One of these things ...

 ... is not like the others. Although it once was, way back in the Before Time.

See, at last we have our Final Four. And it is Gonzaga, Baylor, Houston and ... UCLA?

Wait, what?

You mean 11-seed UCLA? You mean the UCLA that was down 13 to Michigan State in the first half of a play-in game? You mean the UCLA that lost its last four regular-season games, and finished fourth in the Pac-12, and lost nine games in the regular season?

Yes, sir. That UCLA.

Hung on to oust 1-seed Michigan in the Elite Eight last night, 51-49, and don't ask me how that happened. The Bruins just sort of scrounged around and made the game ugly the way Mick Cronin's teams tend to do, and they got 28 points from Johnny Juzang, who kept the wheels on when UCLA was down early. And now they get another 1-seed, unbeaten Gonzaga in the Final Four.

UCLA in the Final Four. 

Turn the clock back to 1970, to bell bottoms and Vietnam and Hell, No, We Won't Go. To Cambodia and battle lines bein' drawn and the Chicago 7, and to Bummer, the Beatles just broke up. To John Wooden and Lew Alcindor and Lucius Allen and Bill Walton, who was counterculture all the way but loved the squarest man in America like a second father.

The ultimate overdog then, the Bruins are the ultimate underdog now. The overdog is unbeaten Gonzaga, which not all that long ago was everyone's favorite Cinderella story. Now it's UCLA wearing that glass slipper, the fourth 11-seed to reach the Final Four in 16 years.

Of course, the others were named George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth and Loyola. Not, you know, once-upon-a-time buckets royalty.

 Remember the other day, when the Blob said college basketball in 2021 is not the same game it was back in the day?

This isn't quite quite what I meant. 

But it works anyway.

Cosmic disturbances

 I suppose there are worse portents. A plague of locusts could have fallen on those ancient championship banners. That equally ancient Indiana jersey -- the one with No. 42 on it, Mike Woodson's back when he was thin and young and the proud owner of a luxurious 'fro -- could have shrunk in the wash.

But on the day the man who needed no introduction was introduced as Indiana University's new men's basketball coach, stuff happened. And not good stuff from a karma/portent situation.

First, the Indiana women, carrying the Indiana brand forsaken by the men these past four years, finally ran into a team they couldn't crack, falling to 3-seed Arizona in the Elite Eight. It was the first time the women had reached the Elite Eight in the program's history,  and the first time any IU basketball team had gone that deep into March Madness in 19 years.

And then, in Indianapolis, in the heart of a state where his name is not well-favored among those of a certain allegiance, Kelvin Sampson reached the Final Four.

His Houston Cougars dispatched Oregon State 67-61 in the Elite Eight, and now it's on to college basketball's summit weekend. In Indianapolis. In Indiana, where the whole blamed tournament has been played.

Kelvin Sampson.

So on the day the Bobbyheads finally got themselves a Bob Knight guy to restore IU basketball's dusty glory, the man who left a smoking crater where that glory once had been reached the pinnacle of his own resurrection. And now we'll all have to choke down one of the media's favorite tropes -- Cue Redemption Story, take eleventy-thousand -- against an Indiana backdrop, 45 miles north of the scene of Sampson's original sin.

After the breaking the same rules at Indiana he broke at Oklahoma, the NCAA threw him out of its circus for being too corrupt, which is a hell of a feat considering the entity doing the throwing. Then they let him come back. Now he's really back, and let the feel-good features flow.

Maybe that's a bad omen, portent, whatever, for Mike Woodson and IU. Or maybe it just suggests the past is the past and now it's on to a brighter future -- even if the Woodson hire is itself a significant nod to the past.

Then again, I could be reading too much into all this. I suppose that's possible, too.

"Ya think?" you're saying now.

Oh, be quiet.

The pick. (With questions)

 So I'm watching Michigan put Florida State's season on the shelf, and I can see this now. Sort of. Maybe.

I'm looking at my TV, and there is Juwan Howard with his NBA resume, and there is Phil Martelli with his college resume, and I see what Indiana's thinking. If it could work in Ann Arbor ...

And so to the Hire, to Mike Woodson coming home to Assembly Hall as Indiana's fourth head coach since Bob Knight, to a 63-year-old NBA lifer who's been a head coach for more than 600 NBA games, most of them losses. He's Indiana's version of Howard, albeit 15 years older. Thad Matta, also hired yesterday as IU's associate AD for basketball, fills the role of Martelli, sort of. 

Gotta think that's the thinking, anyway.

Gotta wonder, also, how long-term is Indiana's thinking, given that if Woodson fulfills his reported six-year deal, he'll be nearly 70 when it's time to re-up it.

So there's my first question.

My second question is why Indiana would again do something that feels like an experiment, when athletic director Scott Dolson said Indiana was done with experiments where its basketball job was concerned. But that's not really so much a question as an observation.

So is this: College basketball is not the same game it was 40-some years ago when Mike Woodson played there. Which is what makes me think this could actually work, maybe.

Look. It's great Woodson's a legacy Hoosier and all, and that he played for Bob Knight, whose shadow continues to enrich Indiana basketball's past while restraining its future. That at least will satisfy the diehard Bobbyheads. 

What will satisfy today's recruits, on the other hand, is entirely different. And that's where Woodson's NBA cred is a plus.

First off, anyone who thinks he's going to come in and install some version of Knight's prehistoric  motion offense will likely be sorely disillusioned, because you don't attract talent in 2021 by saying "Come to IU and set screens for four years."  Those days are done.

No, the college game looks and operates a lot like the NBA now. It, too, is professional basketball in everything but semantics, operating by the same business model and motivated by the same imperatives. Which means, theoretically at least, that the college game should not be nearly the alien landscape to an NBA lifer that it was 40 years ago.

That dovetails neatly with another reality: No one's going to come to IU because they've always dreamed of playing for Mike Woodson. To kids in 2021, Mike Woodson is just some old guy who played at IU when there were still laces on the basketball. What they'll come for is Woodson is a guy who's played and coached in the NBA for 40 years and knows what it takes to get there and stay there.

So IU buckets under Woodson will likely look a lot more like the NBA than the '76 (or '81 or '87) Hoosiers. And if Woodson was never successful with that model in the NBA, he did make the teams he coached better.

In Atlanta, he took the Hawks to the playoffs in 2007-08 for the first time in eight years, and got them to the Eastern Conference semifinals the next two seasons. And in New York, he went 18-6  after taking over the sadsack Knicks in March 2012, then wrung 54 wins out of them the next season.

Ultimately he lost his job in both places, because the Hawks were the Hawks and the Knicks were the Knicks. But both teams got better under his hand.

That's a salient point in Bloomington after four years of Archie Miller, during which the Hoosiers consistently got worse the longer the season went on.

That's not likely to recur if Woodson's track record is any guide.

And will that be enough for the perpetually disgruntled IU fan base?

Maybe. Sort of. We'll see.

Seeing the light

 Self-interest is a wonderful vehicle for clarifying things. The truth may be out there, but until it affects you personally, you sometimes don't see it.

Consider Mick Cronin's vision much improved, in that case.

See, he's got his UCLA Bruins playing in the Sweet Sixteen today, but he doesn't have Dashien Nix. Nix was a showroom guard he had on the hook a couple years ago, until he didn't. Nix opted to go play in the NBA's G-League instead, an option now available to top-flight prospects coming out of high school.

Cronin doesn't have a problem with that. What he has a problem with is the G-League actively recruiting Nix after it knew he was a major UCLA recruit.

And here we go again, the NBA talking junk about how the pros and the colleges are all in this for the athletes' welfare, while treating the colleges like something you scrape off your shoe. And Cronin's damn sick and tired of it, because now it's affecting him.

"A free farm system for 40 years for the NBA," is how he described it the other day.

Well, yes, and the colleges have gone right along with it. Instead of taking steps to push back against the NBA for its absurd 19-year-old rule, they've merely exploited it by signing every year's new crop of Dashien Nixes knowing full well they're just using Whatsamatta U. as a waiting room until they turn 19. 

Which of course makes an utter joke out of the professed mission of college athletics, which is to allow gifted athletes access to first-class educations.

That has been a laughable notion for a long time in the upper reaches of college athletics, and nothing illustrates it more starkly than the one-and-dones precipitated by the NBA's idiotic rule. College coaches and administrators wring their hands and talk junk themselves about it, but the bottom line is the bottom line. If signing a handful of one-and-dones can gain you access to another round of cash in the NCAA Tournament, they'll gladly keep doing it.

Because if they were serious about not using these kids as ATMs, they'd stop recruiting them. Or tell them they wouldn't recruit them without at least a two-year commitment.

Or do a lot more than just complain about the NBA's restraint of trade.

"It's America," Cronin told ESPN Radio the other day. "A guy can go to war when he's 18. He can grab a gun and get killed for his country, but he can't put his name in the (NBA) draft? Come on, man, it's ridiculous."

Indeed it is.

So stop talking and start doing.

The sting of true loss

 The games will go on again today, as the games must. Four teams will reach the Elite Eight. Four will go home, wounded and hurting and unable, for the moment, to stop thinking about what might have been had they just shot straighter, defended harder, been less the victim of basketball's cruel physics.

Loft plus trajectory equals victory. Too much or too little loft, plus too much or too little trajectory, equals just another stat in the rebound column. And heartache. 

But let's talk about true heartache a moment. Let's talk about true loss.

Both happened in northern California the other day, when a young man, his sister and a third person died in a car accident. The young man was 23-years-old. His name was Oscar Frayer. And three days before his young life ended before it had properly started, he played in the same tournament sixteen teams will resume playing today.

Frayer, see, was a 6-foot-6 senior guard/forward for Grand Canyon University, which last week played in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history. The Antelopes lost to Iowa, 86-74. As noted in a story by Myron Medcalf of ESP.com, Frayer started 107 games for GCU in his career, and in his final game contributed eight points, five assists, three blocks and a steal to the Grand Canyon effort.

It was the pinnacle of his basketball life, one imagines. And when it was over he was off first to commencement and then to the rest of his life, having earned a degree in communications.

Now he and his sister and another person are gone. Like that.

No loss you see across the next few days will ever be as final, nor sting as hard.

