Tiger sighting

 Tiger Woods played 18 holes at Augusta the other day with his son Charlie and his best bud Justin Thomas, and what does this mean, America?

I have no idea. And neither does anyone else.

That's because this is Tiger Woods, whose reputation for keeping his private thoughts hermetically sealed is well-known. So I guess if it means he's planning on playing in the Masters next week, we'll just have to wait and see if he shows up.

Speculation being the irresistible human drive that it is, the Blob has some guesses.

My best one is Tiger does show up next week, and he plays the first round, and beyond that it's a lottery. He is, after all, 46 years old, and and it's an old 46. Besides the knee issues and the back issues and all the other issues, there's the small matter of his right leg, which was so severely damaged two years ago in a car crash doctors initially contemplated amputation.

How much better is it now? Hard to say.

How much better will it ever be? Even harder to say.

So if you're betting he'll show up, make the cut and be around to don his usual Sunday red, you're probably not going to cash in. My guess iin s he plays the first round, and maybe the second, and then sees where he stands. But I can't see how the leg will hold up over four grueling rounds in four days in a major.

My guess is there's a WD in his immediate future.

Of course, it is Tiger Woods. Which means no one ever got rich writing his epitaph.

Every time we do, he reminds us, like the old man in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," that he's not dead yet. And makes us all look like fools for thinking so.

And so we're right back to where we started with this.

What happens next?

No idea.

A (very) brief moment of self-indulgence

 And, yes, I know what you're saying, reading that.

"Oh, no," you're saying. "Oh, no, no, no, NO. This isn't gonna be about your stupid Pirates, is it?"

It is! Hey, what would spring be without at least one self-indulgent post about my Pittsburgh Cruds?

This one comes in the form of a question, to quote the late, great Alex Trebek:

Q: How do you know when a game is a spring training game?

A: When the Pirates beat the Red Sox 6-2.

Which, by the way, actually happened yesterday.

God. I love spring training.

Geometry, revisited

 This one goes out to Mr. Hanefeld, my high school geometry teacher, who schooled us in the proper orientation of parallelograms and isosceles triangles and the like, and also let us listen to World Series games because this was when they played them in God's own sunshine, as God himself intended.

(The year this happened was 1970. Mr. Hanefeld was a huge Reds fan. Unfortunately for him, God liked the Baltimore Orioles better that year.)

Anyway ... we're gonna talk geometry here, and why all the gooey baseball poets were wrong about the Splendidness and Perfection of the game's Pastoral Parameters.

Apparently they're not so Splendid and Perfect. 

All these decades upon decades, and now we find out second base is not where it should be. It's misplaced by a foot or so, which messes up the coordinates. The first and third baselines line up with the outside of first and third base; the imaginary line connecting first to second and second to third goes right through the middle of second base.

Who knew? Not me. Although maybe this explains why Ty Cobb was such a prickly asshat; perhaps he somehow sensed something wasn't kosher.

In any event, baseball has decided, after a mere 150 years or so, to do something about it. The minor leagues being MLB's laboratory for experimental work, this year in the minors they'll move second a foot closer to home to bring it into proper alignment, and see if a foot adds up to more steals and more plays that don't involve either home runs or strikeouts.

For the same reason, they're also making the bases slightly larger. They won't be the size of Delaware or anything -- this is baseball, so they won't be radical about it -- but they will be bigger than, say, the wadded-up jackets we used to employ as bases when we were kids.

In any event, geometry is satisfied at last, and hooray for that. I'm sure Mr. Hanefeld will be pleased, if he's not still wondering why the hell Boog Powell keeps hitting home runs and Brooks Robinson keeps vacuuming up grounders.

One mad act

 Of course the Blob will address this, even though it's only peripherally about sports. Everyone in America is talking about it, after all, and the Blob is nothing if not a slave to fashion.

We're talking about the Slap Heard 'Round The World, naturally. Will Smith channels Ali again -- but only half-so, because had he gone the full Ali, the credits would have read "co-starring Chris Rock as 'Joe Frazier in Manila.'" 

The tweets/memes/headlines immediately followed, as day follows night.

"Will Smith got into a fight and won an Oscar. He's an assist away from a Gordie Howe hat trick"* someone with the Twitter handle @jeffisrael25 tweeted.

(* A goal, an assist and a fight, for the uninitiated)

"Can we talk about how the guy who played Muhammad Ali should have had a better punch?" tweeted my friend and former colleague @SportsiCohn.

"Best Smacktor" read the headline in the always reliable New York Post.

The Blob, meantime, weighed in by guessing Will Smith would have to move back to West Philadelphia now, referencing the "I got in one little fight" line from "The Fresh Prince of Belair."

Yes, we all played it for laughs. But the reality wasn't funny in the slightest. Watching a man blow up his career by losing his mind in front of a worldwide audience never is.

That's a tad melodramatic, admittedly. It's doubtful the Slap Heard 'Round The World means Smith will never get another gig; he's too gifted an actor for that (See: "Ali," "The Pursuit of Happyness," and, yes, "King Richard.") But moviegoers will never see him onscreen again without seeing him through the prism of his One Shiner Moment. It will follow him the rest of his career -- just as Mel Gibson has never fully escaped his public persona as The Nutty Anti-Semite.

Yes, Mel still makes movies. Yes, some of them are still quite successful. But who can go to a Gibson flick now without thinking "Yep, there's ol' Crazytown again"?

Simply put, a moment of immaturity will cost Smith, in ways obvious and not-so. He's a 53-year-old grown-ass man, not some punk kid. Yet that was some unfiltered punk-kid stuff last night, simultaneously shaming both himself and his family and hugely disrespecting a fellow performer of some accomplishment.

To Chris Rock's credit, his ability to keep it together after that and not break character showed an admirable amount of, well, character. Unlike his attacker, who showed none.

In any event, the Rehabiliation Tour now begins, and how it goes will be how it goes. But at least one thing's for sure.

Smith's PR people are about to earn their pay. And then some.

Chalk wins again

 So, after all that, we're left with royalty.

Duke.

North Carolina.

Kansas.

Villanova.

Your Final Four, America.

Doesn't get much more old-money aristocratic than that, which is amazing considered all the craziness that preceded it. But the leisure class prevailed in the end, as usually happens in March. Just call this the First-Class Passenger List Final Four, no steerage interlopers allowed.

Consider: Among the four survivors, there are a combined 17 national titles and 61 Final Four appearances, led by Carolina with six and 21, respectively. Kansas traces its family tree back to James Naismith himself. Carolina has Frank McGuire and Dean Smith and Roy Williams, and now Hubert Davis. Villanova won a national title with Rollie Massimino and two more with Jay Wright, perhaps the best college basketball coach now working. And Duke, of course, has Coach K, and also Vic Bubas back in the '60.

Those are some platelet-rich bloodlines right there. And who can possibly wait for K's valedictory clash with Carolina, and Kansas taking on Wright's impeccably schooled Wildcats?

It's gonna be some fun, boys and girls. And the Blob's pick, which is almost always wrong?

Put your dough on the Jayhawks.

The Deshaun Show

I missed the Deshaun Watson unveiling in Cleveland the other day, which is just as well. I've seen enough stagecraft and farce in my time.

Later I watched some video of it, and it was exactly the duck-and-coverfest witnesses described. There stood Deshaun, looking all respectable in a conservative suit and orange tie. There stood Cleveland GM Andrew Berry and head coach Kevin Stefanski on either side of him, listening as Deshaun said over and over that he never-ever-ever has assaulted any woman in his entire life.

He said it once. He said it again when asked if that meant he thinks the 22 massage therapists who've filed civil suits for sexual misconduct are all lying. He said it again when asked why he's employed 40 different massage therapists over the years.

It was his fallback non-answer answer position, along with the lawyer-ly riff that he couldn't say more because the investigation surrounding the civil suits was ongoing. The Suit channeling the suits, in other words.

Meantime, Berry deployed his own fallback Non-Answer Answer position, saying over and over that the Browns had conducted a thorough five-month investigation into L'Affaire Watson -- even when asked, if that investigation was truly thorough, had they contacted any of the 22 plaintiffs or their legal representatives?

They didn't, of course. Which is why Berry kept non-answering the question. 

All of it confirmed what we already knew, which is that the Browns (and plenty of others) were willing to leave lots of troublesome stones unturned if it meant signing Watson. He is, after all, really good at playing quarterback.

 That's why the Browns paid $230 million over five years to get him, all of it guaranteed. And that's why it was just a coincidence (cough-cough) that they structured the deal so Watson won't get hurt monetarily if the NFL's own investigation results in him missing some games.

And the 22 women bringing suit against Watson? 

"(I have) empathy for anyone who's a victim of sexual abuse," Stefanski said during The Deshaun Show, with all appropriate piety and no apparent irony. 

Wonder what those 22 women thought when they heard that.

Or what they threw at their TVs.

