When wrong becomes right

It just keeps getting better for Phil Mickelson, who last week set fire to himself by aligning himself with gangsters even while admitting they were gangsters. 

Now Saudi Arabia's proposed Super-Duper Golf League (a Super-Duper embellishment of the actual name) has evaporated like a drop of water on an August sidewalk, and Lefty's sponsors are deserting him in droves. But not for the reason you think.

They're deserting him not because he aligned himself with, as he called them, "scary mother****ers". Oh, no. They're deserting him because he CALLED them "scary mother****ers."

Weirdly and suddenly, this transforms Mickelson from bad guy to victim, because, well, when he said what he said about the Saudis, he was only speaking the truth. What made it contemptible was that he was willing to buddy up to them anyway for his own purposes.

Now the contempt must shift to the sponsors who are dropping him, because they have revealed themselves to be craven toadies for oppressors and butchers. Among the perps are KPMG, a major business player in Saudi Arabia for three decades; Callaway, Mickelson's golf sponsor who disavowed Mickelson's comments instead of applauding them the way it should have; and American Express, the title sponsor of the Desert Classic tournament for whom Mickelson was the host and whose foundation was the tournament's charity.

But, hey. I'm sure their business dealings with the Saudis are quite lucrative.

And may they choke on all that dough.

And now, racing

 So remember last Sunday, when the Blob wrote in this space that the Daytona 500 was its annual first robin of spring, an occasion to metaphorically power down the windows, hang an elbow in the breeze and crank the road tunes to full blare?

Well ... today is the Blob's official start of the racing season.

Today the green drops down in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the 2022 IndyCar season shrieks to life. It's always an occasion for the Blob, whose bias toward the open-wheel crowd always has been shamelessly transparent. It is the best of American motorsports, and the Blob will entertain no argument otherwise.

That's especially true now.

It's true because IndyCar is coming off its most entertaining season in memory, and it was the kids who made it so. The wily vets -- Scott Dixon, Will Power, et al -- were, and are,  still around, but it was the kids who crafted the season's narrative: Series champion Alex Palou, Colton Herta, Pato O'Ward, Rinus VeeKay, Scott McLaughlin, on and on.

None of them were older than 24. All of them, together, made the 2021 season unbelievably competitive; seven different drivers won the first seven races, and nine drivers won at least one race in the 16-race schedule. The season came down to the very last weekend, when Palou finished fourth at Long Beach to claim the title.

Today, they begin the scrap again. McLaughlin sits on the pole, with Power alongside. Herta and VeeKay start right behind them in Row 2. Then there's former F1 pilot and fan favorite Romain Grosjean and Simon Pagenaud in Row 3, Dixon and Marcus Ericsson in Row 4, and two-time series champ Josef Newgarden and Palou in Row 5.

O'Ward starts on the outside of Row 8, but he likely won't stay there long.

Present and accounted for, all of them. Candidates for the title, all of them.

Drop the green, baby. Let's go.

A preview of Madness

 I have no idea what happens when the calendar kicks over to March on Tuesday, and that is a marvelous thing to contemplate. No one wants order in March. We want chaos, and NCAA brackets reduced to cinders, and a rending of garments that is mostly a false front for sheer delight.

Oh, man, why did I pick Kansas to beat Bucknell? Now my bracket is landfill! Also ... go Bucknell!

That sort of deal.

We want madness with our March Madness, or it's just not Madness. And if yesterday is any indication, we're going to get plenty of it when the curtain goes up on the NCAA Tournament in less than three weeks.

What happened yesterday was seven of the top ten teams in the nation got blackjacked -- including No. 1 Gonzaga, which lost by 10 to St. Mary's. Arkansas beat Kentucky. Baylor beat Kansas. Tennessee beat Auburn. Arizona lost to Colorado, Texas Tech lost to TCU, and Purdue stepped in it again, losing to unranked Michigan State in East Lansing.'

This makes the Purdues 24-5 and drops them a game behind front-running Wisconsin in the Big Ten. It also firms up the Blob's suspicions about them, which is that March could go one of two ways for them.

One, they play like they played against Illinois twice or Rutgers the second time or Iowa twice or Florida State or Villanova, and they get to the Final Four for the first time in 42 years.

Two, they play like they played at Michigan or at Indiana or at Rutgers the first time or against Maryland at home (a fortunate 62-61 escape), and some St. Mary's or Arkansas knocks them out in the second round.

I think it's 50-50 between the two. I could be wrong, of course. I frequently am, particularly in March.

Point is, everyone has players these days, and so chalk is not nearly as dependable as it used to be. This makes it much harder to stay inside the lines on your bracket. It's also what makes Da Tournament great.

Seven of the top ten going down, in late February?

Go, chaos.

Stick to ... well, you know

 I lost track of Charlie Weis when Kansas gave him the gate as their football coach in 2014, so I don't know where he is now or what he's doing. But I do know what he hasn't been doing.

Boning up on political theory.

I know this because yesterday Mr. Schematic Advantage weighed in on the invasion of Ukraine by Russia's criminal mastermind Vladimir Putin, and he was ... well, let's say at a disadvantage.

Here's what Charlie tweeted: As I watch Russia continue their invasion of Ukraine this morning, I ask if Americans that want socialism are watching? Do you want to be a part of something like this?

Altogether now: I'm sorry, what? 

Look. I'll give Weis the benefit of the doubt here, because he's likely spent a lot of his time over the years drawing up plays for Tom Brady and Brady Quinn, and hasn't had a lot of time to study socialism. Same goes for Tommy Tuberville, who somehow got himself elected to the Senate despite having no qualifications other than beating Alabama seven times when he coached Auburn from 1999 to 2008.

Tuberville's contribution to the Ukraine dialogue was to tweet about the evils of communism, apparently having missed the breakup of the Soviet Union 30 years ago.

That neither he nor Weis would not know what socialism and communism are -- and, more to the point, what they aren't -- only makes them no different from a whole lot of right-leaning folks these days. But it's most assuredly not what Russia is.

In fact, Russia is almost exactly the opposite; for want of a better term, it's a neo-fascist state run by corrupt oligarchs and a brutal ex-KGB goon, masquerading as a democratic republic. Its invasion of Ukraine is reflective of that, because, according to people with some actual expertise, part of Putin's motivation is a wholly un-socialistic desire to prop up Russia's fossil fuel-based economy. 

The point here is the usual suspects who cry "Stick to sports!" when a LeBron James or Colin Kaepernick comment on political matters are conspicuously silent when a Weis or Tuberville do so. It's all about whose ox is being gored -- even if their oxen have no clue what they're talking about.

Stick to sports?

Yeah, OK. You first.

The available weapon

 In Barcelona this week, the Formula One crowd is testing for the 2022 season, a shakedown that may or may not provide a clue to the narrative ahead. 

Right now, the narrative being suggested is that Ferrari is going to be a force again. Charles Leclerc set fast time for two days running; Ferrari teammate Carlos Sainz then hopped in the car and put up the fifth quickest time, behind LeClerc, Pierre Gasly of AlphaTauri, Daniel Ricciardo of McLaren and George Russell of Mercedes. The two Ferrari drivers put 149 laps on their ride in the second day of testing.

As for the narrative ...

Well, what's happening Ukraine right now already has partly shaped it.

What's happening there is the present overlaying the past like a double exposure, because its pattern is distressingly familiar. Tanks and troops overwhelming defenses in 2022; tanks and troops overwhelming defenses in 1939. Missiles falling on Kyiv in 2022; Stukas descending on Warsaw in 1939.

Naked aggression then. Naked aggression now.

It truly is all of a piece, right down to the justification aggressors always trot out to put a shine on their crimes. In 2022, Putin claims Russia is merely defending itself against a threat on its borders, and protecting breakaway Russian provinces. In 1938 and 1939,  Hitler claimed the same things about the Sudetenland and Poland.

What F1 has to do with this is very little, other than what it can do. And so yesterday it announced there would be no Russian Grand Prix in Moscow this season -- just as soccer has announced it will move its Champions League final from St. Petersburg to Paris.

This is pathetic stuff, matched against tanks and missiles. But is it the only weapon available to Sportsball World, and so it will wield it.