One shining moment

 And, no, we're not talking about THE One Shining Moment, which is what all of America waits up for the first Monday night in April because CBS refuses to start the NCAA championship game at a civilized hour. 

We're talking about what happened out in Tempe, Ariz., the other day, where a 30-year-old man decided to commit sexual assault on a 71-year-old woman in a park in broad daylight. And where what subsequently happened proves that maybe God wears an Aaron Rodgers or Patrick Mahomes or Tom Brady jersey on Sundays in the fall.

What subsequently happened was, Justin Herron and another man came to the rescue.

Herron, see, is a New England Patriots offensive tackle out of Wake Forest who just completed his rookie season. He's rather large. OK, he's really large: 6-5 and 305 pounds of professional athlete. And when he and a man named Murry Rogers saw what was happening, they leaped up and started yelling at the guy to get off her.

Then Herron pulled the guy off her and told him to sit his ass down and wait for police. I imagine it was a little like a regular-sized human plucking a hotdog wrapper off the sidewalk.

Anyway, the Tempe police declared Herron and Rogers heroes, and Roger Goodell and the rest of the NFL suits must be on their knees thanking a benevolent Almighty. Because, of course, it happened right in the middle of the whole Deshaun Watson mess, in which one of the league's its brightest stars is getting buried in civil suits as an alleged serial sexual harasser/molester.

PR like that you don't need when you've expended so much time and effort telling America you take sexual assault and domestic violence really really seriously. Really.

Now they've got Justin Herron to trot out there and say "See? NFL players GET IT."

Shoot. They might just erect a statue of the guy somewhere.

Parity beckons

The Blob has yapped enough the last few days about the particularly mad Madness of this year's men's March Madness. It's high time, in the interests of the equity the NCAA shuns, to look in on the women's March Madness.

(Yes, I know. The NCAA has forbade the women from using the lucrative March Madness brand. Screw them. This is my Blob and I make the rules, and my rules say the women's tournament shall be called March Madness, too.)

In any event, something interesting and fairly significant is happening on the women's side.

Once upon time there was Connecticut and there was Tennessee and there were Baylor, Stanford, South Carolina, Notre Dame and the Texases, the University and A&M. Iowa and Purdue, sure. Duke and North Carolina a bit later.

Everyone else?

Everyone else was kibble.

A lower seed, back in the day, had about as much chance against one of the top four or five seeds as a stalk of wheat has against a combine. The women's tournament was a second-grade classroom: Big kids towering over little kids, and miles and miles of chalk.

But something wonderful is happening these days.

Parity has entered the building.

Twelves are beating 5s. Elevens are beating 6s. A 13 beat a 4 the other day, and last night, a 2-seed (Texas A&M) had to go overtime against a 7-seed (17-11 Iowa State) and survived by two to reach the Sweet Sixteen.

Conclusion: The women's side is starting look more and more like the men's side every day. Except for, you know, the branding and the amenities and the facilities and that sort of thing, which are still low-rent and still convey the NCAA's unspoken sentiment: You girls get back down in steerage where you belong.

That said, when a 13-seed like Wright State knocks off a 4-seed like Arkansas in the first round, that's a good thing. When a 12-seed Belmont beats 5-seed Gonzaga, that's a good thing, too. Or an 11 like BYU knocking out a 6 like Rutgers.

All of that means the women's game has more quality players than ever before, and not all of them are winding up at UConn. And that means the women's game is growing the way a sport should grow, from the grassroots up.

More elementary girls playing basketball leads to more middle school girls playing basketball leads to more high school girls playing basketball -- and more to the point, more highly skilled high school girls playing basketball.

The NCAA can treat the women's game like a nuisance all it likes. It's still getting better anyway.

And, yes, it's March Madness, too. No matter what a bunch of withered old white guys say.

Timing is all

 Perhaps now is the time for the National Football League to send a decorative fruit basket to Sister Jean. Or to those plucky lads from Oral Roberts. Or to the four Pac-12 teams still thumbing their noses at their allegedly learned detractors ... or to the lonely Michigan Wolverines ... or to ancient Jim Boeheim and his diabolical 2-3 zone.

Let me explain this.

See, the NFL has a great big public relations nightmare blowing up in its face right now, and Sister Jean and the plucky ORU lads and the rest of the NCAA Tournament is providing excellent cover for it. Because without Da Tournament sucking all the oxygen out of the room, how much bigger would this Deshaun Watson business be?

I mean, one of the NFL's biggest stars stands accused of being a serial sexual harasser/molester, and not just any sexual harasser/molester. So far 16 lawsuits have been filed against Watson by women, mostly massage therapists, alleging Watson made unwanted sexual advances to them -- the most recent just this month. And it's mostly flown under the radar because everyone's preoccupied with their Brackets Flambe.

The story wasn't even a blip until the number of Watson's accusers got up in the double digits, and the Blob blames Da Tournament. The American public can't hold more than one big story in its head at a time, and these days it's often either a Stupid Performative Outrage Story or a Totally Made Up Story. And so of course it's going to be a particularly Mad edition of March Madness -- after a year in which there was none -- that has folks preoccupied.

Which should not be, because this Watson thing is huge. 

It's huge, first of all, because not long ago every team in the league with a quarterback deficiency was camping out on Deshaun Watson's front lawn, on the very suggestion he might be unhappy in Houston. This is because Watson is one of the top five quarterbacks in football. It's scary to think how much teams would be willing to defile themselves for him. 

Sorry. Would have been willing to defile themselves.

Now, probably not so much, with the legion of his accusers seemingly growing by the day. Even with Da Tournament still in the midst of a lovely fit of Big Crazy, it's finally become the story it should have been all along. You can't go on a sports website or the Magic Twitter Thingy without seeing the latest developments prominently displayed.

And that, boys and girls, must have the NFL in absolute cringe mode. It's already gotten a reputation as a warehouse for sexual predators and domestic abusers, despite all its earnest PR to the contrary. Now one of its marquee names is being painted as an insatiable horndog? And in the era of #MeToo, when more and more women are saying "Oh, HELL, no" to indignities they've put up with ... well, forever?

What the NFL is going to do about all this remains down the road, the only piece of good news for the Shield at the moment. Right now we're still in the lawyer smear mode phase, accusations being lobbed back and forth like a catapult lobbing boulders at a castle wall.

Watson's people are claiming one of the plaintiffs tried to extort Deshaun after a consensual encounter. The plaintiffs' crew counters that Watson offered hush money to one of his alleged victims and tried to pressure her into signing a non-disclosure agreement, saying repeatedly he could either "help, or hurt, her career."

He said. She said. The age-old tale.

Of course, in other news, Da Tournament starts up again Saturday with Sweet Sixteen games. 

No doubt the NFL can't wait.

One passing, and one memory

 So now I'm 18 years old again, with Cal Purinton gone. I'm 18 and it's 1973 and the Fort Wayne Komets are sweeping Port Huron out of the Turner Cup final, and it's time to go back to that little bandbox McMorran Arena and relive a night I have relived before.

If you read my column back when I was doing my sportswriter gig for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, you'll recognize that night. I wrote about it several times, when the Komets were winning titles in 1993 and the early 2000s. I probably wrote about it too much. Nobody likes a retread, after all.

But now word has come down that Big Cal is gone at 78 after a long battle with cancer. And I've gotta go back there again, because as so often happens death rides shotgun with memory, the former remorselessly dragging the latter along with it whether it wants to come or not.

And so: McMorran Arena in Port Huron, one of the International Hockey League's more remote outposts. An April night in 1973. And Cal Purinton.

Who nearly ended my life that night, and probably never even knew it.

Cal was the classic tough-guy defenseman for the Komet, one of those stay-at-home blueliners who brooked no nonsense in his end and kept the goalmouth clean of enemy forwards and various other annoyances. You didn't mess with Big Cal, who scored just 36 goals in 524 games with the Komets but racked up 1,306 penalty minutes. He and Terry Pembroke -- also gone, sadly -- formed perhaps the Komets' most legendary defensive tandem.

But back to 1973.

My best friend and I were part of the bus caravan that made the four-hour trip to Port Huron for the fourth game of the final, figuring the Komets would wrap it up that night. Twelve busloads of Komets fans thought the same thing. That night half of McMorran was wearing orange-and-black.

And of course the Komets won, completing the sweep. Someone threw a garbage  bag on the ice as the clock got skinny.  It lay there in one faceoff circle as the horn sounded and we all headed screaming for ice level, and then onto the ice itself as the gates opened at one end.

So there I was, slipping and sliding and screaming my head off like the 18-year-old goof I  was. And then I turned around, and there was Big Cal, trying to make his way off the ice.

I don't think he ever saw me, because there wasn't much to see in those days. Just like Rudy from the movie, I weighed 100 and nothin' and stood 5 feet nothin'. And here came the biggest, toughest Komet of them all, bearing down on me like a Mack truck bearing down on a rabbit.

"Gaah!" I said, or something like that.

And then somehow got out of his way at the last second. Otherwise I probably wouldn't be writing this.

So there it is. There's my Cal Purinton memory.

And do I need to say how much I wish it hadn't come up again?

The Smaller Ten

 Take heart, you chastened Big Ten people. At least you're not Kansas.

Beaten out of sight by a football school. Now there's what you want on your tombstone.

But USC couldn't miss and they sent the Jayhawks home last night, and by 33 points. It was Kansas' worst NCAA Tournament defeat ever, and it took a bit of the spotlight off the Smaller Ten's awful weekend.

So there's that, Smaller Ten. And you've got Michigan, which advanced to the Sweet Sixteen by asserting itself in the last 10 minutes and brushing aside LSU.

Other than that ... well, the Smaller Ten did Smaller Ten things in the Madness, only more egregiously than usual. Nine conference teams Marched into the Madness; only one survived the first weekend.

Two of them (Ohio State and Iowa) were 2-seeds. One (Purdue) was a 4-seed. One (Michigan State, usually all flavors of dangerous in March) didn't even get out of the play-in round.

So the Smaller Ten is 1-for-9 in the Sweet Sixteen, and the allegedly much smaller Pac-12 is 4-for-5. It figures.

