Soldier-ing on?

The Arlington Heights Bears.

Roll that one around in your head for a bit, while you remember the wind scything off the lake in the last blush of fall. Nothing colder in the world than that wind, unless it was whatever abomination the Chicago Bears were giving the faithful beneath those Roman colonnades in Soldier Field. And there were a lot of abominations to go with the occasional triumphs.

Me, I remember a particular Sunday in late fall, 40 years and more ago, when the Bears and Lions committed heinous acts against the NFL on a frigid afternoon. I wore six layers that day, and still the wind sliced to the bone.

How cold was it?

It was too cold to drink beer. Almost.

That was about the only way to watch what the Bears and Lions were doing, which only vaguely resembled football. The Bears had the worst offensive performance in club history that day, if memory serves. Or maybe the Lions did. Or maybe neither did.

Memory doesn't serve as well as it used to. Bare-wood truth.

In any case ...

In any case, they were still the Chicago Bears.

Now?

Who knows. Yesterday the news came down that the Bears had purchased the land upon which sits Arlington International Racecourse, an iconic site in itself. With Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot already talking potential new anchor tenants for Soldier Field, it seems a lock the Bears will be leaving Chicago for new digs in Arlington Heights, 35 miles out in the 'burbs.

So, yeah; The Arlington Heights Bears.

This will take be quite a change, if only to the number of layers you'll have to wear when late autumn settles in. No more Lake Michigan wind throwing carving knives at the patrons, so that would be good. No more Soldier Field, either, which ... well, yes, that'll take some getting used to.

The Bears have been playing there for 50 years, even after the hideous renovation in 2002 that transformed it into some sort of Millennium Falcon afterbirth. Even at that, it's now the smallest stadium in the NFL. So maybe it's time they moved on.

As it turns out, I was at Soldier Field for the beginning of the renovation, too. It was another cold day shading into night, this one in January, and the Bears were again the Bears, losing to Donovan McNabb and the Eagles in the divisional playoffs, 33-19. I was columnizing on the game for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that night, and when our beat writer and I walked out after filing, construction crews were already tearing out the seats in one end zone. They were wasting no time.

Nor will they again, one guesses. And who knows? Maybe they can still get away with  calling themselves the Chicago Bears. 

After all, the New York Giants still call themselves the New York Giants, even though they play in a completely different state. Yet no one calls them the Jersey Giants or the Meadowlands Giants, or even the Where The Mob Buries People Who Cross It Giants. 

So, maybe they won't be the Arlington Heights Bears. Although lest we forget, the Chicago Bears weren't the Chicago Bears to begin with, either.

They were, rather famously, the Decatur Staleys.

The Arlington Heights Staleys?

Hmm.

The madness of blocked shots

 NBA media days happened this week, and, among other things, Andrew Wiggins said it's not the public's business whether or not he's been vaccinated against a killer virus that has ended the lives of some 670,000 of the public so far. 

Kyrie Irving, believer in the flatness of Earth and other kooky notions, maintains it's a personal choice not to be vaccinated. Ditto Bradley Beal, who wondered why he should get the shot when he can still get the Bastard Plague if he does, even while admitting it's extremely rare for it to happen.

"Like it's funny that it only reduces your chances of going to the hospital," he says.

Well, yes. It does. Actually it reduces those chances to practically zero.  Which is important given how many COVID-19 patients are going to the hospital, swamping resources and thus affecting far more than just COVID patients.

Not that Bradley Beal cares a whit about that, given his commitment to fighting tyranny and all.

"I don't think you can pressure anybody into making a decision about their body or what they can put into their body," is something the brave freedom fighter also said.

Well ... actually, you can. Just ask a pregnant woman in Texas.

Also, ask any employer about whether or not it's legal to impose workplace rules, especially if the workplace rules involve the health or safety of the workforce. He or she will look at you like you have two heads -- especially in so-called right-to-work states, which give employers the freedom to impose virtually any rules they want and to terminate  employment for virtually any reason, including no reason at all.

So the NBA can say, and has, that if you're a player and you're not vaccinated (again, against a virus that has killed 670,000 Americans), you will be subject to restrictions the rest of the organization will not be. And by "the rest of the organization," we mean "all of it," because the NBA requires team employees other than players to be vaccinated.

I find this entirely sensible, given it's a matter of public health and there are public health restrictions that we routinely accommodate every day. But then I haven't lost my damn mind like Kyrie or Bradley Beal or even Dak Prescott over in the NFL, who cited HIPAA laws that don't apply in defending his "personal choice" not to say whether or not he'd gotten the shot.

Which of course means he hadn't.

I do not get this, as someone who's been riding this rock for 66 years. I do not get how being vaccinated against a killer virus became some sort of half-assed live-free-or-die issue. I do not get it because Americans routinely have been getting vaccinated for stuff that used to kill us for almost all of my life.

I also I do not get, in a country where schoolkids have had to present vaccination records to the nurse's office since I was a schoolkid, how vaccinating your kid and having him or her wear a mask to school became King George III imposing the Stamp Act.

Yet suddenly this is so, in a nation gone mad. At school board meetings in a certain district in Allen County, for instance, anti-masker goons show up to shout down anyone who endorses the system's mask policy, force the board to exit the room because it can't get through the evening's agenda for all the hollering, and follow board members out to their cars and harass them in the parking lot.

Oh, yes: They also mock students who adhere to school policy by wearing masks.

Yelling at high school kids who are only following the rules. Wow. Now there's some grownup behavior for ya.

Thankfully, as I've been reminded lately, these halfwits are not the majority. Even in the NBA, some 90 percent of players have been vaccinated. 

So maybe most of America is still sane after all. Maybe most of us understand that licentiousness is not the same thing as freedom, that "freedom" doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want whenever you want. That in a free society, it comes with a measure of shared responsibility.

In other words, it ain't all about you, boys and girls. No matter how many shots Kyrie 'n' Andrew 'n' them try to block.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 3

And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the incorrigible Blob feature of which critics have said "Well, I declare! You are just incorrigible!", and also "How did you become so incorrigible? I knew your mama, and your MAMA sure didn't raise you that way!":

1. And then, children, what do you suppose happened next? That's right! The Lions Lions-ed it up again ...

2. "A record 66-yard game-winning field goal that HIT THE CROSSBAR AND BOUNCED OVER? What's next, Matthew Stafford throwing four touchdown passes for the Rams to beat the Super Bowl champion Buccaneers?" (Lions fans)

3. "Heh." (Matthew Stafford, after throwing four touchdown passes for the Rams to beat the Super Bowl champion Buccaneers)

4. "Heh, heh." (The ghost of Bobby Layne, as in The Curse Of)

5. The Bucs lost. The Chiefs lost. Jameis Winston beat the Patriots in Foxborough. The Bengals be-

6. "Wait a minute! Jameis Winston did WHAT?" (America)

7. In other news, Aaron "OK, I Guess I'll Play If I HAVE To" Rodgers saved the Packers again, completing two deep passes to Davante Adams to set up Mason Crosby's game-winning field goal against the 49ers.

8. "Wait, I thought he quit. Didn't he quit?" (49ers fans)

9. Also in other news, Carson Wentz, playing on two sprained ankles, did not grow a third ankle and sprain it against the Titans.

10. Of course, the Colts still lost.

A brief celebration of youth

 Maybe you missed it yesterday, what with 'Merica spanking the Europes in the Ryder Cup, and the Rams clocking the Super Bowl champs by double digits, and the St. Louis Cardinals winning their 16th straight game. But out in Long Beach, some other stuff happened.

The 2021 IndyCar season wrapped, is what happened.

Just so you know, Colton Herta won the last race of the season. It was his second straight win. He's 21 years old.

Alex Palou finished fourth to claim the points title, his first. He's 24.

Josef Newgarden finished second, and finished second in the points. He's still just 30 and has already won two IndyCar titles.

Pato O'Ward, who entered the last race neck-and-neck with Palou for the title, tangled early with Ed Jones, broke an axle and finished 27th. He wound up 24 points behind Newgarden, third for the season.

And, oh, yes: He's 22.

I don't know what that says about the future of IndyCar, but it's sure nothin' bad. And if you think this year was fun, wait 'til next year.

Some of us hardly can.

QBNone, Part Deux

 So remember the other day, when the Blob relived some six decades of Chicago Bears quarterbacking tradition, which includes the likes of Gary Huff and Bob Avellini, but no Unitases, Elways, Montanas or Manning/Bradys?

The conclusion was the Bears do quarterback messes the way puppies do messes, period, and it's just a function of their being. Some football teams do linebackers or running backs; the Bears do linebackers, running backs, and Look at that, Concannon just threw the ball into Lake Michigan again.

This brings us to yesterday along the lake in Cleveland, where Justin Fields, the shiniest quarterback prospect the Bears have had since forever, got his first official NFL start. Needless to say it went the way the quarterback business tends to go for the Bears.

Behind an offensive line that couldn't block a random thought, Fields completed 6-of-20 passes for 68 yards while fleeing the Browns pass rush like Dr. Richard Kimble looking for the one-armed man. The Seven Blocks of Al Dente Spaghetti allowed him to be sacked nine times -- and Fields is not exactly the Statue of Liberty back there. The man's got some wheels.

Final score: Cleveland 26, Bears 6. And Fields finished with a QBR of 6.0.

Sooo. Now what?

Now Matt Nagy, already coaching for his job, has to decide whether to stick with the kid and risk destroying him completely behind that Oh-for-God's-sake O-line, or stick the veteran Andy Dalton back there as some sort of sacrifice to the quarterback gods. What to do, what to do.