More telling could be the coordinated sanctions being applied to Russian money and Russian resources by the United States and its allies. And, of course, by the tens of thousands of people even now flooding Moscow's streets to protest Putin's thuggery.

 Russians in the streets brought down the czar once upon a time, despite brutal efforts to suppress them. Now they're in the streets again, and brutal efforts to suppress them are again being employed.

The present, overlaying the past.

More MLB lunacy

 Ay-yi-yi. I swear, if Major League Baseball were "Casey At The Bat," more than the air would be shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

 So would his head.

Because, listen, if this isn't MLB hitting itself in the head with its own bat, I don't know what is. Its latest act of self-harm came down yesterday, when MLB officials reiterated the Feb. 28 deadline to get a deal done was a hard and fast one.

If there's no deal by end of business Monday, they'll start canceling regular-season games. And those games will not be made up.

So now there won't be a 162-game season because of this nonsense. 

And I say "won't be" because there won't be a deal by Monday, either. That's ridiculous on its face. Furthermore, MLB knows it. 

So this is just more gamesmanship by the owners, as spring training sites remain silent. It's an attempt to shift the blame for the continuing impasse to the players, because the public has rightly placed the lion's share of it at the owners' feet. After all, they're the ones who went nuclear by imposing a lockout before negotiations had even begun.

And what are they all arguing (i.e.: posturing) about?

Literally whether hundreds of millions of dollars should be even more hundreds of millions of dollars. Even the dispute over minimum MLB salaries is a squabble over hundreds of thousands.

Bottom line: Everyone's already rich here, the owners especially. So most of what this is about, in the Blob's opinion, is disposable income. And everyone's already making more of that than they reasonably could dispose of in a lifetime.

Meanwhile, the NCAA Tournament is coming up. And the NBA stretch run. And the NFL combine and draft.

Which means most of Sportsball World won't even notice if baseball remains dark.

Go ahead, boys. Hit yourselves again.

That beeping sound you hear ...

 ... is Phil Mickelson backing up, fast, after he said he wanted to climb in bed with a bunch of sociopaths to put pressure on the PGA Tour to reform itself.

Namely, to stop making so damn much money off the players, who make a whole lot of damn money themselves.

Anyway, since air hit that quote the other day, some stuff has happened, and it's all been bad for Lefty. Thinking he was leading some sort of charge, he was undoubtedly quite shocked to look behind him and see no one following. PGA Tour player after PGA Tour player said he had zero interest in the Super Tour. This included all of the top 12 players in the world. 

Meanwhile, the PGA Tour yesterday issued a bald ultimatum: The Tour was moving forward without regard for the Super Tour, and it was time for the players to make a decision: With us, or against us?

And, well ...

Well. Suddenly Lefty was out there on an island, all by himself. Alone, that is, except for Greg Norman, who's fronting the Super Tour for the journalist-killing-and-dismembering Saudis. 

Not a very hospitable island, in other words. And so Phil walked back what he said about the Saudis -- whom he'd actually acknowledged were a bunch of sociopaths, which made it sound even worse when he said he was nonetheless casting his lot with them.

No more. This week Mickelson threw himself on the mercy of the court of public opinion, saying it was rilly, rilly bad what he said, and how he wasn't going to join the Super Tour after all. In fact, he's apparently taking some time off from golf.

Norman, however, is still fully engaged with the butchers of Jamal Khashoggi.

Sleep well, Greg.

A tale of two punishment phases

 Justice was served in two spheres yesterday, although by very different routes. In one sphere, it was blindingly swift; in the other, it sort of lollygagged around, grinding its way  through what bureaucrats and suits like to call the Process.

Let's take Swifty first.

In which it took the Big Ten little more than a day to hand down its judgment on that disgusting display of adults behaving like 5-year-olds in Madison, Wis., Sunday. Juwan Howard is gone for the rest of the regular season for throwing hands at Wisconsin assistant Joe Krabbenhoft. Wisconsin coach Greg Gard was fined $10,000 for putting his hands on Howard instead of just ignoring Howard's snide comment in the handshake line.

The Wisconsin athletic department subsequently indulged in some breathtaking revisionist history, claiming in a statement it would pay Gard's fine because Gard and his staff were doing their best to "de-escalate" the situation. How anyone could watch the video and arrive at that conclusion is beyond comprehension, but that's Wisky's story and they're sticking to it.

The main thing is, the Big Ten did not mess around with the punishment phase. The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, not so much.

Almost 10 months after 2021 Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit tested positive for a banned steroid, and nearly that long since Churchill Downs handed down a two-year ban to trainer Bob Baffert, the Commission finally stripped Medina Spirit of its Derby win, suspended Baffert for 90 days and fined him $7,500. Mandaloun, who finished second that long-ago day in May, will now be recognized as the 2021 winner.

Exactly how long ago has it been?

It's been so long, Medina Spirit isn't even alive anymore. The horse died of a heart attack in December after a training run at Santa Anita.

"Gee, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "What was the holdup?"

That's a very good question, and the Blob admits it doesn't know enough about how horse racing operates to provide an answer. Maybe the Commission hadn't met to consider the case until now. Or maybe there's some sort of horse due process that must be adhered to. 

In any event, justice was finally served. Which means yesterday, justice had itself a day.

Failure to chill in Madison

Woody Hayes could have warned the man, the way he once warned Bob Knight. But Woody is long dead, so there will be no moment when he tells Michigan basketball coach Juwan Howard, "Listen to me, Juwan. Listen to me, because I've made a lot of mistakes and you don't have to repeat mine."

Woody's biggest mistake, of course, was throwing a punch at Clemson linebacker Charley Bauman after Bauman intercepted a pass in the 1978 Gator Bowl. It was also Woody's last mistake, because it got him fired.

Juwan Howard likely will not be. But when he took a swing at Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft yesterday after Michigan's loss to Wisconsin, he had his own Charley Bauman moment -- and it was just as shameful as Woody's.

By now the video has entered Zapruder film territory, so often has it been dissected and re-dissected. When Howard and Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard came together in the postgame handshake line, the two exchanged words. Gard put his hands on Howard; Howard put his hands on Gard, grabbing his sweater and shaking a finger in his face.

At that point, Krabbenhoft said ... something. We know he said something, because Howard reached over Gard to take a swipe at him. That touched off a near-brawl involving players and coaches from both teams.

For that, Juwan Howard is wholly to blame. If the head coach thinks it's OK to throw a slap/punch/whatever that was, how will his players not think it's OK, too?

It escalated a heated discussion between two head coaches into something else, and even if you want to argue Krabbenhoft escalated it first, Howard was the one who chose to react. Without Howard's rabbit ears and loss of his chill, it's just he and Gard jawing at one another. And that's never happened before, right?

Not even Knight and Gene Keady ever threw a punch at one another, heated as their rivalry was. Knight did once smack Joe B. Hall on the back of the head during a fierce Indiana-Kentucky moment, but it was vague enough that Knight was able to alchemize it into a friendly pat. 

Howard can't possibly pull off a similar transformation. He threw hands at an opposing coach. And it doesn't matter why, or what the opposing coach said, or even if he had a reason to be upset with Gard and his staff.

Which he didn't, by the way.

Gard called timeout with seconds to play in a blowout win because Michigan was still pressing the Badgers' scrubs. If Michigan isn't still pressing -- and it made zero sense for them to be doing so at that point -- there likely would not have been a timeout. The game would have ended with some Wisky kid dribbling the last seconds away out by the timeline.

So there was no excuse for any of what came later. As if there ever could be.

Somewhere on the great celestial sideline, Woody's likely saying just that.

That car race

 Forget the damn rodent in Pennsylvania. Spring arrives today, here in the Precincts.

Spring arrives when 40 muscle cars start rumbling and blaring and bellowing at the Florida sky this afternoon, and the green drops on the 64th annual Daytona 500. You'll hear some sweat-blurred summer night, in all that rumbling and blaring and bellowing. You'll look out at the glacier-writ-small that is your February backyard, and see July.

That's how it's always been in the Precincts, aka Blob World. That's how it'll be today.

And that's despite the fact it's not quite the occasion is used to be for me.

These days, Daytona is just about the only NASCAR race I watch, and I'm not alone in that. There are a million reasons why American motorsports' 800-pound gorilla is down about 600 pounds, and not all of it is because the generation that built it is retired now. But I suspect that's part of it.

Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona 21 years ago, and now his son, Dale Jr., is an "old" retired guy. So is Jeff Gordon, former Wonderboy. So is Jimmie Johnson, who's trying his hand at IndyCar now, and Mark Martin, and Dale Jarrett and both Labontes and Tony Stewart and the whole spangled bunch of 'em -- including Bill Elliott, whose son, Chase, is your defending Cup champion.

The new guys are Chase and Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney, who is Dave Blaney's kid. Harrison Burton, Jeff Burton's kid, starts on the outside of Row 4 today. Austin Cindric, son of Penske team president Tim Cindric, starts on the inside of Row 3. 

Whole new deal, in other words. At some point we blinked, and NASCAR turned the page on an entire generation. Hell, Kyle Busch is an elder statesman now. So is Brad Keselowski, another former wild child.

This is not to suggest that's a bad thing, or to come off like some fist-shaking geezer howling against time's inevitable crawl. The kids are good, after all. They can drive the wheels off. But it takes awhile to get to know to them, to figure out who Chris Buescher is (outside of Row 2), or Chase Briscoe (inside Row 5), or Christopher Bell (outside Row 6), or any number of others.

By the end of today, one of them could be a Daytona 500 winner. And we'll know him a little better because of that.

Me?

I'll settle in and watch, same as ever. And Julie, same as ever, will say, "Are you watching that silly car race?"

Yes, dear. I am. 

Spring won't wait a second longer.

A wrong Lefty turn

 Hey, I get where Phil Mickelson is coming fro--

OK, so, no. No, I don't.

I don't get why a man in the twilight of a brilliant golf career would sully it by climbing in bed with a bunch of sociopaths.

I don't get why he'd do that while acknowledging that the people he's climbing in bed with are a bunch of sociopaths.

And I especially don't get why he'd do that for what, in these precincts, doesn't sound like a good enough reason.

In case you missed it, Mickelson says he's going to link up with a proposed Super Golf League bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, that stalwart bastion of human rights. The goal, he says, is to  put "pressure" on the PGA Tour to "reshape how the PGA Tour operates."

What he means by that, essentially, is the PGA Tour makes too much money off its players and should fork over more of it, even though the players aren't exactly destitute. In fact, the Blob is hard-pressed to name any athletes who lead cushier lives than professional golfers. 

No matter. As with most things in the sporting stratospheres, this is about money. And, hey, maybe the courtesy cars aren't up to snuff, either.

In any event, Mickelson is leading the charge, as the Super Golf Tour attempts to poach some of the PGA Tour's biggest stars. At 51, Lefty probably figures he doesn't have much to lose as twilight descends on his career. 

So he's jinin' the cavalry, as they say. Even while, again, acknowledging the Saudis are some nasty folks.

"They're scary motherf***ers to get involved with," Mickelson told Alan Shipnuck, his collaborator on a new biography that will be coming out soon. "They killed (Washington Post reporter and U.S. resident Jamal) Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights ..."

Well, no, Phil. They didn't just kill Khashoggi. They killed him, and then they cut up his body -- discussing how they were going to do it as calmly as if they were in a boardroom somewhere.

 These are the kind of animals Mickelson is throwing in with. And the worst part is, he KNOWS what kind of animals they are. But, doggone it, somebody's gotta do something about those big meanies who run the PGA Tour, sitting as they do on too big a pile for Lefty's taste.

In other words, this is a principled stand Mickeson's taking.

And pigs fly.

An ice charade

 There are always tears in figure skating. It's why they call the area where skaters sit to wait for their scores the "Kiss & Cry" room.

Yesterday was different. 

Yesterday was the final act in the women's singles figure-skating competition, which is frequently rendered comical by its squirrely judges but this time was a horror show wrapped in a farce swaddled in a charade.

A Russian skater won gold, and another Russian skater won silver. But no one will remember Beijing for that. 

What they'll remember it for is yet another Russian skater breaking down in sobs, because she's 15 years old and that's what 15-year-olds do when they're betrayed by all the alleged grownups around them. 

That happened to Kamila Valieva yesterday. A child prodigy, the most scintillating performer in her sport, she stumbled through a wreck of a long program, falling from first to fourth in the final standings. Then she dissolved in tears as her "coach" berated her, a wrenching emotional collapse that will likely be the signature moment of these Games.

What made it wrenching was Valieva's failure was not really her failure. She's 15 -- and, thanks to the venality and incompetence of the adults around her, she bore a weight in these Games no one with years more experience could have borne.

Failure?

The failure belongs not to Valieva but to her jackass of a coach, and to her federation, and to her nation. And last but hardly least, to the Olympic movement itself.

Every last of them failed Kamila Valieva. Every last one of them ought to be strung up by the thumbs for doing so. 

Her coach, for being an unfeeling shite-head.

Her federation and her nation, for allowing a culture of doping that pressures young athletes to go along or get along outta here.

The Olympic movement, which rewarded that culture by allowing Russian athletes to compete in the first place, then dropped it all on the narrow shoulders of  one tiny high school-age kid, allowing her to be held up as the poster child for drug cheats.

Shame on all of 'em. And to hell with all of 'em.

The Olympic motto -- citius, altius, fortius -- has been abused before by its alleged proponents, in small ways and big. Rarely has it done so in a manner that provokes so much disgust. 

Citius, altius, fortius, scapegoate-ius. That ought to be the new motto.

As the Blob noted yesterday, it's always the athletes who save the Olympic Games from themselves. But then you watched as a weight not hers to bear crushed Valieva, and how utterly alone the adults left her with it, and you wondered if even the athletes could save these Games.

I vote no.

When failure is an option

 I don't know what happened to Mikaela Shiffrin, between the time she arrived in Beijing on the cusp of history and when she stood alone at the top of the hill for the first time. I don't know what happened, or what she saw when she first looked down at that strip of snow coursing down the mountain, or when the first doubts began to creep in.

I only know this: Failure is always an option, no matter what they said in "Apollo 13."

Shriffrin came to Beijing as one of the most accomplished Alpine skiers in the world, a heavy favorite to add to her cache of three Olympic medals, two of them gold. One more medal would have tied her with Julia Mancuso as the most decorated U.S. woman in Olympic Alpine history; another gold would have given her more than any American skier ever.

Instead, yesterday, she crashed out of the slalom portion of the Alpine combined 10 gates in. It was her third DNF of these Olympics; her only finishes have been in the downhill, where she placed 18th, and the super-G, where she placed ninth. She crashed out of both the giant slalom and the slalom, the former in the first 10 seconds and the latter in the first five seconds.

Shiffrin was the defending gold medalist in the giant slalom. She was favored to win the slalom event.

Yet she failed. And not just failed, but epically failed.

Her reaction to it has brought both tears and a stiff upper lip, but beneath it all you can sense bewilderment more than anything. A world-class skier does not just forget how to get down the mountain, and yet that seems to have happened. And it carries within it the sort of lessons that are often the saving grace for an Olympic movement grown cynical and corrupt.

The Beijing Games have served up heaping helpings of both, given that the host nation violates the Olympic ideal pretty much daily. This is equally true of the IOC, whose anti-doping initiatives have become a sour joke thanks to its acquiescence to the Russians in general, and figure skater Kamila Valieva in particular.

As this was written, Valieva seemed a lock for a women's singles medal, and a favorite to win gold. It would be the first time in memory that a known doper would be so rewarded.*

(* Update: Or, not. Valieva stumbled through her long program and did not medal, saving both the medal ceremony and yet more embarrassment for the IOC.)

And yet ...

And yet, as the Blob has noted before, it is always the athletes who redeem the Games. It is always the athletes who save the Olympic movement from itself.

It's the athletes who show us what triumph looks like, and also failure. The latter is perhaps even more instructive than the former, because it reminds us we are all fallible, and overcoming that fallibility is what sets the best of us apart. 

But it is always there. And when see a Mikaela Shiffrin fall and fall and fall again, we're reminded of that -- and also reminded of just how difficult a thing it is to fly down a mountain at 70 mph.

Shiffrin and others have so often made it look so easy, we sometimes take them for granted. And so when one of them fails, it makes their triumphs all the more worth watching.