Storybook vs. storybook

 So now the network suits have half their storybook finale. The other half will likely happen today, which will blow up a whole other storybook.

Thus does the Madness become Literature Wars, with Mike Krzyzewski's last ride taking him to his 13th, and final, Final Four, and ancient rival North Carolina waiting in the wings to punch its ticket. Unfortunately the Tar Heels will have to ruin Storybook 2 to do it.

That would be St. Peter's, the Little Peacock That Could, who will try to take down yet another blueblood in the Elite Eight today. The tiny New Jersey school (undergrad enrollment: 2,124) has already sidelined Kentucky and Purdue, the winningest school in Big Ten history. Now it gets Carolina and the whole House of Dean Smith line of royal succession.

Logic says Carolina, currently playing perhaps the best basketball in the tournament, will dispatch the Peacocks with, um, dispatch. But logic  has had little or nothing to do with Da Tournament so far, so why start now?

Of course, Coach K and Duke have already ruined one storybook storyline, In beating Arkansas by nine yesterday, the Blue Devils deprived Razorback assistant Keith Smart a return to the Superdome in New Orleans, scene of his now-legendary Shot.

Indiana fans can still diagram the Shot down to Smart's drift-to-the-baseline-and-pop, because of course they can. It gave Bob Knight his third and last national title, after all.

How much good juju would the Hogs have gotten from that mystic chord of memory? And how many column inches of  Final Four copy would it have generated?

Instead, they'll write even more about Coach K's last ride, which surely has been written about enough already. K's entire hagiography will be hauled out once more for inspection. Every other coach in the Final Four will be asked to offer up a Coach K testimonial. By Saturday, we'll be praying for the Blue Devils' semifinal opponent to end it.

Which, if logic and the chalk finally prevails, will be North Carolina. And that, of course, will be storybook on steroids.

It doesn't get much more perfect than K having to beat the Tar Heels one last time to get to one last national title game -- especially after the Heels humiliated his Blue Devils not a month ago, ruining K's auld lang syne moment in Cameron Indoor. It would be incontrovertible evidence that Naismith or one of the lesser basketball gods is pulling the strings here, which raises a question: Is god interference an NCAA violation? 

Surely the rulebook must say something about it, 800-pound gorilla that it is.

And Literature Wars?

Gotta be a Level 2 infraction. Gotta be.

Pur-didn't

The shock this morning is not that little ol' St. Peter's did it AGAIN, or that Purdue March-barfed all over itself AGAIN, or that this is the maddest Madness ever, and therefore the most wonderful Madness ever.

No, sirree. The shock is that there's actually a National Peacock Day, and how did we all miss that? 

Maybe the betting lines change if more of us knew Purdue was playing the St. Peter's Peacocks on National Peacock Day. This was surely the bad omen of all omens for the Purdues. Another is that the Peacocks have some damn fine guards.

Damn fine guards win for you in March, and so on St. Peter's goes to the Elite Eight, the first 15-seed ever to do so. And back to West Lafayette go the Boilermakers with a basketball team that played its worst basketball at the worst possible time.

Certainly St. Peter's backcourt pressure had something to do with that, harassing Purdue into 15 turnovers and its presumptive NBA star, Jaden Ivey, into an ugly 4-of-12, nine-point, six-turnover night. But Purdue was a willing helpmate, too, going 5-of-21 (23.8 percent) from the 3-point arc and 23-of-54 overall.

With the exception of Trevion Williams, who led Purdue with 16 points and eight rebounds, the Boilermakers failed to exploit their glaring size advantage. Zach Edey was a 7-foot-4 lamppost, scoring 11 points, taking just two rebounds and turning it over five times. The 17 minutes he played would have been better served going to Williams, who played little more than half the game.

I don't know if this was Purdue's worst tournament loss ever, because that covers a lot of waterfront. But it's in the front row of the team picture. And what makes that so is because so much was expected of this team, and it produced so little in return.

(Which is why it's hard for me to buy that this is the "best team in school history." That, too, covers a lot of waterfront. Better than the Glenn Robinson-Cuonzo Martin team that went to the Elite Eight? Better then the Triplets of the 1980s? Better than the Final Four team in 1980, or the 1969 Final Four team, with Rick Mount and Herm Gilliam and Billy Keller.?)

A team some smart guys seriously considered a potential Final Four team ended up not winning much of anything. It didn't win the Big Ten regular season title. It didn't win the Big Ten Tournament. And it crashed and burned against a 15-seed in the Sweet Sixteen, two long steps from the Final Four.

The Blob never saw these Boilers as a Final Four team, but it takes no bows for that (nor wants to, having grown up in a Purdue household). What it saw was an extremely talented, well-coached team that nonetheless had an odd tendency to barely beat teams it should have been blowing out. That didn't bode well for March, in my opinion.

Smarter people probably could tell you why that was, or why I'm full of a smelly substance. All I know is, Purdue's season ended with another thud, and this one was all the louder for the expectations that attended that season.

But all is not lost. At least we know when National Peacock Day is now.

The Big Crazy, Vol. II

 ... in which there is MORE GLORIOUS MADNESS!! In which the improbable storybook finish REMAINS ALIVE!! Also THE ASTOUNDING DISAPPEARING NO. 1 SEEDS!!

 Sorry for the carnival barker act. But doesn't this March of Madness continue to Thrill and Amaze?

The tournament resumed last night with half the Sweet Sixteen games, and in half of those two more No. 1 seeds went down, including the overall No. 1 Gonzaga. Arkansas, the lone SEC team left, took them out 74-68. so goodbye Drew Timme and Drew Timme's 'stache, and goodbye to the Splendid Splinter, Chet Holmgren.

And Arizona?

A lot of wise guys were picking the Wildcats to be national champs, but, nah. Five-seed Houston kicked them to the curb with surprising ease, 72-60, and now the Cougars are on to the Elite Eight, which will doubtless provoke a lot of Kelvin Sampson stories that will conveniently ignore the fact he once got kicked out of college coaching because of his unrepentant cheating.

I don't know if Sampson is still an unrepentant cheat, or if he's just gotten slicker about it with experience. Or perhaps the new frontier of NIL made a lot of formerly illegal shenanigans legal.

In any case, now the Coogs face Duke, which survived and advanced (again!) against Texas Tech. The Dukies have had to scrape and claw in two straight games now, and if that's a testament to how much they want to send Coach K out with one last national title, it may also suggest that sooner or later scraping and clawing won't be enough.

I'm guessing the network suits are praying to all the basketball gods that doesn't happen. A storybook finish after all this lovely chaos? Yes, please!

Meanwhile, America's darlings, those pesky St. Peter's Peacocks, play Purdue tonight. The consensus is, there's absolutely no way they'll be able to pull of three miracles in a row.

The Big Crazy just laughs.

Quittin' time

 I know you don't understand. I'm not sure I do, either, and I spent 38 years of my life writing about athletes and all things athletic.

Retiring at 25, as the No. 1 player in your game?

That's what women's tennis star Ash Barty of Australia just did, and the usual aspersions are being cast by the usual suspects. The fact she just ascended to her No. 1 ranking means she's afraid of defending her position against all comers, some folks say. Why else would you abruptly retire from the sport at 25?

It's a good question, even if it springs from a troll-y place. Most of us can't imagine deciding, at 25, that we're going to quit what we've worked and trained and dreamed of doing just when we've achieved that dream. It simply doesn't compute.

However ...

However, an athlete at the top of his or her game surrenders much to get there, and even more to stay there. At some point, you have to think, the old philosophical question -- "Is this all there is?" -- must surely arise.

For some it's just a fleeting whisper, there one second and gone the next. For others it's a whisper that eventually grows into a shout, and there's no timetable for it.

It happens at 30 or 35 or even 40. And sometimes it happens at 25.

Barty professes to be "scared and excited" about stepping away from the game, and the suspicion is, because she's doing at such a young age and with such a wealth of un-eroded talent, that at some point she'll pick up the racquet again. This happens all the time in other sports, particularly physically punishing sports such as football.

Tennis carries with it its own physical and mental toll, and it is its own sort of grind. Little wonder that Andre Agassi always professed to hate the game, even as he played on and on and the game made him rich. You don't get that sense from Barty -- but you do get the sense that tennis simply doesn't satisfy her anymore.

And retiring from the game at 25 is shocking only because playing well into one's 30s is a relatively recent phenomenon in the women's game. Steffi Graf retired at 30 when she was still the No. 3 player in the world. Martina Hingis quit the game at 22, returning a decade later to play doubles only. Monica Seles played her last professional match at 30. And Evonne Goolagong, the great Australian star of the 1970s, retired at 31.

Ash Barty retiring at 25?

It's what you do when you discover there's more to life than two-fisted backhands and crosscourt groundies. And what's wrong with that?

Goin' to the Matt

 They got him for a song, which might tell you something. And, no, not that Indianapolis Colts GM Chris Ballard is a slick horse trader, though he probably is or at least can be on occasion.