In any event, the Bears, per tradition, don't have a QB1. They're still the home office for QBNone.

But, hey. At least they have a running back (David Montgomery) and some linebackers (Roquan Smith, Khalil Mack).

Again, per tradition.

The Complainer Report

 ... for which we go two places today: The shores of frigid Lake Michigan, and a football stadium in Alabama.

On the shores of frigid Lake Michigan, the American team continued to beat those European schmucks briskly about the head and neck in the Ryder Cup, doing a bit of golf running up the score in the second day's matches. The 'Mericans lead the Euros 11-5 heading into the last round of matches at Whistling Straits -- which means barring an historic collapse by Team USA, the Euros are in dire Straits, and that's not just Whistling Dixie.

Of course, not every American player was giddy about this. And you can probably guess who.

Yes, that's right, ol' Mr. Giddy himself, professional sourball Brooks Koepka, got all mad at the rules officials and said mean things after the officials denied him a drop on the 15th hole. Koepka argued he would hit a drain if he played it where it lay; the officials, one backing up the other, essentially told him to shut up and play.

This did not please Koepka, not the most genial of men under the best of circumstances.

"If I break my wrist, it's on f***ing both of you guys," he said, pointing at the officials.

This not being basketball, the officials couldn't T him up for that. A shame, really.

Because, of course, Koepka didn't hit the drain. 

Meanwhile, down in Auburn, Ala. ...

Well, the Tigers damn near lost to Georgia State, for starters. But they scored the go-ahead six with 45 seconds left and went on to win 34-24, thanks in part to a sketchy call on a pass reception that kept the winning drive alive.

The replay indicated the ball hit the ground. The officials, however, upheld the original call, which was a catch.

This did not please Georgia State coach Shawn Elliott, who in the postgame essentially said, "Typical SEC bull****."

"They had a little bit of help on that review where the ball was incomplete," is what Elliott actually said. "It should have been put back on the 30-yard line. But you know when you play in the SEC, you gotta take the hits. And they gave us a real gut punch on that call. So we appreciate that."

Georgia State fans no doubt said, "Damn skippy, Coach."

Auburn fans, on the other hand, no doubt responded with words like "sore loser" and "whiners."

Ah, college football. It's the best.

A statuary moment

 I imagine the website has grown a healthy beard of cobwebs, after all this time. I mean, even the cranks and the Dammit Where's Our National Title types have to be on board now, don't they?

No, I don't imagine firebriankelly.com is much of a going concern these days, now that Brian Kelly has done something that will result in statuary one of these days. Rockne ... Leahy ... Holtz ... Kelly. Yep, they're gonna have Notre Dame Stadium surrounded before this is all done.

See, Kelly went to the summit of Golden Dome Everest yesterday, after Wisconsin unraveled in the last 14 minutes in Soldier Field. Kelly's Irish were trailing the No. 17 Badgers 13-10 before Chris Tyree went cross country for 96 yards on a kickoff return, and then Wisky quarterback Graham Mertz graciously turned it into a blowout with two pick sixes in the last 2:30.

That made the final a somewhat deceptive blowout, 41-13, and gave Kelly his 106th victory as Notre Dame's coach. That puts him one W up on Knute Rockne and makes him the winningest coach in the school's considerable football history.

So, yes, the statuary is coming. And that's maybe a little startling to contemplate considering more than a few of us were doubting any Notre Dame coach would ever again stick around long enough to win so many games.

It was a pessimistic take but not an unreasonable one, given that Notre Dame had burned through four other coaches in the 13 seasons before Kelly stepped into the job. Bob Davie lasted five seasons as Holtz' immediate successor before getting the gate; his successor, George O'Leary, didn't even make it to his first game before Notre Dame booted him for ginning up his resume. 

Then came Tyrone Willingham, who lasted three seasons. Then Charlie "Schematic Advantage" Weis, who got fat on Willingham's recruits for a couple years and then went 16-21 in his last three.

In came Kelly. And 11 years later, he's still there. 

Only Rockne (13 years) has had a longer tenure, and only Holtz, Frank Leahy and Ara Parseghian were there as long. And perhaps that is as much a nod to the tectonic shift in college football realities in the last decade as it is to anything else.

See, as successful as Kelly has been, Notre Dame still is going on 33 years without a national title. Kelly got them to the championship game once, in 2013. Alabama blew out the undefeated and top-ranked Irish 42-14 -- a painful acknowledgment that while Kelly had restored Notre Dame to national prominence, there remained another level that was still beyond its reach.

Nothing that's happened since has altered that perception. Kelly got the Irish back into the national title hunt last January, but Alabama again beat them -- this time in the national semifinals, and this time by 17 points, 31-14.

So under the Kelly regime Notre Dame is there again, but not quite, you know, THERE. The Irish are back to being a  consistent top ten program. Across the last six seasons, they've averaged 9.5 wins; throw out the 4-8 aberration in 2016, and the number rises to 10,6 wins per year.

That's pretty Notre Dame-y, it seems to me. And plenty good enough for statuary.

Conflicts of interest, and other dinosaurs

I place one sports bet a year, on the Kentucky Derby. And I always lose.

I lose because, first of all, I don't know the difference between a fetlock and vapor lock. And I lose because I tend to pick horses based on the dumbest criteria, like if it was bred somewhere I like (Irish horses always get a nod from me, for instance), or if it has a really goofy name.

If you named a horse, say, What In Tarnation, I'd probably put a couple bucks on his nose. Ditto if it was named This Is A Damn Horse.

All of this means I'm probably the last guy who should be talking about how sports gambling -- once the province of skulks, people of low character and bookies with nicknames like Razorface and F***head -- has become not only legit but wholly embraced by the sports themselves.

This makes the Blob uncomfortable, not to say a trifle self-righteous. The uncomfortable part comes from remembering when Major League Baseball and the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League used to fling the gamblers in its midst into outer darkness. Away with you, Shoeless Joe and Charlie Hustle! We cast thee out, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras!

Well. No more of that ethical propriety.

Why, these days, there's both an NFL team and an NHL team in Vegas, and they're putting up double-deck sportsbooks outside Wrigley Field. And the leagues are partnering with Razorface and F***head, who these days go by aliases like Draftkings, FanDuel and various other online sportsbooks.

Shoot. Apparently even alleged journalists who cover the sports for which the online books set betting lines are partnering with 'em.

And here's where the self-righteousness comes in, as a former sports journalist myself.

Saw an item the other day on the sports blog site Defector that Adam Schefter, one of ESPN's top NFL analysts, has invested in Boom Entertainment, which makes sports and casino gambling apps. And guess who one of his co-investors is?

Robert Kraft. The owner of the New England Patriots.

All of this was reported by Timothy O'Brien in a Bloomberg piece. And it transforms the Blob once again into Old Man Shouting At Clouds, whose timeless rant always begins with him shaking his bony fist at the sky and hollering "BACK IN MY DAY ..."

Back in my day, I would never have been allowed to enter into a business relationship that involved the owner of a team I was covering. Hell, I would never be allowed to enter into a business relationship with online Razorfaces and F***heads regardless of who else was involved.

My newspaper's editor for all 28 years I was there, a by-god journalist's journalist named Craig Klugman, would have thrown me out of his office for even suggesting such a thing. I mean, on Craig's watch, we weren't even allowed to run an office pool for the NCAA Tournament. That's how much of an absolutist he was about conflicts of interest.

And you know what?

He wasn't wrong.

"Oh, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Quit shaking your bony fist and spluttering all over us. Conflicts of interest? Sooo last century, dude. I mean, haven't you been paying attention? There are no conflicts of interest anymore. The whole concept is as dead as triceratops. Congress abandoned it years ago, and the Last Guy In The White House all but made it official administration policy.

"So, yeah, it's perfectly OK now for a guy like Schefter, who has access to all manner of info that helps set betting lines, to become an investor with a sportsbook. I mean, even his employer thinks so. Why else would ESPN not get back to O'Brien when he reached out to them?"

 Good question. And the obvious answer is, because ESPN is in bed with the sportsbooks, too. Its talent, after all, hypes them all the time on various interwhatsis platforms. Thus the lines that always were so clear to those of us of a certain age grow fainter and fainter.

 

Or vanish entirely.

"Ah, old man," you're saying now. "Whyncha go crank up your Model T and leave the rest of us alone? We can't hear you.

"Besides, we got the Packers and the points this Sunday. Mortal lock."

QBNone: A Chicago tradition

 So apparently the Bears will be starting exciting rookie Justin Fields at quarterback Sunday, and he will be QB1 until Andy Dalton heals or Matt Nagy changes his mind again. That's where we are right now with the quarterback situation at Halas Hall.

Which is to say, situation normal, all (bleeped) up.

The acronym for that, of course, is "snafu", which is military jargon but also the unofficial product slogan for Chicago Bears Quarterback Inc. I have been taking up earthly space for 66 years, and in all that time, the Bears have had a Peyton Manning or Tom Brady or Joe Montana at QB1 exactly never. Instead, we got Jack Concannon and Bobby Douglass and Peter Tom Willis and Vince Carter. 

We got Jim McMahon, who was a Super Bowl Quarterback but also a Bears Quarterback -- which is to say, he hit roughly "meh" on the elite scale. We got Jay Cutler, who was actually pretty good but, being a Bears Quarterback, had the huge downside of being a pouty jackass. We even had 4-foot-8 Doug Flutie for fans of novelty acts.

And so this whole Fields/Dalton, Dalton/Fields debate is down-the-middle par for the course. The Bears don't do QB1, see. They do QBNone.