There's no thrill of victory without the agony of defeat, after all. Wide World of Sports told us that a long time ago.

Early withdrawals

Hey, what do I know. Maybe I'd have stopped writing for newspapers at 36 if someone had put me on TV and paid me goo-gobs of lettuce to wear a tie and express Deep Thoughts like, "Ya know, Greeny, defense wins championships a lot more often than you think."

This of course is a fantastical notion, since I have a face made for city-wide blackouts. Lord knows how much circulation it cost my employers over the years because they unwisely ran my picture with my columns.

But enough with tangents. 

This is not about me but about 36-year-old Sean McVay, who just became the youngest head coach ever to win a Super Bowl. He's getting married this summer. And so, in the immediate flush of victory, he made vague sounds about maybe/possibly/kinda-sorta retiring as an NFL coach.

Retiring.

At 36.

Speculation is that, yes, he indeed has a cushy TV job lined up if he decides to go this route, so there ya go. It's no great leap to see a future that involves him doing the professional babble thing for awhile, then coming back to a sideline when, as they say, he's tanned, rested and ready.

But still: He's 36.

Which gets you thinking about what coaching or playing in the NFL is actually like, financially rewarding though it may be. On the same night McVay sounded like a guy who wasn't raring to win another six or seven Lombardi trophies, his incomparable pass rusher, Aaron Donald, was on another part of the field, hinting he might walk away himself.

Aaron Donald is 30.

Which back in the day meant a guy with Donald's abundant skills might only be halfway through his playing days. Of course, then those back-in-the-days started turning up either dead or with dementia by the time they were 50. Or finding it impossible to get through a day without painkillers and/or a cane.

Football players love their game like few athletes, but their game does not love them back.  In exchange for a player's unconditional devotion, it knocks him down, stomps him senseless, almost literally tears him limb from limb. It leaves him a physical wreck and, in the cruelest instances, leaves him unable to even remember playing the damn game.

And coaches?

There's a toll to bear, too, but it's different. It manifests itself in the way it remorselessly gobbles up every second of every day, muscling aside everything else in life: Holidays, kids' birthdays, wedding anniversaries, marital bonds. Absence is the coin it demands, just as physical dissolution is the coin it demands of players.

Today's players -- who love the game, too, but not nearly as myopically -- bear far fewer illusions about this. It's why more and more of them are getting in, making their money, and getting out at 30 or before. 

The rub-some-dirt-on-it crowd sneered when Andrew Luck abruptly retired at 29, but none of them ever got hit the way Luck did, repeatedly. The suspicion is most of those who said he didn't love football enough, or wasn't tough enough, would be curled up in a ball weeping after they got hit the way Luck was as a matter of course.

So Luck got out, because he recognized that football could never give him back what it was taking away. And Aaron Donald, who's now got his ring and his ticket to Canton punched, thought about it, too. Because what else can the game give him but grief from here on out?

As for Sean McVay ...

Well. He said what he said for the same reason. He may be too young to remember the way the game once left Hall of Fame coach Dick Vermeil a trembling wreck, forcing him to flee it for a time. But he no doubt would understand completely.

Retiring at 36? Or 30? Or 29?

You might think it sounds crazy. But football is not banking. 

There are no penalties for early withdrawals. Only rewards.

Major League Buttheads

 Sometimes you listen to folks in Major League Baseball, and you wonder when the Pittsburgh Pirates infected everyone else in the game with their Chronic Dumbness disease. Or you think of that old joke about the redneck.

Q: What are a redneck's last words?

A: Hey y'all! Watch this!

That sort of thing.

Seems like Rob Manfred and the rest of the Major League Buttheads are continually shouting "Watch this!" these days, as they go about making baseball even more irrelevant than it already is. The game's capacity for self-harm has always been epic, but maybe never more so than now, when even the World Series goes into eclipse every time the Cowboys suit up.

MLB's solution to this: Hey, y'all! Let's have a lockout!

So no pitchers-and-catchers report this month, or any gooshy reveries about baseball heralding the coming of spring. Only silence beneath those high desert skies and tropical Florida ones.

But wait, there's more!

The owners' latest half-assed proposal to the players includes a provision that would enable them to axe hundreds of future minor-league playing jobs, including 30 alone from the Domestic Reserve List. This on top of telling 42 minor-league towns -- some of whom had supported baseball for a century or more -- to piss right off 14 months ago.

As a business strategy, it might make sense. As a growing-the-game strategy, it makes none.

The Blob is not going to get all gooshy itself and talk about dreaming boys with baseball gloves dangling from the handlebars of their bikes, and how their dreams just got a little less possible. But it does wonder how fewer minor-league roster spots advances anything but the already-bloated bank accounts of MLB and its owners.

Because the city where I live, Fort Wayne, has had a minor-league affiliate for almost three decades now, I've seen some things. I've seen kids come through here who went on to great baseball things, and I've seen kids who went on to sell mortgages and insurance and interest-free loans. 

Low-A ball, which was the Fort's designation until this past season, was the entry point or close to it for all of them. It was also the entry point, or close to it, to possibility-- and that possibility was the same for all of them.

And if Possibility ended in northeast Indiana?

At least it got to breathe it for awhile. At least a bunch of young baseball players got a few summers as certified members of Organized Baseball, and got paid to play a child's game.

Fewer minor-league players would mean fewer chances to do that.

Fewer minor-league players would mean MLB telling young men who fell hard for baseball as kids they're dead weight. It's telling them they're nothing more than negative assets the clubs need to clear off their books.

This is not the way you win back the next generation from basketball and football. 

This is the way you dim an already dimming game even further.

Geniuses, these people. I swear.

A self-made bed

 By the time you read this, 15-year-old Russian figure skating phenom Kamila Valieva already may have won a gold medal. Or a silver or a bronze one.

If so, the International Olympic Committee already may have committed first-degree hypocrisy, too.

The IOC and the Chinese hosts, see, were very clear there would be no protests allowed in the Beijing Winter Games, although edicts like that rarely stop protests from happening. This doesn't stop the IOC from issuing such edicts, because the Olympics are supposed to be free of political taint, even if they never have been.

Of course, that doesn't mean the IOC can't stage its own protests.

That's pretty much the essence of the IOC's latest edict, which declared if Valieva won a medal, there would be no post-competition medal  ceremony. That's because the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled Valieva could go ahead and compete, even though she failed a pre-Games drug test.

Now, a Russian failing a drug test is hardly stop-the-presses stuff. The Russians have been banned from competing under their own flag since 2017 because of their extensive, state-sponsored doping program. As a punishment, it's a complete joke.

And now it's the petard by which the IOC finds itself hoisted.

If the IOC was not the corrupt, money-grubbing entity it is, it would have banned the Russians from competing, period. And then Valieva wouldn't be an issue, because she wouldn't be in Beijing. And the IOC would not have been compelled, in a fit of pique, to say it was going to potentially screw two of the three medal winners in order to punish a third.

Hey, you had your chance to punish the Russians, boys and girls. It's a little late now to get all stern about it. You made your bed; the two blameless athletes you're potentially prepared to hurt did not. So lie in it, and ditch the protest.

Because you know what?

Somewhere Tommie Smith and John Carlos are shaking their heads and laughing at you.

Zebra wars, culture wars and other odd Super thoughts

 So the Los Angeles Rams are your world champions, and yay for Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald, and go (bleep) yourself, Rams owner and horrible person Stan Kroenke. That pretty much sums up the Blob's feeling on the whole business.

It also has a few Thoughts. Because the Blob always has Thoughts.

* That was some inclusive performance by the NFL refs down there at the end, who kept throwing flags until Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp got it right. It not only brought the conspiracy theorists inside the Super Bowl tent ("The NFL's gonna keep giving the Rams chances because it wants the Lombardi Trophy in L.A."), it got the history nerds inside, too ("Hey, it's the 1972 Olympic basketball final all over again! When do the Rams put in Alexander Belov to make the winning basket?")

And just imagine the debates going on all over America ...

BENGALS FAN: Oh, gee, another flag. What a surprise.

RAMS FAN: Quit  putting your hands all over our boy Cooper, and they'll stop dropping laundry.

BENGALS FAN:  Hey, the Soviets only got three chances in '72. How many they gonna give L.A.?