On this occasion, he pried Matt Ryan away from the Atlanta Falcons for a third-round draft pick. Presumably a couple of boxtops were also involved, but perhaps that's giving the Falcons more credit than they deserve.

In any event, here's what the Colts got for that draft pick: An about-to-turn-37-year-old quarterback who's a four-time Pro Bowler and who's thrown 367 touchdown passes and almost 60,000 yards in his career. And who took the Falcons to the Super Bowl in 2016, when he threw 38 touchdowns and just shy of 5,000 yards, completed 69.9 percent of his passes and was the league MVP.

It's been a slow decline since, but Ryan still threw 20 touchdown passes last season and completed 67.1 percent of his passes. Those are the highlights of a season that was almost identical to that of Carson Wentz, whom the Colts could not get rid of fast enough.

Still, all objective analysis says he's better than Wentz -- a key factor in the Colts list of  Ryan's plusses which apparently reads like this:

1. He's better than Carson Wentz.

2. He's better than Carson Wentz.

3. He's better than ... oh, you know.

I'm being facetious here, of course, and doubtless Ryan will be better than Wentz -- especially as a leader in the locker room, which Wentz apparently was not. But a good deal of Ryan's subpar-for-him season last year was because he was without elite go-to receiver Calvin Ridley for much of the year after Ridley left the team for mental health reasons.

In Indianapolis, he will have no Calvin Ridley. That's because the Colts are fresh out of elite wide receivers.

This is the sticking point here, because a quarterback is only as good as his receivers -- even a quarterback with Ryan's pedigree. It means the Colts have only two-thirds of their offensive puzzle in place; they've got an elite running back (Jonathan Taylor) and Better Than Carson Wentz, but they still need a standout wideout. Ryan's effectiveness may ultimately hinge on whether or not the Colts can acquire or draft one.

In the meantime, cautious optimism seems the way to go here. As always with the Horsies. 

The Big Tin

 We fall for this every year, of course. We're Charlie Brown; the Big Ten is Lucy with the football.

The Big Ten is the toughest league in the country! Hell, they might put FIVE teams in the Final Four!

The ACC, wow, you can smell it all the way up here. The Big Ten is better IN EVERY WAY!

The Big 12? Fuggedaboutit. The Pac-12? Do they even PLAY basketball anymore?

Every year. Every ... freakin' ... year.

And then we wake up the morning after the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, and, damn, where did the Big Ten go? Nine teams made the field; only two are left. And one of the two is an 11-seed a lot of wise guys had getting knocked out in the first round.

Purdue and Michigan: That's what's left of the mighty Big Tin, er, Ten, going into the Sweet Sixteen.

The ACC?

Um, North Carolina's still around. Duke's still around. Miami's still around after kicking 2-seed Auburn and its oily coach Bruce Pearl to the curb by 18. 

The Big-12?

Hey, look, it's Kansas again! Also Iowa State. Also Texas Tech.

And the Pac-12?

Yep, Arizona's still alive. So is UCLA.

It's a hell of thing, this particular Sweet Sixteen. In addition to the Big Ten not having eleventy-hundred teams in the Sweet Eleventy-Hundred, there's an 8-seed (Carolina), a 10-seed (Miami), two 11-seeds (Michigan and Iowa State) and, of course, 15-seed St. Peter's. That's a lot of double digits still showing their faces at this point.

As for the Big Tin, er, Ten ...

Well, let's review.

Indiana lost by 28 to St. Mary's, which in turn lost by 16 to UCLA.

Illinois lost by 15 to Houston. 

Iowa State shocked Wisconsin by five, Duke eliminated Michigan State by nine, Villanova booted Ohio State by 10, Iowa lost by four to Richmond in a 12-over-5 upset, and Rutgers didn't even get out of the play-in round, losing to underseeded Notre Dame.

Nine in; seven out.

Every year. Every freakin' year.

Totally foreseeable Madness

 You knew it was going to be like this. Right?

In a season when half of America was ranked No. 1 at one time or another, you knew the Madness would be particularly, deliciously Mad come March. When there are no favorites, everyone's a favorite. Even the Blob said that -- and the last time the Blob said anything that made sense, it was "Ya know, that Putin guy is kind of a jerk. Prolly shouldn't trust him."

In any event, half the Sweet Sixteen is set now, and half of those have already ruined your bracket. Let's review, shall we?

You've got an 8-seed (North Carolina) that booted 1-seed and defending national champion Baylor, but not before blowing a 25-point lead with 11 minutes to play.

You've got an 11-seed (Michigan) even some diehard Big Ten fans thought would be gone in its first game, but which instead handled by double digits a 3-seed a lot of folks thought was underseeded (Tennessee).

(A brief aside: And how redemptive was that sweet moment in the handshake line, the source of Michigan coach Juwan Howard's infamy? When he hugged that sobbing Tennessee kid -- who'd played on a club team with Howard's son -- this year's One Shining Moment montage had an early entry. Bank it.)

Moving on ...

You've got three 4-seeds -- among them Providence, whom a lot of wise guys thought was such a lightweight 13-seed South Dakota State was a lock to take it out the first round.

Oh, yeah. And you've got 15-seed St. Peter's, America's darling, which did it again Saturday, this time ousting 7-seed Murray State to reach the Sweet Sixteen.

This makes the Peacocks only the third 15-seed to reach the Sweet Sixteen in 37 years. They represent a teeny-tiny school in New Jersey with an undergraduate enrollment of 2,134. This makes St. Peter's two-and-a-half times smaller than Carmel High School, which has an enrollment of 5,400.

But the Peacocks are in, and overall No. 1 seed Gonzaga is in after barely scraping past 9-seed Memphis, and so it goes, and so it goes. Today another woefully underseeded team -- 11-seed Notre Dame, which inexplicably was assigned a play-in game after tying for second in the ACC -- takes on 3-seed Texas Tech after destroying 6-seed Alabama in the first round.

More possible Madness. See also: 7-seed Ohio State vs. 2-seed Villanova, 7-seed Michigan State vs. 2-seed Duke, 11-seed Iowa State vs. 3-seed Wisconsin.

Let the lovely mayhem continue.

The Browns, being the Browns

 I don't know what the good Lord has against Paul Brown. I truly don't.

Maybe Paul declined to doff his signature fedora at the pearly gates, thinking it was beneath his station.

 Maybe God thought he was Paul Brown, and was bummed when the genuine article showed up.

Something, anyway, must explain why the football team Brown founded, the Cleveland Browns, have such a talent for tripping over their own feet there's even a name for it now -- i.e., the Browns, eternally Brownsing it up.

Which brings us to their latest whatever-this-is.

It's not so much that the Browns decided to give a man facing 22 civil suits for sexual assault $230 million for the next five years. Lots of other folks were lining up to give Deshaun Watson that sort of mad money, too. This is because Deshaun Watson, in addition to allegedly being good at fondling massage therapists, is a damn good quarterback -- maybe good enough to get a team to the Super Bowl.

In the NFL, that supersedes everything, despite all the league's fancy words about how much they respect women and blah-blah-blah. Then, in mid-declaration, a Deshaun Watson becomes available, and suddenly it's "We stand by women who've been assaul- Ooh, look! A quarterback!"

Signing that quarterback isn't what makes the Browns, the Browns, in other words. It's what led up to it.

See, the Browns were all in on Watson and ready to deal their incumbent quarterback, Baker Mayfield, who was fine with that. Then Watson suddenly cooled on Cleveland, and the Browns said, "Nah, sorry, Baker, we're keeping you here." 

After which Watson changed his mind, for the aforementioned 230 million reasons. And the Browns changed their minds, again, vis-a-vis Mayfield.

If you're having trouble keeping all of that straight, here's the basic transcript:

BROWNS: "Baker, we don't want you anymore, 'cause we're getting someone better. So we're gonna trade you."

MAYFIELD: "OK."

BROWNS: "Wait, what? We're not getting someone better?"

(Long pause)

BROWNS: "Baker, it turns out we're NOT gonna trade you after all."

MAYFIELD (no doubt rolling his eyes): "Whatever."

BROWNS: "Wait, now we are getting someone better? Baker, it looks like we're gonna trade you after all."

MAYFIELD: "The hell?? What kind of circus are you people running here?"

A rhetorical question, no doubt, because Mayfield already knows what kind of circus they're running.

A very Browns circus.

A-craterin' we will go ...

 Well, now. Didn't see THAT coming.

"You mean St. Peter's knocking out Kentucky in overtime, Mr. Blob, thereby throwing a fragmentation grenade into a million NCAA brackets?" you ask.

Yes.

"You mean Indiana hitting the wall in a head-on accordion job against St. Mary's, losing by 29 in a game a lot of people -- including you, Mr. Blob -- had as a 12-over-5 upset?" you ask.

Also yes.

"You mean Iowa losing to Richmond in an actual 12-over-5 upset? Which, by the way, destroyed poor Dick Vitale's bracket, because he had Kentucky playing Iowa in his championship game?"

