A Plagued landscape

Look, maybe Kansas wins anyway. It's possible.

Every changed reality is still a reality, so maybe No. 2 Baylor still shoots like it forgot how, still looks half-a-bubble off plumb, still loses for the first time in this Bastard Plague college basketball season. It's not like the Bears were playing Directional Hyphen State Tech, after all. No, Kansas was itself ranked (No. 17), and had won 17 of its 25 games coming in, and had won five of its last six games. So maybe the Jayhawks still win in a season not warped all out of round by the Big Sick.

Doesn't mean Baylor coach Scott Drew didn't have a point, postgame.

His point was the Bears were the best shooting in the nation, and so there could be only one reason why they missed 20 of 26 3-point attempts. four days after missing 17 of 25 against Iowa State. And that reason was rust. That reason was the Bastard Plague.

See, until that game against Iowa State on Tuesday, COVID-19 issues had postponed Baylor's last six games. The Bears hadn't played in three weeks. They hadn't even practiced for almost that long. So, yeah, it didn't sound like plain old excuse-making when Drew called COVID-19 protocols Baylor's "kryptonite."

Without the Dali-esque topography of this Plague year, after all, the Bears wouldn't have had a three-week black hole in the middle of their season. They likely wouldn't have needed overtime to crawl past 2-18 Iowa State, the worst team in the Big 12 and one of the worst in the nation. And if they might have still lost at Kansas yesterday, it's doubtful they would have gone down by 13.

Which they did, 71-58.

So now the Bears have a scuff mark in the loss column, and we're once again left to wonder if this entire season should come with a giant easy-to-apply asterisk. Because the way it's played out almost certainly is not the way it would have played out without the hillocks and switchbacks created by playing a college basketball season in the middle of a pandemic. 

In big ways and small, it's altered everything. Without the Plague, to begin with, there would still be traditional home-court advantages. Now there are none. How many road teams have benefited from that, and how many home teams have been unable to use it for fuel the way they usually do?

Maybe, as with Baylor-Kansas, the outcomes would have been the same anyway. But if not -- if all the postponements and all the games in sterile all-but-empty snakepits did in fact have an effect -- how much different would the coming NCAA Tournament look? How many teams that slide off the bubble in a couple of weeks would not have done so?

We'll never know. Just as we'll never know if Baylor would have run the table -- or if, for that matter, they might have already lost to someone whose own season has been disrupted by this alien landscape.

Yessir. Go find that asterisk.

Dying young in a small town

I don't know why my radar works the way it does. I don't think anyone does.

As with everyone some things ping mine, and some things don't. Some are things everyone in the nation knows about, and some are things that only break hearts in a small corner of that nation.

The small corner today is LaGrange, In., in LaGrange County. 

It pinged my radar because two young men died in a car crash up there the other day, and it was all over the local news and Facebook and the Magic Twitter Thingy. This is partly because Tyler and Chace Curtis were both high school athletes, baseball and wrestling, and there is nothing more poignant than an athlete dying young, as A.E. Housman told us. And if high school athletes are the lords of creation in their world almost everywhere, that is nowhere more true than in a small school in a small town.

Tyler and Chace Curtis were high school athletes at Prairie Heights, which sits on a stretch of two-lane blacktop just south of U.S. 20, east of LaGrange and west of Angola. Just 414 students go there in four grades, which means there's a good chance pretty much everyone knew Tyler, 16, and Chace, 14.

Both young men were thrown from the car Tyler was driving when it breasted a hill on a county road in neighboring Steuben County, left the highway and hit a tree almost head-on. The impact tore the car in two; Tyler died at the scene and Chace died in the hospital a day later.

The accident happened shortly before 5:30 on Thursday afternoon, one of those late February days when the mercury breaches 40 and the sun shines at a particular angle that whispers of approaching spring. By Friday afternoon, there were flowers at the base of the tree on C.R. 675W, and the brothers' baseball jerseys -- 8 and 27 -- were on display, covered with a hieroglyphic scrawl of teammates' signatures.

In the photos one of the local news websites ran with the story, Tyler is turning hard on a pitch at the plate. Chace is standing on the Prairie Heights football field with a blue Homecoming court sash across his chest, rocking a righteous throwback mullet. They look like exactly what they were, two high school kids with spring and baseball and their whole lives spread luxuriously before them.

I can't tell you why all of this hit me so hard. I haven't been a full-time working sportswriter in these parts in almost seven years, and in my 28 years at The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette I don't think I ever covered a sporting event at Prairie Heights. I don't think I ever talked to any coach or athlete or administrator there. So their pain right now is not something I can connect with on a molecular level. 

But I have written about other high school athletes dying young in other small towns. I've listened to coaches and teammates and administrators struggle to put the loss into words.

I've seen the hole that loss leaves, and the ways those left behind try to fill it: The jerseys covered in heartbroken signatures, the uniform numbers painted on the grass of a football field, the flowers and other tokens left outside an athletic facility or a scarred tree on a county road, the February fields beyond still frosted with retreating snow.

Thankfully, I haven't had to write about those things often, as those things go. But once is enough. 

No one knows that better right now, I suspect, than the community of a certain small school in a certain small town, hard by a stretch of two-lane blacktop.

Bear-ly possible

Well, this can't happen. You can bet your throwback Decatur Staleys jersey on that.

First, Russell Wilson's agent says his client isn't demanding a trade, says he's just fine with staying in Seattle, doesn't know how these things get started.

Then his agent says but if he were to be traded, there are only four teams to whom he'd want to go. Which of course is how these things get started.

The four teams?

The Saints. The Cowboys. The Raiders. And ... your Chicago Bears.

Let me tell you why the latter is never-ever-ever going to happen.

It's never-ever-ever going to happen because history is a badass, and history will swat the notion of Wilson-to-the-Bears into the cheap seats like Dikembe Motumbo swatting a floater in the lane. History will not allow an elite quarterback to suit up for the Bears, because the Bears don't do elite quarterbacks. Never have. 

You have to go back to Sid Luckman to find a Bears quarterback who would have been considered elite in his time, and Sid Luckman has been dead for 22 years. He last played for the Bears in 1950, when the Cold War was a thing. Since then it's been a little Billy Wade and a dash of Jack Concannon and Bobby Douglass, and a dollop of Vince Evans and Gary Huff and Peter Tom Willis and even Doug Flutie.

Oh, and Jim McMahon -- who wasn't that good, either, but won a Super Bowl because he had a great defense and got to hand off to Walter Payton a lot.

These days the QB1 is Mitch Trubisky, who pretty much fits the Bears quarterback template like he was born to it. He's OK, but not too OK. He can do the math, quarterback-wise, but don't make him do trig or calculus. He's the 2021 Bob Avellini Action Figure, which doesn't yet come with Kung-Fu Grip.

What he isn't is Russell Wilson. Nor ever will be.

No, Russell Wilson in a Bears suit is something history and its sidekick tradition simply will not allow, lest it unleash horrible cosmic events. An awful disturbance in the Force would happen if somehow Russell Wilson stepped foot in Halas Hall. The heavens would rain fire. Frogs would speak Latin. George Halas himself might rise from the dead, wondering what fool thing those damn McCaskeys have done this time.

So ... no. Wilson-to-the-Bears is possible, but it's not possible. So put it right out of your mind, Mikey in Winnetka.

Yeah, I know. History's a friggin' Cheesehead.

Miller('s) time?

These are the dark days in Riverdale, for Archie and the gang. Riverdale High just lost another big game. Jughead has fallen in with a bad crowd. And Archie ...

Well. Did we mention Riverdale High just lost another big game?

In our incarnation, of course, "Archie" is Archie Miller, and Riverdale High is Indiana University, which, way back in the Before Time, was better at basketball than football. Now the Hoosiers don't just have a football team but a FOOTBALL TEAM, and the basketball team is a beige collection of knockabouts clinging to a "tradition" that seems as distant as the Battle of Hastings these days. 

Those five NCAA championship banners hanging in Assembly Hall, for instance?

Ancient as the Bayeaux Tapestry. And about as relevant.

This is because the Hoosiers are now 12-11 and 7-9 in the Big Ten, and in the space of four days have blown big leads to two other beige outfits. First they jetted out to a 19-6 lead at home against a gaggle of Michigan State imposters, only to blow the lead and the game. Then, last night, they led Rutgers 23-8 before lying down on the tracks and letting the Scarlet Knights thunder over them, outscoring them 27-8 the rest of the half and running the lead to as much as 20 points in the second half.