It figures, because no one would have picked this Sweet Sixteen, unless you filled out your bracket in the throes of an acid flashback. Half the 2-seeds are missing. Three of the four 3-and-4-seeds are gone. A quarter of the 16 remaining teams are 11-seeds or higher.

But Michigan is there, and so are two of the other 1-seeds. So the Smaller Ten's got that going for it.

Some people might call that small potatoes. 

But really it's just, you know, Smaller potatoes.

Stop the Madness (Just kidding)

 OK. Now this is just getting silly.

But, you know, the good kind of silly.

See, we're now halfway through the round of 32 in Da Tournament, and, hey, look at this, everyone's favorite national champ pick (Illinois) is done like dinner. And its goose was cooked by a 101-year-old nun and a kid who plays the harmonica and looks like the guy down at Al's Garage who says "OK, mister, try to start her now."

The nun, of course, is Sister Jean, who became a celebrity when Loyola made it all way to the national championship game in 2019. Now the Loyolas are at it again, knocking out the Big School downstate, which was a No. 1 seed and looked like an Illinois team that wasn't gonna fall short like so many other Illinois teams have fallen short.

Alas, Loyola almost perfectly executed an impeccable game plan, the aforementioned kid (Cameron Krutwig) went for 19 and 12 and proved once more how much appearances can deceive, and the Ramblers sent the Illini home by 13 points. They led by nine at the half and Illinois never got closer than six again.

But, wait, that's not all!

Move on to later in the day, and here was 11-seed Syracuse and that damn 2-3 zone confounding yet another team, this time 3-seed West Virginia. And was that 15-seed Oral Roberts doing it again, this time knocking out Florida?

Indeed it was. So now you've got Loyola in the Sweet Sixteen and Oral Roberts in the Sweet Sixteen, and all the Big Ten teams are gone except for Michigan, Iowa and Maryland, because it's Da Tournament and in Da Tournament Big Ten teams do Big Ten things.

Like, you know, lose.

It's all Big Crazy and it's absolutely wonderful, but it does make you think the selection committee tripped over a crack in the sidewalk this time. Oral Roberts looks nothing like a 15-seed, first of all. Loyola is a 4-seed disguised as an 8-seed. And Syracuse is no 11-seed.

Meanwhile, on we go. There are more games today, and in one of them 2-seed and SEC champ Alabama plays 10-seed and  eighth-in-the-Big-Ten Maryland. And in two other games, 1-seed Michigan plays 8-seed LSU, and 2-seed Iowa plays 7-seed Oregon from the Pac-12 -- a conference which, unlike the Big Ten, hasn't lost a game yet. 

The good news for Iowa and Michigan: No nuns.

Things that matter more

So your bracket is cinders now, because March Madness has been wonderfully Mad so far.

So you're an Ohio State fan or a Purdue fan or a Virginia fan or a Texas fan, wondering what the hell happened.

So you're Oral Roberts or North Texas or Ohio U. or Abilene Christian, saying "This happened.

So you're wallowing in basketball heaven right now, brackets aside, because how do you not love a round of 64 in which three 13s beat three 4s, a 15 beat a 2 and two 11s beat two 6s?

Prime stuff. But not the best stuff that's happened so far this weekend.

The best stuff is also about basketball, sort of, but more about human beings doing human things. And not awful human things, because too many of those happen every day, but the sort of human things that make you think, if an advanced alien culture ever lighted on Earth, it might let us live.

Maybe you've tended to overlook it, what with Da Tournament playing out entirely in Indiana right now, but a Hoosier basketball tradition far more anchored in bedrock is happening simultaneously. That would be the Indiana high school tournament, now 110 years old and known as Hoosier Hysteria until 1997. And up in Elkhart, in the venerable Northside gym, something happened yesterday in the 2A semistate that was fairly wonderful.

See, top-ranked Blackhawk Christian rolled over Blackford and the marvelous Luke Brown by 27 points, but somehow Blackford managed to win anyway. Because when the Bruins came out, they were wearing warmup shirts that said this on the back: "Davidsonstrong. Because there are things in life that are just more important than basketball."

This was not a reference to anyone in the Blackford community.

This was a reference to Blackhawk Christian head coach Marc Davidson -- the opposing coach -- who is battling a rare form of lung cancer right now.

Luke Brown was his usual marvelous self in Blackford's loss, scoring 34 points in his final high school game. But before the game even tipped, his team had outdone him.

Impeccably played, Bruins. Impeccably played.

Hand-me-down March

 So I guess Title IX is just, you know, a suggestion.

I guess college athletics is nothing but a revenue stream after all, because them that produces the most stream gets all the revenue.

I guess the (mostly) men who run the bidness venture known as the NCAA really are about half-bright, because how dumb do you have to be to so openly disrespect women's athletics?

They've heard of the internet over there, right? Instagram? Twitter? TikTok? All that?

And so how did they think the women playing in the women's March Madness were not going to be seriously pissed at the second-class citizenry to which they've been so clearly subjected? How did they not foresee some of those seriously pissed women would start posting photos of how different the swag and training facilities and even the meal plans were for them as opposed to the men?

The men got a swag bag full of all manner of goodies with "The Big Dance" and "March Madness" adorning it.

The women got scrunchies.

And none of it said the Big Dance or March Madness because only the men's tournament is allowed to use that branding.

Just like only the men's tournament allows payouts. 

Every school that wins a game gets a payout. No women's team, not even the team that wins it all, will get a red cent. Zilch, zippo, nada.

On and on it goes. Teams in the men's tournament in Indiana have access to an expansive, fully stocked weight room; the women in San Antonio have one rack of dumbbells and some yoga mats. The men get food catered in from the best restaurants in Indianapolis; the women get pre-packaged meals one player accurately described as "like nice jail food."

Perhaps most crucially, the men even have access to a more accurate COVID-19 test than the women.

It's absurd. It's scandalous. And the NCAA's been doing it for decades.

Their mucketies talk a good game about equality and how women's athletics are an integral part of their "mission," whatever that is, but it's all just a massive expulsion of super-heated air. Get to down to cases, and women's athletics is an afterthought. And that's because it doesn't produce the revenue men's athletics do.

Which is a tacit admission that top tier college athletics really is nothing but a corporate enterprise that operates like any corporate enterprise.

I know this because that's how some people will defend treating the women like hand-me-downs. The men produce more revenue, therefore they should be better rewarded. You don't see the low guy on the sales chart getting paid the same as the guy at the top, do you?

This misses the point entirely, of course, if you believe what the NCAA says is the aim of college athletics. If it's all about the "student-athlete" and education and gateways to academic opportunity, then who delivers how much dough should be immaterial. Women and men should be regarded as equally valuable components of the system.

And it's not as if the women aren't producing dough.

As Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post so witheringly points out here, the women's March Madness is not exactly a drain on the corporate ledger. The women's Final Four in 2019 set attendance records in a 21,000-seat arena. The championship game drew 3 million TV viewers. The entire tournament drew almost 275,000 fans.

Fans who paid. Fans who booked hotel rooms. Fans who bought concessions and ate at restaurants.

I doubt seriously if any of them dined on nice jail food when they did.

After all, they weren't the players.

Upsets, we got upsets

 So remember the other day, when people were talking up the Big Ten and had as many as three Big Ten teams in their Final Four brackets, and Ohio State was one of them, and other people thought Purdue might be a crafty pick, too, as a 4-seed?

Good times, man. Goood times.

Because then the games started and 2-seed Ohio State was playing 15-seed Oral Roberts in Mackey Arena, and HEY, WHERE DID THIS KEVIN OBANOR GUY COME FROM, AND WHY IS HE BEATING US?

And then last night came and 4-seed Purdue was in against 13-seed North Texas -- not the big Texas, mind you, but freaking North Texas -- and OMIGOD WE JUST LOST TO A DIRECTIONAL SCHOOL THAT HAD NEVER WON AN NCAA TOURNAMENT GAME IN ITS HISTORY!

Bad times, man. Baaaad times.

But here we have to thank Purdue and Ohio State and also Michigan State (which is outta here, too, already) and really the Big Ten generally, because its disdain for chalk made the first day of Da Tournament what the first day is supposed to be.

Which is: Bunch of folks sitting in front of a bank of TVs, ordering another beer and some more wings while they shout stuff like "What the hell, Ohio State?" and "For God's sake, Purdue!" After which much griping about vaporized brackets will ensue.

It's the best thing about all this Madness. 

Folks in Columbus and West Lafayette will not agree, of course, in the immediate aftermath of the inexplicable. How does Duane Washington Jr. miss that pull-up three at the end of regulation, and then shoot one last three-ball crooked just before the final horn in overtime?  

And Purdue?

How do the Boilers let a guy named Hamlet light 'em up? How do they sleepwalk through most of the game before gasping their way into overtime? And how do they then miss their first nine shots and go 4 1/2 of the five minutes scoreless? 

Of such mysteries are memorable Da Tournaments made.

Columbus and West Lafayette aside, see, yesterday was a great day for the unattached observer. No one wants to see straight chalk in the round of 64. Chalk is boring. Chalk makes you change the channel to The Big Bang Theory reruns. Chalk is for drawing unflattering pictures of Miss McGrumplestein on the board when her back is turned.

 Thank heavens we didn't get that yesterday.

Instead, a 15 beat a 2 and a 13 beat a 4, and there was the requisite 12-over-5 (thanks, Oregon State!). Wisconsin delivered an epic 9-over-8 when the Badgers beat the powder blue out of North Carolina by 23. Lower-seeded teams won six games, including 11-seed Syracuse ball-peening 6-seed San Diego State by 16. 

Brackets all over America were ash, by the end of Friday. We're only halfway through the round of 64 and the Big Ten has already lost three teams, proving once again that in March it often transforms into the Smaller Ten. 

Shoot. Even Indiana fans had something to cheer about Friday, which they needed after Brad Stevens all but picked up a megaphone to announce DAMMIT I'M NOT COMING TO BLOOMINGTON.

See, even though the Hoosiers again missed the Madness, they won exactly as many tournament games as Purdue did.

Something for everybody.

Bracket muckery

 So I guess this is the part where the Blob launches its newest get-rich-quick scheme.

What do you think the market would be for Pre-Ignited NCAA Brackets?