Again, yes.

All of the above, which is why the first two days of the NCAA Tournament are always the best part of it. If it's not a couple 4-seeds (Arkansas and UCLA) surviving by the skin of their teeth against a couple of 13-seeds (Vermont and Akron), it's a 15-seed (St. Peter's) plunging one of America's most rabid fan bases (2-seed Kentucky) into mass depression. Or it's Richmond beating Iowa, or  Indiana abruptly running out of gas in a game a lot of smart guys saw as the biggest potential 12-over-5 upset of the day.

Ye gods, St. Mary's had the Hoosiers down by 34 at a couple of points in the second half. It was a 28-26 game with just under six minutes left in the first half, and then it wasn't. Indiana scored seven points across the next 17-plus minutes, St. Mary's scored 39, and suddenly it was a 67-33 butt-kicking and the Hoosiers' season was gone.

Now, I don't know if playing five games in eight days had anything to do with Indiana so abruptly and spectacularly slamming the wall. I don't know if beating Wyoming in Dayton late Tuesday night, not getting into Portland, Ore., until 7 o'clock Wednesday morning and then playing a very good west coast team on the west coast 36 hours later translated into the Hoosiers shooting 34 percent and once again going Brick City from the 3-point line, where they missed eight of their 10 attempts.

It is, as they say, a theory, and a pretty reasonable one. But it's also something of a cop-out. These are premier athletes in the prime of their youth, with the astounding recuperative powers that come with that. Thirty-six hours should have been enough to reset the internal clocks. You would think.

Clearly, however, that wasn't the case. And when you add in the St. Peter's shocker, and the date, the lesson is obvious: Never play a Saint team on St. Patrick's Day. It's bad karma.

Also, never expect your bracket to escape the first two days of the tournament un-cratered. Never, ever, ever.

Your official NCAA Underdog Watch

 The official NCAA Tournament begins today, no matter what the NCAA wants us to think, and you know what that means, Blobophiles. 

No! Not playing hooky from work to drink beer and watch buckets! Who said THAT?

(Although that will happen, too.)

No, sir. It's time for the Blob to tell you about some of the cool underdog teams in the field, even if most of them will only be around for a day or two.

Ready? Here we go:

* Yale

Yale! The Elis, and also the Bulldogs! Boola-boola! 

Beat Princeton and the Harvards and all those other snooty folks, and they're actual students who actually read books and stuff. How do you not root for that?

* Vermont

The Blob loves him some Catamounts, because who else in America is named the "Catamounts"? No one, that's who. Plus they won their conference championship game by 40 points (OK, so 39), so they're no one to trifle with.

True, they'll probably get smoked by Arkansas in the first round, but then again, maybe not. They've pulled off big upsets before (Syracuse, 2005), so why not again?

* Longwood

Who the hell is Longwood? Where the hell is Longwood?

No one knows, but that's OK, because that's why the Blob is here. Longwood is in Farmville, Va., and it's the Big South champion. Its nickname is the Lancers, and the Lancers are 26-6 and have three guards who average double figures and make a lot of threes. And we all know how important guards are in the NCAA Tournament, especially if they make a lot of threes.

Sure, that probably won't matter against Tennessee, your SEC champion. But then again, it might. Mark this one down as a potential first-round stunner.

* Colgate

What's cool about Colgate, other than the fact people like to make toothpaste jokes about it, is it was founded in 1819, which is a long time ago, and located in Hamilton, N.Y., which is a teeny-tiny village of 4,239 souls. Also, among its alumni are Adam Clayton Powell, Charles Evans Hughes and Andy Rooney.

Andy Rooney! You gotta root for the Colgates now.

Also, this is the third straight year they've made Da Tournament, and they score a bunch of points, and the gurus say teams that score a bunch of points tend to be the teams that pull stunner upsets. So, beware, Wisconsin.

* Delaware

Delaware is located in Delaware (Newark), and its official nickname is the Fightin' Blue Hens, which is awesome as hell. First of all, the Blob loves any team with "Fightin'" in its nickname. Second of all, it makes the Blob wish Coastal Carolina was in the field this year, because its mascot is a rooster (Chauncey the Chanticleer), and who wouldn't want to see a throwdown between a rooster and a Blue Hen?

Also, Delaware is in Da Tournament for the sixth time, the first since 2014, It's never won, and it probably won't win this time against Villanova, but the Fightin' Blue Hens won the Colonial title as a 5 seed, and the last time they played 'Nova, they only lost by eight.

Of course, that was three years ago. And the Fightin's are 0-15 lifetime vs. Villanova. But root for 'em anyway!

* St. Peter's

No list like this would be complete without St. Peter's, because, hey, they're the Peacocks! How do you not love a team called the Peacocks?

They won the Metro Atlantic Conference, these Peacocks, and they're from Jersey City, N.J., and they've been up and down all year, which accounts for their 19-11 record. But their best player is named KC Ndefo, which is fun to say, and when they play Kentucky in the first round, KC Ndefo will be squaring off against UK star Oscar Tshiebwe. 

Ndefo vs. Tshiebwe! Let's hear the broadcast team say that five times really fast.

Road trippin'

The NCAA loves to gussy up yesterday and today as the First Four, but it can't sell those groceries. No matter how often they say "First Four," to the general public they're the Play-In Games, on account of that's what they are.

I say this not to ding the NCAA. I say it mainly because the NCAA itself treats them that way.

Consider: Last night Indiana beat Wyoming by eight in its play-in game, as Trayce Jackson-Davis (29 points) continued to play as if Mike Woodson were holding his parents hostage. That was a 9:10 p.m. start.

The Hoosiers' reward from the NCAA was to hop on a plane, fly west across three time zones to Portland, Ore., and play 5-seed St. Mary's less than 48 hours later.

This means the Hoosiers will be taking on a team that beat overall top seed Gonzaga this season, AND their own internal clocks. And, yes, I know, they're young athletes with the resiliency of young athletes, so this likely won't be as much of an issue as the Blob is making it. 

And ... yet. It seems a huge additional disadvantage for Indiana, already the underdog as a 12-seed. Now they get a west coast team on the west coast that's not only a higher seed, but that has been resting while Indiana played an extra game.

So what happens?

Well, somehow, I still think the Hoosiers pull the traditional 12-over-5 upset. Not because they'll suddenly start making open threes, because they won't, but because they're playing the kind of defense right now that covers that sin and a multitude of others, even as it uglies up the game.

 Also, TJD.

"So what you're saying, Mr. Blob, is being a Play-In team won't hurt them after all," you're saying.

Hey! That's "First Four team" to you, buddy. Show some damn respect.

O unlucky man

 Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, which in Blob World means an annual viewing of  "The Quiet Man" whilst we partake of a Guinness and a bit of the Jameson's. It also brings an onslaught of dumb Irish stereotypes about the wearin' o' the green and kissing the Blarney stone and -- of course -- the luck o' the Irish.

(Which does not really seem to be a good thing, given Ireland's fraught history)

("Wait, you used 'whilst' in a sentence? And 'fraught'? Have you been into the Jameson's already?" you're saying)

Anyway ... the whole luck o' the Irish thing got turned on its head over the weekend, and if you pay any attention at all to social media these days you no doubt know what I'm talking about: Tom Brady's un-retirement, and the consequences for one individual in particular.

Last Saturday, this individual paid half a million dollars for the football Tom Brady threw for his last touchdown pass.

On Sunday, Brady announced he was un-retiring (if in fact he was ever actually retired).

Which means the Last Touchdown Football is now ... well, just a football again. 

Now, I suppose that ball is still worth something as a curiosity. But it's no longer worth half a mill or anything approaching it. So you'd have to say the buyer -- who remains anonymous, and who may or may not be Irish -- has proved once again that the luck o' the Irish is so much, well, blarney.

I think if Tom Brady were a decent sort, he'd track down this unfortunate soul and reimburse him for his half-a-mill. I mean, hell, he and Gisele probably use half-a-mill for beer coasters, so it's not like Brady would miss it.

This would also likely keep the unfortunate soul from plunging a butcher knife into the now-worthless football while screaming "(Bleep) you, Brady!"

A deflated football!

I bet Brady would pay a lot for that.

Fans are idiots, Part 5,627

 I don't know what they put in the water out there in Indian Wells, Calif., but I know I don't want any. My brain cells are dying fast enough as it is.

I say this because the other day former No. 1 women's tennis star Naomi Osaka, who continues to battle her inner demons and should be cheered for doing so, was heckled instead. Some amoeba in the stands shouted "You suck, Naomi!" during the very first game of her match against Veronika Kudermetova in the BNP Paribas Open, and Osaka went on to lose 6-0, 6-4.

Afterward, fighting tears, she addressed the crowd. She thanked the bulk of them for their support, and said the only reason the heckler got to her was because it called up memories of a famous incident at Indian Wells years ago.