That said, Fields does represent the Bears' most promising quarterbacking prospect since, I don't know, Sid Luckman, maybe. He's got a phenomenal skill set, and a potentially gaudy upside.  All he needs is some experience, and for the Bears not to screw him up.

I have not a scrap of confidence the latter this will actually happen.

What I see instead is Fields -- whose numbers in limited action so far (8-of-15, 60 yards, one pick) are fairly pedestrian -- having the usual rookie growing pains against the Browns, one of the AFC's top teams. Then I see Dalton healing, and Nagy going back to him because Fields didn't set the world on fire and Nagy's a stubborn cuss who'll stick to his original plan to bring Fields along slowly, and ... well, here we go again.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope Fields goes out there Sunday and lights up the Browns like a supernova. I hope he forces Nagy to junk his plan and go with the kid from here on out, and that the kid turns into some sort of Patrick Mahomes/Lamar Jackson cyborg.

Of course, that's just an old man dreaming his dreams. I mean, come on. It's the Bears. We all know what's coming.

A niftier Bobby Douglass. That's my guess.

The parameters of the taunt

 Hey, I'm a crotchety old guy. Or at least I'm good at playing one sometimes.

Like all crotchety old guys, see, I, too, occasionally pine for the mythic Good Old Days. You know: Those halcyon days when Larry Csonka,  after turning multiple defenders into chalk outlines on his way to the end zone, used to just drop the football like the whole thing had been nothing more than a leisurely stroll to the mailbox. It was kinda cool, in a minimalist sort of way. 

Also it was sort of taunt-y, if you look at it a certain way.

Two games into the 2021 season, the NFL has apparently decided pretty much everything is taunt-y, if you look at it a certain way. And the zebras have been doing so zealously, carrying through on the league's mandate to start cracking down on taunt-y stuff.

Here's the problem: How do they decide what's taunt-y and what isn't? And what if they're wrong?

Because, yes, looked at a certain way, a whole bunch of stuff could be considered taunt-y -- including disdainfully dropping the football after you've left the field carpeted with bodies. The zebras haven't dropped the laundry on that one yet, but they've dropped it on actions almost as ridiculous.

Like, for instance, Bills' corner Levi Wallace breaking up a pass against the Dolphins and then waving his arms in the traditional "incomplete" signal.

Flag.

Or Bears safety Tashaun Gipson clapping after an incomplete pass by the Bengals.

Flag.

Or jawing a little with the other team's quarterback -- which happens all the time, and which happened in the Bears-Bengals game.

Again, flag.

Are all of the aforementioned actually "taunting"? Do some of the end-zone celebrations upon which the NFL has simultaneously loosened the reins rise to that level? And if so, how does the league rationalize the obvious contradiction?

Look. The notion that a player disdainfully doing a Csonka after a score could be construed as taunting is absurd on its face. But given that the NFL's taunting edict has only the most nebulous of definitions, it's pretty much left up to the game officials what is or isn't taunting. And therein lies the sticking point.

Oh, you say, but the NFL does have a definition of taunting. Sort of. It's described as any word of action that "may engender ill will between teams."

But as Lauren Theisen of The Defector points out here, this is football we're talking about. "Ill will" is one of its Building Blocks of Life. Without it, football is just Field Day at Harold E. Stassen Elementary School. 

In other words, on the NFL level, you might as well outlaw tackling.

Oh, wait. They kinda already did that.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 2

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the numbingly redundant Blob feature of which critics have said "Wait, didn't he say that already?", and also "We'd say this feature was numbingly redundant, but that would be numbingly redundant":

1. "So Aaron Rodgers DID retire!" (The world, last week, after Rodgers threw two picks and put up a 13.4 QBR in the Saints' 38-3 rump-roasting of the Packers)

2. "Hey, look! Aaron Rodgers decided to come back after all!" (Also the world, after Rodgers went 22-of-27 and threw four touchdown passes in the Packers' 35-17 rump-roasting of the Lions)

3. "The Lions? Why are the Lions on Monday Night Football?" (Also the world. And a legitimate damn question)

4. It's Tuesday morning and Bill Belichick is still crawling around in poor Jets rookie quarterback Zach Wilson's head.

5. "Dammit! Get out of my head already!" (Poor Jets rookie quarterback Zach Wilson)

6. Patrick Mahomes.

7. Was not the guy doing all those Patrick Mahomes things in the fourth quarter. It was Lamar Jackson.

8. "He'll NEVER be an effective NFL quarterback!" (Lots and lots and LOTS of NFL analysts, about Lamar Jackson.

9. "" (Those same analysts, after Jackson and the Ravens beat Mahomes and the Chiefs in a 36-35 come-from-behind thriller)

10. "The Lions? The LIONS??" (Because the Blob cannot be redundant enough about this)

Nattering nabobs*

 * ... and thank you, Spiro Agnew, you slimy old crook, for coming up with that one. The Blob has always been partial to it. Especially now, because we're about to discuss Nattering Nabobs.

Come on down, Chase Elliott and Kevin Harvick!

Who, if you're still paying attention to NASCAR now that football has started up again, got into it Saturday in the fabled (though not as much these days) Night Race At Bristol. It seems they got to banging on each other late with Harvick closing in on the win, and Harvick banged into Elliott so hard it flattened his tire, and when Elliott came back out he got in front of Harvick and deliberately slowed down, allowing Kyle Larson to catch up and pass him for the win four laps from the finish.

After which Harvick got in Elliott's face, and Elliott got in Harvick's face, and both said what guys say in these situations.

"We were racing for the frickin' win at Bristol, and he throws a temper tantrum ..." Harvick said of Elliott, who led a race-high 173 laps.

"It's something he does all the time. He runs into your left side constantly at other tracks ..." Elliott said of Harvick, who remains winless for the season. 

Sooo, OK, then. Here's what the Blob thinks of all this.

One, Harvick is kind of a douchenozzle, and always has been.

Two, it's Bristol. Guys bang into each other all the time. Get over it.

And, three ... if Harvick didn't want Elliott blocking him, then punt him out of the way, the way Dale Earnhardt famously tried to do to Terry Labonte one year in the Night Race. It sent Labonte sliding across the finish line sideways with a busted-up car for the win.

Also, if Harvick wanted to win, then don't let Larson pass you. Put him in the wall if he tries. I believe that's called racin', especially at Bristol.

Oh, yeah. And let's put a "four" in there, too.

Don't be nattering nabobs. Y'all sound like a couple of whiners. 

A little overreaction action

 And now for a new Blob feature that's not really a feature, because it probably won't reappear unless, like today, the Blob needs an angle, a hook, or, you know, JUST SOMETHING TO WRITE.

("Does this mean you're running out of ideas? Does it mean your ability to post stupid and annoying stuff has finally jumped the shark and the Blob will go the way of Betamax, AOL and Tone Loc?" you're saying, hopefully.)

No. No it does not.

("Oh. Darn.")

Sorry. But I was cruising the interwhatsis checking out various reactions to Indiana's 1-2 start and the Indianapolis Colts' 0-2 start, and it occurred to me that Overreactions We Have Known might be a relevant theme here.

And so, here we go ...

1. "Oh, no, Indiana is as Indiana as ever! Last year was a mirage! Tom Allen is a cheap knockoff of the same old cheap knockoff! Bench Penix! Bench everybody! Fire Allen and bring in a name coach, like Kevin Wilson! That guy was a class act!"

O-kay. First of all, let's look at the "2" in Indiana's 1-2 record.

Granted, Iowa crushed them in the opener. And the Hoosiers looked like they took the Throwback Uni thing one step further and decided just to be throwback everything. Ah, the glory days! Remember them? Remember the thrill of watching your Hoosiers average 1.2 yards per carry and trail Woody Hayes 69-7 at halftime? Remember how losing to Illinois at home by only two scores made you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

Well ...   this is not that. These Hoosiers are not those Hoosiers.

Iowa, to start with, is now 3-0 and ranked fifth, after smoking then-No. 8 Iowa State 27-17 a week after smoking IU, and taking care of business against Kent State on Saturday. The Hawkeyes have given up three touchdowns in three games. They're giving up 10 points per game so far. They're, you know, really good.

And Cincinnati?

Indiana had the No. 8 Bearcats down 14-10 at the half and 24-23 with a quarter to play, which is not exactly an indication that they're on the verge of regressing to the days when Lee Corso would call timeout so he could take a picture of the scoreboard when Indiana somehow scored first against Ohio State. 

No, the Hoosiers went toe-to-toe with Cincy. And, yeah, they did some Indiana things in the fourth quarter, and Michael Penix threw three costly picks, and they wound losing 38-24. But they're better and deeper up front than maybe they've ever been, and they're getting it done on the recruiting side, and all of that will eventually tell. 

Chill, people.

2. "Oh, no, the COLTS ARE 0-2!! Wentz is hurt again (big surprise there)! The offensive line couldn't block moonlight! There's no running game! The wideouts can't get open! And who's the imposter wearing Darius Leonard's jersey? THE SEASON IS OVER!"

Well ... OK. So a lot of that is true.

Wentz went limping off with a sprained ankle yesterday, as the Rams won 27-24. Aaron Donald and all the other mean boys chased him around the playground all afternoon, sacking him three times and making him run for his life all the other times. Jonathan Taylor scratched out a pedestrian 3.4 yards per carry. Cooper Kupp torched the secondary with nine catches for 163 yards and two scores, and Leonard, the Colts' All-Pro linebacker, had just four solo tackles.

However.

However, the season runs for another three-and-a-half months, according to my calendar. They still get Jacksonville and Houston twice each. They get the Jets, America's Dump Truck. They get the Dolphins, who just got turned into road pizza at home by the Bills, 35-0.  

