Backlash backfire

 I don't know why the New York Mets do what they do. Maybe it just takes awhile for some things to get to Queens these days.

For instance: Apparently no one's ever told 'em the won-loss record for players who whine about being booed is, like, 0-Infnity.

Seems the Mets aren't happy about the way they're being booed by their fans these days, and they've decided to give it back to them. So when one of them does something good, a few have taken to flashing the thumbs-down sign at the fans.  

Javy Baez, late of the Chicago Cubs, seems to be the main instigator in this, and you can argue that he more than anyone is justified in thumbing-off the fans. After all, he's only been a Met for a month. You'd think even New York fans should have accorded him a more respectful honeymoon period.

But, nah. It's New York, the Mets are crud, Baez is a Met now. So they boo. 

And they're completely justified in doing so.

I mean, if you're a Mets fan, how many times do you have to watch your team crap the bed before the words "You suck!" cross your lips? Yeah, the Metropolitans got to the World Series back in 2015 because they had a squadron of flamethrowers on the bump, but they haven't been back to the playoffs since 2016. And in the almost five years since, they're 32 games below .500. 

This season?

As August winds up, they're 63-67 and in third place in the NL East, seven games back of front-running Atlanta and 3 1/2  behind the Phillies for second. Another "Meh"-ts season, in other words.

So, yeah, you're gonna get booed, Javy, no matter how much you feel like you're collateral damage at this point. Your backlash is and always was doomed to backfire. You and your fellow thumbs-downers were never gonna win this one.

As if you ever do.

Daylight Unnecessary Risk Time, Part Deux

 The Ravens lost running back JK Dobbins for the season the other day in a nothing preseason game, and what did the Blob tell you about this JUST THE OTHER DAY?? 

Here it is, in case if you've forgotten. Consider it a great big ol' "I told you so."

Yeesh. When is the NFL going to drop these silly out-of-their-time relics once and for all?

Yeah, I know, probably never, because MONEY. NFL teams make coin off these games, because they strong-arm their season ticketholders into purchasing preseason games as part of the package. And the players get paid for these games, so they might be reluctant to give them up as well.

But for the love of all that's holy, people. Preseason games are a 1961 thing, not a 2021 thing. They're the single wing formation of scheduling.

The Blob says it's time to bury 'em with Sammy Baugh and Don Hutson 'n' them. But if you don't (because MONEY), at least don't risk your front-line vets in them.

Seriously, does Bruce Arians really need a look at Tom Brady against a bunch of scrubs to know if he's ready or not? Does Andy Reid need to put Patrick Mahomes out there against next week's roster cuts to reassure himself that, yep, he can still play?

If you're going to have preseason games, limit them to rookies and down-roster players on whom you haven't made up your mind. Why risk a JK Dobbins in a game that doesn't count? Especially in an age of minicamps and OTAs and interteam scrimmages?

I guess that would be a good thing to ask Ravens coach John Harbaugh this morning.

Hope someone does.

Looking the part

 You know how it is with these Little League World Series kids. Half of  'em look like they've been driving for five years.

And it kinda ruins the effect when the kid walking up to the plate is six feet tall and has a goatee.

But you know what was fun about the LLWS championship game yesterday, besides that it was Michigan against Ohio and Bo and Woody were probably arm-wrestling over the outcome?

The Michigan pitcher. That's what was fun.

His name was Ethan Van Belle and he struck out eight Ohioans as Michigan won the title, 5-2, and he looked like a Little Leaguer. He wasn't very tall and he didn't have a goatee, and you couldn't imagine him driving his buds down to the Dairy Queen to celebrate. He was a 12-year-old who looked like a 12-year-old. And there were a bunch of other 12-year-olds on the Michigan team -- on both teams, really -- who looked like 12-year-olds, too.

Now, I don't know what will become of any of them. Maybe some of them will grow up to wear goatees and drive cars and play in the big leagues, or at least for my Cruds in Pittsburgh. Maybe others will hit a growth spurt and wind up quarterbacking their teams in the Super Bowl against 59-year-old Tom Brady.

All I know is, they look for now like the kids they are. And the Blob finds that refreshing.

It also wonders if Ohio has to give back Toledo now.

A little weekend horsing around

 Most days very little surprises you. After all, we live in an exceptionally weird time -- for heaven's sake, a reality-show goof was President of the United States for four years -- and so weirdness has to get pretty darn weird for any of us to notice.

But come on now. Tell me you've seen this before.

A racehorse biting another racehorse in mid-race?

What was the announcer's call here? "And down the stretch they gum"?

And did Evander Holyfield watch this and think "Yup. Been there, done that"?

And in conjunction with that ...

Your immediate first thought: Mike Tyson trains horses now??

And here we thought he was only into white tigers.

Tee it up

 It's still Rangoon here in northeast Indiana, that charming part of late summer when you can break a sweat just thinking about breaking a sweat, and the outdoors feels like God's dryer vent. But, hey, college football!

Which begins again today, kinda-sorta, and the Blob cannot wait. It has never been shy about its preference for Saturdays in the fall (or today, in the dryer vent) over Sundays in the fall, on account of Sundays in the fall are mainly about fantasy football these days. The college game is just better in every way.

For one thing, it has Army-Navy, Harvard-Yale, Alabama-Auburn, Texas-Oklahoma.

The NFL has Jacksonville-Carolina.

College football has rivalries that go back to the halcyon days of Chester A. Arthur; pro football, with a few exceptions, has rivalries that go back to the halcyon days of George W. Bush. No one's stealing the other team's mascot in the days leading up to the Colts vs. the Titans; no one's sabotaging a rival's flip-card section during that venerable Bengals-Seahawks donnybrook. There's romance in Saturdays that doesn't exist in Sundays, even if the romance attaches to an ugly crockery jug or a beat-up old water bucket.

So ... yeah. I'll be watching today, even if there's not a whole lot to watch.

The big show doesn't begin until next weekend, but at least we've got Illinois-Nebraska this afternoon, speaking of rivalries that go back to, like, yesterday. We've got the 16th annual MEAC/SWAC Challenge, Alcorn State vs. North Carolina Central. And who doesn't want to check out Hawaii-UCLA or UConn-Fresno State?

Look. I know we're fast approaching a time when college football becomes one soulless corporate entity, virtually indistinguishable from the NFL. And it's no fun any more when you already know, or can reasonably assume, who's going to be in the College Football Playoff Final Four in five months.

Alabama Inc., Ohio State Inc., Clemson Inc., Oklahoma Inc. There's your four, same-old, same-old. Oh, maybe Notre Dame Inc. sneaks in there, or a rogue Georgia Inc. or LSU Inc. But there's not a whole lot of suspense that attaches to the CFP anymore.

And that's not why I like college football, anyway.

I like it for all those late nights driving back from South Bend after covering another four-hour Notre Dame game, a prime-time matchup muttering softly from the radio to keep me awake. Maybe it's Iowa, coming at me from WHO in Des Moines. Maybe it's some SEC game -- Arkansas vs. Ole Miss -- that goes seven overtimes, a marathon so long I get to watch the last hour on TV after I get home.

Or, like one night, maybe it's Bethune-Cookman vs. South Carolina State -- an HBCU game riding the quirky late-night airwaves from someplace down south.

Best times of the best time of my life, those drives home with the Hawkeyes or the Razorbacks or the Wildcats riding shotgun.

So, yeah. Tee it up, baby. Let's go.

Bastard Plague update

 Time now to check in on how Sportsball World, and the nation it serves, is handling the latest Bastard Plague counterattack, which has gotten plenty of support from the dimmer bulbs among our elected representatives/citizenry in general:

* In Tennessee, rapidly gaining on Florida and Texas as the national headquarters for crazy, a halfwit named Jason Zachary mocked fellow SEC member LSU for deciding anyone over the age of 12 must provide proof of vaccination or negative Bastard Plague test to gain entry to an LSU football game.

Most rational people would consider this a reasonable precaution, given the delta variant's  unchecked spread. Yet Zachary, who you will not be surprised to learn is a state rep, bragged they don't  hold with such notions in Tennessee, where Freedom and Personal Choice are the twin pillars of a free and choice-y state. "It's our right as Americans and Tennesseans to make sure Grandma winds up on a ventilator!" he said. "If we want to turn our state into a pesthouse, BY GOD WE'LL DO IT! 'Murica!"

OK. So he didn't say that.

But he might as well have.

* Moving on to the NFL, the league has announced that 93 percent of its players and personnel are at least partially vaccinated. Both the league and the players' association want to ramp up testing again in the face of the delta variant of the Plague that has driven yet another surge and overwhelmed the nation's hospitals again.

Most of whose Plague beds are now occupied by those who don't hold with them vaccination shots, on account of they cause autism and really bad acne and lizards with razor-sharp teeth that burst out of your stomach and go scurrying off (like in "Alien"!). No, sir. Livestock de-wormer from the friendly neighborhood vet is all those well-informed folks need for this, thanks!

Meanwhile, the NFL also reports that, of the 68 players who have shown red for the Plague since training camps opened, seven times as many unvaccinated players as vaccinated players have been among them. 

No doubt this will just boost de-wormer sales among the anti-vaxxer crowd.

* Closer to home, the "You Ain't Gonna Make MY Kid Wear No Mask!" forces scored their first victories this week. Less than two weeks into the new school year, Smith-Green schools up in Churubusco announced it was going to two weeks of e-learning after some 30 percent of elementary students and 20 percent of high school students showed red and went into quarantine.