The final score was 74-63. And in one stretch, Rutgers, a 13-9 outfit that had lost five of its previous eight games, outscored Indiana 62-27.

All of which, of course, means the howling for poor Archie's head has reached 747-amping-up-for-takeoff decibels.

That he's not been what he seemed to be when he was at Dayton is obvious now, after all. That he's never even been what Tom Crean was until the lost-in-the-past yokels ran him out is even more obvious, and perhaps more significant.

Crean's teams, after all, won Big Ten titles and reached Sweet Sixteens and even landed a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament one year. And Miller?

Hasn't come close to that, in four seasons. On his watch, Indiana has regressed to a middle-of-the-pack Big Ten program, down there with the Minnesotas and Penn States and (until this season) Illinoises. In Miller's three previous seasons, they've finished tied for sixth, tied for ninth and tied for 10th in the conference. 

This season?

Right now they're ninth, with Michigan and roadies at Michigan State and Purdue still to come.

Speaking of the latter, Archie Miller has never beaten Purdue. And the Hoosiers have yet to reach the NCAA Tournament on his watch -- although they might well have last year had the Bastard Plague not wiped out the Madness.

And so now talk of hot seats and buyouts, and the dawning realization that not only are Miller's Hoosiers wildly inconsistent and schematically easy to defend, the talent level is mostly a mirage, too. Outside of Trayce Jackson-Davis and perhaps an emerging Armann Franklin, the Hoosiers simply aren't that good. They may be getting their share of Indiana Mr. Basketballs, but you didn't see a lot of Dukes and Kentuckys trying to elbow Indiana out of the way for most of them. 

So is this Archie's last stand, then?

Maybe.

Only maybe, because, this being corporate college athletics, economics come into play here. Show Miller the road now, and the buyout is a chunk. And that is likely going to provoke a long hard think for the powers-that-be, given the bite the Plague has taken out of the athletic budget.

Miller's Hoosiers could make that an even tougher call if they'd happen to jump up and  beat Michigan in a few days -- or, even better, take down the Purdues in Mackey next week. That could actually happen, because this Indiana team has at least had a weird propensity for springing the occasional Iowa City Miracle on everyone. But right now?

Right now it doesn't look likely. Right now this is a team that has too much give-up in it -- or so it would appear.

And that buyout, consequently?

Looks less and less scary every day. 

Grim echoes

Ben Hogan is who you thought of, when you saw that silver SUV lying at the bottom of a ravine with its front end gnawed off. You thought of 1949 and a different car and a Greyhound bus coming head-on, and a different transcendent golfer flinging himself across the front seat at the last moment to shield his wife from the impact.

That collision cost Ben Hogan a year on the golf course, and left him with a permanent limp.

This one?

Who knows, as we absorb the single-car crash that left Tiger Woods' lower right leg essentially ground to dust. The injuries are horrific: Multiple open fractures -- i.e., bones protruding from the skin -- shattered bones in the ankle and foot, the entirety now held together by pins and metal rods after an hours-long surgery.

And so Ben Hogan, popping into the head of anyone who knows anything about golf.

Me?

I thought of Hogan, sure. But then I thought of A.J. Foyt.

Who turned his feet to dust up in Elkhart Lake, Wis., one afternoon in 1990, when his brakes failed coming into a hard right-hander and his car became an unguided missile, taking flight and arrowing into a dirt embankment. The impact basically folded his feet back on themselves; the pain was so bad Foyt, the toughest man who ever strapped into a race car, begged the safety workers to hit him in the head with a hammer and put him out of his misery.

He survived, of course. Even raced again, sort of, although his racing days were pretty much over from that moment. It was a year before he could walk again, and, 30 years later, he feels that afternoon to this day when he sets off with a gait that has been off-kilter since.

One more thing: A.J. Foyt was 55 years old when Elkhart Lake happened, and hadn't been a force on the track for some time.

Tiger Woods is 45, and, except for the blip that was Augusta in 2019, he hasn't really been a consistent force on the golf course for some time.

To be sure, even now, no one moves the needle like Tiger. If he's playing on the weekend, and he's remotely within shouting distance of the lead, the TV numbers are a Saturn V rocket. But if he misses the cut ... well, not so much.

The man can still play this game, because he was the best there ever was at his peak and that doesn't just disappear. But after five back surgeries and knee surgeries and lord knows how many more dents and door-dings, he's a very old 45.

Just as A.J. was a very old 55, when he took flight that day in Wisconsin and destroyed his feet.

As for Hogan, the analogy is the obvious one, but perhaps it's  not as exact. Hogan was 36 the night his car met that Greyhound bus head-on, for one thing. He was at the height of his powers, or at least coming to that height. Like Tiger, his injuries were extensive, too -- there was hardly a bone in his body above the waist he didn't break -- but he was younger, and he was Ben Hogan.

A Texan, like A.J. Tougher than a jailhouse steak, like A.J.

And so he was back on a golf course before a year had passed, and won the U.S, Open not very long after that. He went on to win five more majors and dominate the 1950s, playing always in pain and always with a limp.

It was one of the most remarkable stories in the history of any sport. And if Tiger manages to get back to competitive golf, and actually manages to win again to boot -- two exceedingly dim "ifs" at this point, if we're being honest -- that could well be the most remarkable story in the history of any sport.

That's because he's a decade older, and the damage is to his lower extremities, and it's extensive to say the least. And it's because he was already rehabbing from a fifth back procedure when he went off that winding downhill road early yesterday morning.

I don't know if that means this is the end of him as a professional golfer. But I do know what anyone with a soul is hoping right now.

Which is that Tiger Woods' story, from here on out, unfolds a lot more like Ben Hogan's than A.J. Foyt's.

By(e) the number

 I get prerogatives. They're not the same thing as traditions, exactly, but they live in the same neighborhood and their kids go to school together.

So I understand why some people are upset with Colts wide receiver Michael Pittman, because he won't give up the No. 11 he's worn all his life. He was asked to do this, respectfully, by Carson Wentz, the quarterback at whom the Colts just threw a pile of money. That's because 11 has been Wentz's number all his life, too.

It was Wentz's absolute prerogative to do this, as both A) a big deal quarterback, and B) a big-deal quarterback whose contract is far more hefty than Michael Pittman's.

The prerogative for Pittman, therefore, is to give up the number.

But he won't. 

And somehow I kind of admire him for that.

Let everyone else call him a bad teammate and say he's creating a harmful rift between receiver and quarterback, and that he's helping get Wentz's working relationship with the Colts off to a sour start. All of that's true only if everyone decides not to be a grownup about this, however. And I sense Wentz will be, and that the Colts locker room is not the sort of place where non-grownups are welcome.

There's also this: It's Pittman's number.

For that reason it strikes the Blob as wrong, somehow, that he should be regarded by some as the bad guy here because he won't give it up -- even to a quarterback with a fatter paycheck, and even to a far more accomplished player at this point in their careers.

Now, I suppose enough heat could be applied from certain quarters to convince Pittman to concede, and that next fall Wentz will be wearing No. 11. Or not. Joe Montana, after all, finished his career wearing No. 19 in Kansas City because his number (16) was also Chiefs' legend Len Dawson's number, and had already been retired. So Montana shrugged and pulled on a new number.

Didn't seem to bother him any -- even though Montana had four rings, and would retire as perhaps the greatest quarterback in history up to that point.

Maybe Wentz will follow that example, and pull on No. 19 for the Colts himself.

Oh. Wait ...

The weirdness of it all

Some days you have to stifle yourself, as Archie Bunker used to say when he was in full Misogynist Jackass mode. This especially happens as you get older, and the world becomes more strange -- and lord knows it's never been stranger then in the Age of the Bastard Plague.

And so to the latest occasion when I caught myself starting a sentence with "Back in MY day ..."

The "sonny" being inferred.

In any event, this time it was prompted by a tweet from my friend and former sportswriting colleague Justin Cohn, observing the weirdness of our times. See, he was covering a Mad Ants game at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum -- except the Mad Ants weren't at the Coliseum, but half a country away in Orlando. So Justin  was covering it by watching the game on a screen and then (presumably) getting quotes on a Zoom call and writing a gamer off that.

All together now: Back in MY day...