Wentz will heal, and he's been pretty good so far: Three touchdowns, one pick, a 65 percent completion rate in two games. He's been sacked six times, but the O-line's a screen door right now and Wentz has been more adept at ducking other potential sacks than most people guessed he would be. And the O-line will get better once Julien Davenport, the supermarket greeter playing right tackle, is back on the sideline instead of playing right tackle.

Does this mean the Colts are going to the Super Bowl?

No.

Does this mean they aren't kind of a mess in spots -- like, say, the defensive backfield?

No.

Does it mean the playoffs are already out of reach?

Well ... no.

It's a long, l-o-n-g season. Stuff happens. I mean, come on, the Washington Football Team won the NFC East last year with a 7-9 record. Anything is possible.

OK, so not everything. But the Colts' season isn't over, so enough hand-wringing.

That goes for you, too, IU Guy.

Drumgate

 I used to tease the heck out of my mom. Always figured it was a job requirement for a son, and the oldest child to boot.

So there she was, a proud Purdue grad, and there I was, always cracking on Purdue. And my favorite line of attack was the World's Largest Drum, which was an easy mark because Purdue actually calls it the World's Largest Drum, which virtually invites ridicule.

"Hey, Mom, you know the World's Largest Drum?" I'd say. "I've been down on the field next to it. It's really not that big."

"Oh, you," she'd always reply.

If she were alive today, God bless her, she'd likely have a better comeback.

"Not that big, huh? Well, it's TOO BIG FOR NOTRE DAME STADIUM, so how about THAT?"

Likely you've heard now about Drumgate, because even the Washington Post ran a story on it the other day. See, Notre Dame plays Purdue today for the first time since 2014, returning the college football universe to its natural order. But unlike previous South Bend meetings in a series that goes back to the last days of the second Grover Cleveland administration (1896), Purdue will not be able to bring the Drum onto the field at halftime.

That's because Notre Dame renovated the stadium in 2017 and added a visitors tunnel. The tunnel, alas, is too small to accommodate the Drum, which stands 10 feet tall on its carriage and weighs 565 pounds.

So, no Drum today for the Purdues, at least inside the stadium (the plan is to set it up outside). Which in an odd way is kind of a point of pride, because it proves the World Largest Drum actually is pretty damn big after all.

OK. Mom. You win this one.

Major(s) fail

My Cruds are eight losses away now, and baseball has meaning again. The Pittsburgh Pirates, America's Reamed, are at 92 losses for the season with 16 games to play, which means if they manage to go .500 the rest of the way -- and past performance indicates this is unlikely -- they'll finish the season with 100 Ls.

This is my pennant race, in other words. When you're my Cruds, you don't aspire to success, and you don't aspire to just any old off-the-rack failure. If you've got any pride at all, or at least a sense of history, you aspire to epic failure.

Because, really, if you're gonna lose, dammit, lose. Ninety-nine losses? Meh. All that would mean is you didn't fail hard enough.

There's been pretty hard failing going on around the majors this summer, in case you haven't noticed. With any bad luck at all, four MLB teams could finish with 100 losses this season: The Cruds, the Baltimore Orioles, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers.

The O's and 'Backs could hit the magic 100 today, because they each have 99 losses. The Rangers, like the Pirates, have 92 Ls. If both lose like they should in the next two weeks, it'll be the second time in three years MLB has had four 100-loss teams -- and the only reason it didn't last season, probably, is because the season only lasted 60 games thanks to the Bastard Plague.

I don't know what exactly this says about the state of baseball in America, but it's nothing good. Mostly, I suspect, it says revenue-sharing doesn't work very well; the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer but don't really care because they're still getting their cut.

This is certainly what's happening in P-town, where ownership has dropped all pretext and simply functions as a farm team for the haves. Sign prospects, develop them and then, when a handful of them get good enough to demand real money, trade them to the Yankees or Red Sox or Dodgers or Cubs for more prospects. That's the business plan.

It's an absolutely heinous way to run an MLB franchise, especially one that represents one of the game's landmark baseball towns. The home of Roberto Clemente, honored the other day as one of baseball's enduring icons, has become nothing but an ATM for crass opportunists who care nothing for the team or its heritage or its fan base. 

They've got a great ballpark and the TV dough, and so the ballteam, the product itself, doesn't matter. Let all those yinzers in their Clemente jerseys eat cake.

And, yes, I'm as bitter as I sound. When you've got a Clemente jersey hanging in your own closet, these things will happen.

There is a solution, however.

What you do is, you take the last-place teams in each division, and you create a whole new league. Call it Triple-A Plus, and make the six scrubs play one another there until ownership either sells (because there'll be no revenue-sharing jing for the Triple-A Plus teams) or promises a good-faith effort to put a major-league product on the field. 

Only then do you let them back in the majors.

Of course, I imagine Bob Nutting, the Cruds' owner, would find a way around that, too. Pirates fan, thy glass is always half-empty.

Power, meet truth

 McKayla Maroney tops out at 5-feet-4 and weighs all of 100 pounds, but God help you if you cross her. Same goes for Aly Raisman and Simone Biles and Maggie Nichols.

They're all world class gymnasts, see, which means some people look at them and see pixies or sprites or perfectly darling little Tinkerbells. Why, they're just as cute as li'l ol' puppy dogs, these women.

Now say that to Maroney or Biles or Raisman or Nichols. I dare you.

Here's the thing about gymnasts: They're about as cute and spritely and Tinkerbell-y as Rambo. Almost every one of them, because of the nature of what they do, has played hurt in ways that would leave a 250-pound linebacker curled up weeping somewhere.

They're tougher than almost anyone you know., in other words. Hell, they're tougher than the FBI.

Don't know if you saw it, but if you didn't you should jump on the interwhatsis and watch the way Maroney, Raisman, Biles and Nichols played Shred the Feds in Washington yesterday. They got called to testify in front of the usual D.C. bag of hammers, and they were in no mood to be polite.

This will happen when you've been betrayed the way these women were betrayed, by everyone from Michigan State University to USA Gymnastics to, yes, the FBI -- which pissed down its leg for 14 months while Larry Nassar continued to abuse young gymnasts the way he'd been abusing them for 20 years.

Not only did they sit on multiple reports of Nassar's predation, they falsified the reports and then lied about it. In other words, they protected Nassar's sicko ass.

The general tone of the gymnasts' testimony about that: "What the f***, man?"

"It truly feels like the FBI turned a blind eye to us," Biles said.

"Why would duly sworn officers ignore reports of abuse across state lines?" Raisman asked.

And then there was Maroney.

"By not taking action on my report, (the FBI) allowed a child molester to go free for more than a year," she said. "They had legal evidence of child abuse and did nothing.'

Moreover, she said, "they chose to falsify my report and minimize my abuse."

Speaking truth to power has never had a more plainspoken example, nor was that plainspoken-ness more needed. And it reduced FBI director Christopher Wray to pleading apologies and backpedaling like an NFL corner.

As well he should have been. The FBI, after all, was only the final and most egregious of the officials who failed these women. MSU knew what the guy was doing for years and somehow kept letting him continue doing it. USA Gymnastics officials and coaches, some of them, simply refused to take seriously the many stories of Nassar's abuse because Nassar had been an integral part of their program for years, and lots of influential people in the gymnastics world vouched for him. 

If I'm the city of Indianapolis, where USA Gymnastics is headquartered, I tell 'em to hit the road tomorrow.

And the FBI?

Well. Four fierce women gave it what was coming to it yesterday.

Reunion week

 Here comes Mark Herrmann again, skinny as a keyhole, and he's throwing and Dave Young is catching and, hey, wait, isn't Notre Dame the No. 11 team in the nation? And weren't they supposed to crush these Purdues like a stack of Dixie cups?

Nope. Notre Dame 31, Purdue 24, thanks to one of those epic Joe Montana comebacks, as the Keyhole Kid throws for 351 yards and three scores to scare the bejabbers out of the Irish.

And, look, over here ... it's Bob Griese, tormenting the Irish in Rockne's house. And Dale Samuels, ending Notre Dame's 39-game winning streak. And Terry Hanratty throwing and Jim Seymour catching as the Irish are all over the Boilermakers ... and Lou Holtz beating the Purdues 11 straight times ... and Purdue, a four-touchdown dog, shocking the Irish 31-20 in South Bend behind a one-time punter named Mike Terrizzi ...

On and on. And it all comes back now because the Boilers and the Irish meet again Saturday in South Bend, after a seven-year hiatus that never should have happened because it's just not September in Indiana, somehow, if Purdue and Notre Dame aren't knocking heads.

And speaking of something that never should have happened ...

Almost 900 miles away, down in Norman, Okla., there will be another football game Saturday, and it, too, rings to the touch. Nebraska is coming to town to play Oklahoma, and that hasn't happened in 11 years, and even more than Purdue and Notre Dame parting company for awhile, that's a crime against college football.

Nebraska-Oklahoma?

Why, hell, that's the brown-dirt prairie edition of Alabama-Auburn, or Michigan-Ohio State, or USC-Notre Dame. They've been playing one another since the Taft administration, and back in 1971 they played one of the epic games in college football history, No, 1 Nebraska coming from behind to beat the second-ranked Sooners 35-31 on a gray Thanksgiving Day in Norman.

