the greatest Lions Thanksgiving ever. And by "greatest" I mean "maybe the worst NFL game ever played, unless you're of the firm belief that the elements make football what it is."

The year was 1968, I was 13 years old, and the 3-7-1 Lions were playing the winless Eagles in 100 yards of goulash. They called it the Mud Bowl, because that's what it was. The field conditions were so horrible no one could do much of anything, both teams mucking around like hogs in a wallow, wearing the same shade of brown. It was like watching a knife fight between troglodytes far beneath the earth's surface.

The Eagles eventually won this travesty 12-0 on four field goals by Sam Baker. The only offensive player who did anything of significance was Eagles running back Tom Woodeshick, who slogged his way to 79 yards on 37 muck-encrusted carries. The quarterbacks, Norm Snead for the Eagles and Greg Landry for the Lions, completed just 13-of-30 passes for 115 yards between them. Together, the Lions and Eagles scratched out just 20 first downs.

It was wretched football. But it made for some arresting visuals.

Tomorrow?

Well, the game in Ford Field will be indoors, of course, because the NFL no longer thinks the elements should be part of the game. So it won't be a Mud Bowl.

A Dud Bowl, however ...

Well. That's a lock,

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 11

 And now this week's special Thanksgiving edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the Blob's turkey of a feature of which critics have said "What? No cranberry sauce with this?", and also "Well, at least we know what THIS has been stuffed with":

1. "What do you call it when an undrafted rookie quarterback takes his team three-quarters of the field in four plays, on the road, to turn a sure loss into a win?" (The Blob)

2. "A Thanksgiving blessing?" (Baltimore Ravens fan)

3. "The bleeping Bears throwing another bleeping game away in the most bleeped-up way possible?" (Chicago Bears fans)

4. "Correct, Chicago Bears fans!" (The Blob)

5. "The Patriots look like a Super Bowl team! Huzzah!" (Patriots fans)

6. "The bleeping Patriots look like a bleeping Super Bowl team! Bleep!" (Everyone else in the NFL)

7. "We have so much to be thankful for!" (The Texans, the Vikings, the Colts, the Cardinals)

8. "Bleep Thanksgiving!" (The Titans, the Packers, the Bills, the Seahawks)

9. "We're just thankful for the Jets." (Dolphins fan)

10. "We're just thankful we only have to watch this crap-a** team for another six weeks." (Jets fans)