Back in my day, when we didn't have to worry about Bastard Plagues, covering a game remotely would not only have been technologically problematical, it would have been a flagrant violation of the Sportswriter Code. Any conversation suggesting such a thing would have gone like this:

Sportswriter: Hey, boss, the weather's lousy outside. How 'bout I just watch the Purdue game on TV and write my story off that instead of driving all the way to West Lafayette?

Sports editor: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ... no.

But strange times call for strange measures, so now this is how a sportswriter occasionally has to work his gig. 

Oh, they still travel to cover games, a lot, but when they get there nobody's home. Covid protocols mean they're covering the games in empty or nearly empty arenas/stadiums. I can't imagine how bizarre that must be, and how curiously deflating. It must be more like covering a particularly intense practice scrimmage instead of an actual game.

All that's missing is who calls shirts and who calls skins.

And covering a game the way Justin covered the Mad Ants last night?

Well ... back in MY day (sonny), there was a certain sportswriter for a certain publication who was widely suspected of having done the same thing for a particular IU basketball road game. No one on press row could recall seeing him there before, during or in the postgame. But the next day, there was a game story with his byline, complete with quotes and a dateline from the game's site.

In the insular sportswriting fraternity, this was regarded as the worst kind of fraud, and made him an object of scorn. Or at least it did in the city where he worked at the time.

Today, of course, it's just the way you have to do things sometimes -- only it's done up front, and minus the phony dateline. 

Weird. So damn weird.

Ice capades

 Maybe they shouldn't have waited so long. Or maybe they should have waited longer.

Both are correct now that the National Hockey League has tied NASCAR for Most Dragged-Out Sporting Event of 2021, although the NHL probably doesn't see that as any sort of achievement. But, hey. You take what you can get these days.

And so six days after NASCAR stubbornly refused to bow to the weather, waiting out six hours of rainstorms and finishing the Daytona 500, which began on Sunday, on Monday, the NHL followed suit. Its outdoor game at Lake Tahoe -- a gorgeous setting to be sure -- was delayed eight hours, on account of ice melts in direct sunlight.

There was plenty of the latter when the game got underway a little after noon local time, and so the ice, well, melted. Turned to soft rut-carved slush as players and game officials tripped and stumbled and went sprawling in a comic opera whose appropriate score could only have been "Yakety Sax."

After one period of this, NHL commish Gary Bettman pulled the plug. The Las Vegas Golden Knights and Colorado Avalanche left the ice and didn't return until night had fallen, after which the Avalanche won 3-2.

So, yes, they should have waited for nightfall to start the game to begin with, And that's because they shouldn't have waited so long to play their outdoor games.

You can begin to see why every day now, as winter leans toward its last month. It's not yet spring, but on a sunny late-February afternoon, you can to hear its whispers. The sun's subtly different, more direct. There is more punch to it. In Indiana, you walk outside at 7 p.m. and there's still light in the sky.

That's when you know spring is coming, no matter how deep in the icebox we remain.

I've seen this for a week now, looking out at a landscape buried under 15 or so inches of snow. If there is a film of snow or frost on the driveway, it's gone as soon as the sun rises high enough to find it. By mid-afternoon or so, even if  it's in the low 20s, it's gone and the pavement is dry.

First thing I thought of when I saw the news from Tahoe. How could they wait so late in the winter to play an outdoor game?

The Blob has long believed no NHL outdoor game should be played in or around cities that don't actually have winter, and it sticks with it. In fact, if the Blob ran the world, no outdoor game would be played anywhere but an Original Six city. If you're going to give a throwback nod to the origins of the game, then go all the way with it. Hell, play on an actual pond, for that matter.

Of course, I'm well aware this is 2021 and product promotion is all for professional sports, so the aforementioned is never going to happen. So file it under Old Man Shouts At Clouds Again.

Still ... hockey in late February at an elevation where the sun's light is more intense is not the sort of idea anyone with an ounce of sense thinks is a winning play. Then again ...

Then again, it is the NHL. Ounces of sense are a rare commodity there.

The stubbornness of self-image

 Tim Tebow announced his retirement from baseball the other day, and you probably never knew it. 

This is not because you are inattentive. This is because the human radar has only a limited range, and Tebow has been well beyond it for awhile now.

When he retired, see, he did not retire as a major leaguer. He retired as a guy who'd been bouncing around the minor leagues for five years, just like a thousand other guys. And, like a thousand other guys, he had very little to show for it.

His career numbers: 287 games at various levels, and a .223 batting average.

Truth is, he was never a prospect. He only gave baseball a whirl because A) he's a terrific athlete who was a terrific baseball player once upon a time, and B) he'd washed out of professional football at his chosen position. The Mets signed him to a minor-league deal because, what the hell, the price was right and maybe they could stick him in a few spring games with the big club and draw a few more fans.

Which is essentially all that happened.

But enough about baseball. The meat of Tim Tebow's story, and the place where all the what-ifs live, revolve around football. It's an old story, but never did it play out in such a glaring spotlight.

A quarterbacking legend in high school and college, Tebow became a legend of sorts in the NFL not because of his skill set, but because he was a charismatic, fervently Christian man who arrived in the league with great fanfare. The media quickly became obsessed with him, and then became more obsessed with him when he had that brief, magical run with the Denver Broncos.

Unfortunately, the run lasted only a handful of games. After that, it became more and more apparent that Tebow's skill set did not translate well to pro football. He became an uncommon example of a dirt-common NFL trope: The big-deal college quarterback who turns out to be an ordinary (or worse) pro quarterback.

The lucky ones recognize their limitations and find another niche in the pro game. Oklahoma's masterful Wishbone quarterback from the 1970s, Jack Mildren, wound up playing defensive back in the NFL. Julian Edelman, Tom Brady's go-to possession receiver with the Patriots, was a quarterback at Kent State. Ditto Antwaan Randle-El of the Steelers, who was a dynamic college QB at Indiana but found his place in the NFL as a kick returner and receiver. 

None of them, however, entered the NFL with Tebow's hype. It can be blinding, that hype, and ultimately crippling. And so the great what-if with Tebow is where his path would have led had he not been blinded by the media's obsession with him.

Because, see, Tebow could have played in the NFL. He might even have excelled. But he was never going to excel at quarterback.

You wonder to this day, for example (or at least the Blob does), what would have happened had  Tebow been willing to expand his horizons. At 6-foot-3 and 255 pounds, and gifted with uncommon athleticism for a man that size, he could have been a Julian Edelman as an H-back or a tight end. Wisely deployed, he could have been great in that role.

But he wouldn't hear of it. And it's hard to blame him for that, because he'd been a star quarterback all his life, and all he'd ever heard was he was destined to be a star quarterback in the NFL. Tough to see beyond that, with that spotlight in your eyes.

And so he wound up in an instructional league for the New York Mets instead.

And we will always be left to wonder.

Whither Wentz

 So the Indianapolis Colts got their man -- and for a song! -- and now they are GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL, BABY!

No, really. I heard that yesterday, from the more overheated quadrants of Horsey Nation.

I heard with Carson Wentz, the sky's the limit, and he didn't cost that much. A third-round pick and a provisional second-round pick is all it took, and presumably a couple of boxtops from the Post cereal of your choice.

So nothing, basically!

And what are they getting?

Well, the narrative in Indy is they're getting Carson Wentz 2016/2017, before he blew up the knee. In Indy, unlike in Philly, he'll have an offensive line that can block a doorway and dynamic wide receivers and a couple of decent tight ends, plus an emerging force at running back in Jonathan Taylor. And he'll have Frank Reich, the Quarterback Whisperer himself, who turned Wentz 2016/2017 into the shiny bursting-with-promise model he was.

If he can pull that out of Wentz again, then, yes, Indianapolis will have itself a very good football team. Perhaps a very, very good football team.

Except ...

Except now comes the part where the Blob, inveterate rain-er on parades that it is, breaks out the umbrellas. 

To begin with ... if you're getting Carson Wentz for the aforementioned boxtops, what does that mean?

A third-rounder and a provisional second-rounder means what you're not getting is showroom-floor stuff, and that's Wentz all over. You're getting a quarterback with a surgical knee and back issues and concussion issues. You're getting a quarterback who -- because of his innate North Dakota toughness, and an offensive line that couldn't block a doorway -- has spent the last three seasons getting the brick-and-mortar knocked out of him.

You're getting late-stage Andrew Luck, is what you're getting. Minus a couple pages on the calendar.