Who could forget Jack Mildren running and pitching to Greg Pruitt and throwing to Jon Harrison out of the Oklahoma wishbone? Who could forget the Sooners building double-digit leads twice, and then Nebraska running back Jeff Kinney, his  jersey in tatters, clambering over the pile in the dying minutes to give the Huskers the W? And who could forget one of the iconic plays in history, Johnny Rodgers' twisting, weaving, switchbacking 72-yard punt return that gave Nebraska its first score?

And then ...

And then it was 2010, and modern times happened.

Nebraska bolted the Big 12 for the Big Ten. Next year Oklahoma will bolt the Big 12 for the SEC. Someone else will bolt somewhere else for another somewhere, and long-standing rivalries will go dormant, but everyone will make lots and lots of money from one TV deal or another. And it will all be bigger and yet somehow less than before.

But not this weekend. Not this one sweet Saturday.

On that day, we get Purdue-Notre Dame again. We get Nebraska-Oklahoma. We get a great big nostalgia wallow for every lost-in-the-past geezer among us, and it will be glorious.

Enjoy.

A Jacksonville nightmare

(Three a.m. A comfortable home in a comfortable suburb in Jacksonville, Fla. A man wearing a brand-new Jacksonville Jaguars jersey -- No. 16, with "Lawrence" across the back -- moans and thrashes in his comfortable bed, kicking off the sheets, finally awakens with a scream on his lips) 

"NO!!!"

(His wife sits bolt upright, terrified)

"Honey? Honey? What's wrong?"

(The man lies back, shaking)

"I just had the most horrible dream."

"About today? The Jags?"

"No, no. I mean, yeah, that was bad. You get your asses handed to you by Tyrod Taylor? By a team even more dysfunctional than the Jags, thanks to the radioactive quarterback they don't dare play?

"No, this was worse. I dreamed USC fired their head coach two games into the season -- I know, that's nuts, but dreams are like that -- and suddenly Urban is kinda squirming around, sighing loudly, wondering how the hell he wound up coaching a team that loses by three scores to the goshdarn Houston Texans and that goshdarn radioactive Deshaun Watson, who they somehow haven't gotten rid of even though we're up to about 800 women now who are accusing him of pawing them ..."

"What's that got to do with USC? I don't follow."

"Well ... it's USC. One of the iconic college football programs in the history of the game. And, yeah, they did just fire Clay Helton two games into the season, God knows what they were thinking there, and in my dream Urban is squirming and sighing and looking at his phone, and then he's picking it up ..."

"Oh, come on. It's just a dream. Surely in real life USC isn't going to reach out to him, and surely he isn't going to reach out to them after just one game. That's just silly."

"Is it? I'm not sure. I mean, you know how these coaches are. You throw enough money at 'em, they'll have their bags packed before you can say 'seven years for $70 mill'. And it's USC. Lots of coin to throw around, and a program that, outside of Ohio State or Alabama or Michigan or Notre Dame, maybe, has more historical prestige than any other. Lore hangs off it like Spanish moss, for cryin' out loud."

(The man's wife, always the rational one in the family, merely smiles)

"Oh, hon, I don't think you're going to wake up anytime soon and see a Breaking News crawl on ESPN that says URBAN MEYER GOES BACK TO COLLEGE AS USC'S NEW COACH. It was just a dream."

(The man sighs. Pulls up the sheets. Lies back down)

"Yeah. You're right. Just a dream ..."

(He rolls over. Stares at the clock.  When the alarm goes off at 7 a.m., he's still staring at it)

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 1

And now the dangerously contagious return of The NFL In So Many Words, the stubbornly resistant Blob feature of which critics have said "Gaah! It's so stubbornly resistant!" and also "Where's my Hazmat suit? SOMEBODY GET ME MY HAZMAT SUIT!!":

1. "Yippee! This is our y--" (Bills fans)

2. "Yippee! This is our y--" (Titans fans, Colts fans, Packers fans, Browns fans)

3. "We're gonna beat the Chiefs in Arrowhead! WE'RE GONNA BEAT THE CHIEFS IN ARRO--!" (Also Browns fans)

4. It's Tuesday morning and Cardinals edge rusher Chandler Jones just sacked Titans quarterback Ryan Tannehill again.

5. It's Tuesday morning and Ryan Tannehill just woke up screaming from a horrible nightmare in which a 50-foot Chandler Jones was chasing him.

6. Lions suck. Bears suck. Vikings suck. Packers suck.

7. "Yippee! It's our year to win the NFC North!" (The Duluth Eskimos)

8. In other news, Aaron Rodgers (15-of-28, 133 yards, two picks and a 13.4 QBR in a 38-3 loss to the Saints) apparently carries through on his threat not to return to the Green Bay Packers.

9. Also in other news, Jameis Winston throws five touchdown passes for the Saints.

10. "Yippee! It's New Jameis!" (Saints fans, until next week)

Slammed, and slammin'

 Rod Laver is 83 years old now and, to the Blob's knowledge, not a particularly gloating sort.  So maybe he just smiled a little when the news came in Sunday from New York.

He's still Rod Laver, see. And Novak Djokovic still is not.

Joker had his Laver moment all lined up in the gunsights yesterday, but then Daniil Medvedev happened. He stunned Djokovic in straight sets in the men's U.S. Open final, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4, denying Joker the first calendar-year Grand Slam in men's tennis since 1969.

When, yes, Rod Laver did it. 

So the Australian lefty still has that going for him, and Emma Raducanu still is the story of this Open. The 18-year-old Brit didn't come out of actual nowhere to win the women's singles title, but nowhere was her next-door neighbor; she came into New York ranked 150th in the world, and as a qualifier. 

After which she did some slammin' of her own/

All Raducanu did was battle through the qualifying round and then the tournament, 10 matches in all, without losing a set. Polished off fellow teen Leylah Fernandez of Canada in straights in the final.

In so doing, she became the first qualifier ever to win a Grand Slam event. Again, without losing a set. And having won just 13 matches all year up until New York, almost none of them in tournaments of which anyone's heard.

So maybe it's a little early to call her, and Fernandez, the future of women's tennis. We shall see.

One thing's for sure, though.

The seeing part will be fun.

Here come the Irish, sort of

 Touchdown Jesus, he loves him some Jack Coan. Lou and Ara and Rockne and  Father Corby, all the statuary standing watch over Notre Dame Stadium, they love them some Jack Coan, too.

Jack Coan saved them from Toledo, after all.

He threw and Michael Mayer caught and Notre Dame scraped past the Rockets, 32-29, in a not particularly lore-ful home opener for the No. 8 Irish. Oh, one supposes the Domers will make some lore of the ending; Coan dislocated a finger on his throwing hand, had a trainer pop it back into place and then threw the winning 18-yard score to Mayer with 1:09 to play. But that the Notre Dames needed some lore to beat Toledo is surely not what everyone in attendance was expecting.

Of course, the Blob could point out, as a proud graduate of a fellow MAC school, that sleeping on MAC schools is never a stellar idea in the fall. An abundance of historical examples exist to support this.

Nonetheless, Notre Dame slept (OK: dozed), and Toledo did what MAC schools frequently do, which is hang around in annoying fashion. And meanwhile, down in Florida, a non-MAC school also hung around, until a gentleman named Zerrick Cooper out-Coaned Coan and threw a 59-yard touchdown pass to a gentleman named Damond Philyaw-Johnson as time expired.

Because that happened, Jacksonville State, an FCS school, shocked Florida State 20-17. It was the first time Florida State had lost to a non-major opponent in 60 years.

It also makes one wonder, or should, just what sort of team Notre Dame is trotting out there this year. 

See, the Irish needed overtime to beat this same Florida State team last week, 41-38. Now they come home and barely survive Toledo. So they're unbeaten but sorely tried by a team that lost to an FCS school, and a team from the MAC.

The Irish gave up 29 points to the latter. They gave up 21 points more than Jacksonville State did to the former. Which suggests they have some issues on defense.

Does this actually mean they have issues on defense?

Beats me.

Does it mean old rival Purdue is going to come into Notre Dame Stadium next week and give the Irish fits, the way the Purdues occasionally do?

Maybe.

Possibly.

OK, probably not.

No, what will probably happen is Notre Dame will beat Purdue eleventy-hundred to 12 and everyone will say the Irish are back, baby, and the previous two weeks were just a big foolie from the football gods.

Then they'll go out there and lose to Wisconsin or Cincinnati or, hell, maybe even Navy, and people will be back to saying "Yah, I knew they weren't very good this year."

But, hey, it was an upset/close call Saturday all around yesterday, which is exactly the kind of Saturday that makes college football great. Jacksonville State beat Florida State. Oregon whipped No. 3 Ohio State in the 'Shoe. No. 5 Texas A&M needed a score in the last three minutes to escape unranked Colorado; Stanford swatted No. 14 USC by 14 in the Coliseum; unranked Arkansas crushed No. 15 Texas 40-21 in Fayetteville.

So, I don't know. Maybe the Irish were just honoring the theme of the day.

The statuary devoutly hopes.

That Day, 20 Years On

 Twenty years now since That Day, and we all pause to remember again where we were, what we felt, who we lost, how we got through That Day and the days after. Of the latter, here are a few thoughts I jotted down several years ago. It appeared this morning in the pages of my former employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, and once again I am including a link so you can subscribe, because local journalism is a vital piece of every free society and too much of it is being eradicated these days by vandals and greedheads. So push back, please.

There's a gleaming new building filling the sky there now, reaching up and up with a singular brassy defiance. There's a museum and a pair of reflecting pools and names etched in polished metal, because that's what you do with days that have become history, days so momentous and awful you remember them in spite of how much you'd rather forget.