What happened was, the entire crowd booed Serena Williams viciously. This was 22 years ago, in 2001. Which suggests that whatever idiot juice is in the water has been there awhile.

Wonderful folks, those Indian Wells-ers. I bet they have a big ol' time at their annual Pulling Wings Off Flies Festival every year.

Seriously, now. Who boos Serena Williams, the greatest women's player in history? And what kind of freakazoid thinks it's cute to heckle Naomi Osaka, whose struggles with mental health issues have been all over the news? What sort of thought process leads to such a decision?

Hey, watch this. I bet I can make Naomi cry, the little weakling.

I'm guessing that's pretty close to the mark.

What kind of human being thinks like that? And does he (or she, in this case) actually qualify as a human being?

That might be a bit harsh, too, I realize. But sometimes the Blob veers into the unfairness lane when someone does something this massively awful. And it'll be awhile if you're waiting for me to apologize for it.

Thing is, I've been studying fan behavior for 40 years now -- it's unavoidable when you do the sportswriter thing -- and I'm continually amazed at the next-level stupidity of some of it. How warped do parents have to be to heap abuse on some poor 13-year-old umpire who's just called a third strike on their little Johnny? Or, worse, to physically attack that ump?

I realize that's an extreme example, and that most fans are not degenerate asshats. But it's the degenerate asshats who poison the well. No one's going to hear about the fans who behave like normal human beings, because behaving like a normal human being is the least we should expect in a civilized society. 

Unfortunately ...

Well. Unfortunately, there's always whoever that woman was at Indian Wells. And, while we're at it, the tournament officials who didn't immediately track her down and drag her off the premises.

But, like I said: Indian Wells.

Something in the water, clearly.

The retirement shuffle

 I think I know what the last six weeks have been like, for Tom Brady. I have an imagination that won't keep quiet, after all. And so, with Brady announcing he'd decided to keep playing after all, the Blob offers for your consideration "Tom Brady: Scenes From A Retirement" ...

(Morning. Sometime in February. Tom Brady sits in his man-cave, absently looking out the window)

TOM: "Gisele! When's lunch?"

GISELE: "You just ate breakfast!"

TOM: "I did?"

GISELE: "Yes! Like ten minutes ago!"

TOM: "Oh. Well, what do I do now?"

GISELE (exasperated): "I don't know, Tom! Go work out! Go to the health-food store for more hydrogenated kale and flaxseed extract! Play with the kids! Isn't that why you said you were retiring, to spend more time with your family?"

TOM: "Eh, I'm tired of playing with the kids. It's so BORING."

GISELE (now really exasperated): "What? You've only been retired for a DAY! How can you be tired of us already?"

TOM: "I don't know. It's just weird, not having football to look forward to. I'm 44 years old, and I've never done anything else. And I don't need to now, because look at all this money we have. We couldn't spent it in six lifetimes!"

GISELE: "So un-retire. Go play football again. You know you want to."

(A deep sigh from Tom)

TOM: "Gisele, I can't do that! I've been retired for, like, 12 seconds. I'll look like a total flake! Hell, I'll be Gronk -- or even worse, Brett Favre!"

GISELE: "Maybe. But does Brett Favre have seven rings? And it's not as if you'd be un-retiring to play for the Jets, for God's sake."

(A long pause as Brady thinks it over)

TOM: "Well ... that's true ..."

(A month later. Brady officially announces he'll be returning to the Buccaneers for his 23rd NFL season. Says he has "unfinished business.")

REPORTER: "What unfinished business would that be, Tom?"

TOM (rolling his eyes): "What do ya think? Lunch!"

Your bad bracket takes for today

 OK, first off, on the morning after Selection Sunday: You're gonna hate the Blob if you're a Purdue fan.

You're gonna think I threw a rock through the World's Largest Drum.

You're gonna think I swiped Purdue Pete's hammer and caved in his giant papier mache head.

You're gonna think I despise black and gold, and Jack Mollenkopf, and Leroy Keyes. Also Gene Keady, Rick Mount, Joe Barry Carroll and every single member of the John Purdue Club.

All of that, because I've seen the bracket. And I've seen Purdue play these last several weeks. And I honestly think there's a very good chance the Boilermakers don't get out of the first weekend.

What I see when I've watched them the last several weeks is a team barely scraping past teams it should be blowing out if it's actually the eighth-ranked team in the country. I see it becoming too dependent on Jaden Ivey to save the day. I see it losing twice to Wisconsin and somehow remaining ranked ahead of the Badgers,  and trailing most of the way Sunday against an Iowa team it had already beaten twice, and that needed a garbage bank shot from midcourt to beat Indiana in the Big Ten semis.

Long story short, I see a team that's not playing its best basketball heading into the Madness. And so I see a team that maybe, might, possibly could get a scare from Yale on Friday -- and that maybe, might, very possibly go down to either 6-seed Texas or 11-seed Virginia Tech in the second round.

I see a team ripe for one of those upsets that blow up a bracket.

On the other hand, I see an Indiana team that is playing its basketball right now, and -- if it continues to do so, always problematical with these Hoosiers -- is going to be a very tough out for whoever they play. The NCAA assigned them to a play-in game against Wyoming, but I could see the 12-seed Hoosiers winning that, pulling off the legendary 12-over-5 upset against St. Mary's in the first round, and then likely getting 4-seed UCLA in the second round.

A winnable game? Maybe. 

"Oh, right, sure, you IU homer, you," Purdue Fan is sneering now. "Where's your candy-stripe pants to match your candy ass? Why don't you just go ahead and SING THE IU FIGHT SONG while you s*** all over Purdue like always? Andy Katz has Purdue in the championship game against Arizona, and he's FORGOTTEN more about college hoops than you'll ever know!"

Yes, I'm sure that's true.

Yes, I know I'm betraying my family's roots by being suspicious of Purdue.

But here's your saving grace, Purdue Fan: I'm almost always wrong when it comes to the Madness.

So you've got that going for you.

Pink slip justice

 You're never supposed to break out the champagne and party favors when a coach loses his/her job. It's sportswriter protocol, sort of, because firing a coach is a bad moment for everyone, costing both fire-er and the fire-ee monetarily and requiring a disruptive reset for both. 

That said, LSU fired men's basketball coach Will Wade yesterday. On the eve of Selection Sunday, no less, with the Tigers projected as a 6-seed in Da Tournament.

And the Blob's reaction?

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA. HA. HA.

Because, listen, if you can't break out the champagne and party favors for Wade finally getting the gate, you're never going to. It's the sort of  deal for which the Germans coined the term schadenfreude: Taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.

It's a mean word describing a mean human reaction. Nonetheless ...

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA. HA. HA.

Wade, see, is the slimebucket who -- among much else alleged illegal horse-trading -- got caught on a wiretap bragging about buying a player. Then, he refused to discuss it with his bosses. 

That wiretap went public three years ago, and telling his bosses to sit on it and spin in response should have gotten Wade fired right then and there. Instead, he threw lawyers at LSU, which scared the school into keeping him on with a few face-saving stipulations.

Wade, of course, promptly ignored those stipulations. He's accused of continuing to offer recruits jobs, cars, cash and -- in one notorious instance -- even hush money to a player's fiancee.

But that's not the worst part, by the Blob's lights.

The worst part is the only reason LSU cares about all this now is because the NCAA just hit the school with the results of its investigation into Wade's program. It ain't pretty. Between the two of them, Wade and assistant Bill Armstrong are accused of six Level I violations and two Level II violations.

LSU reaction: "Geez! This is terrible! We had NO IDEA! We need to fire this guy ASAP!"

Of course, the school has actually had an idea for three years now. That it didn't react this way  then probably has nothing to do with the fact Wade is 108-54 at LSU, and won the SEC title in 2019. Of course it doesn't. Just like the fact the NCAAs are about to bring the hammer down on them has nothing to do with them finally getting all righteous now.

What was it LSU president William F. Tate and athletic director Scott Woodward wrote in an open letter upon announcing Wade's dismissal?

"Our responsibility to protect and promote the integrity and well-being of our entire institution and our student-athletes will always be paramount," the letter read.

Edited out of that statement, the Blob suspects?

"Unless we start losing."

Who are these guys?

 Come on, admit it. You thought this ended against Michigan.

Down 13 at halftime, down 17 with 11 minutes to play, the Hoosiers were about to go slaloming off the NCAA Tournament bubble. Toast, they were, as Yoda would say. Taking the early checkout, they were.

Except two days later, they're still in the hotel room, watching free HBO and ordering room service.

In other words, it's been an astounding two days for these Hoosiers, who flub-dubbed their way through February, losing five straight at one point and seven of their last nine games. But weird stuff happens in March.

Flub-dubs become basketball teams. Pinocchios become real. Michigans and Illinoises fall down and go boom.

First Michigan suddenly couldn't buy a bucket with cash money, and Indiana shoveled that 17-point pile down to nothing. And Indiana won, 74-69, outscoring the Wolverines 31-9 in the last 11 minutes, holding them to just two field goals in that span. harassing them into 10 turnovers in the second half.