That's right, boys and girls, now you can purchase your brackets already burned to a cinder, thanks to what happened last night in the play-in games. I mean, you had Michigan State going deep, right?

Sure you did. After all, Tom Izzo always has Sparty ready to take someone down at tournament time. March Madness wouldn't be March Madness if MSU wasn't on one of your Sweet Sixteen lines. And these Spartans look like just the sort of pick astute bracketeers would pick, because, remember, they beat one of the No. 1 seeds (Michigan) and als-

Wait. What?

What do you mean they LOST THEIR PLAY-IN GAME??

Yes, that's right. UCLA got Sparty in overtime last night, 86-80, and, hey, no fair, the upsets aren't supposed to begin until today. Seriously, who saw some lame Pac-12 school taking them out? Who saw Izzo grabbing a fistful of one of his kids shirts like he was, I don't know, channeling his inner Bob Knight?

Today and tomorrow are gonna be three rings of fun if that's any indication.

I don't know how the games come out and neither do you, but this is already one of the madder Madnesses in a stretch. And we haven't even gotten to the good part yet.

Duke and Kentucky and Louisville and Izzo are out, but Hartford is in for the first time ever. Drake beat Wichita State last night for its first NCAA Tournament win in 50 years. Two HBCU schools (Norfolk State and Texas Southern) won their play-in games last night, and a football school (Alabama) is a 2-seed.

Six schools from Texas are in, speaking of football places. Grand Canyon is in, but the rest of Arizona is not. On and on.

The Blob's favorite for the traditional 12-over-5 upset?

Winthrop over Villanova.

Ghosts of Upsets Past Special?

Cleveland State (Remember when it beat Indiana?) over Houston.

Traditional MAC School Surprise?

Ohio over Virginia.

Naturally, none of that will probably happen. 

But as this guy liked to say: Be cooler if it did.

Welcome to Indiana

 Tonight the 2021 NCAA men's basketball tournament begins, sort of, although not really if you consider tonight's games the play-in games, which they are no matter what the NCAA says.

In any event, it's gonna be all kinds of different this year, thanks to the Bastard Plague. All the games will be played in Indiana, which is right and proper and the way God intended. This is because basketball was invented in Indiana, or at least high school basketball was, because when the harvest was in and spring planting was a ways off Hoosiers needed something to do.

And so they started a high school state tournament in 1911, and Crawfordsville won, and then a couple years later a little dot on the map called Wingate won because they had a muscle-y farm kid named Homer Stonebraker, who was the state's first Damon Bailey. And off Indiana went.

And now, you're here, America.

Welcome. And as a public service, the Blob presents a handy guide to stuff you should experience while you're in Indiana if you want to get the full Indiana experience:

1. Find an out-of-the-way diner somewhere and order a giant breaded tenderloin.

Indiana's famous for the giant breaded tenderloin. The biggest ones are the size of Bulgaria and are served on a regulation hamburger bun, which sits on top of it like the batting helmet used to sit on top of Oscar Gamble's luxurious Afro. It's kind of Indiana's idea of a joke.

Also, breaded tenderloins are delicious. Also-also, they will slam your arteries shut faster than you can say "myocardial infarction." 

Assuming you can.

2. Drive over to Knightstown and make a layup in the gym Jimmy Chitwood made famous.

Perhaps nothing so enhanced Indiana's reputation as a basketball mecca as "Hoosiers," that cinematic love letter Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh composed in 1986.  The old Knightstown gym was the home gym for the mythical Hickory Huskers. It's where Jimmy played and Rafe and Strap and Ollie, and where Shooter ran the picket fence at 'em before he started hitting the booze again.

In any event, it's in Knightstown, which is 38 miles east of Indianapolis in Henry County. Just a hop, skip and a jump, really.

One thing, though: If you take a shot there, you gotta use the glass. Jimmy did.

3. Swing by Chrysler Arena and Crispus Attucks High School.

The former is the home of the New Castle Trojans (and Steve Alford!), a few miles down the road from Knightstown. It was for a long time the largest high school gym in America. New Castleians used to brag about that endlessly, which provoked an epidemic of eye-rolling from everyone else in the North Central Conference. 

After all, the NCC had its share of iconic gyms: The Wigwam over in Anderson, the Muncie Fieldhouse, Bill Green Arena in Marion, the Berry Bowl in Logansport, Memorial Gym in Kokomo.

And Crispus Attucks?

Located on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street in Indianapolis, it's where Oscar Robertson played, and where he led Attucks to back-to-back state titles in 1955 and 1956. That made Attucks the first all-black high school to win Indiana's high school tournament.

Contrary to what some Hoosier bumpkins believed at the time, hell did not immediately arrive in a handbasket.

4. Visit Crown Hill Cemetery in Indy and say howdy to John Dillinger.

He's buried there, you know. One of the guys who ran with him, Homer Van Meter, is buried in Fort Wayne. We're famous for our outlaws and psychopaths.

Jim Jones grew up in Richmond, 73 miles east of Indy. Charlie Manson spent some time in Terre Haute as a boy. Al Capone and the boys used to hang out at the Barbee Hotel up in Kosciusko County. 

Oh, and, Dean Corll, who briefly held the title of Worst Serial Killer In American History when he murdered 28 young boys down in Houston in the early '70s, was born in the Fort Wayne suburb of Waynedale.

Something in the water, perhaps.

5. Wait, come back. Don't be scared. There's lots of other stuff to see in Indiana.

Seriously, most of us are quite friendly, and aren't looking to kill or rob you. So you'll be perfectly safe if you're looking to venture away from Indy for a day trip or two.

You can drive down to tiny Milan in southeast Indiana, where ... well, you know about Milan. Bobby Plump, The Shot Heard 'Round The World, all that. Someone made a movie about it.

And while you're in southern Indiana, you can always celebrate Christmas early and visit Santa Claus. It's the hometown of former Bears quarterback Jay Cutler, aka the Sourest Man In Football. Which is hilarious if you think about it.

Also in southern Indiana is Lincoln's boyhood home. He grew up in Indiana, mostly. Kentucky claims his birthplace and Illinois calls itself the Land of Lincoln, but screw them. We own him, too.

Headed north?

Well, Fort Wayne was once the Native American metropolis of Kekionga, the most important trading center in the old Northwest Territories. It was the capital city of Little Turtle and the Miamis, and Tecumseh and his brother the Prophet lived there for awhile, and William Henry Harrison was there a few times. 

There's a statue of Little Turtle in Fort Wayne, but it's hidden away in a secluded glade in Headwaters Park. On the other hand, the statue of Anthony Wayne, for whom the city was named after he ran off the Miamis and the other native peoples in the region, sits in Freimann Square on Main Street downtown. 

Which is pretty much American history in a nutshell. 

Now grab yourself a giant breaded tenderloin and root for that 16-seed. Because we like our underdogs in Indiana.

The Bear(s) minimum

 Bears Fan was looking a bit downcast this morning, more downcast than usual, which will happen when your childhood memories include Bobby Douglass handing off to Ralph Kurek.

"Andy Dalton?!" Bears Fan is saying, upon learning the Bears had acquired Dalton from the Cowboys on a one-year, $10-million deal. "But we wanted Russell Wilson!"

Well, they tried, Bears Fan is told. 

"'Tried?'" Bears Fans sneers, and then channels Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no try!"

But Wilson wasn't leaving Seattle, it turns out. Maybe he found out the Bears were serious.

"Oh, sure! Make fun!" Bears Fan says.

And then looks sad again.

"Why can't we have nice things, like other teams?"

Well ...

Well, because it's the Bears. Getting Russell Wilson would have upset the natural order, because in the natural order, the Bears aren't supposed to have an elite quarterback. They haven't in my lifetime, and I'm 66 years old. I mean, they're the Bears.

So of course they wound up with Andy Dalton.

Andy Dalton is the perfect Bears quarterback, see. He's OK, but not too OK. He had a few more-than-OK stretches with the Bengals -- he's a three-time Pro Bowler, remember -- but he's also had some not-even-OK stretches, and occasionally he was flat-out bad.

He's thrown 218 touchdown passes in 10 seasons, but he's also thrown 126 interceptions. That works out to 12.6 per season. He had eight last year in 11 starts, and he was also sacked 24 times.

Meanwhile, Mitchell Trubisky, the heir apparent Bears quarterback, started 10 games last year after being benched for awhile in mid-season. He threw 16 touchdown passes and eight interceptions. The Bears were 6-3 with him calling the signals.

What the Blob concludes from that is the Bears just paid $10 million for a semi-reliable backup. In other words, they just acquired Nick Foles again, only with flaming red hair. 

Which means Dalton the Magnificent Carrot Top will probably see a fair amount of playing time this season when Matt Nagy inevitably benches Trubisky again.

"You mean this year will be the same as last year?" Bears Fan wails. "But we wanted Russell Wilson!!"

Yeah, well. It's the Bears. You'll have to make do with Virgil Carter.

Or Bob Avellini. Or Gary Huff. Or Peter Tom Willis or Jim Miller or Doug Flutie or ...

Who for IU

 Scott Drew ain't the guy. After 18 years he's Mr. Baylor now, same as Bob Knight was Mr. IU by the time his alma mater's job opened up at Ohio State.

Steve Alford ain't the guy, either, on account of IU apparently isn't interested.

John Beilein, Dane Fife, Tony Bennett at Virginia, Chris Beard at Texas Tech?

Maybe, maybe, maybe and maybe.

That leaves one guy. I think you know who he is.

Brad Stevens.

Indiana born and bred, prodigy coach at Butler, he's everyone's perfect fit to come to Indiana University and resurrect its dead glory. And if a single donor was willing to shell out $10 million to evict Archie Miller, who was fired as IU's basketball coach on Monday after four pale seasons, surely the alumni pockets are deep enough to pry Stevens away from the Boston Celtics.

Except.

Except Stevens has been an NBA coach for almost a decade now, and he's taken the Celtics to the Eastern Conference finals three of the last four seasons, and the only reason they never got to the NBA Finals is they kept running into LeBron. And the year they didn't make the conference finals, they lost in the semifinals.

The last five seasons, they've won at least 48 games. Last season they won 48 and lost in the conference finals to Miami.

This year, however, they've been awful.

And the IU job just came open.