A couple of days later, East Noble's school system announced it was also going to e-learning, and canceling all sports for the rest of the month. This means East Noble will not be playing football tonight, the first Bastard Plague football casualty of 2021.

One hopes it will be the last, but logic suggests otherwise. Both Smith-Green and East Noble school systems  are "mask-optional" (i.e., "no one's wearing a mask"). So are East Allen and Northwest Allen and Southwest Allen, having gotten an earful from parents who howled that making kids wear a mask in the face of a rebounding pandemic was like waterboarding or herding them into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz or some such thing.

In other words: There are gonna be some more open dates on Friday nights this fall. Count on it.

And enjoy.

Mascot news!

 Because who doesn't love mascot news? Especially here on the Blob, your official Mascot News You Can Use website?

 First, though, here's a quote from "Jaws":

The thing about a shark ... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. 

Or, you know, like PURDUE PETE'S EYES.

Which would have scared ol' Quint green, because, geez, just look at 'em. A shark's eyes are NOTHING compared to Purdue Pete's eyes. A shark's eyes, by comparison, are merry orbs of merry merriment. They're perfectly lovely eyes.

Purdue Pete's eyes?

Gah. Tell me these aren't the eyes HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" would have if you gave him human form.

Soulless, horror-stricken and HOLY CRAP THOSE THINGS ARE CREEPY would be some ways to describe Purdue Pete's eyes. Add in the hardhat he wears and the sledgehammer he lugs around like Jason Voorhees lugs around a machete, and I guess you can see why Purdue Pete was just named the Creepiest College Mascot in America beating out Oklahoma State's Pistol Pete, Stanford's Tree and Lousiana-Lafayette's Cayenne.

Which looks like this, in case you were wondering.

Personally I don't see how this mascot didn't make the podium, or this mascot, or this mascot.

All of them are way creepier than Pistol Pete or the Stanford Tree, the latter of which is just weird, and therefore sort of cool. Cayenne has the demonic smile going for it, but it doesn't quite follow you down into your dreams the way the Wichita State Shocker does, or the Providence Friar, or whatever the hell the Western Kentucky mascot is.

Or the way Purdue Pete and his soulless eyes do.

Of course, we're used to Purdue Pete in Indiana, the eyes and the hardhat and the hammer. So he's not nearly as creepy to us as he is to the rest of the country, probably.

Especially when you know the story one of my sportswriting buds once told me.

Seems he was down in Bloomington covering the Old Oaken Bucket game during one of the many years when the Hoosiers looked like they'd never seen a football before, and Purdue had roundly thrashed them the way the Boilermakers tended to do in those years. And here came Purdue Pete marching triumphantly around Memorial Stadium, until ...

Until a bunch of IU fans surrounded him, took his hammer away and started chasing him with it. 

Purdue Pete didn't look very scary then. In fact, according to my friend (who may or may not have been embellishing this tale), he looked pretty comical running around with his big ol' head wobbling to and fro.

From that day on, I thought about that whenever Purdue Pete's eyes lit on me during one of my many trips to Ross-Ade or Mackey Arena through the years. 

Kept me from being, you know, creeped out.

Too many last laps

 All day long the tears and tributes flooded the interwhatsis, and it was like being flung to a place where the living present merged with a living past. Names upon names, all of them evoking this day or that ...

Mario and Michael and A.J. and The Captain. Chip and Juan Pablo and TK and Dixie.

James Hinchcliffe. Graham Rahal. Alexander Rossi. Tony Stewart. Even the Haas F1 team from the other side of the pond.

Robin Miller is gone, 12 days after he came back to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for what almost everyone understood was a last look around at his best-loved place. And so the tributes from racers past and present flowed, and there's a hole in motorsport now only memories can fill.  

For me, it's a hole in my months of May, mostly.

I'm retired now, and I haven't so much as stepped foot in the Speedway since 2018. But I covered May at Indy for 40 years, and I can't conceive of that month and that place without Robin Miller. It is simply beyond my ability to imagine.

This is because he was as synonymous with Indy as many of the drivers, first for the Indianapolis Star and later for various national entities. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone. Which will happen when you first gain entry to the place at 18, stealing beer from fans' coolers to slake Jim Hurtubise's thirst.

After that, Miller tried his hand at racing himself, driving snarling mean-hearted USAC midgets. Then he traded a firesuit for a typewriter, and got crosswise with some folks more than once because that typewriter was sometimes too honest.

Along the way, though, he became IndyCar's fiercest advocate. And occasionally its conscience.

I didn't know Robin well, but I know a lot of the guys who worked with him, and I know the regard in which they hold him. They'll tell you he was fearless and loud and profane and flat-out hilarious. They'll tell you the Library of Congress couldn't hold all the stories he knew, and that he never tired of telling them, holding court in the media center surrounded by boxes of donuts and bags of candy he freely dispensed. 

They'll tell you he was a journalistic throwback, one of those guys who could smell something fishy from a mile off and knew how to unearth it.

Hell, he even dressed the part. Or maybe you had to be there in the '80s when Robin used to traipse into the claustrophobic old Speedway media center in quasi-parachute pants.

Thing is, he was larger than life among our tribe in a way you hardly ever see anymore, and now that his self-described "last lap" is done, it's worth noting there have been too damn many last laps lately. Bobby Unser went in early May, the month of his legend. Bob Jenkins, the voice of IndyCar for so many years, followed just a couple of weeks ago. And now Robin Miller.

That's a hard summer of mortality going on its head. And if you're of a certain age, that makes it a hard summer of understanding that the past, however lively, is still the past, and that time is getting along.

With the hammer down, and all four tires below the white line.

Domino theories

 They don't always tumble neatly, the dominoes. Seismic events are messy, and it's another seismic event that's set the dominoes to tumbling once again in big-boy college football.

In other words: Your guess is as good as mine about what the landscape is going to look like three or four or five years down the pike.

This is because no one yet knows how this ACC/Big Ten/Pac-12 alliance is going to work, and that includes the people who are putting it together. That was your A-list takeaway from the Zoom conference announcing it yesterday, which included the commissioners of all three conferences. 

All they know for sure -- and they were quite candid about this -- is there will likely be some cross-scheduling deals in the future, and then there'll be some other stuff that will address the latest new realities they're facing. Aside from that, the dominoes will fall however they fall.

So what do we know -- or at least can strongly suspect?

Well, even if Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren was the only one to kinda-sorta address it, it seems clear the elephant in the room here is the SEC and its partner in crime, ESPN. When Texas and Oklahoma announced they were jumping to the SEC earlier this summer, essentially gutting the Big 12, the realignment train was rolling again. The whole NIL thing may factor into it, too, but let's face it: without the SEC's raiding party the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 aren't conducting a joint news conference yesterday.

Truth is, the announced alliance is more or less a prevent defense against further marauding by the SEC and its hired guns at ESPN. It's a way to keep Clemson in the fold and Ohio State and Penn State and Michigan and Wisconsin, and maybe even Notre Dame -- which likes to pretend it's a football independent, but is as much an ACC school in the fall as it is in the winter.

In any event, it's now the SEC Inc. vs. All Them Others Inc., and if you let your imagination off the leash you can see where this is headed. Eventually Big Football will form its own Inc., operating by a set of bylaws that will codify what Big Football already is. 

Which is to say, an unofficial semipro league/NFL farm system. Big Football Inc. would simply remove the "unofficial" from the equation.

Ultimately this could be a good thing, because the current model isn't sustainable. It's absurd, after all, to imagine Alabama and, say, Ball State exist in the same universe, football-wise. Alabama is a multimillion-dollar corporation; Ball State is a MAC school that must depend on wealthy alums and student fees to keep football afloat. 'Bama goes to high-end bowls that pay out millions; Ball State goes to Radial Tire/Chicken Sandwich bowls whose payouts are hardly worth the time and expenditure. 

Two different worlds, in other words. Two different sets of priorities.

And maybe one more set of dominoes, ready to tumble.

The gentle art of coercion

"You got a nice football team here. Be a shame if somethin' happened to it."

And, OK, so that is NOT what NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told the good people of Buffalo yesterday.

Not exactly, anyway. Not ... altogether.

But the Hammer was in Billstown yesterday, and he did say the old stadium had been renovated as much as it could be renovated, and it was time to suck it up and shell out for a new stadium so "we can make sure the Bills are here and successful for many, many decades going forward."

A "private-public partnership," the Hammer said, would be the ideal solution. The translation for which (since the Blob can't resist being cynical about this ageless con) would be this: Yes, we're going to get in your knickers again, Mr. and Ms. Taxpayer. All so you can pay for the privilege of paying for the privilege of gaining entry to a stadium that wouldn't have been built without your money. Don't worry, we won't charge you more than 20 bucks to park, 10 bucks for a beer and a few hundred for a seat license that entitles you to purchase season tickets for a few more hundred.

Oh, it is the perennial of perennials, this new stadium strong-arming. It's been going on since long before the city of Indianapolis built the Hoosier Dome for Bob Irsay, and the only revision is the folks doing the strong-arming have become slicker with its language.

These days it's the art of coercion practiced gently, which doesn't alter the fact it's still coercion. The spokesperson for team owners Kim and Terry Pegula, Jim Wilkinson, revealed as much when he noted that a proposed deal for a new $1.2 billion stadium in Orchard Park couldn't go forward until Erie County got off the schneid and hammered out a deal with them.

"The city of Buffalo and the state are going to have to decide if they want a team," Wilkinson said.