Trayce Jackson-Davis, Indiana's nominal star, played like one, scoring 19 of his 24 points in the second half to go with eight rebounds and four blocked shots. Point guard Xavier Johnson played under control and in control, finishing with 17 points, seven assists and eight boards.

And yesterday?

Well, it was a 9 (Indiana) vs. a 1 (Illinois) seed, and, holy crap, the 9 seed won, 65-63. Jackson-Davis was superb again, going for 21 points and seven rebounds against Illini star Kofi Cockburn, who had 23 and 10. Johnson added 13 points, four boards and six assists. Race Thompson had 10 points, nine boards and a three-pack of 3s. And the defense shone again, limiting Illinois to 35.7 percent shooting/

And so now the Hoosiers are into the semifinals against Iowa, and again the talk around them is that they have finally Turned The Corner and Absorbed The Mike Woodson Way, and so on and so forth. We've heard all this before, of course. The wise course, then, is to say "Let's see what happens today."

Maybe Jackson-Davis continues to play as if Woodson is holding his parents hostage. Maybe Good Xavier doesn't revert to Bad Xavier. Maybe the defense -- the one part of Indiana's game that has been consistently and demonstrably better from the day Woodson arrived -- continues to smother people.

Or, maybe not. We've seen it before from these Hoosiers, after all.

Thing is, thanks to the last two days, we're gonna see them do one or the other again next week in the NCAA Tournament. We haven't seen Indiana there in six years. And we've seen them win 20 games only one other time in that same span.

All of which means Woodson at least the needle tracking in the right direction again, as Indiana hoped when it hired him.

"I don't know," a disgruntled Hoosiers fan (is there any other kind?) said to me back when IU was flub-dubbing it. "I think the jury's still out on Woodson."

"Maybe," I replied. "But remember, it's gonna take Woodson awhile to get all the Archie Miller out of their systems. And even if it may not look like it all the time, I think he's well on his way to doing that."

What do ya know. I might actually be right about that.

Speaking of weird March stuff.

Baseball, and stuff

 Well, boys and girls, Major League Baseball is back, after another completely avoidable work stoppage. This one lasted 99 days, making it the second-longest in history. About 60 of those days were wasted on thumb-twiddling and Big Swinging Appendage-ing, but you can't have everything.

So I guess this is the part where the Blob says, "Yay! Baseball! It's not dead after all! Yet!"

OR ...

Or this is the part where we go full curmudgeon and say, "What took you so long? And what's the deal with some of these rule changes?"

The Blob, being a cranky old guy, chooses Door No. 2.

What took so long is easy: They're all a bunch of greedy rich guys who don't care about the fans. Greedy rich guys who don't care about the fans do not always take the long view. OK, so they hardly ever do.

The rule changes?

Some of them are good, like the universal (Finally!) DH. I realize this isn't the standard Cranky Old Guy position, but it's beyond ridiculous that one league has had it for almost 50 years and the other hasn't. They should have gotten on the same page decades ago -- because if something's been around for 50 years, it's here to stay. Bitching about it is like bitching about how the Wright Brothers ruined everything with their damned aero-plane.

On the other hand, this Cranky Old Guy says MLB should have held the line on the shift.

The players hated it, so the owners agreed to get rid of it. They also agreed on a pitch clock, which skeptics (i.e.: me) believe will only work if it's enforced. And they harbor deep doubts it will be -- at least consistently.

But back to the shift.

It's what teams do when they face a batter who can't go to all fields, and by the Blob's lights it's a completely acceptable defensive stratagem. But because players today, or a lot of them, never learned to hit to all fields (and forgot how to bunt, too, while we're at it), they claim it's not fair. 

The Blob's curmudgeonly response to that is, well, neither was the Bears' 46 defense, which was basically "Blitz everybody." But while the NFL has neutered its defenses in other ways, I didn't see the league banning that.

Baseball agreeing to get rid of the shift, on the other hand, rewards lack of expertise. But it's designed to open up the game and make it more what baseball was always supposed to be, a game of hitting and movement.

Again, I'm deeply skeptical. The homer/strikeout/homer devolution seems too advanced.

But enough crabbing. Baseball's BACK! And they're gonna have spring training and a 162-game season and everything!

"Oh, great!" Cranky Old Guy says. "Now the World Series won't end until the middle of November! October Classic, my ass!"

Sigh.

From Wentz he came

 OK. So now what?

Now, if you're the Indianapolis Colts, you go back to the drawing board on the quarterback deal, and right now the drawing board is a scrawl of doodles and stick figures. You got rid of Carson Wentz, who was The Guy until he wasn't, and you even suckered the Washington Commanders into picking up the $28 mill left on his contract.

So, again: Now what?

Lots of names floating around out there as the Next Guy for the Colts, and none of them are Peyton Manning, or even Andrew Luck. You've got the backup QB in Buffalo (Mitch Trubisky) and a handful of other backups/journeymen, and there isn't a single one who's going to make you forget Carson Wentz.

Who wasn't bad, in his one season with the Colts. And whom the Commanders thought enough of to swallow that $28 mill chunk and pay him an additional, reported $22 mill on top of it.

In Indianapolis, that means Colts GM Chris Ballard snookered Washington, and now has a fat pile of cash-cap dough to play with.

Elsewhere ... well, why does the Blob suspect there's a good chance the Colts could wind up with seller's remorse here?

Look. Wentz was not the guy the daydreamers in Indy thought he could magically become simply because he was reunited with his pal Frank Reich. Nor was he ever gonna be.

However ...

However, he was better than you think he was.

Everything is perception, and much of the perception about Wentz was colored by the way he pooped the bed in the Colts' last two games. And it was also colored by the way a pissed-off Jim Irsay ran his mouth about Wentz as a result.

This obscured a few things.

Like the fact Wentz threw 27 touchdown passes against just seven interceptions in 2021 -- or one pick every 74 attempts, which ain't half bad.

Like the fact he had a not-superb-but-not-horrendous 94 passer rating.

Like the fact he had zero, zilch, nada elite receivers to work with.

If Ballard's as smart as some people think he is, he'll remedy that situation by spending  some of the Colts' pile to bring in an elite receiver or two. Or steal a potential one in the draft with the picks they got for Wentz. 

But they won't have a QB much better than Wentz to throw to him, because this is a weak QB draft and Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers are no longer walking through that door. As if they ever were going to anyway. 

So ...

So, that leaves Trubisky as a possibility, or perhaps Jimmy Garoppolo. Neither, however, is more than first aid. And only the latter would be a clear upgrade from Wentz.

"I'd like to quit Band-Aiding (at quarterback)," Ballard said back in January.

Sure. And I'd like to shoot 3s like Steph Curry, too.

But that ain't happenin', either.

Seahawkin'

(A transcript of the secret front-office meeting in which the Denver Broncos -- thought to be trolling for Aaron Rodgers -- decided  instead to swing a blockbuster deal for the Seahawks' Russell Wilson:)

Front Office Guy #1: "Well, boys ... looks like Rodgers is staying in Green Bay."

Front Office Guy #2: "(Bleeping) drama queen. 'Ooh, they traded all my favorite guys, ooh, I feel so disrespected, ooh, maybe I'll go to Denver.' (Bleep). (Bleep) his (bleeping) Real Wives of Green Bay, Bachelorette, crazy anti-vaxxer histrionics."

Front Office Guy #3: "And after we hired his offensive coordinator as our head coach to try to lure him here! Now what do we do with that guy?"

Front Office Guy #4: "Hey, there's always Russell Wilson."

Front Office Guys 1, 2 and 3: "Oh, sure. Like he's ever gonna leave Seattle."

Front Office Guy 4: "No, really! I hear he's kinda fed up with Pete Carroll. Hear he wouldn't mind getting away from the Cream-of-Wheat-for-brains, ain't-gonna-run-Marshawn-Lynch-on-the-1-yard-line doofus. It's worth a shot, right?"

(Brief pause as everyone thinks about it)

Front Office Guys 1, 2 and 3: "Y'know, if this true ..."

Front Office Guy 1: "Dudes! Russell Wilson!"

Front Office Guy 2: "Finally we'd have a quarterback like everyone else in our division!"

Front Office Guy 3: "No s***! I mean, come on. Mahomes, Carr, Herbert ... Drew Lock. Who else in here is tired of THAT bulls***?"

Front Office Guy 4: "Boy, would the Seahawks fans be pissed, or what? We get Russell, they get Drew Lock? Bwah-ha-ha-ha!"

(Brief pause as everyone thinks about that)

Front Office Guy 1, 2, 3 and 4: "Get 'em on the phone!"

The Shot, shot

 Ah, well. It was a nice dream, right?

Nice to imagine for a few days that Purdue-Fort Wayne -- regarded these days by West Lafayette as just another cute regional campus, all evidence to the contrary -- might actually swim in the same waters as the parent school. Purdue and Purdue-Fort Wayne, both in the NCAA Tournament? Beauty.