RAMS FAN: What is this, the noon show at Busch Gardens? They're water-skiin' behind  Coop!

BENGALS FAN: Oh, look, the Rams finally scored. The refs must be so relieved.

RAMS FAN: At last! Coop gets to do Coop things without being assaulted!

Rinse and repeat.

* Overheard where I was Sunday night, while watching the Super Bowl halftime show: "The right wing is going to lose its mind on social media over this."

After which the right wing lost its mind on social media, calling the artists "hoodlums" and claiming the halftime show should be banned from television. The usual suspects saying the usual things, and so forth.

Me?

I'm a crotchety 66-year-old white guy who's not into rap. But I thought the halftime show (featuring rap icons Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and Eminem) was terrific. Amazing energy, amazing showmanship from an amazing collection of  performers. Best halftime show I've seen in awhile, and I saw the best halftime show ever in person -- Prince in the rain in Miami.

But we're a nation of two distinct cultures now, and I find that extremely sad. Our differences -- in perspective, in musical and artistic taste, in social tradition and history -- used to define us as unique and special. Now we see evil and existential threat in those differences, and beat one another over the head with them.

Same as every other country on earth, in other words. So much for American exceptionalism.

* Cooper Kupp deserved his MVP trophy, sealing it with four catches for 39 yards to propel the Rams' winning drive. Without him, that drive doesn't happen. So well done.

But you know what?

This was the rare instance when you could have made a strong case for co-MVPs.

The other one I'd have given to Aaron Donald, who sacked Joe Burrow twice, made four tackles including three solo, and made the game's two biggest stops on back-to-back plays: Stopping Bengals running back Perrine a yard short on third down at midfield as the Bengals were trying to force overtime with a last-second field goal, and then sacking Burrow on fourth down to end it.

In a game whose narrative was largely written by the two defenses, it seems only right a defensive player should have gotten at least a piece of the MVP.

* So which Ram had the best night in L.A.?

You could say it was Donald, tears mingling with sweat on his face as he talked about  winning a Super Bowl in his eighth NFL season. You could say it was Odell Beckham Jr., the refugee from the Browns, breaking down in tears when the game ended and the blue-and-yellow confetti rained down. You could say it was Matthew Stafford, winning it all after a dozen years of hard labor in the Lions gulag, or safety Taylor Rapp, who proposed to his girlfriend on the field as the celebration went on around them.

None of them had the night wideout Van Jefferson did, though.

At a little past 10 o'clock Eastern time, he won the Super Bowl. 

Two-and-a-half hours later, with Jefferson at her bedside after high-tailing it to the hospital from SoFi Stadium, his wife gave birth to their second child, a son.

Now there's a guy who had himself a night.

And now ... Da Prediction

 I know what I'm going to be looking at, come 10:30 or so tomorrow night. And if there's any queso left, I may decorate the wall with it.

My Foo'ball Exper-tease and ex-sportswriter skillz tell me I'm going to be seeing Rams owner Stan Kroenke grinning like a raccoon while he leaves his grimy paw prints all over the Lombardi Trophy.

"Gee, Mr. Blob, can we deduce from this you don't care much for Mr. Kroenke?" you're saying now.

Yes, you can deduce that. I do not like Mr. Kroenke, and it's not really because he carpetbagged the Rams out of St. Louis and took them back to L.A. with the NFL's blessing. It's that he felt compelled to trash the city of St. Louis on his way out of town.

That was as low class as low class gets. So to hell with him. And to hell with the Rams, even if reason tells me they're going to win the Big Roman Numeral tomorrow.

They'll win because they've put together a Superfriends team with a quarterback (Matt Stafford) they freed from the Lions gulag, and the most feared pass rush in professional football. And they'll be going up against the Cincinnati Bengals, who have one of the worst offensive lines in the league.

This is not a good matchup, the Exper-tease tells me. And so as wondrous Joe Burrow is for the Yipes Stripes, I fear he's doomed to be sacked eleventy-hundred times tomorrow. If Von Miller doesn't get him, Aaron Donald will.

And so the head tells me the Rams win, like, 27-17.

The heart, however, tells me the Bengals have them right where they want them.

Which is, right where they had the AFC's top seed, Tennessee, in the divisional round. And right where they had Kansas City, the prohibitive favorite to win it all, in the AFC title game.

In the former, Burrow was sacked nine times and yet somehow got the Bengals close enough for Evan McPherson to win it with a field goal at the gun, 19-16.In the latter, they got down 21-3 and then shut down the Un-shuttable One, Patrick Mahomes, limiting the Chiefs to a field goal in the second half.

Then McPherson came on again in overtime to finish 'em off, 27-24.

Now they're on the road again, sort of, playing the Rams in the Rams home digs, SoFi Stadium. And they still have Burrow and McPherson and that defense, and also LaMarr Chase and Tee Higgins. So, you know, maybe ...

Maybe Burrow gets sacked and sacked and keeps getting up to throw lasers. Maybe the Rams focus on taking Chase away, and Higgins has another huge day like he did in Arrowhead, when he caught six passes for 103 yards. Maybe Joe Cool II pulls off the same sort of upset Joe Cool I -- last name, Namath -- did in Super Bowl III.

Of course, this time, McPherson gets the winner in overtime. 

In my dreams, that's how I see it going. And you know what?

I kinda like my dreams.

Bengals 27. Rams 24.

Go. Figure.

 I should know by now, I suppose. Thirty-eight years wallowing around as a professional sports wallower ought to have taught me something, don't ya think?

Apparently not. Because it still shocks me what a bunch of frat boy pranksters the sports gods are.

See what happened to Your Purdue Boilermakers last night?

They went up to Ann Arbor as the No, 3 team in the country, having just annihilated Big Ten frontrunner Illinois in a manner that had people whispering Final Four. Why, just look at their two-headed lab experiment in the middle, Zach-Trevion Edey-Williams! Can't stop 'em with a bazooka! And if Jaden Ivey isn't the best player in the country .. well, what have you been smokin', sonny?

And then they went up to Ann Arbor, like we said.

And Michigan stuck 'em in a bucket of Mr. Clean, wrung 'em out and mopped the floor with 'em.

Beat 'em 82-58, the Wolverines did. Shot 51.6 from the floor and 12-of-21 from the 3-point arc, a ridiculous 57.1 percent clip. Outrebounded the Purdues 35-25.

The Wolverines put all five starters in double figures, led by center Hunter Dickinson -- who got 22 points and nine boards and fought the two-headed lab experiment to a draw all by himself. And Jaden Ivey?

Well, he did lead Purdue with 18 points. Wasn't exactly the 26-point, four-rebound, six-assist masterwork he put together in the 84-68 mauling of the Illini, though.

The loss, Purdue's first since Jan. 20, dropped Purdue from first to third in the Big Ten. And no doubt triggered a stomach-dropping bootlegger's turn from the prisoner-of-the-moment crowd.

Two days ago, after beating Illinois by 16: Purdue? They play like that, they'll be in the Final Four. Maybe win the whole schmear.

This morning, after losing to Michigan by 24: Purdue? They play like that, they won't get out of the first weekend.

And somewhere, the sports gods laugh and laugh. They do love them some whiplash.

Accountability 101

 This was Mike Woodson's Illinois moment, until it wasn't. Further review will do that to a thing. 

Illinois, see, was the Blob's initial thought when word came down that Woodson had suspended five regular rotation players minutes before a game at Northwestern his Indiana Hoosiers kinda had to have. And by "Illinois," I mean a certain road trip to Champaign 37 winters ago, when Bob Knight -- Woodson's coaching sensei, as it were -- abruptly benched four of his five starters and sent four freshmen out to replace them.

The Hoosiers lost by 11 that day, scoring just 12 points in the first half. Even the Bobbyheads were outraged, wondering how a man in his right mind could just throw away something so precious as a Big Ten game.

And so, when Woodson abruptly benched his guys, and Indiana went on to lose at Northwestern, here came the thought: "Wow. Woodson just went Illinois on 'em."

Except he hadn't.

Except, upon further review, this was miles different from what Knight did that long-ago day in Champaign. That was less about discipline and accountability than it was simple pique, a Knight specialty. And it was mostly directed at stickout guard Steve Alford, whom Knight got it in his head needed to be taken down a peg. 

This?