Hell of a thing to say about a city that's supported pro football for 61 years.

The Bills were a charter member of the American Football League, and they play in a city which sits in the mouth of a weather shotgun at the east end of Lake Erie. You've gotta be a hardy soul to show up for Bills games after Halloween, but somehow hardy souls keep doing it. And have for six decades.

Now some hump has the nerve to question whether or not they want a team?

Yeesh. Same old, same old.

Anachronisms and such

 By now you know what the NCAA is, if you've at all been paying attention. It's the surrey with the fringe on top in a Testarossa world.  

It's an organization that presides over a multi-billion-dollar industry while pretending it's still all books and learnin' and sis-boom-bah, even as it acknowledges the former by finally allowing its labor force to benefit from its labor. In all other ways, however, it's as anachronistic as milkmen and oil lamps.

Case in point?

According to this story in the Canton (O.) Repository, the other day the NCAA slammed the Akron football program with sanctions for providing "impermissible benefits" to nine players.

The "impermissible benefits", in this case, were cash loans ranging from $100 to $1,000, paid by a now-former associate director of athletics. And the reason those loans (loans, mind you, backed by signed contracts and everything) were made?

In at least two cases involving mid-year transfers, it was because the university hadn't yet disbursed their scholarships. Which presumably meant the two kids in question needed money for stuff like, I don't know, books and tuition until their scholarship money kicked in.

Now, I can't speak for any of you. But I don't see anything remotely wrong with this.

It was, in fact, the decent and honorable thing to do, given that the two kids had entered into a contract of sorts with Akron by transferring there. Also, I can't think how it could be considered an "impermissible benefit," given that the definition of "impermissible benefit" is a benefit not available to non-athletes.

This presumes no regular student at Akron in a similar situation has ever been floated a similar loan. Which of course is absurd on its face.

Bottom line?

The NCAA is treating Akron like a criminal because one of its former employees did the right thing. 

That's some old-school NCAA logic there. Not to mention unschooled.

Daylight Unnecessary Risk Time

 A quiz for you this Sunday morn, and, yes, the Blob knows it's Sunday, and therefore quizzes are unfair, and, well, life's a tough old haul all around, idn't it?

Anyway, here's your quiz: What is more useless than NFL preseason games?

A) Attempting an ocean crossing in a Ferrari.

B) Talking sense to Trumpazoid groupies.

C) Talking sense to elected representatives who are Trumpazoid groupies.

D) Every preseason game in every sport.

The corrects answer, of course, is "E," which is either "all of the above," or "absolutely nothing is more useless." 

This is an argument the Blob has made before, and it's an argument fresh in the mind today because the Blob actually watched bits and pieces of the Bears-Bills preseason tilt yesterday. No, I don't know why.

Maybe I was wondering what would happen if the Bears' prize rookie, Justin Fields, got hit so hard his head came off.

OK, that didn't happen. Fields only got hit so hard his helmet flew three feet in the air, which prompted this response from Jesse Spector on Deadspin.

Spector's absolutely correct, of course. Preseason games are stupid and unnecessary, and have been for some time. All they are is Daylight Unnecessary Risk Time in what should be a Daylight Saving-The-Body-For-Real-Games world.

Fields apparently emerged unscathed from his big knock, but you can put that down to dumb luck. More likely would have been a turn in concussion protocol, or an injury that would have him cost him down time and the Bears the services of a guy for whom they paid goo-gobs of dough.

That didn't happen this time, but it has in the past. So why does the NFL insist on continuing with these games?

Easy off-the-top-of-the-head answer: Tradition.

Or, more properly, the inertia of tradition, which dictates one must continue to do something a certain way because it's always been done that way. There seems to be no other rational explanation for the NFL clinging to preseason games, other than money: The NFL gets to squeeze the customers for a few extra dimes, and the players want the extra dimes they get for them. 

Otherwise, they make zero sense.  Especially now that the regular season is expanding to 17 games, which means yet another opportunity for players to get hurt in a game whose attrition rate is already critical.

And yet NFL teams will again play three and in some cases four preseason games. Why?

The standard answer always has been that preseason games give marginal players the opportunity to win jobs. But that answer is decades out of date.

In this era of OTAs and minicamps and controlled scrimmages, marginal players get plenty of opportunities to impress without preseason games. And it's not as if their coaches don't already have a handle on them before they even show up; the sometimes comically exhaustive analytics available to them in 2021 ensure that.

So again we're back to the question: Why?

Take your time. I'll wait.

Oh, no! Controversy!

 Full disclosure time this morning, because everyone should know the Blob's biases, and  can then better judge how disdainful they should be of its takes.

("Pretty disdainful, generally," you're saying now)

Anyway ... here's the deal: The Blob does not do video games.

This is not just because the last video game at which the Blob was remotely competent was Pit Stop, a racing game that was popular back in, I don't know, the 1880s or something. Everything since is a mystery. My son might know the difference between "Assassin's Creed: The Crimean Years" and "Madden 1954," but I don't.

And so it's with more than a little amusement, and whole lot of eye-rolling, that it observes the "controversy" among NBA players over ... a video game.

It seems more than one has an issue with the way they're rated by video game publisher 2K Sports in this year's NBA game, NBA 2K22. No, really.

Kevin Durant, for instance?

Well, he's kinda miffed, and LeBron James is kinda miffed on his behalf, because he thinks his rating should be a 99 instead of a 96 (whatever that means).

Meanwhile, LeBron also scoffs at Steph Curry's rating of 96. And Trae Young wonders how he can be just an 89.

The Blob's take on this, of course, can likely be guessed.

"It's just a stupid video game," is the gist.

But the athletic stratosphere is a curious place, occupied as it is by sometimes delusional egos. This should not be surprising; any athlete who rises to the level of a KD or LeBron there because he or she possesses the arrogance of supreme confidence. Some are just better at hiding the arrogance than others.

So, yeah, they waste oxygen on the silliest things. Because they wouldn't be who they are if they didn't.

Still ...

Still, it's just a stupid video game.

So you'll forgive my laughter.

Beating the rap on beating

 Trevor Bauer is no longer a Los Angeles Dodger, at least for now. But he's still adept at dodging stuff.

He's still got that professional athlete mojo that allows him to duck responsibility for heinous behavior, with the help of sympathetic gavel-bangers and assorted feats of lawyerdom. A little of both combined yesterday to get him sprung from a restraining order filed by the latest young woman he's beaten the crap out of during "rough sex."

The gavel-banger in this case is Judge Dianna Gould-Saltman of the Los Angeles Superior Court, and those must be hella seats she has in Dodger Stadium. In dissolving the restraining order against Bauer, she essentially ruled the young woman in question invited the "rough sex" to which Bauer subjected her, and therefore anything that happened during said "rough sex" was all on her.

Including getting beaten into unconsciousness, which Bauer apparently likes to do during sex, and which he reportedly did to this woman.

Oh, he is one sick puppy, our Trevor. Guy oughta be in a cage. Doubt you'll see him gracing any Wheaties' boxes in the near future.

Doubt, too, that the young woman in question departed the courtroom feeling much different than so many women feel when they take on professional athlete mojo. Particularly in the face of such blatant judicial slut-shaming.

I mean, what else do you call it when the judge looks at you and decides you got what was coming to you? Even if what you got landed you in the hospital with injuries so severe veteran personnel said they'd never seen anything quite like it?

It make you wonder how far Bauer would have had to go with his "rough sex" before Gould-Saltman would have held him accountable for his actions. If he'd have beaten her to death, would he then bear some responsibility? Or would the fact she asked him to be rough with her in texts allow him to skate?

That's probably a bit over the top. But tell me that isn't the logical extension of Gould-Saltman's ruling.

Bottom line here is She Asked For It has rarely had a more stark example. And Trevor Bauer is now free to continue doing what he does -- which includes threats and online harassment of women who've dared to criticize him on social media. 

Wonder  how bad that harassment might get for a woman who dared to challenge him court?

Love to hear the good judge's thoughts on that.

Little big game

The Little League World Series begins again today in Williamsport, Pa., and so out roll the cliches like an overturned bag of baseballs. All the usual suspects are present and accounted for:

"It's the passion and love for baseball in its purest form." (Cubs manager David Ross, who covered the LLWS for ESPN)

"It's magical. You don't have be a kid to enjoy it." (Angels manager Joe Maddon)

"It's all about simplicity and the joy of the game in Williamsport." (Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove)

All of these quotes appear in a piece by ESPN's Tim Kurkjian, who himself writes that the LLWS is "all about the kids; the kids are kings; the kids show you the way." This is especially true when some 12-year-old moves the runner over with a perfect drag bunt -- a skill that available evidence indicates somehow disappears between Little League and the major leagues.

What happens in Williamsport, see, is not so much a microcosm of the grownups' game as its distillation. It's the game with all the ego and and artifice drained out of it, even as ESPN has corrupted it, in small ways and big, the way TV always does.

And yet ...

And yet, everything the Blob wrote about the LLWS four years ago still applies. And rather than waste newer words on it, here it is in its entirety. Enjoy:

Mid-August now, and summer has grown old and weary. A million little tells are there now, dropping hints its hold is loosening: School buses rumbling again, high school football lighting up Friday nights, the very light in the sky taking on a different, bronzer cast as it rouses itself later in the mornings and flees earlier at night.

And then of course there's this: Two different universes of baseball showing us both the promise of the game, and perhaps its waning.