And then ...

And then one of basketball's home truths rose up to smack the Mastodons down.

That truth is if you live by the shot you die by the shot, and last night Purdue-Fort Wayne died. Northern Kentucky threw a suffocating matchup zone at the Mastodons, and the  Mastodons bricked their way out of the Horizon League tournament, shooting 29 percent and missing 17 of 20 from the 3-point arc, where they were one of the nation's best-shooting teams.

The final was 57-43, and it wasn't really that close. The 43 points were Purdue-Fort Wayne's lowest total of the season, and it was the first time the Mastodons had scored fewer than 50 points since November 19, when Minnesota beat them 78-49.

That was an astounding reversal for a team that had won 10 straight games and 16 of its last 20 coming into last night in Indianapolis. In that 10-game streak, the Mastodons never scored fewer than 70  points, and four times scored more than 80. In their final two regular-season games, they made 27 threes in 56 tries, a robust 48.2 clip.

Last night, they shot 15 percent from the arc. They missed all 12 of their 3-point attempts in the first half and didn't get one to drop until Damian Chong Qui finally hit with 17:37 to play.

And so down went the Mastodons' Shot, shot down by shots that wouldn't fall for the first time in more than a month.

Or something like that.

The surest bet

 Pete Rozelle could have told 'em, if he weren't six feet under. Alex Karras and Paul Hornung, too, considering they were Calvin Ridley in another time.

Calvin Ridley, see, bet on pro football while he was taking a mental health break from football last fall. Even bet on his own team, the Atlanta Falcons.

Karras and Hornung?

They put money down on the NFL, too, 59 years ago. 

Rozelle, the NFL commissioner then, suspended them both indefinitely -- partly for even associating with gamblers and "known hoodlums."

Of course, that was six decades ago. Nowadays the league Rozelle built into America's obsession does its own associating with gamblers and hoodlums.

They do deals with them. Movie stars do ads for them. And those ads run during NFL games, with the NFL's blessing.

And so of course another Karras/Hornung episode happened. It was as predictable as sunrise, a 100 percent lock anywhere along the Strip you wanted to place a bet.

Today's commissioner, Roger Goodell, landed on Ridley with both feet, suspending him for an entire season. Naturally he doesn't see the glaring contradiction in this, although it likely has Pete Rozelle spinning like a cyclotron in his grave. How can you willingly climb in bed with gamblers, then go all Kenesaw Mountain Landis when you find one of your own under the covers?

It's a very good question. And it's doubtful Goodell has an answer that makes any kind of sense.

He did the right thing here, but he has zero credibility to do so. You can't actively promote gambling on your product -- the NFL actually has sponsorships with THREE online betting sites -- and elicit anything but laughter when you try to discipline one of your employees for it. Hell, Ridley placed his bets using exactly the sort of mobile app that's a feature of the online sites with whom the NFL does business.

But, hey. You let one of your franchises move to Vegas, you're gonna do Vegas things. Just don't expect anyone to take you seriously when you start talking about the evils of gambling.

"There is nothing more fundamental to the NFL's success -- and to the reputation associated with our league -- than upholding the integrity of the game," Goodell wrote, without a trace of irony, in notifying Ridley of his suspension. "Your actions put the integrity of the game at risk, threatened to damage public confidence in professional football, and potentially undermined the reputations of your fellow players throughout the NFL."

Gee, Rog. And you haven't?

Collateral damage

 Brittney Griner sits in a jail cell in Russia right now, a casualty of war and penuriousness. One has nothing to do with the other, and yet they have everything to do with each other.

The casualty of war part ... well, Griner's basically being held hostage by the Russians in retaliation for U.S. and Western sanctions that are in turn retaliation for Russia/s lawless invasion of Ukraine. The official charge is possession of vaping paraphernalia with traces of cannabis oil -- an infraction that carries an absurd 10-year sentence, and which would have been resolved in about five minutes if the Russians weren't reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble.

Griner, after all, is a star basketball player in Russia. I'm guessing that carries weight in a corrupt oligarchy where greasing the right palms is no doubt the national pastime.

And the penuriousness part?

That's on her offseason employer, the WNBA. Because Griner, a future Hall of Famer, wouldn't be a star basketball player in Russia if the WNBA paid its players anywhere close to what it should.

An interesting aside in the news stories about Griner is the fact she makes a cool million bucketing for UMMC Ekaterinburg in Russia. That's four times what she makes playing for Phoenix in the WNBA, even though she's one of the league's most decorated players. A seven-time league All-Star, her resume includes a WNBA championship with the Mercury, two Olympic gold medals and a college national championship at Baylor.

Yet there she is in Russia, supplementing her income. And she's hardly alone. Among other WNBA stars playing in Russia or Ukraine this winter were league MVP Jonquel Jones, and Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley -- last seen leading the Chicago Sky to the 2021 WNBA title.

All of them got out safely. Griner did not. She's collateral damage on two fronts, in a sense.

"Brittney Griner has the WNBA's full support ..." the league said in a statement after Griner was detained.

Pretty words. But words only.

Your Guys In Shorts update for today

 So I'm eating lunch yesterday in a place with lots of sports on lots of TVs, and on one of them they're showing the NFL combine, aka Guys In Shorts Running And Jumping And What-Not. And it's both weird and weirdly compelling.

The weird part is watching prospective NFL tight ends and wide receivers run pass routes against orange cones.

The weirdly compelling part is watching SUV-sized offensive linemen run the 40, even though the only thing that's relevant for an OL is how fast he runs the 5.

Nevertheless, there is this: On the TV screen showing the combine, a man weighing 341 pounds just ran the 40 in 4.87 seconds.

"Wow," I say.

Because, listen, people who weigh 341 pounds cannot normally run the 40 in 4.87 days, let alone 4.87 seconds. Most wouldn't even finish 40 yards. They'd get out there about 20, 25 yards and then say "Ah, screw this."

What this does is remind us that NFL players are not normal, and possibly not human. They do things you and I can't do, and couldn't do without Tony Stark's Ironman gear. 

Forget, for a moment, what it must be like to be 341 pounds and run a 4.87 40.  Imagine instead what it must be like to be on the other end of that 4.87 40. Imagine how it must feel to get hit by something that big moving that fast.

And yet, that happens in the NFL, like, every week. On virtually every play. And somehow the hit-ee (usually) gets up -- and, on the next play, sheds that 341-pound 4.87-second runner like an overcoat on a warm day, runs even faster and collides with another guy who's running even faster.

It's what I think about every time I hear someone say the NFL is like touch football now because no one can hit anyone anymore.

That's only partly true. It's true you can't sack a quarterback with an excess of zeal anymore, or clock a receiver going across the middle, or even bump-and-run him the way you could back in the day. But ...

But that doesn't mean guys still don't get hit. And they're still large men moving very, very fast. And so the layman can't really imagine the level of violence involved in said hits.

I have never stood on an NFL sideline. But I've stood on more Power 5 college football sidelines than I can count, and I've heard what it sounds like when those players collide at full speed.

It sounds like a car crash. I mean, literally, like a car crash.

And that's not anywhere close to the NFL.

So the next time you're compelled to call a guy like Andrew Luck "weak" because he had the good sense to walk away from the game before he turned 30, cue up that 341-pounder running 4.87 again. And then imagine what it must feel like to get hit by a dude like that, and imagine how many times Andrew Luck kept getting up from it despite busted ribs and a lacerated kidney and a smashed shoulder and various wrenched knee and ankle joints.

Then imagine how many times you'd get up.

I'm guessing zero.

Goodbye to all that

 I suppose this was inevitable, like the man himself so often has been. Sooner or later the Blob had to say something about Mike Krzyzewski -- about this being his farewell tango with winter, and with the weight of numbers that have themselves become inevitable.

Which is to say, Coach K has won and won and won so often he's turned Duke basketball into a natural phenomenon of sorts. The sun rises in the east; Duke wins a national title every six or seven years. And, lord, how everyone outside Durham, N.C., has grown sick to death of the Blue Devils because of it.

The Blob, too, I must admit. But today is K's last home game, and so the inevitable must be observed.

First off, Mike Krzyzewski is the most successful coach in men's college basketball history, a Rushmore guy, right up there with Wooden and Knight and Smith and probably bigger than all of them.

He's done it the way you're supposed to do it most of the time -- Christian Laettner's chest stomp, Grayson Allen's incorrigible goonery and the flagrant purchase of Zion Williamson being obvious exceptions.

Because of that, a certain amount of sanctimony (again: inevitable) has attached itself to K's program. To his credit, Krzyzewski himself has never invited it. But it's there, and most of the loathing for Duke outside Durham springs from it.

It's one thing to be too good for your own good, after all. But when you're both that and too goody two-shoes for your own good ...