And so the thinking is, well, the timing is right now, and the moneybags alums obviously have some financial want-to -- look what one of them did just to get rid of Archie! -- and the new AD, Scott Dolson, obviously has someone big in mind because he's not even activating a search committee. So ...

So maybe this time WE GET BRAD STEVENS!

Except.

Except the Blob is letting his imagination take over, and what it's imagining now is Brad Stevens sitting in his office in Bloomington. The phone rings. It's the Rockets or the Suns or the 76ers or maybe even the Lakers, and they're looking for a coach. What will it take to get you back to the big time, Coach?

Because listen, even if IU pulls off this miracle and gets its man, Stevens has already established himself as an extremely attractive NBA hire. He's got experience, he's had success, he's an established, proven commodity in the league. And established, proven commodities are the most valued coin in the NBA realm.

How long before Brad Stevens realizes that, and takes the phone call?

After eight years, see, he's an NBA guy. That's his identity. A lot of folks, despite this year, regard him as one of the brightest young minds in the league. And people like that rarely go back down to college ball.

The only coaches who tend to do that are coaches who fail in the NBA, like Rick Pitino and John Calipari. That's certainly not Brad Stevens.

I could be wrong, of course. It wouldn't the first or second or even the eleventy-hundreth time. And Stevens has already showed he walks a different path; look how many of us were shocked when he left Butler to take the Celtics' job. 

So maybe he does it in reverse this time. That's what every good little Hoosiers fan is hoping, anyway.

Me?

I'll believe it when I see it. And admit I was wrong, wrong, wrong if I do.

Madder than usual

 Well, Colgate is in. So we got that goin' for us.

Drexel is in, Winthrop is in, the Hawks of Hartford are in for the first time ever. Duke, Kentucky and Louisville are all out, for the first time since 1965. And if Indiana will not be playing in Assembly Hall this week, Kelvin Sampson will be, returning to the scene of the crime with his Houston Cougars.

Vegas has it 5-3 he gets struck by lightning the minute he steps on the floor. Or maybe one of those five rotting NCAA banners falls on him and smothers him, the Ghosts of IU Past getting their revenge on the man who blew up the program.

Yes, it will be that weird this week, in a Madder-than-usual March Madness. All the games will be played in Indiana, which is entirely appropriate but hardly the norm. There'll be games on two courts in Lucas Oil Stadium, and in Assembly Hall, and in Mackey Arena in West Lafayette. The old arena at the fairgrounds, where Mel Daniels used to do battle with Zelmo Beaty back in the day, will play host to some games. Hinkle Fieldhouse will. Banker's Life will.

Personally, the Blob wishes they'd have farmed out a few games to some more sites, just to give people a taste of how deep is Indiana's basketball weave. Play some games in Chrysler Fieldhouse in New Castle, for instance. Re-open the Wigwam in Anderson. Send Bob Huggins and West Virginia to the Hickory gym over in Knightstown, or Patrick Ewing and Georgetown.

Look, guys! It's Norman Dale! And isn't that Ollie with him?

Weird upon weird.

This does not mean the Blob won't roll out its people's choice again, as it does yearly. You never want to plunk down hard green on anything the Blob predicts about the Madness, so if it says it likes Illinois and Ohio State and thinks Gonzaga is not going to be the upset bait some people think, you want to flee screaming from all those notions. But a heartwarming Cinderella?

Well, listen up: Hartford's your pick.

Not only, as noted, is this the Hawks' first NCAA Tournament ever, they've got some cool history to them. Dionne Warwick is a Hartford grad. So is the late Jack Swigert, the pilot on Apollo 13. So are Jeff Bagwell, Hall of Fame baseball player, and Vin Baker, Hartford's most notable basketball alum.

It's not all that old a school -- only been around since 1957 -- but 48 states and 43 countries are represented among its 6,792 students, so it's as cosmopolitan a campus as any. Plus it has a pretty righteous mascot, Howie the Hawk.

The Hawks, as a 16-seed, drew Baylor in the first round, so they're probably gone in an eyeblink. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't root for them. The whole deal with the first weekend of Da Tournament, after all, is rooting for teams that have no chance. Because sometimes they do.

So why not Hartford? I mean, weirder things have happened.

Especially this year.

Impeccable exit

 So now Drew Brees walks away, and I'm seeing the kid with the plastic lobster again. The mind is a river, and it chooses its own course. This one is mine.

It twists and turns and fetches up in eddied pools, taking me back to a November day with all the light gone out of it. Darkness has fallen with a thud in Ross-Ade Stadium, as it tends to do in November in Indiana. But the lights are blazing in Ross-Ade, and the field is stuffed with celebrating Purdues, and here comes this one kid waving a plastic lobster in the chilled evening air.

Between his teeth, there is a red rose. 

That will, weirdly, be my defining image of Drew Brees, who's not even part of it. Oh, he's somewhere in this crush, having just beaten Indiana to seal Purdue's only Rose Bowl berth in the last 55 years. In a few minutes I'll wade through the bodies to the south end zone, where the sports information folks have set up the Brees Box from which Drew addresses the media after every home game.

 He'll go on from this night to the Rose Bowl and then to the NFL draft and then to New Orleans as damaged goods, a quarterback with a wrecked shoulder who barely breaches 6-foot-1. San Diego didn't want him anymore. Miami turned up its nose at him. So he'll arrive in New Orleans, a city that was still damaged goods itself in the wake of Katrina.

Fifteen years later, his next stop is Canton. And he is as much a part of the fabric of New Orleans as the jazz and the beignets and the fleur-de-lis that adorns Brees's helmet.

On the football field he did what he could to lift his adopted city, taking the Saints to a Super Bowl title five years after Katrina and becoming the most prolific passer in NFL history. Off the field, he and his wife Brittany did even more, becoming civic pillars in a way few athletes and their wives are in a profession of itinerants.

But Brees  stayed, and when it came time to announce his retirement yesterday he had his four kids do it. It was sweet and endearing and as perfect as his throwing arm so often was, a throwing arm that wedged the football into impossible nooks and crannies when Brees was at his best. 

You can be 6-1 when you have a laser for an arm, and Brees did. At his best there was something almost surgical about it, and the numbers kept climbing and climbing and climbing.

Despite all that, oddly, you hardly ever hear Brees's name mentioned as one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. You hear Brady and Peyton and Montana and maybe Elway or even Unitas for the old-school set, and then "Oh, yeah, and Brees." It's not quite a diss, but it is a damn curious phenomenon.

In any event, he'll be in Canton as soon as he's eligible, and we know that's coming as surely as we knew Sunday was coming. It was that look back over his shoulder after the loss to Tampa Bay two months ago that did it; there was something wistful and aching in it, and you knew, right then, it was the look a man wears when he's doing something for the last time.

For Brees, it was walking off the field in the Superdome that day. For the rest of us, it will be watching him carve up a helpless defense, or win a Super Bowl for a hurting city.

Or, a decade before that, compel some crazy college kid to wave a plastic lobster in the air on a chilly November night, a red rose clenched in his teeth.

Basketball Saturday. Some observations.

 It was a great big Saturday for buckets yesterday, one of those Saturdays that remind you high school basketball still lives and breathes in Indiana.  And it was one of those Saturdays that remind you college hoops can still draw you to the tube in March, no matter how devalued some think they've become.

And so congratulations to the Leo Lions, who survived -- barely -- and advanced to the first semistate game in the school's history. And do we really have to wait six more days to see Caleb Furst and Blackhawk Christian get Luke Brown and Blackford in the semistate up at Elkhart?

And never mind that we haven't even gotten to what happened with the college employees yesterday ...

* That was Patrick Ewing over there celebrating Saturday, for all the Madison Square Garden security personnel who just thought he was some large anonymous human wandering its corridors the other day. And how perfect was that?

First he gets flagged by security in the building he virtually owned as a New York Knicks icon -- his freaking jersey hangs in the rafters, for pity's sake -- and then, wonder of wonders, his eighth-seeded Georgetown Hoyas shock the world in the Big East title game.

The Hoyas, with their greatest icon now coaching them, obliterated favored Creighton, 73-48, to earn their first NCAA Tournament bid in six years. And somewhere in the Garden, some security wanker no doubt had one of those epiphany things.

"Oh, so THAT'S who that guy is," you can imagine him saying.

Indeed.

* Look, I get it. This is the most play Iona's gotten since Jeff Ruland played and Jim Valvano coached there.

But, please, let's not make this some sort of redemption story, a creature some media folk find as irresistible as M&Ms. Yes, Rick Pitino's the coach now, and, yes, after Iona won the MAAC championship in his first season by beating Fairfield, he became only the third coach in NCAA history to take five different schools to the Madness.

But, please, people. Please. Let's remember why he's coaching in the MAAC now instead of the ACC.

He's there because he ran a dirty program at Louisville whose lowlights included an assistant coach running a brothel out of the basketball complex, and another assistant allegedly serving as the bagman for sneaker cash payments to a prize recruit. The FBI uncovered the latter in its investigation into college basketball.

Pitino was fired but otherwise has skated so far. Although the FBI probe is ongoing. 

So hold the adulation. Please.

* I don't know if Illinois is going to win the Big Ten Tournament today, or if beyond that the Illini go on to hoist the big trophy on the first Monday in April. But they sure are the flavor of the minute right now.

More and more folks out there are jumping on the Illinois bandwagon, mostly because more and more folks have seen them play. Yesterday they kicked Iowa to the curb by 11, and they looked pretty darn unstoppable doing it.

This is a team that can throw the best guard in the Big Ten at you (Ayo Dosunmu), and when you get tired of chasing him it can throw Trent Frazier and Andre Curbelo and Adam Miller at you, too. The Illini can play fast or faster -- and if you want to bang inside. Kofi Cockburn, a mountain range of a man at 7 feet and 285 pounds, will gladly take you to the low blocks and crush you. 

This is a hell of a team that can play any way you want to play, in other words.

Of course, March eats those teams for breakfast sometimes. It actually takes pleasure in doing that. So we shall see.

But, lord. Won't the seeing be fun?

Lamest. Excuse. Ever.

 Well. Looks like I have an out now.

Looks like if I ever say anything blatantly racist or sexist or otherwise ignorant (not that I ever would, except for the last), I have the perfect excuse. 