September 11 was all about emptiness: Blue sky empty of clouds, a skyline empty of two iconic towers, a city suddenly empty of two thousand-plus souls. And so the way we memorialize it is by trying to fill that emptiness, obsessively and endlessly.

That process started almost before the towers collapsed in a jackstraw heap, and went on all that numbed week. I remember, that aching day, sitting in a hardware store in Auburn listening to a man try to fill the emptiness by telling me about another catastrophe, a fire that had destroyed the store 90 or more years before. And I remember going to a football game on Friday night and again the next day, while debate raged as to whether or not it was appropriate..

That debate goes on to this day. I suppose it always will.

What I've come to believe, however, is that that week was all about making the empty go away, and if going to a football game did that for some people, then I'm not going to quibble about whether or not it dishonored the dead. All I can say is it didn't feel like dishonor.

All I can say, going to a football game down in Monroe Friday night and then to another the next day at Saint Francis, is that it felt more like catharsis, and commonality, and the stitching together of  a social fabric torn asunder. That it was a football game that provided the vehicle for this was immaterial; in the end, it was about family, our American family, reaching for each other at a time when we desperately needed to do so. We all could have been at a quilting bee for all that the scoreboard at one end of the field mattered.

Could there have been a better remembrance, I think now, than to stand as one as the taped voice of Lee Ann Rimes floated out across the farm fields around Adams Central, "Amazing Grace" spinning out and out into the September twilight?

  Could there have been any dishonor in what happened the next day, when Saint Francis and some team from Wisconsin played a football game that was of no consequence, except for the simple fact that by playing it we had an excuse to come together?

I saw no dishonor in that. I saw none at the tables that greeted you as you came in the gate that day, where donations for the victims were being taken. I saw none in the silver American flag stickers on the back of every Saint Francis helmet. I saw none, at the far end of the afternoon, in the sight of two young boys throwing a football around down in the south end of the field.

One kid scooted for the end zone, football tucked beneath his arm like a loaf of pumpernickel. The other kid gave chase, catching up with him in the end zone and wrestling him to the ground. And then they rolled around for awhile down there, two American boys doing what American boys do on a sunlit American afternoon.

And, for a moment, anyway, filling up the empty.

Programming note, Non-Football Division

 I don't know what you're doing this weekend, other than watching high school football and college football and pro football and more pro football and FOOTBALL, MAN, FOOTBALL! 

But there's something happening in New York tomorrow that's, you know, kinda cool.

Yes, you there in the back in your gravy-stained throwback Mark Gastineau jersey.

"DOES IT INVOLVE FOOTBALL?"

No.

"WHY NOT?"

Because it doesn't.

"WELL, THAT'S BULL****!"

Um ... no. No, it isn't. And please escort this gentleman out.

That's because the Blob has something to say about something that does not involve football, and in fact does not involve any of your normal sports. It involves tennis.

Hear what's happening tomorrow in the U.S. Open?

Two teenagers are playing for the women's singles title.

One (Emma Raducanu) is British. One (Leylah Fernandez) is Canadian. Raducanu is 18; Fernandez is 19. Neither came into the U.S. Open ranked in the top 100 women players in the world.

Yet here they are. And history rides shotgun with them.

 First of all, it's the first time in U.S. Open history that two teenagers have played for a singles title. Second, Raducanu is the first Englishwoman to reach the U.S. Open final in 44 years. 

You have to go all the way back to Virginia Wade in 1977 to find the last one. Disco was a thing then. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, dressed like Dreamsicles, were the worst team in the history of professional football. Raducanu's father, Ian, was a preschooler. And Joe Biden had just become eligible for Medicare.

(Sorry. Just goin' for the cheap laugh there.)

Anyway ... again, this is some pretty cool stuff.  I mean, it's not football, but it might be worth tuning in, even if you haven't paid attention to tennis since Chrissie and Martina and McEnroe and Connors were knocking about.

Consider it a programming note.

Art, meet life

 Some former presidents do stuff. It's not required, but the sense of duty that compelled them to run for president in the first place isn't an easy jones to shake.

And so Jimmy Carter takes a hammer and nails and builds houses.

And others launch charitable foundations of one description or another.

And then, of course, there's Donald J. Trump.

Who, when he's not whining about not being president anymore, reverts to being the empty-calorie celebrity he's always been, and which defined his presidency more than anything else.

He always wanted to be a TV star, and so for four years he got to be the biggest TV star there is. "The Apprentice" was nothing but a warmup act for "The President," the ultimate American reality show.

So now what's he doing?

Now the former President of the United States will be providing commentary on a "gamecast" of the Evander Holyfield-Vitor Belfort fight Saturday night -- a Triller production that's apparently some sort of Senior Tour deal, given that Holyfield is 58 and Belfort is 44.

Trump, meanwhile, once hosted a bunch of boxing matches in his Atlantic City casinos before they all went under. So he's got that going for him, expertise-wise.

And if you're wondering now why someone who once held the highest office in the land is providing commentary for some cheesy fight card ... well, again: He always wanted to be a TV celebrity. Also, life occasionally imitates art.

Which brings us to Mike Judge's film "Idiocracy" -- released in 2006 as satire but, like so much else since the TV celebrity was elected President in 2016, is now pretty much a documentary about an America gone insane.

See, in "Idiocracy," the President of the United States is a professional wrestler. You know who I'm talkin' about: President Dwayne Alozando Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, played with over-the-top gusto by Terry Crews. 

Now an ex-President will be a commentator (and eager shill) for an event that might as well be professional wrestling.

President Camacho, meet former President Trump.

You guys hash out which of you is fiction.

The agony of success

 Naomi Osaka broke down in tears again last week, and not because she'd just been ousted from the U.S. Open by unseeded teenage phenom Leylah Fernandez. She broke down in tears because the game at which she is so skilled is also the game that is wounding her.

Much has been written and said, some of it actually coherent, about Osaka's struggles this summer. It began when she bailed on the French Open (and got fined for it, stupidly, by the halfwits who run tennis these days) because fulfilling her mandatory media obligations had become intolerable to her.

Then she skipped Wimbledon.

Then she left a pre-tournament news conference in Cincinnati in tears, because columnist Paul Daugherty, one of the best in the business, asked a completely legitimate question about the mental wear-and-tear on elite athletes.

For that, Osaka's equally halfwit agent labeled Daugherty a "bully." Which was likely an intentional attempt to deflect attention away from Osaka.

Fast forward to New York, where Osaka lost and then, tearing up again, said she likely would be taking a long break from tennis because tennis had become torture for her.

She's not the first athlete, or even tennis player, who's been undone by his or her precocity. Jennifer Capriati, a star at 13 and a burnt-out rebellious teenager at 18, comes to mind. Andre Agassi, raised by a maniacal father obsessed with turning his son into a tennis immortal, always maintained he hated tennis even as he became ascendant in it. Numerous other examples abound.

This hits the Blob's radar again because the other day I sat down and watched the latest installment of Netflix's "Untold" series of sports docs, which centered around former tennis pro Mardy Fish and his own battles with the game's mental toll.

Fish came up with his pal Andy Roddick in the late '90s as the Great Next in American men's tennis, and neither became the Great Next. This owed not to their talent so much as to their timing, because they had the misfortune to arrive at the same time as perhaps the three greatest players in history.

Pretty tough to become the next McEnroe or Connors or Sampras, after all, when you're sharing the stage with Roger Federer, Rafe Nadal and Novak Djokovic. 

Roddick managed it better than Fish, helped along by his victory in the U.S. Open as a teenager. Fish, meanwhile, used an obsessive training and diet program to eventually vault to No. 7 in the world.

But as he became the new American star, he paid a horrible price: Crippling bouts of anxiety that made his mind race and his heart beat wildly, and eventually led to him fleeing the U.S. Open in 2012 on the day he was to have played Federer in the quarterfinals.

As with Osaka, the game and its pressures had broken him in the most intimate way possible. And as with Osaka (or gymnast Simone Biles, for that matter), the halfwits saw this as some sort of failure of will or character or simple intestinal fortitude.

It is not, of course. Fish, like Osaka and Biles, had no more control over what was happening to him than you or I have over a sneeze. And so this was an education, and a window into the world of the elite individual athlete: the unrelenting travel, the unrelenting expectations, the constant spotlight that always attends athletes when they stand alone before the world on their chosen (or chosen for them) field of play.

Fish went public with all this several years ago, a remarkable display of, yes, intestinal fortitude. He was rewarded with the overwhelming support of his tennis brethren, who understood exactly what he was talking about. 

As one imagines Fish watching Osaka break down in tears last week, and understanding, too.

We always hear about the agony of defeat. Now, perhaps, it's time to acknowledge there's an agony of success, too.

The education of Urban

 You can see how this plays out, or at least you can if you fancy yourself a student of  history. The reading of the tea leaves could not be more clear.

Urban Meyer was a hugely successful college football coach, the best in the business not named Nick Saban, the master of a culture in which every program is a small fiefdom ruled by an all-powerful potentate.

He has, however, never been a head coach in the NFL. Which has a culture all its own.

In this he has been proceeded by a whole lot of others who go by names like Lou Holtz, Steve Spurrier, Chip Kelly, and, yes, Nick Saban. All of them were, or are, icons of the college game. And all of them, to one degree or another, crashed and burned in the NFL.

And so it's easy to look at Urban Meyer's tenure so far in Jacksonville and sense what's coming down the wind. He may still be 0-0 as an NFL coach, but his naivete about the professional game is already showing.

He signed Tim Tebow, a 36-year-old failed quarterback, and tried to make a tight end out of him because Tebow won him a national title at Florida and Meyer figured he knew the guy's skill set better than anyone.