This is not as gloomy as it sounds, understand. Late-stage Andrew Luck put up some numbers in his last full season with the Colts; in that season, 2018, he threw for 4,593 yards and 39 touchdowns and completed 68 percent of his passes. So there's that.

But there's also this: He played hurt again. And the cumulative effect of playing hurt again, combined with all the other times he played hurt, was finally too much. And he abruptly walked away from the game right before the 2019 season.

This did not mean Luck was weak or a bad teammate or didn't love the game enough, as some of the more witless Barcalounger warriors claimed.  What it meant is that playing professional football is a hard dollar, maybe the hardest dollar there is in Sportsball World. You spend most of your waking hours in some degree of pain. Your body slowly breaks down. One too many knocks to the head, and you can literally lose your mind.

And so here comes Carson Wentz, who's been knocked in the head and the knee and the back and lord knows where else playing behind that breezeway of an O-line in Philly. About the best you can say right now is he'll be safer in Indy, and he'll be reunited with the man who made him a sensation in his one golden season. So there's a chance he could regain some of Wentz 2016/2017.

But all of it?

Well. He's four years older chronologically, and eons older physically and mentally. So we shall see.

But if the best he can do is Andrew Luck 2018?

Horsey Nation will take that, and with extra gravy. You bet. 

Requiem for a demagogue

I met Rush Limbaugh once.

It was a hazy summer's day at Fort Wayne Country Club, and I was there (and Limbaugh was there) for the Mad Anthony's Hoosier Celebrities charity golf tournament, and I corralled Limbaugh at the practice range for a couple of minutes. It was 1999, and the man who died of cancer yesterday was at the height of his powers as America's premier right-wing demagogue, the lineal descendant of Charles Coughlin and Westbrook Pegler. So of course he was column fodder.

What I learned in that brief encounter was the vast difference between the performer and the man, and that most of the vile spew Limbaugh ladled out was simply his innate understanding of his audience and its bottomless appetite for fear and loathing.

That's because the racist, homophobic, misogynist creature who commanded the American airwaves every day was nowhere in evidence that afternoon at FWCC. If I expected the swaggering bombast who mocked AIDS victims and told black callers to take the bones out of their noses, I didn't get it. 

What I got instead was a man of average size with a fading spray of Huck Finn freckles across his face, giving him the look of an aged teenager. And, like that teenager, he was diffident to the point of shyness. I've interviewed high school athletes with more presence.

I walked away thinking Limbaugh the Demagogue was mostly just a business transaction, with very little honesty to it. He preached hate because hate sold. He courted our worst instincts as human beings because there was profit in it, as there always has been. And somehow that made what he did all the more despicable, because it was deliberate and not organic.

In so doing, of course, he blazed a trail that led to Donald Trump, and to the vandalism Trump has brought to the Republican party. Limbaugh became a force within that party not in spite of his contempt for nearly everyone who wasn't rich, white and male, but because of it. He taught his ideological brethren they could say right out loud what they'd always said with a wink and a smirk, and there was a constituency out there that would send them to Washington for it.

What that's led to is a party increasingly held hostage by cranks, conspiracy kooks and barely disguised white supremacists, all of whom pander to an audience that equates a more diverse America with tyranny. And a goodly number of whom serve not America, but Donald Trump's Svengali-like cult of personality.

Limbaugh became a rich and powerful broadcasting force mining all of that. His genius was recognizing it existed long before anyone else did, and that the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 meant it would now be exploitable.

It's a hell of legacy. And not in a good way.

One can only hope Limbaugh -- afflicter of the afflicted and comforter of the comfortable -- is extended more grace in the afterlife than he ever himself extended in this one.

Could be his toughest sell yet.

Green truth

 Some folks exist to annoy others. This is why Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors is not the most popular guy in the NBA.

Whether he's kicking dudes (OK, Steven Adams) in the manhood, playing the fly that keeps buzzing around your head or just being generally a pain in the glutes who sometimes hurts his team as much as he helps it, he's never been a fast-tracker toward Mr. Congeniality. Lots of otherwise fair-minded people can't stand the guy.

But you know what?

When he's right he's right. And the other day he was as right as a cold beer on a hot day.

In a win over the Cleveland Cavaliers, see, he noticed that the Cavs apparently told Andre Drummond right before the tip they were shipping him out of town, so they sent him back to the locker room to take off his uniform. Green did not think this was proper, and said so. More broadly, he said he was sick and tired of PLAYERS being told they're spoiled brats and locker-room cancers if they complain about their situation and ask to be traded, but no one criticizes OWNERS for doing what the Cavs did to Drummond.

That's just bidness, y'all.

"As a player you are the worst person in the world if you want a different situation, but a team can say they are trading you and that man has to stay in shape, he is to stay professional, and if not, his career is on the line," Green said.

The broader point here -- that there's a double standard in the NBA for what players can say or do in regard to a trade, and what owners can say or do -- is dead on. A James Harden can publicly state his unhappiness and agitate for a trade, and everyone hauls out the "loyalty to the team" card. As if it's seventh-grade basketball or something.

It is not, of course. It is, yes, a bidness, and in bidness there is no loyalty. The owners have never stepped foot on that road, so why should the players?

Bidness being bidness, after all, if an owner thinks you've outlived your usefulness, or your market value is slipping -- or maybe if he just doesn't like you -- he's going to mail your sorry butt to Memphis. Or Charlotte. Or Orlando.

Or, God forbid, maybe even Sacramento.

Thing is, no one's going to call out that owner on his loyalty. Even if the player he's sending to Sacramento has been with the owner's team for a good long stretch, you won't hear a peep about it. Thanks for the memories, pal. Now take a hike.

Lousy owners do this more egregiously, and clumsily, than good owners, and always have. The cheaper and greedier they are, the bigger ingrates they are. And somehow, the biggest ingrates and greedheads always turn out to be the current owners of the Blob's cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates.

Not to put my personal spin on it or anything.

In any event, here's to Draymond Green for speaking a bit of truth the other day. Hope he doesn't get fined for doing so.

Wouldn't hold my breath on that, though.

A minor(s) undoing

Pitchers and catchers report this week to Florida and Arizona, which are glad tidings indeed for those of us who just finished tunneling out of our homes through what the Blob will call a "short ton" of snow instead of another "sh" word.

In other words, winter has us in its icy grip, or some other weather dude cliché.

And so it will be a welcome thing to turn on the TV some day soon and see green grass and red brickdust and blue skies, and men in shirtsleeves playing a child's game. Baseball, after all, promises spring like few other American pursuits. And I suppose that, too, is cliché.

Ditto the notion that no one can muck up a good deal like Major League Baseball.

Like all soulless corporate entities MLB craved more control over its product, and so it effectively whizzed in its groundwater. In order to gain firmer control over the minor leagues that feed it, MLB eliminated 42 minor-league clubs, some of which had been fixtures in their communities since the turn of the last century. Then it restructured what was left into six leagues, attractively graced with pseudo-names like Double-A Northeast and High-A Central.

The latter is where your Fort Wayne TinCaps will play, and maybe it will still be called the Midwest League and maybe it won't. In any case, the bump up to high A has been long overdue for one of the minors' best-run and most successful franchises, so applause, applause to Mike Nutter and his crew for that.

However ...

However, it's not the TinCaps I'm thinking of today. It's the Burlington Bees and the Clinton Lumber Kings.

The former began playing baseball in Burlington, Ia., in 1924, and had been a fixture in the Midwest League for nearly 60 years. The latter, meanwhile were born in 1954 and had been playing in the Midwest League since 1956, succeeding predecessors (the Clinton Giants and Clinton Owls) who began playing in Clinton in 1934.

Now both have been kicked downstairs to something euphemistically called the Prospect League, which is short for "college kids who aren't really prospects." They're out of the affiliate club, and those that are left were forced to surrender a measure of local control so that MLB, presumably, could more effectively homogenize the product.

"Homogenize," in this case, being short for "institute the requisite cookie-cutter corporate blandness."

This of course strikes at the heart of what has always made the minors special, which is a certain local flavor and/or quirkiness. Every team did it differently, from promotions to presentation to concessions. Hopefully MLB will still allow all this to continue, but the rhetoric doesn't make it sound that way.

Instead, Rob Manfred's released statement is a masterwork of Corporate Speak, with plenty of the usual disingenuousness and/or straight up nonsense.