Every sports bar in America now has the somehow flawed finished product on one TV these days, and the somehow better, lesser version on another TV. On this particular night in this particular place, the finished product at one end of the bar is the Red Sox and the Yankees, renewing their endlessly renewed ancient beef from Fenway Park. And down at the other end?

Two groups of kids playing a game on national TV they've been playing all summer.

It's Little League World Series time again, and if once that was relatable to every American who ever picked up a bat and swung it during his or her summers, it is unfortunately less so now. If Little League baseball was the game unalloyed, the all-seeing eye of ESPN has transformed it into a Spectacle now, because that's the inevitable result when you turn the TV cameras on a thing. And now the TV cameras are everywhere, airing not just LL World Series games but regional qualifying games -- so many games, in fact, they've become so much late summer background noise.

The Blob has made its unease with this phenomenon known before, so we won't re-plow that ground here. Suffice it to say it still believes giving 12-year-olds the full ESPN treatment is something that should be viewed with a raised eyebrow at the very least. Proceed with caution, in other words.

Of course, that's not how TV does things. Less is not more; more is more. With the inevitable result that it winds up being less.

And yet ... you can understand why the teevees are so all in on this. Whether or not it's a byproduct of the Steroids Era, which has thrown a shadow over the game that exists to this day, baseball at the finished-product level has something empty at its core. It is not definable, and the Cubs winning the World Series last fall was a respite from that, but t's there. 

This summer, for instance, baseballs are flying out of ballparks again. There should always be magic in that act, but the Steroids Era now makes us innately suspicious if it happens too much, and that's where we are right now. Baseballs are flying out of ballparks, but they are going too far and it is happening too often. The magic has become the commonplace -- and after awhile, the commonplace elicits not wonder but a shrug, and more of the aforementioned raised eyebrows.

"Oh, look. Giancarlo Stanton hit another homer. Wonder what HE'S on."

That sort of thing.

But the LL World Series, for all the corrupting influence of TV, remains untouched by this. Whatever is missing in the finished product, it remains found in the Little League product. There is something purer, more elemental in it, something more in tune with the game we all grew up playing. It is, yes, less, but it is more.

Even now. Even if it, too, is on the TV at the end of the bar every day now.

Background noise it may be, here in mid-August. But there is still music in it. 

A question of questions

Once upon a time I knew this high school kid.

I won't identify her by name or by school or even by the sport she played, but she was a linchpin of a team -- maybe the linchpin -- that won a state championship one year. And so local media, electronic and what we used to call "print," had occasion to interview her more than once.

It wasn't exactly like Leroy Jethro Gibbs grilling a suspect in the box. I mean, she was a high school kid.

Yet she was terrified.

So terrified, her coach had to beg her to answer even the simplest questions, and then had to stand next to her while she did. I always wanted to say "Hey, it's OK, I don't bite." In fact, I did say that a time or two.

All of which is a long-way-around-the-barn way of saying I understand Naomi Osaka's own unease around the media.

She's no high school kid, but she's young, too -- just 23 -- and she's not an exceptional athlete at a high school in Indiana but an exceptional athlete on a global stage. As maybe the best women's tennis player in the world, she is in many ways the face of her entire sport, or at least one of them. And I think we  forget sometimes what a burdensome thing that can be.

Especially if, like Osaka and my nameless high school kid, you're someone whose discomfort with the spotlight veers into a phobia over which you have little control, and for which no one should blame you.

That's what I think about Osaka -- and Simone Biles, for that matter. And so you won't catch me saying her struggles with this are just a ploy to get out of answering tough questions at news conferences, as some of my sportswriting colleagues have suggested.

However.

However, I don't think this means you paint media types as ogres just for doing their jobs.

Example: Paul Daugherty of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Who's one of the best, if not the best, sports columnists in America, and a seasoned pro who knows how to ask the tough questions. The other day he asked Osaka an entirely legitimate one at a presser for the Western and Southern Open in Cincinnati, and Osaka teared up and fled the podium as a result.

Later, her agent called Daugherty a "bully" whose "sole purpose was to intimidate." And yet ...

And yet, here's the text of Daugherty's question. You tell me if he sounds like a bully:

You are not crazy about dealing with us, especially in this format, yet you have a lot of outside interests that are served by having a media platform. I guess my question is, how do you balance the two, and also do you have anything you'd like to share about what you did say about Simone Biles?

Those are entirely appropriate questions framed by an entirely legitimate point. In fact, those are great questions, given the issue of mental health to which Osaka, Biles and others have recently focused some well-deserved attention. And they're exactly the sort of questions you'd expect an exemplary journalist such as Daugherty to ask.

That hardly makes him a bully. And it hardly makes him someone trying to intimidate anyone.

Yet Osaka fastened on the word "crazy," responding "When you say I'm 'not crazy about dealing with you guys,' what does that refer to?"

To which Daugherty responded "You are not crazy ..."

Wrong thing to say, obviously. Even the pros misstep once in awhile.

Yet it doesn't change the fact Daugherty's questions were fair and on point. And that, in reacting the way she did, Osaka clearly still is struggling with the issues to which she first called attention at the French Open.

That should elicit our compassion, not our disdain. But on the other hand, labeling a respected journalist a "bully" when he indisputably wasn't does nothing to help either her or her situation.

Two things. Both true. 

Tebow ti--

 ... which, in case you need a translation, means "Tebow time" getting cut off in mid-time.

Comes now the word from Jacksonville that Urban Meyer, Tim Tebow's old college coach, has released him, after Meyer's experiment trying Tebow as a tight end failed like Fyre Fest.

In other words, it was simply embarrassing watching him the other night. Particularly when he tried to block people. 

Turns out he was too old, too light and too slow to get it done. And so, this being pro football, where no one keeps guys around just because they're good guys and old friends, Meyer had no choice but to show the man the road.

Too old. Too light. Too slow.

Hmm. That sounds familiar ... 

 Again, it's the NFL. Sentiment goes to die there. If Tebow is too old, too light and too slow to do everything NFL tight ends are asked to do these days, he'll get cut in training camp. Not even his old college coach is going to keep a guy around who can't help him.

And if that happens (and the odds are pretty good it will) ...

Gee. Who said that?

Oh, yeah. Me.

The Blob said that back in May, when yapping poodles all over sports-talk world were doing what they do best, which is whipping up phony outrage. This was a joke, they all said. It was a publicity stunt. Why Tim Tebow was going to STEAL SOMEBODY'S JOB!

To which the Blob said, oh, horse pucky. It saw this going almost exactly how it went, which was no particular feat of insight. Anyone who knows how the NFL operates and had one eye open could see it coming from miles off.

So the Blob takes no bows here for being wise and all-seeing. Much as it would like to.

Today's dispatch from Idiotville

 I know what we've all been saying. The fans make the event, right?

And so numerous tributes, paeans and huzzahs have been raised since Sportsball World started letting fans back into the house again, because sports are nothing but children's games without the fans and it's all just a lot of meaningless blockin' and tacklin' and pitchin' and catchin' if they're not there. It's a silent move in a Dolby Surround Sound world, an ocean cruise that never leaves port.

This is true, mostly.

Here's what is also true, however: The fans are frequently idiots.

Which brings us to the christening the other night of the new football stadium in L.A., which apparently is wondrous and magical and and, you know, like Oz or Candyland or Far Far Away, sort of. The occasion was a preseason game between the city's two NFL teams, the Rams and the Chargers, which prompted some of the fans in attendance to celebrate the way some NFL fans tend to celebrate.

In other words, to engage in a big-ass brawl.

Now, I suppose the Blob could list this as one of the many reasons it tends to give NFL games a miss, which include the extortionist ticket costs and adult beverage costs and concessions costs and parking costs. It's a variation on the old joke about team owners: How do you build a modest nest egg? Start with a hefty nest egg and take your family to an NFL game.

Also, don't forget the crash helmet and body armor.

Because, listen, this sort of thing happens all too often at NFL games, particularly in the upper reaches of stadiums where the weather is frequently drunkest. But that's not what elevates what happened in L.A. to a special class of dumbass-ery.

It's the fact that it happened at a preseason game. Between the Rams and the Chargers, two teams that do not exactly call to mind Bears-Packers, Steelers-Browns or Cowboys-Washington as a particularly legendary rivalry.

Few things are less worth getting brawling-worked-up-about than a preseason game.  Even fewer things are less worth it than a preseason game between the Rams and the Chargers. If there were such a thing as a "Meh" Bowl, this would be a frontrunner.

So congratulations, idiots. Way to christen your new stadium in a way that puts all other idiots to shame.

Fans, man. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

Bucs win! Bucs win!

 Yeah, OK. So not really.

My cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates are still a minor-league organization traipsing around in Daddy's big-boy clothes, and that's not going to change anytime soon. Right now they're in a submarine 34 fathoms below .500, and the only way they could be deeper in the NL Central is if the Cubs magically disappeared.

In case you missed it, the Lovables have lost 11 games in a row and now are only nine games ahead of the Cruds. This will happen when your owners have become that furniture store guy shouting "EVERYTHING MUST GO!" during "Law & Order: SVU" reruns.

So at least the Cruds have some company in their misery.

However.

However, in at least one area, the Cruds are not Cruddy. In fact, they're No. 1 in the entire world.

Roll out ol' T206, boys!

That would be the set of baseball cards printed between 1909 and 1911, of which Pirates immortal Honus Wagner is a part. In fact, as of this morning, the Wagner card is THE most valuable card in baseball card history, having just fetched a record $6.606 million to shatter the previous record by almost one-and-a-half mill.