This was about team rules, and the consequences for breaking them. This was actually about discipline and accountability, instead of just theoretically. It was Bob Knight 2.0 --  clearer-eyed, and without the grandstanding of the original.

And it took a lot more gumption.

When Knight did what he did, see, the Hoosiers were spiraling toward a 15-13 season, 7-11 in the Big Ten. It was the year of the Chair Game and much else.

Woodson's Hoosiers, on the other hand, are 16-7, 7-6 in the Big Ten, and have a murderer's row of Michigan State, Wisconsin and Ohio State just ahead. Currently projected as a mid-pack NCAA Tournament seed, they need every W they can get to stay there. And Northwestern was an eminently gettable W. 

It's also a different era. The transfer portal and NILs have altered the traditional imbalance of power in high-end college athletics; players have more control over their own destinies now, and coaches are thus more compelled to cater to those players who can elevate their programs. It takes major brass ones to go old school on them.

And yet, Woodson did, for the sake of his program and the culture he's trying to instill in it. Three of the five players he suspended indefinitely are transfer portal players, including Xavier Johnson, Woodson's starting point guard. So it can reasonably be assumed they've already gotten disgruntled with other programs for one reason or another.

Woodson's message: Transfer here, you do things the way we do them here. If you can't do that, there's the door.

"When you talk about building a team, I'm building a culture here," Woodson said the other day. "I'm not here to mess around with guys who don't want to do what's asked of them. If they don't, they've got to go. That's how I look at it."

Indeed.

Winter of farewells

There's still a pile of white out there, a week after the big storm. We're ankle-deep in snow and February, full stop in the celestial calendar. It's a world of skeletal trees and monochrome landscapes and, when the sun shines in the afternoons, the first whispers of a better season in the angle of the light and the way it lingers the tiniest bit longer in the evenings.

Which is a gussied-up way of saying it's a time for both beginnings and farewells. Especially if you're of a certain age.

I am dead center in that certain age, and so the beginning for me is the beginning of realizing that the farewells are starting to pile up. And that certain farewells require certain seasons if they're going to feel at all right.

And so we come to say goodbye to Merv Dubchak today, here in the full flood of his season.

He was a winter boy from Kenora, Ont., who came to Fort Wayne 59 years ago to help make winter golden here, and he's the second of them to go in his season. Len Thornson, the best hockey player ever to chase a puck for the Fort Wayne Komets, passed not quite two months ago. Merv died at 81 yesterday, in February, which was only proper.

February in Fort Wayne, after all, was cold nights in a warm building with Merv or Lenny or Lionel Repka flying up and down the ice, playing a boy's winter game against the evil Dayton Gems or Port Huron Flags. It was the 1960s, and  a lot of Komets legends played in that decade, and Merv was one of them.

They called him Stubby, and he had a nuclear slapshot, and when he got it off on net whatever poor schmuck was manning the goal crease never had a chance. Sometimes he never moved until the puck had spanked the net behind him.

The red light would glare. The crowd would roar. And somewhere in all of that would come the boom.

Which would be Merv crashing into the endboards, unable to stop after his headlong flight down the wing.

Merv scored 321 goals in his seven seasons with the orange-and-black, still third alltime in franchise history, and abused heaven knows how many endboards. In the 1965-66 season, he put 72 pucks in the net. That's still the club record.

He was one of those guys who would have been in the NHL if he hadn't come up in the Original Six era, same as half the winter boys with whom he played in Fort Wayne. He's now the third of them to go in the last year, along with Lenny and Cal Purinton. The farewells keep coming.

The memories, however, remain. No full stop there, by God.

Sullied showcase

 This is shaping up to be a hell of a week for spin cycles, if you're the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League. It's their signature event -- The Super Bowl! Greatest occurrence in the entire  history of humankind occurrences! -- and the commissioner, Roger the Previous Hammer Goodell, will deliver his usual glowing speech about how AWESOME the NFL is and what TERRIFIC strides they've made in diversity and keeping women away from Daniel Snyder and such.

Somehow I doubt Brian Flores's name will come up.

Or that of Alvin Kamara, the Saints' Pro Bowl running back, caught on video with his entourage beating a man within an inch of his life in Las Vegas on Pro Bowl weekend.

Or that of Dennis Allen. which kind of goes back to Brian Flores.

Flores, see, is the black former coach of the Miami Dolphins who's filed a discrimination suit against Goodell's wondrous league and its wondrous diversity initiatives.

Allen is the Saints' white defensive coordinator, whom the Saints just promoted to head coach.

It will be Allen's second stint as a head coach. In his first, he went 8-28 in three seasons with the Raiders. This makes him another failed/mediocre white NFL head coach to get another shot this hiring cycle, along with new Raiders coach Josh McDaniel (11-17 in two seasons with the Broncos) and maybe new Jaguars coach Doug Pederson, who won a Super Bowl with the Eagles in 2017 but was canned after going 22-25-1 thereafter.

Allen's hiring means, of eight new head coaches hired so far this cycle, seven are white. Five have no previous head coaching experience. Only Lovie Smith -- the Texans' in-house hiring -- breaks the mold. And Lovie got the Bears to their only Super Bowl in the last 36 years and went 81-63 in nine seasons in Chicago -- an achievement, considering that crash site of an organization.

Meanwhile, Kamara, one of the leading lights in Goodell's NFL, has a charge of battery resulting in substantial bodily harm hanging over him now.

"Yeah, but look at all our guys in Vegas who didn't put some dude in the hospital with an orbital fracture of his right eye," one can imagine Goodell saying.

OK. So he probably won't say that.

But there'll be some symbolic throat-clearing, I'm guessing. Let the spin begin.

Shufflin' days

 We used to do it at parties, when the hour got late and silly. Someone would produce a roll of TP -- a makeshift football that was perhaps more symbolic than we cared to admit -- and we'd conduct our very own Elbert "Ickey" Woods dance contest, which of course consisted of just one step.

The Ickey Shuffle: Everyone knew how to do it, right?

That's because it was 1988 and the Bengals were on their way to the Super Bowl, and the Ickey Shuffle was all the rage. Ickey Woods was a rumbling dump truck of a running back for the Bengals that season, a joyous man with a nose for the end zone and a whimsical soul. So he'd score and then do this little soft-shoe that ended with an emphatic spike of the football.

It was great. It was fun. Everyone loved it.

Except, of course, for the NFL. To its eternal shame.

They don't call it the No Fun League for nothing, and so here came the joyless boardroom suits after Ickey. They deemed the Shuffle taunting, which it most assuredly was not, and penalized the Bengals every time Ickey did it. So he began doing it on the sidelines, safely away from the field of play.

That was 33 years ago. And the Bengals, finally, are back in the Super Bowl.

So let's start the official Ramping Up Of The Hype Week with an homage to the Ickey Shuffle.

He's still around, Ickey is, and last Sunday he was in Kansas City to present the AFC Championship trophy to this generation of Bengals. Hopefully this will mean a revival of the Ickey Shuffle all over the greater Cincinnati area this week, and maybe all of America. Because you know what would be great about that?

The NFL that hated it so back in the day might fully embrace it this time. I'm sure they're desperate for anything right now that would divert attention from Brian Flores's lawsuit and its exposing of the league's sham diversity initiatives.

Plus, the irony would be all kinds of juicy. I mean, the despised Ickey Shuffle to the rescue?

Beautiful.

To Russia with love

 So I looked up at the TV last night, and I saw USA! USA! was leading an Olympic hockey game 2-0, and then I saw who had the "0". And I thought "Hey, look! We're beating the Russians again in hockey!"

Which we were.

But it wasn't Mike Eruzione and them this time.

And it wasn't "Russia," either, at least not officially. 

This is because it was the USA! USA! women's team, which more resembles the 1980 Soviet juggernaut than the Eruziones. And the team they were beating (the Eruziones in this scenario) was  not Russia but the Russian Olympic Committee team. 

Officially, see, Russia is banned from the Games, and has been since 2017, when it was discovered that Putin and his corrupt totalitarian state were engaged in a government-sponsored doping program. So the International Olympic Committee -- a medical miracle that somehow walks upright without a spine -- said "No soup for you!"

OK, so not really.

Actually, the IOC didn't ban anyone. It simply told the Russians they couldn't display their national flag or play their national anthem at the Games. Instead, they must compete under the generic Olympic flag.