"We are excited to unveil this model, which only provides a pipeline to the Majors, but continues the Minor Leagues' tradition of entertaining millions of families in hundreds of communities," Manfred's statement reads in part.

Of course, no mention is made of the fact that, under the new model, the minors will be entertaining fewer millions of families in a third fewer communities. 

But, hey. You can't mention everything, right?

Endless

 Well, that was a Daytona 500 for the books.

"Daytona 500" being short for "Daytona 500 Hours."

Like the playwright, you could have called it a long day's journey into night, except it was actually a long day's journey into night and then into another day. It started mid-afternoon on Sunday, didn't end until after midnight on Monday -- and naturally it had an appropriately stupid ending, with Penske teammates Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski wrecking each other on the last lap and taking a whole pile of others with them.

That handed the victory to a guy most people called "Michael McWho?", on account of not many folks knew him by his real name, Michael McDowell.

But McWho flat-throttled it through the last-lap junkyard like the veteran he is to win it under yellow. It was the weirdest finish to a Daytona 500 since Derrike Cope lucked into the only win of his career 31 years ago; even weirder, Cope was in the field Sunday, taking one last auld-lang-syne bow at the age of 62.

 Alas, the bow was a brief one. Cope's day ended on the second lap when a tire went down and he spanked the wall.

Of course, by the time McDowell did his deal, Cope was probably eligible for Medicare. So he had that going for him.

That's because this was the Daytona 500, which meant NASCAR wasn't going to give up without a fight. And so after some more stupid stuff -- an unconscionably early Big One that took out 16 cars just 15 laps into the race -- NASCAR waited out an ensuing clutch of thunderstorms for almost six hours before finally resuming the race sometime around 9 p.m.

Thus the Daytona 500 actually became the Daytona 37.5, followed by the Daytona 462.5.

That the rain delay lasted so long meant some viewers (aka, "me") forgot they hadn't just scrubbed the mission, which they should have and probably would have done if NASCAR folks weren't such an uncommonly bullheaded lot. But they waited and waited and waited, and three hours became four and then five, and eventually one driver (Ross Chastain) left the track and zipped through a McDonald's drive-thru, because why not?

The six-hour intermission meant some viewers (again, "me") never saw a second big wreck on lap 38. Or saw Bubba Wallace make history by becoming the first black driver ever to lead a lap at Daytona, driving  the 23 car for a team co-owned by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin. Or saw Logano and Keselowski trigger the Final Big One, and McDowell step through the door those two dopes left ajar. 

It was his first Cup victory in 358 starts, and he was wheeling a ride for tiny Front Row Motorsports, so hooray for the little guy.  And it wasn't as if this little guy hadn't persevered; McDowell came to Daytona with 14 Cup seasons under his belt, and he had just four top-five finishes and 13 top tens to show for it.

"It's been a tough road for me," he acknowledged early Monday morning. "I've had to spend a lot of years grinding it out."

Plus one really, really long day.

OK. So one day and part of another, then.

Stuff that rhymes

Poimes. We done got poimes (aka, "poems") today here at the Blob.

That's because it's Valentine's Day, when we celebrate hearts and flowers and the wonder of love, and all that other gooshy junk. Also assorted chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, which we will forego today because sooner or later someone always gets the icky one with a nut in it, and there's enough disappointment in the world without that.

 No, sir. To honor the day, the Blob will waive its usual rule against writing stuff that rhymes, and serve up a few of the aforementioned poimes. They will not be about the Blob's sweetheart or your sweethearts or any sweetheart, however, because even the Blob has a gooshiness limit.

Instead, they'll be about this ...

* Your Indiana Hoosiers got road-killed in Columbus, Ohio, yesterday, a circumstance absolutely no one saw coming except for everyone who's even casually followed them this season. After all, the Hoosiers just beat Iowa for the second time this season, and then miraculously beat Northwestern because, well, Northwestern is awful.

So they had a two-game winning streak, and everybody's hopes were up again, and there was much talk about turning corners and such. So of course Ohio State toyed with them like a kitten toys with a ball of yarn, 78-59.

An occasion well-suited to rhyme ...

The Hoosiers were coming,

All the signs did portend,

But then came Columbus ...

Dammit. Fooled us again.

* It was the week that wasn't for new Jacksonville Jaguars coach Urban Meyer, who hired a guy (Chris Doyle) the University of Iowa kicked out for being an apparent racist dirtball, and got appropriately slammed for it from every quarter.

A day later, Doyle resigned. Perhaps by poime ...

OK, OK, 

So I'm outta here, boss.

Guess that means your new gig

Has begun with a loss.

* It was the week that wasn't for Republicans in the Senate, too, who displayed impressive flying dismounts of logic in trying to explain why it looked like they didn't care that their former mad king helped set a murderous pack of lunatics loose on the very seat of American democracy. 

Turns out these Republicans were horrified -- horrified, I tell you! -- by what happened January 6, and, yes, their former mad king bore responsibility for a lot of it. But that didn't mean they were going to hold him accountable or anything, because that would be wrong.

Or as the poet might put it ...

Sure, he's guilty as sin,

Now that we have thought twice.

But we can't vote that way,

'Cause we're timid as mice.

* The speculation goes on in Indianapolis, where the Colts are still looking to settle their unsettled quarterback situation. Who will it be? Matt Ryan? Carson Wentz? An untried (and probably unready) Jacob Eason?

Maybe a poime will help ...

It's a hell of quandary,

This whole Colts QB mess.

If it goes on much longer,

They may dig up Unitas.

* The Daytona 500 is today, an odd convergence of event and holiday. This is because there won't be a lot of valentines exchanged when the laps get skinny and people start getting greedy as they barrel around the joint three wide. 

Yes, sir. It'll be every man for himself then, and no love will be lost. Which doesn't mean there isn't a poime for this occasion, too ...

Roses are red,

And those violets ain't hay.

You drive like my grandma,

Now get out of my way.

Legacy

 They drop the green down in Daytona again tomorrow, and here in Indiana all is arctic fastness. Piles of snow flank the driveway. It forms white ice cream cones on the stacked chairs on the back deck. And the footprints leading across the backyard have almost filled in from the fresh snow that descends almost daily now from a sky the color of slate.

Winter holds court, in other words. You could hardly expect otherwise on the weekend of Valentine's Day.

But tomorrow there will be a rumble and blare from Florida, and that freight train of American and Japanese muscle will sweep around Daytona's 31-degree banking like a squadron of jets, and it will be a movie trailer for summer. The first robin of spring, only louder and faster and crazier.

I don't know why, but all of that feels different to me this time. Maybe it's because the page that has been turning for a few years now has finally turned for good. Some of the old names are still around, but the grid is stuffed with another generation: Alex Bowman and William Byron and Aric Almirola and Austin Dillon; Christopher Bell and Bubba Wallace and Ryan Preece.

And, of course, Chase Elliott, your defending Cup champion and First Prince of all the sport's young princes.

So odd, running your finger down the grid and seeing the Bells and Preeces and Byrons and Cole Custers. And so odd, realizing it's been 20 years now since the patriarch of all of this nosed almost delicately into the wall on Daytona's last lap, and never drew another breath.

Dale Earnhardt died two decades ago this weekend, and still I see that trademark smirk, and the glint in the eye that accompanied it. It was his standard greeting for all of us media creatures, and it made him look for all the world like he was putting one over on us and knew it. Like all of this was a huge prank, and we were the last ones in on the joke.

And then the tail of Earnhardt's black No. 3 wiggled as he entered turn three on that last lap, and he slewed up the track, and Sterling Marlin turned him just so, and a fraction of a second later he went into the wall at that fateful angle. 

And he was gone. Dead of a basal skull fracture, because by God he was Dale Earnhardt, and he wasn't going to wear that newfangled HANS device a handful of drivers were already trying out.

But because he didn't, head-and-neck restraints have been standard issue for NASCAR drivers since. And because of that, the most horrific-looking crashes -- like Ryan Newman's a year ago at Daytona -- do not end with TV announcers speaking in hushed tones and ambulances making their leisurely way to the hospital with the lights and siren off.

All of that happened 20 years ago this weekend, and to this day I can still see it. Earnhardt's crumpled car sitting motionless in the infield, and Ken Schrader, the first person to reach it, peering inside and then frantically motioning for help. Darrell Waltrip up in the booth, saying "Hope Dale's OK" in a tone that indicated he knew Dale wasn't.