Six-point-six million! Why, just think what the Cruds' current ownership could do with that.

No, not go out and get a marquee player, silly. Buy a ski lodge or something!

I mean, come on. Spending real money on your baseball team?

What a ridiculous idea.

Bricking up the Brickyard

 Well. At least it wasn't boring.

But this cannot be what the poobahs had in mind, this first NASCAR Cup race on the infield road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The drivers hated the idea, for one thing; some of them bitched and moaned and said it was terrible they weren't going to race on Indy's hallowed oval, even while acknowledging that doing so was like watching grass grow. But the fans kept yawning and staying home, so ...

So to the road course they went Sunday. And of course it was an absolute (brick)-up.

The culprit was the chicane between the fifth and sixth turns, which started coming apart as the race went along. With five laps to go William Byron ran over the damaged curbing and set off an eight-car pileup that red-flagged the race ... and then seven more piled up in the same place as soon as the green dropped again  ... and then Chase Briscoe ran through the grass and spun out leader Denny Hamlin ... and finally AJ Allmendinger stepped through the open door to take the checkers.

Allmendinger led only two laps. But it was the right two.

"Survival of the fittest," he said.

That was one way to put it.

Another was, "The hell was THAT??"

Still another was, "Why didn't they just build a ramp between turns 5 and 6? Couldn't have bent up more sheet metal than they did."

In any event, the Verizon "Look Out!" 200 at the Brickyard was half the Brickyard 400, but twice the mess. And it makes you wonder a couple of things, whether or not it makes the organizers wonder them or not.

One, maybe the racing gods hated the idea of abandoning the oval, too.

And two, maybe trying to run three major events on the road course in one weekend wasn't such a great idea after all.

It's as yet unclear whether IndyCar, Infiniti and Cup all qualifying and racing over the same patch of asphalt across 72 hours was just too much for the road course infrastructure to handle. But it's absolutely clear at least one part of that infrastructure failed.

And you can deduce from that a couple of other things.

One, this could well be the last time you see IMS try the IndyCar/Infiniti/Cup tripleheader.

And two, we perhaps haven't seen the last of the Brickyard 400, even if it is the spectator equivalent of a medically induced coma. Given Sunday's fiasco, and how vocal some influential voices (Kevin Harvick, Austin Dillon, etc.) were about abandoning the oval to begin with, it's not at all hard to envision Roger Penske and the IMS brain trust scrapping the "Look Out!" 200 and going back to the oval.

Hey, it looked great on the drawing board ...

That sort of thing.

And if the fans don't come back?

Then they don't come back. Not even Roger Penske gets everything he wants all the time.

The Brickyard: A requiem

The kid is no more than knee-high to a Goodyear, but he knows his stuff. On this afternoon 27 years ago, he stands with his tiny hands hooked through the chain-link, watching all that Detroit muscle rumble past in the shimmery heat. And he sings out the names, one by one by one.

"Ricky Rudd!" he chirps in his high piping voice, as the No. 10 Tide Ride snarled out the gate.

"Rusty Wallace!"

"Bill Elliott!"

"Sterling Marlin!"

Car after car, blaring billboard after blaring billboard, rolling out onto the fabled oval. And then one more, and the kid is practically shrieking.

"BOBBY LABONTE!"

Because, see, he's dressed head-to-toe in the green of Labonte's No. 18 Interstate Batteries Pontiac. And now his dad is smiling.

"That's his guy," he tells a bystander. "He knows 'em all, but that's his guy."

And now the bystander -- me -- is smiling and nodding, too. It's the first blush of August in 1994, and we're all metaphorically shouting out the names, because NASCAR has come to the most famous 2 1/2 miles in motorsports. And it is strange and wonderful and earth-shaking all at once.

In 83 years, after all, no event but the Indianapolis 500 had been run at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. No month but May was ever loud and fast and coursing with humanity, and shot through with triumph and turmoil and sometimes tragedy.

But NASCAR was a happening by '94, and so here came August and more loudness and speed. All those names riding the NASCAR crest were there, and more besides. 

Among the 85 entries, for instance, were 57-year-old H.B. Bailey and 66-year-old Herschel McGriff, neither of whom made the field. Indy 500 winners Danny Sullivan and A.J. Foyt did make the field. 

On race day, which was perversely cool for August, polesitter Rick Mast led the field into turn one in his black-and-white No. 1. As he did, I raised a camera and snapped off a picture. I still have it somewhere, and should dig it out this weekend.

After all, it's a piece of history that actually is history now.

This is because what used to be the Brickyard 400, or the Something-Something 400 at the Brickyard is no more. The NASCAR boys are Indy this weekend for a tripleheader with the IndyCar guys, but they won't running on the oval anymore. 

Instead, they'll be running on the infield road course, which didn't even exist in '94. And the name of the race will be the Verizon 200.

I'm entitled to feel a bit wistful about that, having covered the first 20 Brickyard 400s. Even if I've been banging the gong to move the race to the road course for a good decade now.

This is because a race that was strange and wonderful and earth-shaking in '94 gradually became a really loud Tournament of Roses parade as the years marched along. Technology advanced and changed the cars and those iconic 2 1/2 miles, unchanging across more than a century now, became the worst possible venue for NASCAR. What was a show the first few years became a dreary slog under a melting August sun, and when the shine wore off NASCAR-at-Indy the dreary slog was all that was left.

People stopped coming, gradually, once they discovered the Brickyard was a giant bore. Then came Tiregate in 2008, and they really stopped coming.

That's when the Blob began saying maybe the Speedway and NASCAR ought to think about moving the event to the road course. It wouldn't be the same as running the race on that hallowed oval, but at least it wouldn't put the audience into a full snooze -- or decide it wasn't worth making the trek to Indy at all.

At the very least the visuals would be better. Because they wouldn't be going around and around and around in front of acres of empty seats.

Well, that's all past. Tomorrow they come to the green going south-to-north on the main straightaway, braking hard to make that tight right into the infield, and, sure, this will be better. NASCAR at Indy will be fun again -- or least not the tranquilizer the oval race had become.

The Blob applauds this.

But a part of me will miss that kid, and the wonder of it all.

Get Off My Lawn Guy surrenders

 OK, OK, O-KAY. So that was pretty cool.

It was pretty cool the way the Yankees and White Sox came walking out of the corn in that temporary ballpark MLB built next to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

It was pretty cool the way they sprayed the corn with dingers -- the Yanks clubbed four, accounting for all of their eight runs, and the  White Sox rainbow-ed six -- which gave all of us plenty of whacks at various corny home run calls.

Mine was "Aaaaand He Who Walks Behind The Rows gets another souvenir!" But that's  because I'm a Stephen King fan, and some people aren't, which means it's an inside joke only a select portion of the audience would have gotten.

Kevin Costner walking out of the corn to start Fox's broadcast, that was cool, even if it was too Hollywood even for this Hollywood event. Tim Anderson's walkoff homer into the corn to win it for Chicago, 9-8, on the other hand ...

Well. That was Hollywood, too, so much so it felt like a setup. Although you have to think not even MLB would be knuckleheaded enough to pull that sort of stunt.

No, that was just karma, moment colliding head-on with circumstance -- the circumstance being MLB riding piggyback on an iconic film to generate some desperately needed buzz (and, ahem, a little coin, too). The game's devolved into an extended episode of Home Run Derby, stripping it of much of its traditional appeal. When both going yard and going down swinging become the rule instead of the exception, both become mundane. Instead of a Moment, they're just moments.

So maybe Get Off My Lawn Guy was just being his harrumphing self when he bah-humbugged the whole idea the other day. He now admits, grudgingly, that MLB not only needed this, it actually pulled it off. He admits it wasn't nearly as crass as he feared it would be. He even admits it almost wove the same spell the movie did, which your mind told you was completely ridiculous but which had you reaching for the tissues at the end anyway.

Field of Schemes last night may have been. But in the end -- yeah, OK -- you couldn't help cheering. 

Dammit.

No nyah-nyahs for you!

 The keep-your-shirt-tucked-in Force has always been strong in the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League (as Howard Cosell used to pronounce it). So I guess we should have figured this was coming.

"This" being the NFL's recent pronouncement that, henceforth and forevermore, the league would be cracking down on taunting, and NO EXCEPTIONS. The minions will obey the laws of sportsmanship (and good grooming, too!), or else.

I suppose we should applaud this nod to propriety and straightenin'-up-and-flyin'-right. After all, football is no place for cheap shots, even if it frequently is.

That's not the issue. The issue is it's the NFL. and we've seen the way it already enforces its taunting rule. And so there are questions.

Such as, what will the league consider taunting under its enhanced enforcement?

Because a lot of what it already considers taunting frequently isn't taunting, at least the way the Blob understands it. And that's a problem.

I mean, will it be taunting when two linemen start jawing at each other after a particularly contentious play, of which there are a bunch every game?

Will it be taunting when a quarterback gets hit late on an out of bounds play, leaps up and gets in the perpetrator's face to show he won't be intimidated?

Will it be taunting when a pass rusher sacks the QB and whispers "All night, old man, all night long ..."?

'Cause that exact thing actually happened one time.

It was Bubba Smith who said it to Bart Starr, and the year was 1967. Re-read Jerry Kramer's "Instant Replay" and you'll find it. 