My blood sugar made me do it.

You've probably heard by now about the high school basketball announcer in Oklahoma who spewed the n-word into an open mic the other night, because some of the girls from one team took a knee during the national anthem. This gets certain people all exercised, because the anthem is Sacred and Holy and the Troops and the Flag and what-not.

So here was this announcer, calling a bunch of high school girls the n-word and dropping a few f-bombs too. And then, after the backlash hit, blaming it all on his Type 1 diabetes.

A sugar spike was the culprit, he said.

Now, I do not have Type 1 diabetes. But I'm just over the line for Type 2 diabetes, the legacy of too many ballpark hotdogs and McCholesterol meals eaten in the car on the way to one game or another. If you are what you eat, I am a Bavarian cream with a bacon cheeseburger chaser.

But at least the elevated blood sugar I got from all that gives me a handy excuse.

Those bleeping-bleeps I utter when the mower won't start?

Blood sugar.

That f-bomb I unleash when the ATM eats my card?

Blood sugar.

All the exciting adjectives I used to spew (in front of multiple witnesses!) when my laptop blue-screened me on deadline?

Blood sugar.

See, the devil didn't make me do it, your honor. It was that second glazed.

Brought to you by ...

 I get why the folks in East Lansing are a trifle whiny these days. No one likes being laughed at.

That's what happened at the Big Ten Tournament this week, when the MSU Spartans Presented By Rocket Mortgage (their new official name) took a raft of stuff about their new official name. People all over America have been hooting at this for a couple of days now, ever since MSU announced its new corporate deal with Rocket Mortgage and it was announced that, henceforth, Michigan State would be referred to as "MSU Spartans Presented By Rocket Mortgage" at all game in the Breslin Center.

Folks wondered when Tom Izzo and the lads would start dolling themselves up with sponsor patches like NASCAR drivers (OK, so I wondered that). Or, like NASCAR drivers, would say stuff in the postgame like "We'd like to thank all our sponsors for the wood chipping we laid on those poor Golden Gophers today," or "The MSU Spartans Presented By Rocket Mortgage were a Rocket ship today."

And then Izzo would wink and say, "Rocket ship! See what I did there?"

Sparty got so butt-hurt about this, the school put out a defensive release that said, hey, schools do deals like this all the time. Everyone has corporate sponsors now, so what's the big deal?

To which the Blob responds: Well, at least they're finally admitting it.

What I mean by that is college athletics are no different than any other business venture, no matter what fiction their poo-bahs try to sell about edukashun and the like. And they haven't been for a long time.

Corporate sponsorship is nothing new. Schools have been making their athletes shootin', reboundin', tacklin' and go-route runnin' ads for their apparel deals for decades now. Assembly Hall in Bloomington is now Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, and college arenas and stadiums everywhere are plastered with corporate signage.

And who could forget Bob Knight in his Texas Tech days, logo-ed up like Jimmie Johnson for O'Reilly Auto Parts?

Hardly much of a leap from there to MSU Spartans Presented By Rocket Mortgage.

The heinous thing about all this, of course, is the Michigan States cut these corporate deals on the backs of their "student-athletes" (i.e., "unpaid labor.") In exchange for some book-learnin' and state-of-the-art facilities, the "student-athlete"/unpaid labor gets zero say in this. If  Happy Clown Party Supplies dumps a truckload of cash on Whatsamatta U., the unpaid labor will go out there dressed like clowns if Happy Clown decides that's the tradeoff.

And the school will go along with it because, you know, dollars.

"Oh, come on, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "That could never happen."

Maybe not. But come talk to me when Sparty gets replaced as the Michigan State mascot by Zoom the Rocket.

Start the clock

If this is how it ends, it ends with a sigh. A profoundly weary one, apparently.

If this is how it ends, zero field goals in nine minutes is the appropriate bang of a whimper.

If this is how it ends, losing to a 15-10 team that played indifferently itself is the F. Scott Fitzgerald final line.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the FOR GOD'S SAKE INDIANA MAKE A DAMN SHOT!

Yes, the Indiana Hoosiers lost again last night, lost to Rutgers for the third time this season, lost in a manner that suggested not just a basketball team but an entire coaching tenure had run out of steam. Archie Miller is done. It may not happen for another year, financial matters being what they are, but he is done. 

The more hopeful think IU fires him today, but the Blob is doubtful. An athletic department already strapped because of COVID-19 is going to have to think a bit before it decides to take another Joe Frazier hook to the bank account. And swallowing the remaining dollars on Miller's hefty contract would be a painful hook indeed.

So, Crimson Nation waits. And Miller waits.

In the meantime, we contemplate what could well be our last look at his time in Bloomington, and it was the last four years all crammed into one evening. The Hoosiers lost by 11 to a team that missed 36 of its 60 shots and 17 of 23 from the 3-point arc. They lost to a team that turned the ball over three more times than Indiana did. They lost spectacularly, head-grabbingly, fading down the stretch at a time of the season when no team should be fading down the stretch.

"We got fatigued," Miller said when it was done. "We got gassed."

Really, Coach? In March?

And yet, that's not the worst part.

The worst part is, he wasn't wrong.

After taking a 48-47 lead with nine minutes to play, see, the Hoosiers wilted like Valentine's roses on St. Paddy's Day. They scored just two points the rest of the way, both on free throws. They missed their last 13 shots from the field. A horrible shooting team all season, they plumbed new depths, missing 14 of 16 from the arc and shooting 40 percent overall.

They also were outrebounded 41-33. And rebounding is nothing but want-to.

If this is how it ends, that last may be the fitting epitaph. 

We were fatigued. We were gassed.

Start carving it today.

Even if today is not the day, or next week isn't, or 2021.

Paper champions

 John Wooden once spoke the truth to me about conference tournaments, and he did it 33 years ago.

We were in the conference room of an Indianapolis hotel that evening in 1988, just the two of us, and we spent 90 minutes or so talking about everything from his great-grandchildren (he had pictures, of course) to the state of college basketball. And at some point or other the subject of conference tournaments came up.

Wooden came as close to sneering as such a gracious gentleman ever could.

"They're moneymakers," he said. "That's all in the world they are."

I'm reminded of this now because this week in Indy the Big Ten Tournament is happening, and at the end of it the winner will be declared the conference champion and be rewarded with the conference's automatic NCAA bid. This won't be right, but it's a reality to which conference hoo-haws must cling to lend the tournament some sort of relevance. 

Otherwise, it's just what John Wooden called it in 1988: One more chance to squeeze a few extra dimes from an underpaid workforce.

This comes up, obliquely, because of the letter Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman wrote to the Big Ten this week, protesting that Michigan was declared the Big Ten's regular season champion over Illinois. Illinois, by virtue of playing more conference games in this pandemic-scarred season, won more conference games. But Michigan had the better win percentage, which is the metric the Big Ten chose to go with to account for any and all COVID-19 cancellations/postponements.

That Whitman would feel compelled to protest (and come off a bit whiney doing so) indicated that the conference regular season still had some value. And, even if Whitman didn't say so, that it was the true measure of a champion.

Which is what the Blob has maintained all along.

In the world according to the Blob, see, the regular-season champion should get the automatic NCAA bid, because the regular-season champion is the actual champion. Whoever that is proved themselves over the long jaunt, not over a long weekend. And they should be appropriately rewarded.

The conference tournament?

Oh, you can still play it, because the bubble teams probably need it. But the big trophy, and the big prize, should go to the true champion.

This is especially true in the smallest conferences, which yearly receive a single NCAA bid. It's absolutely ludicrous that a sub-.500 team can pull a couple of upsets in the conference tournament and wind up in the big show, while the team that dominated the  season but had one off day sits home. 

And conferences like the Big Ten?

Seven or eight or nine teams are always going to get into the Madness, no matter what happens during the conference tournament. The only thing that might change is a seeding or two, and which teams on the bubble make it or not. But that's going to be true regardless of whether or not the winner gets the automatic bid. 

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Doesn't that make the Big Ten Tournament sort of pointless, except to make money?"

Now you're gettin' it.

No soup for Hoosiers

 Saw something interesting on the Magic Twitter Thingy the other day, posted by an old sportswriting acquaintance named Rick Bozich. 

Rick, who covers a lot of college buckets exceedingly well down in Louisville, plugged a handful of teams into a conference tournament simulator run by a guy named Bart Torvik. And according to Mr. Torvik's calculations, Indiana has a 0.7 chance of winning the Big Ten Tournament, which kicks off today in Indianapolis.

A 0.7 percent chance. 

That is No Soup For You country right there.

That's even less a chance than Wile E. Coyote has of catching the Roadrunner, according to the Blob's own calculations. Or that something will come out of Marjorie Taylor Greene's mouth that doesn't sound like she's on acid. Or that you will walk outside today and a glowing chunk of space stuff will hit you in the head and transform you into the Green Lantern.

In other words, Indiana will not be playing in the Madness when it begins a week hence. Well, it will, but not THAT Madness. This Madness will be called the Fire Archie Miller And Hire This Guy Over Here Who Has Indiana Ties Because He Once Attended A Frat Party There Madness.

Then again ... a 0.7 shot at winning the Big Ten Tournament is still a shot, right?

At least, this guy thinks so.

Night of nights

Fifty years gone now, and still we see the red tassels dancing on the white shoes of the Greatest, see the set jaw of his remorseless pursuer, see the Beautiful People glittering in the dimness at ringside. 

Fifty years gone, and there is Frank Sinatra shooting photos and Norman Mailer writing the gamer for Life magazine. There is Muhammad Ali dancing, dancing, dancing. And there, of course, is Joe Frazier: Bobbing and stalking, bobbing and stalking, a human threshing machine chiseling away at Ali's legendary prettiness.

Close your eyes. You can still see it all, can't you?

It was the night of March 8, 1971, and if I close my eyes I can see a friend's lake cabin, and me trying to get the fight to come in on a radio wholly inadequate to its purpose. And pumping my fist when Ali went on his back in the 15th round, because I was not an Ali fan then. 

I was a week shy of 16 years old, see, and I wanted Frazier to shut him up. Which of course he did.