He brought in a goon named Chris Doyle as his director of sports performance, which lasted nanoseconds after it was revealed Doyle had been talking racist trash on numerous occasions at Iowa, which is why Iowa fired him.

He does some other college-y things his players, who are grown-ass men, haven't appreciated, like conduct illegal workouts (for which he was fined). And most recently, he said right out loud that, yes, a player's vaccination status might be a factor in deciding whether to keep that player or cut him.

Now, Meyer was dead right about that. If we're ever going to get a handle on the Bastard Plague, then we've got to weed out the nitwits. So if you want work as a pro football player, you should have to be vaccinated.

Those who run a workplace, after all, are responsible for the health and well-being of their workforce. They aren't always, of course, nor do some even think they need to be. But they do need to be, and it should cost them hella dough if they aren't.

So, yeah, Meyer was right. And the Blob suspects there isn't a coach in the NFL who doesn't agree. 

None of them were dumb enough to say it out loud, however.

This is because, unlike college, the players have a say in what happens to them. To a college guy like Urban Meyer, this is of course an utterly foreign concept. And so he said out loud what he shouldn't have, and the NFLPA now has duly opened an investigation into Meyer's roster cuts.

And so Urban Meyer's education goes on. For as long he lasts, no doubt.

Joy, with a side of qualm

 The Blob loves him some college football. You know that because I keep repeating it until you want to scream.

And so of course I'm loving this first big weekend, because there were fans and bands and defensive stands (See: Georgia 10, Clemson 3). There was a quarterback who nearly had his leg amputated three years ago (McKenzie Milton) bringing back Florida State from 18 points down in the fourth quarter against Notre Dame.

There was Jack Coan (26-of-35, 366 yards and four touchdowns in his first start) and Michael Mayer (9 catches for 120 yards and a score) doing the sons of Notre Dame proud, and Milton and Jordan Travis and Jashaun Corbin doing the late Bobby Bowden proud for Florida State, dadgum it.

There was Northern Illinois, coached by Bishop Luers grad Thomas Hammock, knocking off Georgia Tech. There was UCLA looking strong in knocking off LSU, and Virginia Tech looking strong in knocking off North Carolina. There was Penn State going up to Madison and knocking off Wisconsin.

Shoot. There was even a graduate assistant (Zeb Noland) improbably winding up the starting quarterback for South Carolina against Eastern Illinois, and throwing four touchdown passes in the first half of a 46-0 rout.

It was wondrous. It was joyous. It felt like college football was back, as the teevees kept saying ad nauseum all weekend.

Except.

Except, if you're a thinking human at all, you couldn't help feeling a little queasy at the same time you were feeling thrilled, seeing all those stadiums packed cheek-by-jowl with fans.

Look. College football is nothing without the fans. We all know this. The fans make the game more than they make any other game, and nothing reiterated that more than what we saw this weekend

But as a few timid voices pointed out, how many superspreader Bastard Plague events did we also see this weekend?

Because, listen, the Plague isn't going away. In fact, it's killing people in droves and overwhelming medical services again, thanks to the remorseless delta variant and the heedless lunacy of the anti-vaxxer, anti-masker crowd.

We can pretend, in other words, that everything is normal again because we're mostly just sick of it not being normal. But nothing is remotely normal.

Seeing packed stadiums again was great, thrilling, abundantly joyful. But with the joy came a side of qualm. With the joy, at least some of us paused briefly to think, "Um, is this wise? Did I miss the memo about the Plague being over, because it sure doesn't sound like it's over?"

Yeah. I know. Total Danny Downer stuff.

But tell me you didn't think the same thing, at least fleetingly, while you were watching all that joy. Tell me you didn't.

Seriously, though ...

 Two more Ws now, after Jonathan Doerer sidewinded the football through the uprights in overtime last night. Two more Ws and Knute Rockne steps aside as Brian Kelly becomes the winningest coach in Notre Dame football's long and endlessly storied history.

What this means is that Brian Kelly is an excellent football coach.

What it doesn't mean is he can do standup comedy.

If you missed it -- and I don't know how you could, given that it's all over the Magic Twitter Thingy and various other forms of social media today -- Kelly tried out an old John McKay line on sideline reporter Katie George after No. 9 Notre Dame outlasted Florida State 41-38 last night. He blew the punchline.

Actually, he took the punchline, chopped it up, sauteed it and then left it on the stove to burn.

The original McKay line was in answer to the question "What do you think of your team's execution?" McKay's answer: "I'm in favor of it."

Witty. Hilarious. And classic McKay.

Kelly's mangling of it, alas, was classic Kelly.

"I'm in favor of execution," Kelly said, after the Irish blew an 18-point lead in the fourth quarter. "Maybe, maybe our entire team needs to be executed after tonight."

Ouch.

Also, clearly Kelly trying to be John McKay and failing.

Also, not what you should say if  you once had a kid die on your watch after foolishly deciding to conduct practice in a windstorm.

Also, not a "thing" -- although, because it's 2021, it was a thing because in 2021 everything is a thing, no matter how silly or inconsequential.

Five will get you ten Kelly will issue a public apology today during his weekly day-after presser. Even though he addressed it last night by saying, correctly, "Are you people crazy?"

Why, yes, Coach. Yes, they are.

Indinia*

 (*And, yes, we know that's misspelled)

Or maybe it isn't.

Maybe what showed up on the front of freshman running back David Holloman's jersey -- "Indiana" somehow spelled "Indinia" -- was only a Distant Early Warning for what kind of day it was going to be out there in Iowa City. Because after that, "Indinia" went on to misspell "win."

Also "expectation."

Also "What the hell was THAT?"

Iowa 34, Indinia 6. That's what that was.

It was an outcome you could almost have predicted, if you're a long-time follower of IU football. They are the masters of deflation, these football Hoosiers. They are the kings of raising expectations and then shattering them like a petulant child flinging a china cup. If they had a mascot, it would be a cheery red balloon that slowly loses air as the game goes on.

Certainly everything up to Saturday was a cheery red balloon for this Indiana team. Hadn't the Hoosiers gone 6-2 last year and risen to No. 7 in the polls? Didn't they return quarterback Michael Penix and a whole pile of guys who could play? Hadn't Tom Allen created a culture -- LEO, for "Love Each Other" -- that was attracting the sort of recruits Indiana never used to get, and even a former USC running back (Steven Carr)?

And so, yeah, the expectations were through the stratosphere. Old-timers from the 1968 Rose Bowl team were predicting this would be the team to go back to Pasadena. They were saying the Hoosiers would go 10-2 or 11-1. L. Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated even did a feature story on Allen and his program.

And then ...

And then Penix threw a pick six.

And then he threw another pick six.

And then he threw another pick -- Iowa didn't take this one to the house, but still -- and suddenly Indiana was down 31-3 and and the game was gone.

Iowa 34, Indiana 6.

A throwback result, but not the sort of throwback the sons of '68 envisioned. 

This one looked more like a throwback to 1973, 1974, when the Hoosiers went a combined 3-19 and lost by scores that looked a lot like Saturday's: 24-0, 49-9, 38-17, 37-7. It won't be that bad in 2021 -- look for the Hoosiers to stomp Idaho next week and then give No. 8 Cincinnati all it wants -- but it won't be 11-1 or 10-2, either.

The Blob sees 8-4, maybe, and another bowl game. And the Bucket will stay in B-town.

In retrospect that cheery red balloon was likely overinflated, as cheery red balloons tend to be in the weeks leading up to a new season. Penix, for instance, struggled in the last game he played last year, going 6-of-19 for 84 yards against Maryland before the Terrapins knocked him out for the season. And then the Hoosiers lost to a 4-5 Ole Miss team in the Gator Bowl, after grumbling that they got dissed out of a New Year's Day game.

So maybe the expectations were a step or two beyond realistic to begin with.

Still.

Iowa 34, Indiana 6?

No matter how you spell it, no one expetced that.

A Throwback Hoosier suggestion

 The Blob tends to be ambivalent about football teams and their throwback uniforms. Its feelings about them depend largely on how butt-ugly the chosen throwbacks are, and to which era they're being thrown back.

A few years ago, for instance, Notre Dame broke out its shamrocks-on-the-helmets throwbacks. This was a mistake, and not just because they looked horse you-know-what. It was because when the Irish wore shamrocks on their helmets, they were circus clowns.

Probably not a good idea to remind fans of perhaps the ONE era in your storied program's history when you were going 2-8 and the like. Ah, yes, the Joe Kuharich years. Those were the days, boy!

On the other hand, there's what Indiana is going to do this fall.

For the Cincinnati game on Sept. 18, see, they'll be wearing throwback unis from the 1980s and '90s. 

Not only will that be a salute to the Bill Mallory Era -- the best period of sustained competence in IU's admittedly pallid football history -- but Indiana actually looked like Indiana in those unis. Crimson jerseys, crimson helmets with the iconic block "I" and a stripe down the middle, the whole shootin' match.

Considering the Hoosiers once donned helmets that looked like the love child of Yuri Gagarin and Santa Claus, this is an entirely pleasing and respectful development.

But the Blob thinks there's a throwback uni choice that would be even better.

With all the expectations flying around this team, why not break out unis that honor the 1968 Rose Bowl team?

The Hoosiers haven't been back to Pasadena since, and probably won't be this year unless a massive sinkhole opens up and eats Columbus, Ohio. But they are ranked in the preseason top 25 for the first time in 52 years.

So maybe this is the year to break out the Harry Gonso/John Isenbarger/Jade Butcher duds.

Works for me.

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh ...

 ... My Cruds are still Crudding stuff up.