Point is, a little trash-talking -- taunting? -- has been part of the football culture forever. The game's a demolition derby, large men smashing into one another at light speed, and hefty reserves of testosterone are required to play it. And testosterone makes you do and say things. Testosterone has quite a mouth on it.

It can also choreograph. See: Elmo Wright and Billy "White Shoes" Johnson, the NFL's seminal end-zone dancers, high-steppin' in the end zone.

See also: Deion Sanders strutting across the goal line with his hand on the back of his head. Or Chuck Bednarik exulting over Frank Gifford's stretched-out body after knocking the consciousness out of him, one of the NFL's alltime iconic images.

How much of that will now be a flag and 15 yards? Or a flag, 15 yards and a fine?

Look. No one's saying here that taunting an opponent is a good thing, or should be emulated by kids on youth football fields.  But there's a fine line between behavior that's beyond the pale and behavior that just flows from the emotion and intensity of the game. And the NFL hasn't always been particularly discerning about the difference.

Which is why this crackdown might wind up being cracked.

The Malice, reconsidered

 Let's begin today with this: Some fan.

Some fan in his home arena at the end of a contentious game between bitter rivals, who finish it by squaring off with one another. Some fan who reacts to this by assaulting one of the visiting team's players ... which leads to a visiting team player going into the stands after said fan ... which in turn leads to other visiting team players going into the stands to brawl with the home fans.

Sound familiar?

Of course it does. It's the Malice in the Palace, right?

It's the Malice in the Palace, and the fan's name is John Green, and he's thrown a beer at Ron Artest of the Indiana Pacers. Which leads to Artest and Stephen Jackson going into the stands after him.

Which leads to a full-scale brawl between the Pacers and a bunch of charming drunks throwing beer and chairs and God knows what else on the night of Nov. 19, 2004.

Except.

Except that's not the date we're talking about here.

The date we're talking about is Dec. 23, 1979, and it's not a basketball game in Detroit between the Pacers and Detroit Pistons. It's a hockey game in New York between the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers.

The name of the fan, in this instance, is not John Green but John Kaptain. The name of the player he's assaulted is Stan Jonathan of the Bruins, whom he's whacked with a rolled-up program. And the name of the Bruins' player who climbs into the stands to go after him is Terry O'Reilly, followed not by Stephen Jackson but by Mike Milbury and Peter McNab and a whole pile of other Bruins.

Here's the interesting thing, though: No one came up with some catchy nickname for this.

 It was just a hockey brawl, albeit a notorious one. The participants were suspended, and the NHL went on about its business. 

There was no dog-whistle hand-wringing about the league's "culture". No yapping sports poodles calling the players involved "thugs" on national TV. No one intimating that the NHL was full of gangsters, by God. The commissioner of the NHL didn't even institute a dress code because of it. 

All of the above happened after the Malice in the Palace. And I bring it up today because I watched the Netflix documentary about it yesterday, and from 17 years distance it's appalling how robustly the media and NBA commissioner David Stern were blowing those aforementioned dog whistles -- because, unlike that other brawl, this one did not involve  white hockey players but black basketball players.  

How did more of us not see then what's so crystal clear now?

Maybe it's just that we needed those 17 years distance to get the full picture of what happened that night in Detroit, and how people who should have known better reacted to it. Artest was a loose cannon and so was Stephen Jackson, and from that the assumptions spread outward in concentric circles -- assumptions that almost entirely had to do with race, because the sight of black players brawling with mostly white fans was the worst possible imagery for the NBA.

And so Stern's solution, and the media's that took its lead from him, was to treat the black players like criminals. And to tacitly encourage media to use the word "thugs" to describe them, which is about as dog whistle-y as it gets.

Problem was, the video and the facts didn't fit the NBA-is-full-of-(black)-criminals narrative. If Artest and Jackson broke the cardinal rule of sports by going into the stands, it was the mostly white fans who did the rioting thereafter. 

They were the ones who rushed the floor, while security ... well, who knows what they were doing. They were the ones who threw things. They were the ones -- one in particular -- who came at Artest after he'd returned to the floor, who came at Jermaine O'Neal, who showered the Pacers with beer and popcorn as they finally left the arena.

What began as some not-uncommon pushing and shoving between the rival Pistons and Pacers at the end of a blowout Pacers' win escalated into an utter s***show because John Green decided to throw a beer at the volatile Artest.

Nothing else happens if he doesn't do that.

In the Netflix doc, Green comes off as about as much a jackass as you'd figure, and indeed the prosecutor in Michigan did go after him. He also went after the jackass who came at Artest on the floor, and the jackass who threw a chair. So at least there some culpability for more than just the players.

And yet ...

Dec. 23, 1979.

Nov. 19, 2004.

Two brawls. A world of difference. 

Role models

The stupid, man. It burns sometimes.

Read the other day that in Alabama, congress critter Marjorie Something Crazypants applauded the state's Bastard Plague vaccination rate, but not because it was the nation's highest. Because it was the lowest.

People actually applauded and cheered, like it was the greatest thing they'd ever heard.

Elsewhere in Alabama, of course, medical personnel are being overwhelmed with Delta variant patients. And the top health official in the state said they had to throw out 65,000 expired vaccines because, well, the state's apparently also infested with kooky anti-vaxxers and schmucks who listen to people like Rep. Crazypants.

Then there's what's going on in Tuscaloosa.

Over there, at the University of Alabama, Nick Saban's Crimson Tide football team is closing in on a 90 percent vaccination rate. And over in Oxford, Miss., another state crawling with kooky anti-vaxxers, Lane Kiffin reports that his Ole Miss football team is now 100 percent vaccinated.

Which led Donovan Dooley of Deadspin to post this observation.

It makes an excellent point. What better role model for responsible behavior in the Deep South than college football, the resident secular faith? Hey, if the vaccine is good for the Tide, or good for the Rebels or Tigers or Bulldogs or Vols, why wouldn't it be good for everyone else?

After all, how many national titles has Rep. Crazypants won?

Not as many as Saint Nick, I bet. And you for damn sure will never hear him encouraging folks to shoot anyone who comes to their doors with vaccine info, the way Rep. Crazypants did the other day. Everyone laughed in delight at the thought.

The stupid. It burns bad.

Product (mis)placement

 I don't know if Shoeless Joe will come stomping out of the corn like an avenging angel tomorrow, when Major League Baseball appropriates the Field of Dreams for filthy lucre. But I do know he's gotta be damned confused these days.

A sportsbook right outside Wrigley Field? After what happened on the other side of town 102 autumns ago?

Oh, but this is rich irony indeed, and welcome to modern times. The Black Sox scandal, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis's biblical judgment of it, might have made consorting with gamblers baseball's cardinal sin. But that was before baseball discovered it could make a buck off it.

And so, yes, the Cubs have gotten permission to build a two-story sportsbook outside ivy-clad old Wrigley, a crime against not only esthetics but the game's own commandments.

Somewhere Pete Rose must be having himself a good, if bitter, laugh.

Somewhere more celestial, the Judge and Bart Giamatti must be stomping around, wondering if everyone in baseball has lost his or her moral compass.

"What the hell?"  the Judge is howling.

"What the hell?" Bart is echoing.

"What the HELL??" Shoeless Joe is chiming in, shouldering his way through the corn.

Now he's nudging Eddie Cicotte and Buck Weaver and that little creep Chick Gandil, and they're all saying the same thing.

Are you freaking KIDDING me? A gambling den right outside the ballpark? And baseball banished US for all eternity??

Meanwhile, Arnold Rothstein, the mobster who engineered the 1919 World Series fix, is lighting another cigar and nodding like he knew it all along.

Ah, I knew you mugs would come around eventually ...

And, yeah, I get it, this isn't about the players laying bets right outside Wrigley Field. But by whom do you think the 1919 fix was put in motion, and who was it designed to benefit? 

The gamblers. The very people who'll be stopping by the sportsbook to lay down some coin on the Cubbies.

Baseball has spent a century keeping those types at arm's length, because they almost ruined the game. Now it's in business with them -- or at least, some of its teams are.

Look. I get that the world has changed. I get that online sports wagering has removed a lot of the stigma that used to surround it. It's not just sleazy Arnold Rothstein types who lay bets down on our games now; it's Everyman Everywhere.

 And Everyman isn't going to try to rig the games to cash in, right? That could never happen, right?

So why not a sportsbook right outside Wrigley Field? Why not MLB implicitly encouraging, or at the very least not discouraging, fans to bet on the game?

"Geez, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "You sound like you just time-portaled in from 1950. It's 2021, dude. Don't be such a prude."

I hear ya, believe me. I know I sound like Peter Puritan, like Stephen Severe, like one of the Mather boys from Olde New England. But I'm a history nerd, and sometimes I'm too cursed with looking backward. Sometimes I'm too cursed with lessons learned that maybe don't apply anymore.

You know that bit about 1950?

It's relevant because I just finished reading Matthew Goodman's excellent chronicle of the 1950 CCNY basketball point-shaving scandal, "The City Game: Triumph, Scandal and a Legendary Basketball Team." Betting in New York was illegal at the time, but the police and politicians looked the other way and the top bookies were minor celebrities. And gaming the games naturally followed.

Now the top bookies advertise on TV, and no shadows attach to sports betting. It's as American as apple pie -- and baseball.

But the essential dynamic remains, it seems to me. And that's troubling.

I know. Peter Puritan strikes again.

Triple the Fame

 So the Triplets are where they belong now, or will be after Peyton Manning steps up to give his induction speech tonight. Marvin (2016), Edge (2020) and Peyton (2021), all dressed in gold blazers and bust-ed to a fare-thee-well over there in Canton, Ohio. Talk about hitting the trifecta.