Later, I would see the replays on TV, and notice the incongruity so many other observers noticed: Those red tassels bobbing gaily as Ali crashed to the canvas, his aura of invincibility slipping away forever. 

Later still, I would come to understand how much of Ali's ceaseless patter was stagecraft, and that beneath it was a flawed but unique human being whose magnetism made him the most famous man on Earth. And that inside him beat a lion's heart that ultimately led to his  ruin.

I also came to understand just how special was that night 50 years ago last night.

We don't always appreciate the bigness of an event when it's happening, but March 8, 1971, in Madison Square Garden, was not one of those events. They were calling it the fight of the century before Ali and Frazier ever stepped inside the ropes, and it remains so to this day. It might also have been the fight of any century, boxing having gone into what seems a permanent eclipse.

Big Fight Night is now the province of MMA, and that is a sad thing in the Blob's estimation. There was an elegance to Ali-Frazier, a measure of skill, that made its attendant brutality palatable. There is none the Blob can see in MMA. It's two guys fist-fighting and then rolling around on the mat trying to force a submission.

It is physical and brutal, too, in other words. But there is no style to it.

And it will never have a March 8, 1971. Hell, what will?

Buddy system fail

 So Les Miles is out as the football coach at Kansas, three days after he was placed on administrative leave, several more days after a waterfall of accusations began to flow that ol' Lester was a horndog at LSU who loved him some college girls.

In other words, he's accused of  "inappropriate behavior toward female students," as ESPN more judiciously phrased it.

That's not what it dinged the Blob's antenna, however.

Buried in the story, see, was this nugget: That Kansas AD Jeff Long did not use a search firm when he hired Miles, on account of they were buddies from their time together at Michigan 30 years ago.

Search firms get a bad rap from fans of austerity sometimes, particularly when their services are engaged by government entities. Taxpayers want to know why excessive amounts of their dough are being squandered on what seems to be a frivolity. Why can't the mayor/city council/whoever conduct a search themselves?

I mean, they've got Google down there at city hall, right?

Well. Consider this Exhibit A for why search firms are often worth the expense.

It's hard to imagine, had Long enlisted one, that it wouldn't have uncovered at least some of Miles' alleged disturbing behavior at LSU. Enough, at least, to raise a red flag or two. Rumor and whispers grow like ditch lilies on every college campus, after all. How could any substantive vetting not picked up on some of that?

Instead, Long apparently decided that was an unnecessary expense, because Miles was available and he'd won a national title at LSU -- and, besides, Long knew that old boy. Hell, he'd known him for three decades. What further vetting did a guy need?

Now, it's possible the Blob is being unfair here. Perhaps none of the above was part of Long's process at all. But it sure looks like it was, and appearances matter in the Age of the Interwhosis, when everything eventually appears somewhere.

Which might be why, upon announcing Miles was being let go, that Long said Kansas would be using a search firm to find its next coach.

Live and learn.

All-Star games and other unwatched stuff

I didn't watch the NBA All-Star game last night, keeping alive my string of several decades of not having watched the NBA All-Star game.

I didn't watch the Slam Dunk contest, either, having quit on that the year Blake Griffin jumped over the car. 

Know what else I didn't watch?

The Harry/Meghan/Oprah interview.

Apparently everyone else in America watched it, judging by social media. I didn't because I enjoy being an oddball. Also, I've watched "The Crown" and am familiar with Banastre Tarleton, Sir Bernard Law Montgomery and the Amritsar massacre, so I already knew the Brits could be racist sociopaths and arrogant twits.

As the old line goes, there are but two things I don't do about the royals, and both of 'em are care.

So I was out of touch with a whole lot of America last night, as our household's Superior Human (i.e., my wife) and I settled in to watch "Nomadland" on Hulu.

(Which is terrific, by the way. You should check it out.)

The NBA All-Star game?

Not even the players wanted to be there, from what I heard. They thought the pandemic had rendered it pointless, since only a handful of fans were allowed to attend, and All-Star games are generally fan-driven made-for-TV events. The only good thing about this one is the proceeds went to benefit Historically Black Colleges and Universities and COVID-19 relief.

Also, the final score was 170-150, no doubt triggering at least a few shaking-their-fist-at-clouds types who say the NBA All-Star game is a joke because No One Plays Defense. This is always hilarious, because it's an All-Star game. No one's supposed to play defense, or take it seriously.

Besides, it's not even East-vs.-West anymore, but a glorified pickup game pitting Team LeBron vs. Team Durant. Which is OK, I guess. But if they're going with that concept, they should go all the way with it.

Play make-it, take-it. Shirts-vs.-skins. And the last guy picked is in charge of the water bottles, and only gets to play if he promises never to touch the rock.

"Go stand in the corner and stay out of my way," Giannis Antetokounmpo might have said, as he made all 16 of his presumably uncontested shots on the way to the MVP trophy.

That last actually happened, by the way. Now you know.

And so do I.

Last rites in Bloomington

 So, you think you've seen bad? You don't know bad, mister.

Bad is when you're 0-7 against your oldest and most bitter rival, and you're getting farther away from turning the "0" into a "1" with every meeting.

Bad is when your big-deal freshman class scores six points on 1-of-6 shooting, turns the ball over five times and looks more like No Deal than Big Deal.

Bad is when you haven't won more Big Ten games than you've lost in four seasons. When you can't throw it in the ocean from the ocean, especially from the 3-point arc. When you miss 18 of the 23 shots you attempt from there against that aforementioned bitter rival -- further proving that, in Bloomington, In., these days, the arc is less an Arc de Triomphe than an Arc de Splat.

Because of that and some other stuff, Purdue beat Indiana again yesterday, 67-58. The Boilermakers have beaten the Hoosiers nine straight times now. And the dog bit the man, and water is wet.

This does not bode well for the current occupant of IU's flamin' hot seat, Archie Miller, whose team has now lost five in a row, is 12-14 and 7-12 in the Big Ten, and will miss the NCAA Tournament for the fourth time in Miller's four years. And you think that's bad?

Bad is when you still have a pulse and they're already planning your funeral.

Miller's still IU's basketball coach, after all, and no one in a position to say otherwise has said otherwise. And yet I tuned in local sports-talk radio the other day, and they were speculating on who the next IU coach would be.

At first I thought I'd somehow missed the news that Miller had been fired. But, no. This was just the basketball version of last rites.

And so on the radio, and all across Indiana, people are dreaming their dreams. They're wondering what it would take to buy out Scott Drew at Baylor, or Celtics coach Brad Stevens. Steve Alford, that hardy perennial, has emerged in conversation again. Or what about Dane Fife up there at Michigan State?

Indiana needs an Indiana guy, the thinking goes. Which of course ignores the fact that the most successful coach in the program's history had no Indiana ties whatsoever.

And, listen, Scott Drew is a pipe dream, too. He has Indiana roots but, after 18 years in Waco, he has deeper roots in Texas. He's Mr. Baylor now, just as Bob Knight was Mr. Indiana even though he was an Ohio State boy. So no matter how much money Indiana could throw at Scott Drew, Baylor would no doubt match or exceed it.

Ditto Brad Stevens. The Celtics are having an awful year, but Stevens is still one of the brightest coaching minds in the NBA. He's not coming back to college.

So who, then?

I don't know.  What I do know is the IU job doesn't have nearly the cache it used to, no matter what its delusional fan base thinks. Baylor has more basketball bonafides now, which is another reason Drew wouldn't leave.

And in any event, this entire discussion feels creepy anyway, given that Miller's corpse isn't cold yet. Hell, it's not even a corpse.

What IU fans are chasing, however, is a ghost. What they really want is another Bob Knight, and there's only one of those. Everyone else the alums are going to crab about -- which is why they ran off Mike Davis even after Davis got IU to its only Final Four in the last 28 years, and why they ran off Tom Crean even though he won two Big Ten titles and got the Hoosiers to three Sweet Sixteens, and coached teams that won 29 and 27 games, respectively.

Think Crimson Nation wouldn't take that in a heartbeat right now?

Think it's thinking, "Dang, we screwed up"?

That would be a "yes" to No. 1. And a grudging "maybe" to No. 2.

A few shots at the Brickyard

 And, no, this is not the part where the Blob makes fun of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The Blob would never do that. It would be like making fun of the Sistine Chapel, because like the Sistine Chapel the Speedway is hallowed ground.

No, taking shots at the Brickyard actually meant taking shots at the Brickyard yesterday, because they opened up IMS as a drive-in COVID-19 vaccine site. This was an utterly brilliant idea, because few places are more suited to handle thousands of vehicles/people at once than IMS. It's literally what it does every year on Memorial Day weekend.

Of course, having spent more than a few Memorial Day weekends at IMS over the last four decades, the Blob can't resist wondering if any of the notorious yellow shirts -- Indy's sometimes annoying crowd control militia -- were involved, and what they might have been telling people.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, the Blue Lot is full. You'll have to wait over in the third turn."

"Middle lane, sir! MIDDLE LANE!" (Blows whistle shrilly)

"This is not media parking, sir. Media parking is outside the track in Brownsburg. A shuttle will take you to your assigned vaccination station. Or you can walk."

(A few seconds later)

"Look, I don't make the rules. This is where the assigned media parking is today. And I don't care if you have been coming here for 40 years Mr. ... Smith, is it?"

Oh, yes. I can hear all that now.

I also wonder, just for the hell of it, how awesome it would have been if every person who got their shot at the Speedway yesterday was allowed to take a victory lap around the venerable 2.5-mile oval. It didn't happen, because the people who run the Speedway aren't insane. But, come on, it would have been awesome, right?

They stick a needle in your arm and then you drive the Family Truckster over the yard of brick and down into turn one, all four tires below the white line, the late Tom Carnegie's voice playing in your head as you come off two and fly down the backstretch at a thrilling 75 mph or so ...

"Halfway around on this one!" Carnegie is saying. 

Cool beans, man. Cool beans.

Plantation mentality

 I don't know what possessed Creighton basketball coach Greg McDermott to say what he said the other day. And don't tell me you do, either.

Why a white man in a roomful of black basketball players and a black assistant coach would say "I need everybody to stay on the plantation" in urging his team to stick together is a mystery, probably even to him. I imagine his brain screamed "WHAT THE HELL DID YOU JUST SAY??" as soon as the words cleared his lips. 