And, finally, an aerial shot of the ambulance, slowly driving away from the track with its lights dark and its siren silent.

You pretty much knew then, long before Mike Helton made the official announcement.  And 20 years later?

Twenty years later, Ryan Newman starts the Daytona 500 from the inside of the fourth row, a year after he walked out of the hospital under his own steam, holding hands with his two girls, two days after what surely seemed a fatal accident.  

Twenty years later, that is Dale Earnhardt's gift to the sport that killed him.

Two-act America

F.  Scott Fitzgerald was never more wrong than when he said there are no second acts in American life. He might as well have declared the Earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese and there's a giant invisible bird in Montana that flaps its wings and makes the wind blow.

This is because not only are there second acts in American life, the nation is virtually defined by second acts. Politicians get them and athletes get them and coaches certainly get them, because if that weren't true Rick Pitino wouldn't be coaching basketball at Iona, and Bruce Pearl and Kelvin Sampson wouldn't be doing the same at Auburn and Houston, respectively.

Which brings us to Chris Doyle, and his second act.

If you've forgotten who Chris Doyle is, or never knew, that's understandable, because he wasn't a limelight sort of guy. He was the strength coach for the Iowa football program, until he wasn't. Iowa showed him the road last June because that's what you do to a guy who spews racist crap in a workplace that's more than 50 percent black.

Doyle of course denied being a bigoted turd, but the allegations stuck because there were plenty of them and they tended to be specific. Like, oh, telling black players he would send them back to the ghetto if they didn't work harder. Or mocking black players for the way they dressed. Or any number of other slights.

Fast forward to today, and new Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer going on the defensive because he decided to hire Doyle as his director of sports performance.

And so, voila, welcome to Doyle's second act. Which is actually a promotion, because he's gone from being a strength coach in college to an executive position in the NFL.  

This would not seem to be a natural career trajectory for a guy who, on top of being a bigoted turd, once landed 13 players in the hospital with an idiotic 100-squat training exercise. This is the guy you want running an NFL strength and conditioning program?

Apparently Meyer does. He says Doyle was aggressively vetted, and he's convinced the man has straightened up and will fly right -- which might actually be true, because, after all, this is the NFL.

See, you can get away with abusing 18, 19, 20-year-old kids on the college level, because college athletes more than any other athletes have absolutely zero leverage. Plus, they are still kids. 

That's not the case in the NFL, where Doyle will be working with grown men who in a lot of cases make considerably more money than he does. And who therefore are a hell of a lot more important to the organization.

Would love to be a fly on the wall the first time Doyle tries out the "ghetto" line on one of his new charges.

Something tells me it'll be the last time.

That song again

They laid out the case against a former President of the United States the other day, and it made you weep for this country. The case was devastating. The evidence was glaring. And the half of Congress no longer pledging allegiance to America, but to a corrupt and half-mad king, pointedly ignored the whole thing.

Instead, like snickering seventh graders, they made a big show of reading or shuffling paperwork or otherwise symbolically yawning as images played out of a violent attack on the Capitol building by the mad king's lunatic minions.

The message was clear, and we got it: They couldn't care less about that. It's over, so no need to hold former presidents accountable. 

Bless their hearts.

Because, see, what some of their fellow ideological travelers do care about is the national anthem, apparently, and here we go again. A president of the United States whipping up a  a mob bent on insurrection doesn't bother them, but an NBA owner deciding not to play the national anthem before games in a pandemic-emptied arena?

Why, that's cause for true outrage. To the ramparts, mon ami!

Never mind, of course, that Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks hadn't been playing the national anthem before games since the season began the day after Christmas. Or that no one noticed or cared -- not even the NBA, which shrugged when Cuban said he was going to do it -- until a writer for The Athletic happened to mention it.

Then, of course, suddenly everyone cared, including the NBA. Like every corporate entity, it got all righteous about it only when someone trained a light on it and people started yowling. Only then, citing a previously ignored rule, did it order Cuban to reinstate this curious national tradition of ours.

And it is curious, when you tilt your head and look at it just-so.

As with many traditions, this one grew out of circumstance, not out of any bone-deep conviction that a patriotic tune should be played before grown men commenced playing children's games. The Star-Spangled Banner, in fact, wasn't even the national anthem when its playing was first popularized during the 1918 World Series. And it only happened then because the United States was at war in Europe, and someone thought it might be appropriately patriotic.

And yet ... it didn't become a pregame staple until America was again fighting overseas in World War II. And the NFL didn't start playing it before games until after World War II. From then on it grew into a ritual more reflexive than symbolic, something that happened before ballgames just because that's what you did before ballgames.

So now we sing it, never wondering why baseball or football  or basketball games are particularly patriotic events. And we have all these rules for it -- which is how it became controversial when Colin Kaepernick first knelt for the anthem to protest racial inequality, and many of his fellow athletes followed suit.

The Blob will maintain to its last breath that, given the almost reverent nature of the act, it's not the kneeling that really got so many people wrathy. It was why Kaepernick and the others were kneeling. Racial inequality, after all, is something a significant part of the American populace has never liked to think about -- or even to acknowledge.

In any case, Cuban decided the best way to handle the controversy over the anthem was simply to remove the anthem. That no one noticed for almost two months speaks volumes.

Look. The Blob holds no brief for or against the playing of the national anthem at sporting events. I actually sang it before a TinCaps game once. And for four decades as a sportswriter, I proudly stood for it, my hands behind my back in what the military calls parade rest.

I'll even maintain there are certain times -- the Indianapolis 500 on Memorial Day weekend, or any sporting event conducted on the Fourth of July, for instance -- where it makes complete sense.

But to make it a cause celebre because it wasn't being played at a basketball game in January is absurd. Especially given the backdrop of what happened on January 6.

If it's been played at all at basketball games since that day, it should be played as a dirge. 

Cruel erasing

 You wonder, as always, how much of him remained when death finally took him. Was there still a scrap of some cold gray sideline afternoon, and the passion that warmed it? Were there still dimly connected dots, faces to which he could attach a name?

Bernie or Earnest or Kevin or Ozzie. Marcus or Derrick or Neil or Lake.

LaDainian. Drew. Philip. Junior. On and on.

Were all of them gone, when Alzeimer's finally claimed Marty Schottenheimer the other day after seven eroding years? Was even Marty Schottenheimer lost to him?

Dementia killed my father two years ago, and it is a mean, filthy bastard that isn't content with just ending a man's life. It erases it first, shard by shard and crumb by crumb. And that is especially cruel when the life you lived was as public and accomplished as Schottenheimer's.

The numbers say his teams won 200 games in 21 seasons as an NFL head coach, and that his teams reached the AFC championship game twice, and that the 200 wins place him seventh on the alltime list. But the numbers are not what fueled the tributes that flooded social media at his passing, from former players and colleagues and rival coaches and media who covered him.

What the tributes said was that Marty Schottenheimer was not a mere won-loss ledger, but a human being with perspective, a rare breed in as consuming a profession as professional football. What they said was Schottenheimer saw the forest for the trees, and that if he was tough and pushed the way football coaches do, he did so because he saw things in players that players sometimes never do. 

It's what separates great coaches from the merely good, and the good from the bad. It's what makes a coach beloved instead of just respected. 

You hope Schottenheimer somehow still knew that, at the end, even if the particulars were lost to him. You hope, somehow, he knew he wasn't alone in all that emptiness.

"There's a gleam, men," he said to his Cleveland Browns once, in a clip that's now famous. "There's a gleam. Let's get the gleam."

God willing he did.

Cub World, in slogans

So now we're a week deep in February, and, yeah, it's February-ing. The sun is a rumor. The windchill has a "-" in front of it. The world slumbers beneath a blanket of white, everything else is gray and/or also white, and, oh, look, it's time to go shovel the driveway again for the 1,347th time.

Yessir. February sucks. 

But do you hear that?

It's spring, whispering beneath all that implacable winter silence. It's spring, telling us this, too, shall pass, that someday there will be color again, and green growth, and breezes that don't come with a fistful of razor blades.

It's the rumble and blare of muscle cars down there in Daytona, Fla., where on Sunday they wind 'em up and go flatfooting around again like it was June or July or steaming August. And in just a few more days, in Florida and Arizona, summer's official invocation -- "pitchers and catchers report" -- will again be heard.

Which brings us, in the Blob's usual meandering, unmade bed way, to your Chicago Cubs.