And, oh, do the memories come flooding back ...

Of Marvin pulling in that diving one-handed catch at Tennessee. 

Of Edge relentlessly churning out yards and catching passes and scoring touchdowns as the man who kept defenses honest and made the Colts offense so unfair for seven golden years.

Of a particular sunny Sunday in January, in blood-red Arrowhead Stadium, when Peyton was so sublime those of us who were there figured this was what Skynet would be like if it churned out quarterbacks instead of time-traveling terminators looking to kill Sarah Connor.

Of Peyton again after his rookie year, when he was just this new kid out of Tennessee and the Colts media relations brought him up to Fort Wayne under armed guard.

OK, so not really. It only seemed like it.

What actually happened was all us local media chumps got to sit down with the Future of the Franchise, in a typically proscribed Colts-ian manner. Each of us got two minutes, or something like that, with Peyton. The only thing missing was Colts media personnel  standing over us with stopwatches. 

In any case, I sat down with Peyton and asked him a couple of questions about his rookie year, maybe three, and TIME'S UP, BUDDY. 

"Thanks," I said.

"I said TIME'S UP, BUDDY," one of the Colts media people said.

OK. Again, so not really.

And, look, I'm not trying to give the Colts a hard time here, even if dealing with them was often like dealing with the Kremlin. They are and always have been quite professional. And it's not like media access controlled with an iron fist is a Colts thing; it's an NFL thing. It's what happens when a sport becomes a product -- or, Product.

In any case, access to Peyton or Edge or the famously reticent Marvin isn't what you remember most about those days. What you remember was the sheer joy of watching them play. That day in Kansas City, and a lot of other days, watching the Triplets work was like watching a particularly sophisticated timepiece work.

Every gear meshed. Every play, run or pass, seemed to catch the defense leaning. Every pass route met every pass at precisely the right moment.

Come with me if you want to live. No, not you, opposing D.

And now?

Now they all get to live together under the same  hallowed roof. As they should.

Ageless

 That was some cool deal yesterday in Tokyo, when a young woman from Wisconsin, Molly Seidel, won the bronze medal in the women's marathon on yet another day of stifling heat and humidity.

Hardly anyone saw that coming, and not because Seidel, a Notre Dame runner, does not know how to put one foot in front of the other over and over and over. It was because it was only the third marathon she'd ever run.

Guess she's a quick study -- even if "quick" is not the word you think of first when you're talking about a 26-mile, 385-yard foot race.

But you know what?

That wasn't the most amazing part of the Olympic track and field the last few days.

The real amazing part is what happened in the women's 400 meters.

What happened was a 35-year-old woman also won a bronze medal.

That would be Allyson Felix of the U.S., who is the polar opposite of Molly Seidel. Felix, you see, is the most decorated women's track and field athlete in Olympic history. And by the end of today, when she runs on the U.S. women's 4x400 relay, she'll likely be the most decorated Olympian, period, man or woman.

Felix's bronze was her 10th overall medal in five Olympics, the most for a woman ever and tied with Carl Lewis for the most by any track athlete. Her six gold medals are also the most for a woman. Yesterday's  medal came three years after the birth of her daughter by C-section.

Nonetheless, at 35, she came with .25 seconds of her PR in the 400. And the two women who finished in front of her?

The gold medalist, Shaunae Miller-Uibo of the Bahamas, is eight year younger than Felix. The silver medalist, Marileidy Paulino of the Dominican Republic, is 11 years younger.

Update: As expected, Felix is now the most decorated track-and-field Olympian ever, man or woman. The U.S. 4x400 relay won the gold, Felix's seventh alltime.

America's game. Still.

 So remember a few days back, when the Blob pointed out it was no biggie that France upset Team USA in their men's Olympic basketball opener, because buckets didn't just belong to America anymore?

Well, that's still true.

But a few other things are also true, after Kevin Durant dropped 29 and the U.S. won the rematch with France, 87-82, to win its fourth straight Olympic gold medal.

1. A Greek (Finals MVP Giannis Antetakounmpo) a Serb (regular-season MVP Nikola Jokic) and a Slovenian (phenom of phenoms Luka Doncic) may have played dominant roles in the NBA this season, but the U.S. still has more of the best players in the world and it's not even close.

2. After losing to France, Team USA won its next four games by 54, 35, 14 and 19 points, respectively. See "1".

3. Did I mention "1"?

Well ... duh

 Kudos to the likes of Jane McManus and Sally Jenkins, two of the finer sports journalists working the gig these days, for highlighting the work of Kapler Hecker & Fink LLP, which is not a comedy troupe and is certainly no joke for the NCAA.

What Kapler Heckler & Fink LLP has done is release a report entitled NCAA External Gender Equity Review, which reveals the NCAA's gender equity initiatives as themselves a joke.

Read all about it from McManus here, and Jenkins here.

And then permit the Blob its own rather cynical judgment:

Well ... duh.

Because we really didn't need Kapler Heckler & Fink LLP to tell us the NCAA's priority is chasing the buck, and everything else is empty-calorie blather. All we needed was one social media post back in March from one pissed-off young woman to reveal just how little the NCAA thought of the women's Final Four in relation to the cash-cow men's Final Four.

The pissed-off young woman was named Sedona Prince, a forward for the Oregon Ducks, who pointed out on TikTok the discrepancy between the women's Final Four weight room -- one lonely set of dumbbells -- and the men's expansive Final Four weight room. She also called out the NCAA on its BS explanation that there simply wasn't enough room for the women by panning around the virtually empty expanse of the room where the dumbbells were located.

Further examples from other pissed-off women's players followed, detailing disparities ranging from the food at the two Final Fours (one young woman accurately characterized what was offered to the women as "nice jail food") to the swag (the men got a bag with all manner of goodies; the women got scrunchies) to the branding (only the men were allowed to call their tournament the Big Dance or March Madness).

So, yeah, the report just released is dog-bites-man stuff. Good for Leavy and Jenkins for using it as a hammer to bash home the point once again, but it's not exactly revelatory.

The women get short shrift, always have, and the NCAA can no longer use their lack of drawing power as an excuse. Because the evidence is overwhelming that the women's tournament does draw, and draws quite well.

One more body blow to an organization that, like George Foreman in the eighth round in Zaire, is tottering and about to go down.

Today's News From The Weird(o)

 Well. I'm glad we cleared that up.

Here we thought the U.S. women's soccer team's semi-flameout in Tokyo -- they beat Australia to win the bronze last night, not what you'd expect from the world's dominant side -- was just age catching up with the roster, which happens. Turns out it was really because they're all Radical Leftist Maniacs who speak out about Radical Leftist Things, like equal pay for women and how persons of color shouldn't get shot to death for, I don't know, arguing a ticket or reaching for their licenses in a threatening manner. 

So says the Lunatic of Mar-a-Lago, anyway.

Our former Fearless Leader released a babbling rant about the USWNT, and, as usual when a political figure weighs in on sports, it was completely absurd. It was also borderline insane, that being Fearless Leader's general mental state these days.

Headlined "Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America," here's what F.L. had to say in its entirety:

If our soccer team, headed by a group of Leftist Maniacs, wasn't woke, they would have won the Gold Medal instead of the Bronze. Woke means you lose, everything that is woke goes bad, and our soccer team certainly has. There were, however, a few Patriots standing. Unfortunately, they need more than that respecting our Country and National Anthem. They should replace the wokesters with Patriots and start winning again. The woman with the purple hair played terribly and spends too much time thinking about Radical Left politics and not doing her job!

My goodness. Such impeachable logic.

OK, first off: What Donald J. Trump knows about soccer is less than the Blob knows about soccer, which is to say you couldn't find it under an electron microscope. So when he says "the woman with the purple hair" -- i.e., Megan Rapinoe -- "played terribly," you take it for what it's worth.

Which isn't much, considering Rapinoe scored two goals in the bronze medal game and scored the winning goal on a PK to get the U.S. past the Netherlands earlier in the tournament.

Second off: As with most things about which he bloviates, you'll always go broke betting Fearless Leader has any clue what "woke" means -- or, for that matter, "patriot". He only knows what he thinks they are.

Third off: Again with the dissing-America thing because some of the women chose to kneel in quiet contemplation during the National Anthem? Geez, get some new material, will ya?

And, just to reiterate, the Blob's rule again: Never let a politician talk sports. Embarrassment generally follows.

If the name fits, Part Deux

 ... in which the Cleveland Used-To-Be-Indians unveil an appropriately local-flavor new nickname, only to discover someone else already owned it.

Say hello to the Cleveland Guardians, a men's roller derby team you can read all about at ClevelandGuardians.com. Charlie O'Connell salutes you!

(And if you don't know who Charlie O'Connell was, well, too bad for you. You probably don't know who Big Joanie Weston was, either. Or the San Francisco Bay Area Bombers, or the Northwest Pioneers, or any of the other legends of roller derby who used to entertain us on Saturday afternoons back in the day. 'Twas a different time, young'uns.)

In any event (as the Blob has said many times before), is this not the most Cleveland thing ever?

The city's doomstruck MLB team decides to finally offload its unsavory relic of a nickname, and it actually chooses a a kind of cool new name that has a connection to the city, and -- WAIT, NOBODY THOUGHT TO CHECK FIRST IF SOMEONE ELSE WAS USING IT?? WHAT DO WE HAVE INTERNS FOR??