I imagine this, because before what he said even went fully public, he issued a public apology. And not one of those "mistakes were made" apologies. An actual apology that acknowledged how painful and radioactive a word "plantation" is when uttered in the presence of black Americans.

I don't know about anyone else, but I found this fairly extraordinary. I'm trying to think of the last time a public figure apologized for something that wasn't even public yet. Perhaps my memory isn't what it used to be, but I can't immediately think of one.

So, yes, I will give Greg McDermott credit for that. I will also give him credit for what seems an obvious sincerity and not just a trying-to-save-my-job ploy. And I'll do the latter because he already offered to resign.

His players (at least according to McDermott) said that's not what they wanted. And since no player or assistant coach has publicly disputed that, I have to conclude McDermott's version is the correct one.

However.

However, this does not mean I think McDermott is any way a wronged party here. Or that Creighton suspending him in any way makes him a victim of political correctness or cancel culture or whatever American bigots are calling simple respect for others these days.

He said what he said. And I will not trivialize it by calling it a slip of the tongue. Somewhere in his brain a connection was made with the darkest of historical roots -- was he channeling his great-great-grandpappy, perhaps? Who knows? -- and he gave voice to it.

Again, I don't know why, and neither do you. But I do know he did it in the context of high-end collegiate athletics, which have more than once been accused of harboring a plantation mentality themselves. And not without cause.

In other words, McDermott said what he said in the worst possible environment in which he could have said it. So, yes, he deserves whatever punishment his bosses think is right.

At the moment, that means he won't be coaching Creighton in its home season finale against Butler tomorrow. And McDermott took to social media to say he thinks that's as it should be.

So should we all.

A brief Twilight Zone interlude

All this one needed was Rod Serling, one eyebrow hoisted, smoke curling lazily from a cigarette cradled between two fingers.

Didja hear about that thing Terry Bradshaw did?

Sure, that's a question with a multiple choice answer. I mean, the man's swim trunks once fell off while he was parasailing, leaving him buck naked 20 feet in the air on national TV. So it could be almost anything.

But I'm talking about a specific thing.

What happened was, he checked into a Louisiana hospital for surgery on his elbow. He didn't want every bozo in America to know about it, so he checked into the hospital under an assumed name.

The assumed name was "Thomas Brady."

Which just sounds like another of those goofy Terry Bradshaw things, until you learn when he did it: 1983.

In other words, 38 years ago. 

When the "Tom Brady" who would eventually become "Tom Brady" was 5-years-old.

So what do ya think? Did Terry Bradshaw have a brief flash of second sight? Had he briefly encountered a time warp that shot him from 1983 to 2021 just long enough for him to learn who Tom Brady was, and to watch him win his seventh Super Bowl?

Or was this exactly what it seems, which is a bizarre coincidence?

Right. And I suppose next you're gonna tell me Joe Biden won the election.

The Eyes of privilege

I never learned the words to my alma mater's school song. I'm not sure they exist.

OK, so they do, but I never got past "Ball State, Ball State Baaaalll State." After that it's 
"we must something, something." Or whatever.

Point being, this is a damn silly thing over which to get one's shorts in a twist, unless of course you're some rich white goober in Texas who loves him some Longhorns football. Then "The Eyes of Texas" is practically a religious artifact.

And never mind that it's rooted in the good old days of slavery and the Confederacy.

On those grounds, the band refused to play it last fall, and a number of black players refused to stay on the field after games for the traditional postgame singalong. This doesn't seem unreasonable given the aforementioned interpretation.

Well. Unless you're one of the aforementioned rich white goobers.

They've gotten their backs up about it, those who are Texas alums, and they're threatening to shut off the money tap by yanking their donations. Over a song.

This suggests none of them really care a fig for good old UT, no matter how much burnt orange they wear. What they care about is the privilege they enjoy as rich white goobers. That song belongs to them, just as their university always has, and by God no one had better mess it with it. The band better play it, and those players better stay on the field and sing it, no matter how offensive they find it.

More rational people would acknowledge that it's hurtful to some, and seek out some middle ground. But privilege, and the power that comes with it, has a way of blinding the people who possess it, and triggering all their worst instincts. So instead some of them have sent letters and emails to the administration saying if the black players and students who've protested the song don't like it, they can just go to some other school.

And there you go. No matter how far we've come as a nation in wrestling with the issue of race, it seems, we haven't come nearly as far as we like to think we have.

 "Love it or leave it," after all, is a hearty perennial in America, and in this case it comes straight from the 1950s or '60s or even 1970, when Julius Whittier finally became the first black player to suit up for the Longhorns. A year prior, Texas became the last all-white team to win a national title.

So there's your context for the current caterwauling. 

It's the sort of wannabe victimhood popular now with the privileged, whose new catechism is "cancel culture." It's what they deem any correction to the historical record that doesn't embrace the narrative with which they grew up -- and never mind big chunks of that narrative sprang from the Lost Cause revisionism of the post-Reconstruction period.

Which of course means some of those who most loudly condemn "cancel culture" have canceled their share of culture, too. But of course they don't see it that way.

More blindness.

Conflicted

 I don't have a lot of faves on sports-talk radio, other than the local guys. But Sarah Spain is one of them.

Until the local affiliate ditched ESPN for Fox -- a lame decision that now subjects us to daily doses of Colin Cowherd and the Trumpazoid Clay Travis -- I was a regular listener to her radio gig. She always had something to say that made me think, which is how I gauge the worth of this particular genre.

So I'm sure she'll find some way to handle the conflict of interest she just created for herself.

This upon the news that Spain has signed on as a minority owner of the Chicago Red Stars of the National Women's Soccer League, the women's version of MSL. On one level, it makes all kinds of sense; Spain is a Chicago native and former collegiate athlete who's followed the team for years and has become a leading proponent of a bigger footprint for women in all levels of sport. So, yeah, perfect.

On the other hand ...

Well, this is where Old School Journalism Guy grabs the wheel and takes me on one of his curmudgeonly up-on-two-wheels joyrides.

Old School Journalism Guy, see, looks at a sports journalist becoming a sports owner and gets a little queasy. I came up in an era where you kept a certain professional distance between you and those you covered. There were certain lines you simply didn't cross, and they were clearly delineated. If you were friendly with sources because sources are the lifeblood of journalism, you always guarded against becoming familiar. 

Now?

Now the notion that a journalist should avoid conflicts of interest like, I don't know, Colin Cowherd's radio show, seems impossibly quaint. Like milk bottles on your doorstep, or Sunday rides in the country. 

Partly this is due our late unlamented President, who made conflicts of interest official policy during his four years of corruption-as-usual. Propriety and rules? Bah. Only losers cared about them.

And so it is in journalism these days, too, or that's how it seems to the grouch driving this sentence.  As more and more media becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the traditional lines become blurred if not extinct. Media entities that own newspapers or TV properties also own sports franchises or  financial institutions or energy companies. Athletic conferences have their own broadcast entities now; ESPN itself owns the exclusive rights to SEC football and basketball.

And so when the former reports on the latter, it becomes more than just a conflict of interest. It becomes damn near incestuous, and makes suspect everything that gets reported.

This is no reflection on Sarah Spain, understand, or on her integrity as a journalist. She established her bonafides there a long time ago. But it does make you wonder what happens if some scandal breaks in the NWSL, or more specifically with the Red Stars.

How would Spain handle that? And would simply acknowledging her connection to the team -- which is how she says she'll handle it -- be enough?

I guess in this world it would be. But in the world of Old School Journalist Guy, she'd have to recuse herself from the discussion entirely.

Of course, that notion seems impossibly quaint these days, too. 

Ah, the joys of being an anachronism. Yes, sir.

Business decisions

 So I see Dan Dakich is in hot water again, because he got in a Magic Twitter Thingy tiff with a trio of college professors about college athletes and whether or not they have the same rights anyone else in America does, and that escalated into Dakich making some crude remark about one of the profs, a woman.

Something about the prof, a former swimmer, challenging him to a race in the pool, and Dakich turning that into a sexual innuendo in classic seventh-grade-boy style.

Which only proves you can take the lunkhead out of the Region, but you can't take the Region out of the lunkhead. With apologies to all those from the Region who aren't lunkheads.

In any case, ESPN is now "looking into" Dakich's remarks, which is code for "we're gonna suspend his ass." Dakich's loyalists will of course scream "Cancel culture!", the current fetish phrase of the perpetually aggrieved right. And so it goes, and so it goes, as Vonnegut used to say.

But let's go back to the original argument.

It started when Dakich, like a lot of coaches and ex-coaches, called Duke one-and-doner Jalen Johnson a "quitter" because he did what Dakich and a lot of other coaches and ex-coaches do all the time. 

He made a business decision.

What he did was leave the Duke basketball team in mid-season to prepare for the NBA draft, which of course raised the ire of all the coaches and ex-coaches out there. Dakich is one of those; he's always maintained that college athletes are compensated enough because they get room and board and a free education for generating millions of dollars for their athletic departments. So shut up and play.

The problem with this is the way athletic departments make those millions looks a lot like the way any corporation operates. And that makes those "student-athletes" look a lot like  employees. The school can trade on their images by making them billboards for their various apparel deals, they can force them to work holidays -- remember those Christmas Day Big Ten games? -- and they don't even have to pay overtime.

And when a kid comes along who has the juice to work that system in his favor?

He gets called a quitter.

He's not, of course. He's just doing what his school does, which is making what he regards as the best decisions for his economic future. Just like coaches and ADs and university administrators do every day.

Dan Dakich and a lot of other coaches and ex-coaches can say Jalen Johnson quit on his teammates, and where is his team loyalty, and all that mess. But where's that talk when Dakich or any other coach leaves his kids at one school to take a better job at another school? That, too, after all, is a business decision. So why is Jalen Johnson a quitter, but Coach Ladder Climber is not?

And in Johnson's case, his connection to Duke is a lot less a bond than it is for the aforementioned coach's. He's been there all of four months or so, for pity's sake. Duke's a bus stop for him. That's not his fault; that's just the system under which he's compelled to play.

A system that makes the Dukes of the world hella rich, by the way. And the Dan Dakiches.