The Blob has confessed before it doesn't know why the Cubs do what they do, but after a brief interlude when competence was a thing on the north side of Chicago, they've gone back to doing it. This offseason they've unaccountably dismantled a division champion, selling value for parts as if they were suddenly destitute. Not even the Blob's cruddy, Dollar General Pittsburgh Pirates have dumped salary this hard.

Know how I know this?

Because one of the the Cubs' recent acquisitions is a pitcher named Trevor Williams, an injury-plagued righty the cruddy Pirates were poised to ship back to the minors. In other words, he's not even good enough to win a roster spot on the worst team in baseball. How's that for a pickup?

Of course, there's also Joc Pederson, a career .230 bench jockey whom the Cubs just got for a song from the Dodgers. And  Sergio Alcantara, who batted .143 for Detroit last year.

The Cubs claimed him after the Tigers, next-to-last in the American League in 2020, placed him on waivers. So again they snatched up a guy not even one of baseball's worst teams wanted.

All of this gets the Blob to wondering how the Cubs are going to market themselves this year. Why, the slogans almost write themselves ...

Cubs 2021: First In Your Hearts, Fourth In The NL Central!

Cubs 2021: You're Gonna Love(able) 'Em!

Cubs 2021: STILL Better Than Pittsburgh!

Cubs 2021: STILL Your 2016 World Series Champions!

Cubs 2021: The Beer's Just As Cold And Delicious As Ever!

Cubs 2021: And God Knows You'll Need It!

Yikes.

The morning after

Those damn New England Patriots. There is no end to their chicanery.

Here we thought we'd finally gotten rid of them, and didn't have to spend yet another Super Bowl Sunday watching Darth Hoodie emote over on the sideline (Look! He just went from grimacing to Extreme Grimacing! The man's a CHAMELEON, I tell you!). And then we tune in Super Bowl LV last night, and what do we see?

Brady to Gronk for six.

Brady to Gronk for another six.

Brady to Antonio Brown for yet another six.

Please. Don't try to tell me those were the "Tampa Bay Buccaneers." Those were the stupid Patriots. They were just wearing a clever disguise, like The Weeknd wearing jockstraps on their heads for whatever that was at halftime.

("Well, you weren't the target demographic," you're saying, vis-a-vis the halftime show)

("What was the target demographic? Non-spellers?" is my response)

Anyway ... the Patriots, er, "Buccaneers" won easily, 31-9, and who didn't see that coming? ME. I had the Chiefs winning by 11. I did not have them failing to score a touchdown because not even Patrick Mahomes can catch his own passes. I also did not have Todd Bowles' defense so thoroughly smothering Mahomes Magic, sacking him three times, pressuring him a staggering 29 times and intercepting him twice.

Your Super Bowl MVP? 

Yeah, Tom Brady won it, because quarterbacks always win the Super Bowl MVP unless they're Trent Dilfer, and Brady threw three touchdown passes and is the greatest ever to play the game besides. But it should have gone to the Tampa defensive front. They came through the undermanned Kansas City O-line like a spring breeze through a screen door, sending Mahomes running for his life like Cool Hand Luke on virtually every play.

Twenty-nine pressures? Seriously?

Some other thoughts:

* People you had to be happy for: Tampa coach Bruce Arians, Tom Moore, Clyde Christensen, Joe Haeg, AQ Shipley and defensive coordinator Todd Bowles. Arians because he's one of the best people in the game; Moore, Christensen, Haege and Shipley, because they're former Colts assistants and good folks, too; and Bowles because he so richly deserved this, having served a stretch in Shawshank as head coach of the wretched Jets. 

* My friend and former sportswriting compadre Jim Saturday observed this, because he's much more astute than I am: You have to wonder how much Andy Reid's son being involved in a serious car crash Friday disrupted the Chiefs' pregame Zen. Reid at least tacitly admitted as much by extending his condolences to the victims in his postgame opening statement; Britt Reid, a Chiefs' assistant, is under investigation for the crash, which left a 5-year-old girl in critical condition.

You can "pffft" at that if you like, but the Chiefs clearly were not right from the opening kickoff Sunday, killing themselves with penalties and mistakes of composure that were utterly foreign to them. No other explanation for that seems credible.

* Best call of the night: Kevin Harlan's radio play-by-play of the daring mid-game raid carried out by some bare-assed fool wearing a bra. "Pull up those pants!" just dethroned "Do you believe in miracles?" as the most famous sports call ever.

* Best bare-assed broken-field run in Super Bowl history: Pull Up Those Pants Guy.

* Best suggestion by the Blob, having heard Eric Church and Jazmine Sullivan try to sing the national anthem: Just have Lady Gaga sing it every year from now on.

The end.

Da prediction

 I get it all the time during Super Bowl Week, because folks know what I did for a living for four decades and they can't help asking.

(Four decades! Man, when you say it like that ...)

They look at me and say, "So what's your prediction?" And of course I always give 'em one.

And then I say this: "But you don't want to listen to me. I'm almost always wrong about these things."

Then I tell them about  how my sister used to call me for advice when it came time to fill out her NCAA Tournament bracket, and how I would always say "Why are you asking me? You know I'm gonna be wrong. And not just wrong, but catastrophically, epically wrong,"

And then of course I would tell her what I thought anyway.

And later on, when I did indeed turn out to be catastrophically, epically wrong, the phone would ring and it would be my sister, saying "I thought you said ..."

"I told you not to listen to me," I'd always reply.

Which is what I'm saying to all Blobophiles now: Don't listen to me.

Don't listen to me, but my gut tells me the Big Roman Numeral goes one of two ways tomorrow. Either Tampa Bay wins a close one late, or  the Chiefs win by a couple of scores.

The former is the sexy pick right now, and it could indeed happen. I think Brady throws a couple of touchdowns no matter which way it goes. one of them to Gronk. I think he'll also get picked a couple of times, and sacked a couple of times, because he hasn't been immune to either in the playoffs so far.

I think the Buccaneers will sack Mahomes a couple of times, because they've had a pile of 'em this season and they bring everybody but the line judge on blitzes. And if they can do that enough and get Mahomes, the flow-iest quarterback in the NFL, out of his flow, they'll win 35-31 or something like that.

I don't think that's likely, though.

I think it's more likely the Chiefs get down early and then Mahomes starts doing Mahomes things. I think Brady, whose completion percentage is only around 55 percent in the playoffs, can't quite get it done this time. I think the undervalued Chiefs' defense, dinged early, shuts down the Bucs in the fourth quarter, and the Chiefs repeat as champs.

Final score: 35-24.

Let the hooting and ridicule commence,

Havoc, wreaked

Well, surely it's official now. The Bastard Plague hates no place the way it hates Fort Wayne.

Last March it pulled the plug on the Division III men's basketball Final Four.

This March it has again pulled the plug on the Division III men's basketball Final Four.

Both of those events, plus a Division I women's regional, were supposed to happen in the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum. But the Plague has now snuffed out all of them. The NCAA made that a certainty the other day, canceling all Division III winter sports championships on account of not enough member schools were participating.

And so there goes an estimated $1.775 million, flapping away like a big bird. And Fort Wayne emerges as luckless as the man who makes it safely across a heavily traveled street, only to have a piano fall on his head from the fourth floor of the building on the other side.

Cliff Notes version of the narrative, from the moment the city landed the Division III Final Four from 2019 to 2026:

Hooray for us! We just landed the Division III Final Four from 2019 to 2026!

Hooray for us! The 2019 Final Four was a rousing success! Can't wait for 2020!

Wait ... what ...

Indeed. The Plague wiped out 2020, and then it wiped out 2021 because not enough schools decided to send their student-athletes out to play in the middle of a pandemic. This seemed like a pretty well-duh decision, frankly -- except that it's played out against the backdrop of D-I men's and women's hoops deciding to forge ahead.

Which they did for the usual reason, naturally. I believe "cha-ching" is the appropriate sound effect for it. 

In any event, we're now five days deep in February, and it's hard to say who made the wiser call. On the one hand, not quite half the men's and women's basketball teams in D-III decided the game wasn't worth the candle, thereby killing the postseason. And on the other hand?

Well. In D-I, where the game is the candle, the season has devolved into a chaotic landscape of postponed games and canceled games and vast unscheduled breaks between.