You might remember my Pittsburgh Pirates, alleged major league baseball team, pulling this laugh-a-minute gem back in May. Well, the other night they were again playing the Cubs, who are Cruds themselves now after garage-saleing themselves into oblivion. And this happened.

Yes, that's right. The Cubs won because Wilmer Difo dropped an infield popup none of the Little Leaguers we just saw in Williamsport would have muffed.

And now the Cruds are just 13 Ls away from the magic 100-loss mark for the season.

Come on, boys. You can do it. The Blob believes in you.

Hittin' the head (games)

 Those of a certain ideological bent might disagree, but there are some lines media types remain loathe to cross. We might ask a politician when he stopped beating his wife, but no one is comfy with asking a tennis player about why the hell he's spending so much time in the bathroom.

"Pee or poo?", it seems, is a question reserved for Marge Schott -- and then only about her St. Bernard, Schottzie.

But how else do you approach the kinda-sorta controversy Stefanos Tsitsipas has created for himself at the U.S. Open?

For the second straight match, Tsitsipas took an inordinately long toilet break at a suspiciously opportune time, and, yes, people are now wondering what the hell he's doing in there. Tsitsipas spent eight minutes in the loo immediately after losing a set to Adrian Mannarino, a couple of nights after taking multiple bathroom breaks -- including one that lasted seven minutes -- during his win over Andy Murray.

The eight-minute epic against Mannarino seemed especially fishy, and indeed Tsitsipas emerged to bagel Mannarino in the next set and wrap up the match, 6-3, 6-4, 6-7, 6-0. So it was logical to deduce Tsitsipas used the lengthy break to get his head back together, and play head games with Mannarino.

Either that or there's a heck of a stash of reading material in that bathroom.

In any case, folks are wondering now if he's abusing the privilege, and also what the guy is eating. And it surely makes for some squirmy moments for media types more accustomed to more, um, customary questions.

"Getting enough roughage, Stefanos?" is not a question, after all, you hear every day. Even if no one's asked it so far.

So would the Blob ask it?

Nah. Movie buff that I am, I'd more likely ask Tsitsipas how the process of taking a mid-match break works, hoping against hope it would be the way it worked in "Cool Hand Luke."

"Bathroom break, boss?" ...

After which Tsitsipas locks himself in the bathroom and shakes the bush every so often to let 'em know he's still there.

Awesome.

The joy of make-believe

 We love our fairy tales, here in America. Just look at all the fairy tales the Previous Occupant spun, and all of 'em that continue be spun by his lovesick groupies.

So maybe this story isn't as weird as it seems. Or maybe it's even weirder.

It's confusing and confounding and draped in questions, like tinsel on a Christmas tree. But here's the nut: It seems ESPN, which likes to put big-deal high school football teams on the air periodically, got slicked recently into putting a "team" on the air that doesn't actually exist.

OK. So the team exists, even though it's not much of a team. Somehow its coaches, or someone, talked their way into a televised game with a legit high school power, IMG Academy out of Florida, and got laminated 58-0.

It was frankly embarrassing for all parties --  including ESPN, which got righteously catfished. That's because the team represents a prep school, "Bishop Sycamore" from Columbus, Ohio, that apparently doesn't exist.

Well. OK, so it might exist, but if it does it's only an online entity. It has a website, but it's empty. It's not a member of the Ohio high school athletic association. There's never actually been a "Bishop Sycamore" in Ohio, and it has two listed addresses that seem more than a little suspect.

One is a duplex in a residential area. The other is the library at Franklin University in Columbus.

Further, its coach, Roy Johnson, is a con artist who's fielded fake high school teams before and currently has a warrant out for his arrest on domestic abuse charges. 

The "team," meanwhile, was 0-6 last year and got poleaxed by everyone. And it played a game on the Friday night before it played IMG on Sunday.

All of which shifts the Blob's famously bent powers of imagination into hyperdrive ..

FORT WAYNE, In. -- Marvin "Big Boy" Merlin, the coach of a high school football team some suspect doesn't actually represent a high school, issued an impassioned rebuttal yesterday to the rumors swirling around his team.

"It does so exist," Merlin said of Bishop Herb High School. "Does so, does so, does SO."

Asked where the "school" is located, he waved a hand vaguely toward the southwest side of Fort Wayne, a city of 300,000 or so in northeast Indiana.

"Aw, it's over there somewheres," Merlin said. "You know, over where all the rich people live. It's right out there next to one o' them fancy housing developments -- the Swale-y Swales of Swale Hills, the Glen-dy Glens of Glen-dy Hollows, one o' them places."

When told no one has been able to locate it, Merlin scoffed.

"Well, you just ain't lookin' hard enough, then," he said.

There are other questions about Bishop Herb, some of which involve the players on the Fightin' Chardonnays' roster. A few, it seems, are rumored to be 27, 28, even 30 years old.

"Well, that's just ridiculous,'' Merlin said, a bit huffily. "They's all legit, and we got some good'uns. Our quarterback, Billy 'Early Withdrawal' Barrow, is a junior coll- er, junior transfer from Dirt Clod, Oklahoma. Got a heck of an arm, and he beat that armed robbery rap fair and square. 

"And his favorite target? Shoo. Well, that's Homer 'Jailbreak' Jenkins, who came here from Hog Jowl Correctional in Alabama after an unfortunate dispute with the parole board. Kid can fly, I'm tellin' ya.

"We got a bunch o' other good kids, too. They ain't too big and they can' run a lick, but they'll hit ya, especially when you ain't lookin'. Just gotta teach 'em a little whistle discipline."

Asked how they were doing in "school", Merlin again waved his hand airily.

"Ah, they doin' fine," he said. "Found the cafeteria on the first day."

To date, Bishop Herb does not have a complete schedule. Merlin says he'd love to play the other Catholic schools in town, Bishop Luers and Bishop Dwenger, both of  which have a deep and illustrious football tradition that includes a combined 15 state titles. But so far Luers and Dwenger have given Bishop Herb a wide berth -- wisely, most people in Fort Wayne seem to think.

"They just scared," said Merlin, whose team is 0-2 so far and been outscored 125-6.

Officials at Luers and Dwenger refused comment, aside from rolling their eyes, shaking their heads and maybe laughing a little.

Contagion(s)

 There's a contagion loose in America these days, and it puts the Bastard Plague in the shade. Delta variant, you say? Pffft. This bastard plague's got a million variants.

Call it Viral Crazy. And so far there ain't no vaccine for it.

You hear it coming these days from the mouths of babbling halfwits on Fox "News", and from conspiracy kooks going live on the interwhatsis from Mom's basement, and even from elected officials. Hell, the Previous Occupant was Patient Zero for it.

And so you look up one day and here's some lunkhead congress critter named Madison Cawthorn talking, in almost wistful tones, about taking up arms against the dang gum'mint of which he's a part. And here's another lunkhead congress critter named Marjorie Taylor Greene hollering about made-up electoral fraud. And here are school board members and local political hacks saying wearing masks in a raging pandemic causes kids to commit suicide, and that ingesting livestock de-wormer is a safe and effective way to treat the Plague.

Anyone who says otherwise, of course, is simply a Tool Of Big Pharma who's Suppressing The Truth because they want us to take the Vile Vaccine, which everyone knows turns us all into brain-eating zombies.

Or, you know, something like that.

Just the other night, the anti-vaxxer, anti-mask nuttery was on full display at a local school board meeting. People, presumably parents, shouted down a doctor when he pleaded for a little common sense. They chanted "Re-vote! Re-vote!" when the board decided to re-institute mandatory masking because, well, kids are already getting sick two weeks into the new school year.

Their kids, presumably. Or some of them. I can't even.

Meanwhile, in the NFL ...

("Finally! Sports!" you're saying)

In the NFL, your Indianapolis Colts remain a bastion of anti-vaxxer nuttery, and because of that, new store-bought quarterback Carson Wentz is in Bastard Plague jail. So are wide receiver Zach Pascal and center Ryan Kelly -- and so, recently, was star offensive tackle Quentin Nelson.

Wanna guess what they all have in common?

Yep. None of them have been vaccinated. 

None of them have been vaccinated, even though the NFL is pushing it hard and instituting different rules for those who haven't been -- which is why Wentz, Pascal and Kelly are all on quarantine not because they tested positive, but because of "close contacts." Had they been vaccinated, they wouldn't be quarantined for that.

But now they all are, less than two weeks before the start of the season. And the Colts kinda-sorta need them. And what is the big damn deal, if you're at all a rational human, about getting a freaking shot?

The Pfizer vaccine is now FDA approved, after all, and it was safe before it was because they tested the hell out of it before they allowed it on the market. Long-term effects? I don't know, what are the long-term effects of any vaccine/shot/medication?

I'll tell you: Virtually none, statistically.

And so, yeah, I'm going to call out the anti-vaxxers as nutters, because that's what they are. I'm going to say Wentz and Nelson and Kelly and Paschal, and any other Colts who haven't been vaccinated, are being selfish and stupid. And I'm not going to shed any tears for Cam Newton, whom the New England Patriots abruptly released the other day.

Cam, you see, isn't vaccinated, either. I don't think that was why Belichick showed him the road, but I doubt it was a point in his favor. And I'd have to think long and hard about signing him if I were another team, because given the NFL's protocols, not being vaccinated means his availability would always be in question.

And, yes, I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say name-calling is no solution, and I've been name-calling to a fare-thee-well in this post.

You're absolutely right. It's not a solution, and I have been.

But I can't help it. The truth may hurt, but I gotta speak it. And it's not my fault.

The Viral Crazy made me do it.