The Russians' imagined response, as they laughed behind their hands: "Oooh! That's so harsh!"

And then proceeded to march in the opening ceremonies and compete just like always.

The Blob thinks this is ridiculous. 

The Blob also admits to a certain bias against the Russians, those lying pushers-around of weaker nations and/or athletic entities.

I suppose I could see my way past this if so many of our elected representatives weren't such Russian fanboys and girls themselves.  But certain reps actually seem to admire Putin and his thug-ocracy, going so far as to take his side against the nation they allegedly serve.

First and foremost among those, of course, is the Former Guy, who spent four years taking Putin's word over that of his own intelligence community. Now Former Guy's acolytes seem to have taken up his standard.

The other day, for instance, a video popped up on Russian state TV of North Carolina representative Madison Cawthorn, an ardent Trumpist, praising the Russian military while denigrating our own. Meanwhile, Donald Trump Fredo Corleone Jr. says he thinks our intelligence community is "lying to us" about a potential Russian cyberattack

So here's the son of a former American president calling American intelligence liars. Which means by simple logic he's taking the word of  a former KGB goon on whose watch close to 30 journalists and more than a few political opponents have died under, shall we say, mysterious circumstances.

The Russians had a phrase for people like this, back in their Soviet days. They called them "useful idiots."

Putin, on the other hand, no doubt nodded approvingly when he heard about Cawthorn and Fredo.

"There's my good poodles," you can imagine him saying.

And then he waved a Russian flag while watching all those not-Russians compete not for Russia in Beijing.

What a world.

A few (very) brief thoughts on the Pro Bowl

 This is Ebb Tide Weekend on the sports calendar, aka Thank God For The Winter Olympics, aka Hey, Look, Another NBA/NHL/College Buckets Game. The Big Roman Numeral is still a week away, so a lot of stuff hasn't happened yet.

No one's done the umpteenth feature on Joe Burrows's dog, or his sunglasses, or whether he's reached out to his doppelganger, Macauley Culkin. No one's gone to Detroit to ask the people who live there how they feel about Matthew Stafford playing in the Super Bowl. And no one's delved into the fascinating backstory of the backup right tackle for the Bengals and/or Rams.

It's a dead weekend, in other words. That's why the NFL, which desperately wants to divert attention from Brian Flores's racial discrimination suit and fresh evidence that Daniel Snyder and the Washington Commanders organization are a pack of slobbering horndogs, is presenting the Pro Bowl tomorrow in Las Vegas.

The Pro Bowl! Who's up for a little sort-of football to whet your appetite for the real football?

It's the greatest spectacle in groin-pull avoidance, the Pro Bowl is, but they've been playing it for 71 years, so it does have some history. I mean, who among us of a certain age doesn't have a few cherished Pro Bowl memories? 

I know I do. 

(A brief pause while I retrieve my cherished Pro Bowl memories)

(A longer pause)

(A really, really long pause)

(The sudden realization that it's now Monday morning and I still got nothin'. Plus this year's Pro Bowl is over and I don't know who won on account of I didn't watch it.)

(But don't tell me. I recorded it.)

("You did not," you just said)

Dang. Can't put anything past you folks.

Your (mis)guide to the Games

 The opening ceremonies for the Winter Olympics happen today in Beijing, or already have happened, or won't officially happen until we see them here in the United States tonight. Time is such a confusing concept.

In any event, the Games are here, even if spectators mostly aren't allowed because of the Bastard Plague, and even though the host nation's favorite hobbies involve genocide and messing with other nations via their phones and other devices. But that's not why we're here today.

We're here today because the Blob, combining its passion for the Winter Games with its complete ignorance of the particulars, is here to make some predictions about how the competition will go. And so without further ado (or perhaps just "do," period), here is the Blob's Extremely Vague And Ill-Informed Olympics Forecast:

* Let's begin with the glamour events, shall we?

In women's figure skating, some Russian will win gold. This is because a Russian always wins the gold in this event, especially if East German judges are involved. The only time a Russian doesn't win is when Katarina Witt or Dorothy Hamill does.

Well, Katarina Witt is 56 years old now, and I don't know who Dorothy Hamill is this year on account of I never watch women's figure skating. So there you go.

On to the men's downhill!

In which a guy from one those umlaut countries will win the gold, because the Umlauts are really good at falling with style, which is pretty much what the downhill is. Umlauts will also take the silver and the bronze. 

The Americans, on the other hand, will all just fall.  And at least one guy -- a Russian, maybe, to make up for the figure skating -- will fall, crash into the snow fence and break his leg in three places.

* In Nordic skiing (or as Dan Jenkins once described it, "How a Swede goes to the Seven-Eleven"), there will be more Umlauts. The Russians on the other hand, will win the biathlon, which is Nordic skiing combined with shooting rifles -- a skill the Russians have been perfecting lately in preparation for invading Ukraine.

* In the boblsed, there'll be multiple Austrian, Swiss and German sightings. The Americans will scrounge up another former NFL running back or track-and-field standout to get the sled off to a flying start.

Then they'll crash.

* Did someone say luge and skeleton? Of course we said luge and skeleton!

No Umlauts here, by God. Luge and skeleton each will be won by an American, most likely one who's been declared clinically insane by medical professionals. We're good at producing clinically insane people these days. I mean, just look around.

* In speedskating ... oh, who cares. Eric Heiden is 63 now, so it'll just be the usual bunch of Hans Brinkers. Borrring.

Short-track speedskating, however, will involve a lot of skaters taking out rival skaters, and other NASCAR memes. Dale Earnhardt Jr. will win. 

* Ski-jumping?

More Umlauts. Also Eddie the Eagle and that Agony of Defeat guy from ABC's Wide World of Sports.

Hockey?

The Americans and Canadians will battle it out on the women's side for the 3,476th time. Mike Eruzione will again not play for the men.

Curling?

The world's most mesmerizing sport for no reason whatsoever will be won by the Canadians and Americans, but that's not why all the chauvinist-pig men will tune in. The chauvinist-pig men will tune in hoping Madeleine Dupont and the Danish women's team make another run.

Whatever happens, the traditional beer will be quaffed by the winners.

The Umlauts are buying.

Wolverine waffle

 The Blob is not one for blowing its own horn ("Right, Dizzy Gillespie," you're saying), but remember a month or so ago when it was saying, kind of, that it couldn't see Jim Harbaugh fleeing Michigan for the NFL right now because he finally had the Wolverines where he wanted them?

Well, I was right about that. And I was wrong.

Allow me to explain.

("This I gotta hear," you're saying)

See, I'm right because Harbaugh just told the Michigan brass he's staying in Ann Arbor. But he had to tell them that because he also just interviewed for the Vikings job.

So maybe it would be more accurate to say he's not leaving Ann Arbor TODAY. But his dalliance with the Vikes certainly indicates he might at some point in the future.

Oh, sure, he told UM nothing like this would ever happen again, and he's Michigan's for as long as they'll have him. But how do you believe him?

Because if you read the tea leaves of this exceedingly odd episode, it quickly becomes obvious that Harbaugh had his track shoes on and was ready to sprint off to Minneapolis. The only reason he didn't, reportedly, is because the Vikings interviewed him like they would any other potential head coach, instead of as the heir apparent.

Which Harbaugh apparently thought he was.

At some point (again, reading the tea leaves), he seems to have gotten the idea he was the Vikings' guy, and the "interview" was simply a pro forma coronation. So if I'm Michigan, I'd be taking his sudden declaration of loyalty with several large grains of salt.

After all, Harbaugh repotedly had already made several farewells before he left Ann Arbor for his interview with the Vikings. Only when he got to Minneapolis and found out they were treating him like just another candidate did he say, essentially, "Yeah, no, just kidding.  I'm not going anywhere."'

Which is kinda like trying to cheat on your wife and and then pledging eternal fidelity to her because the potential cheat-ee shut you down.

Makes me wonder what Harbaugh's players are thinking right now. 

Hey, Coach, if  you're saying now you're never gonna leave us, why did you try to leave us? Really, Coach? Is this the Big House, or the Waffle House?

Something along those lines, I imagine.