Yeesh. So now the MLB team likely will have to pay for the website domain and the rights to the name, after first trying to squirm out of it by throwing lawyers at the problem. The good news is, the roller derby team isn't exactly a going concern -- it hasn't played in two years because of the pandemic -- and it's so far under the radar you'd have needed sonar to find it until all this happened.

So I imagine the baseball team will just throw a few hundred thou at it (OK, so maybe a little more, but not much more), and the roller derby team will take it and run (or roll.) After all, it's already gotten more pub because of this than it possibly could have generated otherwise.

Still ... you've gotta just shake your head at being so dumb even a gold-star doofus like Washington NFL owner Daniel Snyder is probably laughing at you.

"Ya knuckleheads," you can imagine him cackling. "Whyncha just call yourselves the Cleveland Baseball Team?"

Chemistry experiment

 So here we go again with another NBA Superfriends experiment, although I suppose the proper term for this one is Super Old Friends. Carmelo and Russ and LeBron, together in L.A. Starring Anthony Davis as "The Kid."

This is because Anthony Davis is only 28, although his body is apparently 82.

LeBron, Russell  Westbrook and Carmelo Anthony, on the other hand, are a combined 105 years old. 

Together they have played 49 NBA seasons.

This suggests they'll at least be able to old-man-strength a few Ws next season, although as always chemistry will be key. Which will make a team that got bounced from the playoffs in the first round in 2020-21 the most intriguing watch in the league in 2021-22.

How's this gonna work, exactly?

Beats me. Russ is a triple-double machine who can't shoot a lick but craves the basketball. LeBron is a somewhat older triple-double machine who gets hurt a lot more than he used to, and is also used to having the basketball in his hands. And Carmelo?

The Lakers signed him to a one-year deal because, even with 18 seasons of tread on his tires, he can still shoot the rock, albeit in a less expansive role. Last season he averaged 13.4 points coming off the bench in Portland, and -- maybe most importantly from the Lakers' standpoint -- shot a career-best 41 percent from 3-point line.

So the Lakers get a guy's who's always been able to score -- he's 10th on the alltime NBA scoring list -- and can stick the triple, and a guy who can score but not shoot, and LeBron and AD. The Blob is not even going to attempt to predict how this will go.

After all, it thought adding James Harden to Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant in Brooklyn would require three basketballs, but that didn't happen. Harden subordinated himself to a remarkable degree with the Nets, leaning on his underrated skill as a facilitator to make KD and Kyrie better. The Nets were the best team in the NBA down the stretch, and only injuries to Irving and Harden in the playoffs kept them out of the finals.

So what do I know.

Except that the Lake Show is going to be very, very interesting this time around.

Saved by the sublime

 Maybe you haven't been watching, because of what the Bastard Plague and the greedy organizers have ruined. Maybe the Olympic Games are just background noise this time, because these are the Games of ghosts and echoes, the Games of athletes competing for themselves and their nations and not for the multitudes that aren't there.

The Tokyo Olympics are the Games of Bubble Wrap, going ahead despite a raging pandemic, despite the overwhelming opposition of a host nation that was foursquare against them.

But.

But what greedheads and reckless, incompetent bureaucrats do their best to ruin, the athletes always redeem.

And so the face of these Olympics belong to Mutaz Essa Barshim of Qatar and Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy, who chose to share the gold medal in the men's high jump after tying for first place.

The face of these Olympics belongs to Tahani Alqahtani of Saudi Arabia, who defied an unofficial boycott by competing against her Israeli opponent after many athletes from Arab nations refused to compete against Israelis.

It belongs to the irrepressible Tom Daley of Great Britain, gold medalist in synchronized diving and hero of knitters everywhere, who crocheted a Union Jack bag for his medal and has been hard at work on a sweater for his dog during the diving competition.

It belongs, yes, to Simone Biles, the greatest women's gymnast of all time, who did what was best for her and her team despite the scorn of meatheads everywhere -- and who overcame her "twisties" to win a bronze medal in the vault, a display of courage the meatheads could dream of duplicating.

The face of these Olympics belongs to the medalists, the non-medalists, the ones who understand and exemplify the Olympic creed better than any of the greedheads who put on the Games every four years. It belongs to Flora Duffy of Bermuda, who won the women's triathlon to deliver her nation's first-ever gold medal; for weightlifterHidilyn Diaz of the Phillipines, who did the same for her nation; for Alessandro Perilli of San Marino, whose bronze in women's trapshooting was the first ever medal for her tiny nation in 61 years of Olympic competition.

The face of these Games belongs to sprinter Kristina Timanovskaya of Belarus, whose own Olympic committee tried to force her to fly home after she criticized her nation's thuggish regime. And it belongs to the Japanese government, which refused to let it happen.

The athletes always redeem everything, no matter how ham-fisted everyone around them conspires to be. One way or another, they redeem everything.

He Wentz thataway

 It's August 2 and Carson Wentz is already on the shelf, and this is where the Blob's hyperactive imagination takes over. We've warned you about this. It's right there on the warning label that comes with the Blob.

But enough about that. The phone is ringing ...

Somewhere in Indianapolis. The phone is ringing. A certain person of whom you might have heard answers.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Andrew? It's Chris. Long time no talk to, buddy! How's it goin'? How's the shoulder/calf/ribs/kidney fee--"

"No."

"Ah, come on, man. Can't a guy check in on an old frie--"

"No."

But we'd love to see you here at the facility! Think about all the fun we used to ha--"

"No."

"Not even if w--"

"No."

(Click)

OK. So that never happened.

Indianapolis Colts GM Chris Ballard didn't call Andrew Luck when Wentz messed up his foot last week, on, like, the second day of training camp. The Colts signed veteran castoff Brett Hundley instead. They've still got Jacob Eason, rookie Sam Ehlinger and second-year QB Jalen Morton around, but clearly they'll rest easier if there's a guy with NFL touches in the fold.

At any rate, the Quarterback Predicament, a hardy perennial, is back for more, which is exactly what the Colts hoped they would avoid by signing Wentz. This seemed a bit naive, given Wentz's history of breaking himself. I mean, you sign a guy who hasn't made it through a season three of the last four years -- and who lost his starting job to Jalen Hurts last year, which might be why he made it through 2020 unscathed -- you've got to have all your phalanges crossed. 

But even at that, the Colts had to figure Wentz wouldn't be this brittle.

Seems the other day he rolled out and planted his foot, and felt an immediate "twinge." The twinge was a broken bone the Colts expected would inevitably require surgery. 

Instead, Wentz initially opted for rest and rehab instead of immediately going under the knife, which would still leave his return as iffy as it gets. Going that route means he could be back for Week 1, or he might not be. One seems as likely as the other at this point.

And in the meantime ...

In the meantime, you've got a retread (Hundley), a guy who's still being groomed (Eason) and Ehlinger and Morton -- one of whom (Ehlinger) did all sorts of wondrous things at Texas.

The Blob would love to see Ehlinger get a chance to recreate that magic in Indy. But it also realizes Texas ain't the NFL.

So here we go again.  It's early August, training camp is underway, and the Colts' quarterback situation is once more a hot-air balloon.

Which is to say: Up in the air.

Update: What the Colts expected has come to pass. Head coach Frank Reich announced today that Wentz would undergo surgery this afternoon and be out anywhere from five to 12 weeks.

The tradition of bidness

 Just caught up with Kirk Herbstreit's lament on SportsCenter the other day, when he declared college football to be an "arms race" that's "about the money," and that tradition has therefore been beaten senseless by the business of bidness.

It made me realize who Herbie is now.

He's that Japanese soldier who emerged from the jungle on Guam 30 years after the end of World War II, believing the war was still raging.

Like that poor soul, Herbie has emerged from the jungle to bemoan another war that's been over for at least 30 years: The war of money vs. everything else in college football. The Blob sympathizes, because tradition has always been what made college football superior to its professional counterpart, and why the Blob has always watched way more football on Saturdays in the fall than Sundays. But reality is reality, and the reality is there's virtually nothing these days that separates Saturdays from Sundays on a fundamental level.

The NFL is about commerce; college football on the corporate level is about commerce. The rest is just details.

And so when Herbie wrings his hands over the defection of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC, you wonder just how deep in the jungle he's been all these years. Tradition, except in some precious few cases, has been dead in Power 5 college football for awhile now.

It died when the old Southwest Conference broke up and Texas, linchpin of the 82-year-old SWC, joined the Big 12  25 years ago.

It died when Nebraska, a Big 12 linchpin, defected to the Big Ten in 2011, thereby killing Nebraska-Oklahoma, one of college football's most hallowed rivalries.

It died when West Virginia, another Big East school, defected (rather oddly) to the Big 12, thereby killing West Virginia-Pittsburgh, another traditional rivalry. When Maryland, an ACC school, and Rutgers, a Big East school, defected to the Big Ten because Jim Delany wanted a wedge into the East Coast media market. When Syracuse and Notre Dame and Louisville and Pitt all fled the Big East for the ACC.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

Tradition?

Tradition is when Notre Dame, which used to play all three service academies, dumps Army and Air Force to make room for ACC schools with whom it has almost no history.

Three years ago the Irish, whose football history goes back to 1887, played Wake Forest, a school it had never played until 2011. This year it plays Virginia, a school it has played just three times in 134 years, and never until 1989.

That's tradition now. That's college football, and it has been for a long time.

Welcome to 2021, Herbie. How'd you survive in the jungle all this time?