Because of the Bastard Plague, Indiana just played its first game in nine days, blowing a seven-point halftime lead at home and losing in overtime to No. 12 Illinois. Butler has had four games canceled or postponed so far this season, and went 22 days between games early in the season after several positive COVID-19 tests. Duke's women's team played four games and then decided to hell with this, canceling the rest of its season on Christmas Day.

And in Division III?

Well, up in Angola, the Trine men's team remains unbeaten. And the women have lost just once. So good news for both.

Of course, the men have played only eight games.

And the women have played just six.

And it's February.

What a mess. What a complete, utter Bastard of a mess.

A furniture row, Part Deux

 Look, I know Tom Brady is special and all, what with his magic diet that keeps him perpetually 25 and his six rings and his Legacy -- which is something he's compelled to think about now even though the magic diet will probably keep him playing until he's 65.

(And that may be low-balling it)

Anyway ... yeah, he's special, in an annoying Mr. Perfect sort of way. But, come on, man. Levitation?

We take you now to the highlight of this week's pre-Super Bowl media feeding frenzy, when Brady seemed to rise into the air while answering a question, and then slowly return to earth. Check it out. And prepare for coffee spew.

Now the question, obviously, is what happened here. Did the Zoom camera malfunction and then correct itself? Was it all a prank Brady was pulling on the media with his chair adjustment (in which case, he deserves an Oscar for not breaking character)? Or was Brady simply showing off his Super-Secret Tom Brady Powers?

The likely answer is "B," but I vote for the last. Although the notion that Tom Brady has Super-Secret Levitating Powers is a pretty creepy notion, given that Randall Flagg had levitation powers in "The Stand." And we all know how that turned out.

Tweren't pretty.

Super theft

 So again the other day one of those online sportsbook ads came on the Tee Vee, and again the Blob was struck by a couple of things.

One, that the NFL that once upon a time kicked Paul Hornung and Alex Karras out of the league for a year for gambling now is oh-so-cozy with the betting crowd. I mean, the Shield even moved one of its teams to Vegas, for pity's sake. And it apparently has an Official Online Sportsbook, because DraftKings was calling the Super Bowl the "Super Bowl," and rival Fan Duel was calling it the "Big Game."

Which brings me to the other thing by which the Blob was struck: The draconian hellscape of naming rights.

The NFL, sees, actually owns the exclusive rights to the term "Super Bowl," which is why no commercial venture that is affiliated with the league is allowed to say that. No, they have to call it the Big Game or something similarly generic, or risk the Shield throwing lawyers at them until the end of time.

This is completely absurd for a couple of reasons.

One, and most obvious, the term "Super Bowl" is itself generic, after 55 years. It's what the game has been called by virtually everyone in America since the Packers ran over the Chiefs in Super Bowl I. Claiming exclusive rights to the term is like Major League Baseball claiming exclusive rights to say "World Series." Or the NHL to decree no one can use the words "Lord Stanley" or "Stanley Cup" in any description of its playoffs.

Shoot. The NFL saying no one but people it makes money off of can say "Super Bowl" is  perilously close to banning use of the word "football." I'm completely serious.

Which brings us to the second reason this is so absurd.

Go back to the origins of "Super Bowl," see, and what you'll find is the NFL might have actually stolen the name itself. The story, possibly apocryphal, is that Lamar Hunt got the idea for "Super Bowl" from the Super Ball, a popular kid's toy of the time. Super Ball ... Super Bowl ...

It sings, by golly!

This being 1966 and a less litigious time, attorneys for Wham-O, the company that made the Super Ball, did not send a cease-and-desist letter to the NFL. And so Super Bowl it became, and Super Bowl it remains to this day.

Well. Unless you're a commercial enterprise not affiliated with the NFL, that is.

Then it's the Big Game. Or That Roman Numeral Thing. Or Sixty Minutes Of Commercials Occasionally Interrupted By A Football Game. Or Wait, Don't Change The Channel To The Puppy Bowl.

Me?

I'm kinda partial to the Stolen Name Bowl. It sings.

A furniture row

Well, now we know one more thing, because in life you never stop learning.

We know throwing furniture around at a basketball game only makes you iconic if your name is Bob Knight.

This is because an Indiana high school coach named Nick Moore threw a chair the other day while his team was losing by eight, and all it did was get him fired. Yep, picked up a chair and winged it toward the opposing team's basket while his Lighthouse College Prep Academy Lions were losing to Bowman Academy 73-65 with 6:32 to play in a game up by Gary.

Hey, it almost worked. Bowman ended up eking out a 92-91 victory after Coach Moore was ejected. That dropped Lighthouse to 3-12 on the season, which might have had as much to do with Lighthouse's swift dismissal of Moore as his homage to Bob Knight.

Also, he tried to throw a second chair, but one of Lighthouse's assistants restrained him. Also, the school's athletic director, Lawrence Sandlin, was ejected. Also another Lighthouse assistant threw another chair when the game ended. 

Apparently originality isn't a thing at Lighthouse.

Either that, or they think starting a row by throwing furniture is the way successful coaches become successful.

I've been hitching a ride on this planet longer than I like to contemplate, and in all that time I've seen my share of coaches who thought that way. Coaches who thought the secret to Bob Knight's success was bullying players, game officials, administrators or some poor schlub from the student newspaper.  Coaches who confused intimidation with teaching. 

That wasn't why Knight was successful. Knowledge was why Knight was successful.

When he wasn't throwing hissy fits and being a sociopath, see, he won basketball games because most of the time he knew more basketball than the opposing coach. And he was better at teaching it -- even if sometimes he, too, confused intimidation with teaching.

Look. I don't know if Moore was consciously imitating Knight the other day. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was just super pissed off, and had to release his pissed-off-ness by taking it out on an inanimate object. The chair just happened to be what was at hand.

This is why I've always thought coaches should have an Anger Management Object with them on the bench at all times. Jerry Tarkanian used to gnaw on a wet towel when things got tense. One of the best high school coaches I ever covered, the late Norm Held at Anderson High School, used to carry a towel he would periodically fling toward the heavens when some egregious wrong was done his Indians. 

Imagine if he'd done that with a chair. Why, someone could have gotten hurt.

Anyway .. maybe if Moore had had a towel of his own the other day, he'd still have his job. A towel or a Koosh Ball or a clipboard with a built-in hinge so he could snap it over his knee without actually breaking it. Or maybe just a colorful Hawaiian lei.

Then when Coach Moore got angry he could rip off the lei and throw it towards the opposing basket, and it would make everyone think of warm sun and sandy beaches. Heck, it would almost be festive.

And festive's better than fired, right?

Requiem for a circus

 Today is the first day of the stupidest month of the year, February, when we slowly begin to understand that The Sun Is A Myth Created By The Mayans, and also that The Damn Rodent Lies, Winter Is Going To Last Until May.

It's the month Ted Turner forgot to colorize, a monochrome dial tone in which we celebrate the birthdays of two presidents, but not on either of their birthdays. Also Valentine's Day, when men venture tremulously into the haunted realm of candy and flowers and Victoria's Secret. Also Super Bowl Week, which begins today but won't be like any Super Bowl Week in recent memory thanks to the Bastard Plague.

See, this won't be like usual, when the two teams show up at the game site a week before the game and are subjected to five days of questions about their families and their SECRET DESIRES, and that coach in PAL who convinced them there were Big Things in their future. No, sir.

 In deference to the pandemic, the teams won't be arriving until Friday. Which means, among other things, no Media Day or Opening Night or whatever they're calling it these days.

Instead, there will be a virtual Media Day/Opening Night, assuming the Zoom links all work. Which of course takes all the circus out of Super Bowl Week's most circus-y manufactured event.

It's always been the event that most defined the Roman Numeral Game, and showed us what a national holiday would look like if it wore a fright wig, fake nose and giant clown shoes. Alleged media types show up dressed as superheroes or brides or even, one year, Mozart. They ask grumpy coaches to put on funny hats just to hear them grump. They ask the players what a football is, and who their favorite Marvel character is, and what position Chewbacca would play if Chewbacca were a football player.

(An actual question actually asked of Bears tight end Desmond Clark one year)

It's all dumb and annoying and three rings of elephant dung. And yet, sometimes, even when Gilbert Gottfried shows up, you're compelled to laugh at it..

Not this year, though. This year won't be the same. 

This year, it will be players answering dopey questions from, I don't know, their  bathrooms or some place.

And how do you ask Coach Grumpy to put on a silly hat when he's 1,000 miles away?

Man. Some circus this will be.