Name that team

 Somewhere today, a mean and petty corner of the Blob imagines, a commander of some description woke up, saw the news about the Washington Football Team, and flew to Twitter to complain that the Washingtons' new nickname demeaned him personally and professionally.

"Dammit!" owner Daniel Snyder would respond. "Now we gotta do this over again!"

Alas, that probably won't happen. The Washington Commanders -- unveiled today as the Washington Football Team's new nickname -- seems suitably inoffensive. Plus, Douglas MacArthur is dead, so it's not like anyone can hear any crabbing from the famously imperious general.

"A FOOTBALL TEAM??" MacArthur ranted from the Great Beyond, while Ike and Omar and Georgie Patton nodded in assent. "What the HELL??"

"Ah, calm down," replied Ulys Grant. "At least people aren't constantly talking about what a drunk you were. Man, that s*** gets old."

Yeah, um ... no. Commanders is safe. Commanders is slur-free. It's accurate -- I mean, there's a lot of Commanders in Washington, including some who only think they are -- and its logo, a simple burgundy "W", isn't going to piss anyone off, unless it's fans who are passionate about other letters.

Boring? Sure. Generic? Extremely. Impervious to criticism, except from people who think it's boring and generic?

Absolutely. But at least it doesn't exude the stink of racism -- which is kind of important for a franchise founded by a notorious racist (George Preston Marshall).

Besides, think of the mascot possibilities!

Commander Cody, General Jeremiah. Major Tom, who could burst onto the field to "Ground control to Major Tom," wearing epaulets and a chestful of medals.

And somewhere in the stands, someone will say; "Hey! He looks like Mussolini! The hell is that, Snyder?"

Sigh.

Can o' worms. Or whoop-ass.

 Brian Flores probably would be the first to say he's ill-fitted for the role of crusader.

He's a football coach. Football coaches holler a lot and wonder why their Os keep screwing up the intricate loveliness of their blackboard diagrams, and likewise their Xs. Sometimes they win and feel good for a minute. Sometimes they lose, and they're depressed for, like, years.

But Flores just opened a can of worms on the NFL and three of its teams, and possibly a can of whoop-ass at the same time. He's filed a racial discrimination suit against the Dolphins, Giants, Broncos and the NFL, a frontal assault on the Shield's self-congratulation about what a fine job it does with its racial diversity initiatives.

Hey, look, the league crows. We passed a rule that says you gotta interview at least one minority candidate when you're looking for a coach, even if most of the time it's a charade and you've already decided who you're going to hire! We talk and talk and talk about how important racial diversity is, which proves we're serious about it! And black head coaches do sometimes get hired in our league, ya know!

And then get fired before practically any white coach would be, which is why right now there's now only one black coach in the NFL, Mike Tomlin of the Steelers. Last hired, first fired: That's kinda the point Flores is making with his suit.

The Dolphins, after all, just gave him the heave-ho after three seasons in which he took them from the outhouse to ... well, not the penthouse, but nice joint with a view. The Dolphins went 10-6 and 9-8 in Flores' last two seasons, and were in the playoff hunt in 2021 until almost the last week of the season, thanks in part to a defense that Flores remade into a unit with some bite to it. 

That combined 19-14 record is the best two-year stretch the Fish have had since they went 9-7 and 10-6 in 2002 and 2003. Which is like 19 years ago if you're keeping score at home.

Nevertheless, Flores lost his job. Last hired, first fired.

Supposedly he lost his job because he was difficult to work with, which apparently is code for "Wouldn't go along with his owner's crazy schemes." In the suit, Flores alleges that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered him $100,000 for every game the Dolphins lost in 2019 so the Fish could get the No. 1 pick and draft Joe Burrow.

Flores, a man of considerably more integrity than his owner, refused. The Dolphins wound up winning five games that year, and the Bengals got Burrow instead.

But, wait, there's more!

Flores also alleges the Giants scheduled an interview with him after they'd already decided to hire Bills assistant Brian Daboll, something Flores inadvertently discovered when Bill Belichick, who had mentored both Brians in New England, got confused and sent Flores a congratulatory text meant for Daboll. 

The Broncos, meanwhile, called Flores in for an interview that was so obviously going through the motions to satisfy the Rooney Rule that then-Denver GM John Elway showed up an hour late and hungover, according to Flores.

If you were so inclined, you could dismiss all of the above as mere pettiness from a man who's just butt-hurt because he got fired. The league, and the three teams named in the suit, implied as much with their responses, which used words like "baseless" and "without merit" to describe Flores' claims, after which they dished the usual pablum about being committed to diversity and we-did-so-seriously-consider-him, and ... well, blah-blah-blah.

Of course, the suit also points out that, according to its data, black head coaches are 3.5 times more likely to be fired than white ones -- and when they're fired, they rarely get the second, third or fourth chances white coaches get. According to the NFL's own numbers, the suit contends, 116 white former head coaches or coordinators have been re-hired since 1963; in the same time frame, only 21 former black head coaches have.

This number is skewed, of course, by the fact there were no black head coaches in the modern NFL until the Raiders hired Art Shell in 1989. But still.

As for Flores ... well, if he's just doing this because he's butt-hurt, he's potentially blowing up his career for nothing. Which doesn't seem likely.

"... the need for change is bigger than my personal goals," Flores said in a statement put out by his attorneys. "In make the decision to file the class action complaint ... I understand that I may be risking coaching the game I love and that has done so much for my family and me. My sincere hope is that by standing up against the systemic racism in the NFL, others will join me to ensure that positive change is made for generations to come."

Gee. That sounds pretty crusade-ery for a football coach.

Beating winter's fury

 Apparently we're about to be socked by the Blizzard of '78's ill-tempered offspring, and like many of you the Blob is thinking, "Do I have enough Little Debbie cakes?"

No, of course that's not what you're thinking.

You're thinking, "Do I have enough bread and milk?"

No, that's just silly. If you're going to be stuck at home for a day or two, why stock up on bread and milk? Like you gorge yourself on bread and milk any other time?

I suggest stocking up on beer instead. Beer is full of nutrients, and it tastes good, too!

But enough of this. Winter is apparently coming, because it's February and February is the dial tone of months, a surly bastard whose only notable achievements are a made-up holiday (President's Day), a Geez, I Gotta Get Candy And Flowers Day (aka, Valentine's Day), and a whole lot of St. John's-Seton Hall on the tube.

(Or, Northwestern-Penn State. Same difference.)

In other words, it's a bad time to get snowed in. But the Blob is here to help.

And so, a few suggestions to ride out the storm ...

1. Dial up an NBA game from the 1980s and marvel at how dumb you sound when you say "Steph Curry wouldn't have scored a point against Bird and Magic!"

2. Dial up an NBA game from the '90s (The Decade When You Could Mug A Guy And Call It "Defense") and marvel at how dumb you sound when you say "Now that was real basketball, man!"

3. Re-watch any of the NFL playoff games from the last two weekends. Marvel at how much better it is than the Super Bowl will be.

4. Also, count how many ads there are for BetMGM or one of the three other Official Betting Partners of the NFL -- which used to be death on gambling, but now wholeheartedly embraces the culture because it's found a way to make money off it.

5. Dial up the 1992 Duke-Kentucky NCAA Regional final. You'll have hours of fun throwing stuff at the TV when that (bleeping) Laettner hits that (bleeping) shot again.

6. Then cuss at Rick Pitino for not guarding the inbounds pass. Because cussing at Pitino is never NOT fun and appropriate.

7. Dial up Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. Watch Carlton Fisk dance down the first-base line, waving the ball fair. Marvel at a time when baseball mattered -- or when the owners didn't poop where they ate by pre-emptively locking out the players.

8. Watch the Greater Velveeta Bank And Trust Open. Yeah, it's golf, and golf is boring when it's not the Masters or the Open at the Royal and Ancient Duke of Earl Golf Club. But at least you'll be reminded that, somewhere, it's green and the sun shines and ... good God, look how green it is!

9. Watch "Home Team" on Netflix, which stars Kevin James as former Saints coach Sean Payton. It's truly awful, but, you know, it's about football. Think "Mall Cop III: Hey, Look, I'm Sean Payton!"

And last but not least ...

10. Watch a National Geographic doc about Antarctica. Marvel at how many times you scoff, "Pffft. You call that SNOW?"