Well. No one likes a snob, and Duke often gives off a whiff of snobbery that likely has as much to so with its status as an elite academic institution as it does with the entitled snots on its basketball team. The fact the entitled snots seem to get every break, always, only enhances that.

Almost all of that is perception, mind you. Duke's basketball players, most of them, come from backgrounds that could hardly be described as "entitled." But, dammit, why did Gordon Hayward's desperate heave rim out, back in 2010? How come Laettner wasn't ejected for the chest stomp in the '92 regional final, which would have meant we wouldn't have to watch his winning shot over and over and over ad nauseam?

 And why do the Dukies have to get EVERY DAMN CALL, particularly in Cameron Indoor?

This evening that will no doubt happen again, or at least we'll think it  does. Duke will beat North Carolina, its fiercest rival. K will wave goodbye through a prism of tears. The Cameron Crazies will press pause on their usual obnoxiousness to swipe away a few tears themselves.

Goodbye to all that, and all that.

And you know what?

It will all be perfection. Because of course it will. 

The march of March

Epiphanies come in odd packages sometimes. Mine came in my car.

Mine came in my car, in a left-turn lane on U.S. 24, seven years ago (I think) this month. I sat in that left-turn lane for a long time, on that Saturday afternoon. The stoplight cycled  three, four, five times before I finally got turned and drove on down to Huntington North High School, where I could barely find a parking spot.

The occasion was a couple of semistate basketball games, 18 (I think) years after the IHSAA put a shiv in what we used to call Hoosier Hysteria.

The gym was fire-marshals-looking-the-other-way packed.

The atmosphere was full of body heat and exposed nerve endings and a claustrophobic electricity that felt as old as laces on a basketball, and as fresh as tomorrow.

And that's when it dawned on me.

That's when this old sportswriter realized you can kill "Hoosier Hysteria," but you can't kill March in Indiana. Its fundamentals are eternal, no matter how many ways you slice them. One class or four, it's all of a piece, and it's been that way since John Wooden played at Martinsville and Dave Dejernett broke the state title color line at Washington, and since Plump and Oscar and Mount and McGinnis and Damon and on and on and on.

 I was there for the last gasp of Hoosier Hysteria, a term I'll always reserve for the old single-class tournament. It was 25 years ago in the old RCA Dome, and LaPorte and Delta and Bloomington North and Kokomo were the final Final Four. The favorite, Bloomington North, beat Delta 75-54 in the title game to finish 28-1 and win the last single-class title. A North player named Adam Hawley scored the last single-class bucket.

When IHSAA commissioner Robert Gardner presented the winner's trophy that night, the crowd booed him. He was, after all, Hoosier Hysteria's executioner.

And now a quarter century has flown by, and it's sectional week again, and the 1997 state finals seem so ... old timey. As if that night were rendered in sepia tones, and people came to the RCA Dome by horse and buggy, and don't forget to leave a note for the milkman.

Hell. Even the RCA Dome itself is long gone.

Which is to say, March marches on, and if what it means in Indiana never changes, everything else does. Going back to one class today would be like trading in your  Apple Music app for a Victrola. The demographics of school systems have changed that radically since 1997, and even more so since 1954, when Milan beat Muncie Central and launched a mythology that would animate the supporters of Hoosier Hysteria for the next 43 years.

Then, Muncie Central was the "big school," with just over 2,000 students. Today, the biggest school in Indiana is Carmel, which has 5,400 students in four grades and looks more like a small-college campus than a high school.

Now imagine a school that size or close to it playing, say, Shakamak (enrollment 334) in the first round of the sectional. It would be beyond farcical.

Look. No one was more opposed than I was in 1997 to breaking Hoosier Hysteria into four pieces. I had a whole pile of carefully reasoned arguments against it: Tradition, the fact it was still by far the most successful high school basketball tournament in America ... tradition. Why fix what wasn't broken?

What I missed was that if it wasn't broken, it soon would be. Attendance was already dwindling in dribs and drabs. The big schools were getting bigger and the small schools were still small. And the most important thing I missed?

That the love match between Hoosiers and high school basketball wasn't going to change no matter what happened. 

Crowds might be smaller, the infrastructure more diffuse, but certain truths would remain truths. Communities would still hang their hopes on the slender shoulders of teenagers. They would still scrawl SEMISTATE BOUND or GOOD LUCK (INSERT NICKNAME HERE) on their car windows. They would celebrate with their boys or girls as they cut down the nets, or swear the refs got paid under the table if they lost.

All of that is happening again this week. And all of that has been happening in this state for 111 years now.

I could be wrong, of course. But I think it's here to stay.

A brief pause for provincialism

 The hottest D-I basketball team in Indiana plays tonight, at home, and you're probably not going to guess who it is.

No, it's not Notre Dame, although the unranked Irish have won seven of their last nine games, are 21-10, and perhaps represent the best coaching job ever for Mike Brey, longtime ND coach and one of the best people in the business.

No, it's not No. 8 Purdue, who lost Tuesday to Wisconsin on a buzzer-beating three and likely surrendered the Big Ten title in the process.

And, no, it's certainly not unranked Indiana, which lost Wednesday to Rutgers on senior night, also on a buzzer-beating three, and as usual couldn't find the basket with search planes and a topo map.  

So who is it, then?

It's Purdue-Fort Wayne. And please excuse the Blob's brief foray into provincialism.

Right here in the Fort, see, the Mastodons have quietly won nine straight games. Unlike Purdue, they win key games on the road. Unlike Indiana, they can find the basket, and they don't need enhanced assistance to do it.

Want to know what the Dons did last week to lock up the co-championship of the Horizon League in just their second season in the conference?

They beat 20-win Oakland and Detroit Mercy, both on the road.

They beat the former by making 32-of-59 shots (54.2 percent) and sticking a mind-numbing 16 threes in 34 attempts, a 47.1 percent clip.

They handed the latter its only home loss of the season by making 29-of-50 shots (58 percent), and hitting 11 more threes in 22 tries, an even 50 percent clip.

Five players scored in double figures for the Dons in that one, led by 18 off the pine from Deonte Billups, the Horizon's sixth-man of the year. First-team all-conference pick Jarred Godfrey added 16 for Jon Coffman, the Horizon's coach of the year.

Tonight, the 20-10 Dons host 14-15 Illinois-Chicago  -- which itself has won six of its last eight games -- in a Horizon League tournament quarterfinal. If they win that, they'll be two Ws away from the school's first NCAA Tournament appearance.

So, go Dons.

This concludes today's Provincialism Moment.

Playin' dumb, per usual

 Well, of course, playin' chicken wasn't enough for the amoeba brains who run baseball. Once again they wind up at the bottom of the cliff like Jimmy Dean's rival in "Rebel Without A Cause."*

(* Gratuitous film nerd reference. Bonus points if you can name the actor who played the kid who went over the cliff in the game of chicken)

(Wrong. It was Corey Allen)

Anyway ... the two sides talked and talked yesterday, and then the deadline after the deadline-that-wasn't-really-a-deadline ran out, and now MLB has canceled Opening Day and the first series of the season. Unholster blunderbuss, shoot foot right the hell off.

One of the major sticking points, of course, is the owners' insisting on expanding the postseason to14 teams, because of course they are. This brings out the shouting-at-clouds geezer in the Blob, who agrees with the players on this one.

Which is to say, 14 teams in the playoffs is absurd. There are already 10 teams in the playoffs, and that's too many. The postseason is supposed to be a reward for proving one's mettle over a 162-game, six-month slog, not another month-long slog. 

The playoffs already run into November. At this rate, the October Classic will be the Thanksgiving Classic, and everyone will make the playoffs except the Blob's Pittsburgh Cruds, who frankly should be relegated to Triple A until their owners decide they want to behave like major-league owners.

But just for the sake of argument, let's look at who would have been added to the postseason in 2021 if it had been 14 teams instead of 10.

That's two teams per league, one would assume. In the American League, that means the Blue Jays (91-71) and A's (90-72) would have gotten in. OK, so two 90-win teams. Fine, but how often are there going to be seven 90-win teams in one league?

More representative is the National League, in this case.

Two additional teams would have meant the Phillies (82-80) and Reds (83-79) got in last fall. So, after 162 games, two barely-over .500 teams get rewarded with playoff berths?

Um, no. Sorry. And the thing is, how long before the owners would be pushing for a 16-team postseason?

ESPN is already offering to kick in an additional $100 mill for a 14-team postseason, which of course is what's driving this. After all, when have baseball's owners ever chosen the welfare of their players over a loftier pile of cash?

One hundred fifty years of players just answered "Never."

Playin' chicken, per usual

 I hear the chirping of birds outside my window this morning, as gray light comes up on the day.

The piles of snow outside the same window have withered to narrow scraps of white where the plows have moved them aside.

According to my weather app, it's supposed to hit 63 here this weekend. Sixty-freaking-three.

I guess the calendar ain't lyin', in other words.

It's March.

It's March, first week of, which here in Indiana means basketball sectional week. A million trace memories attend it: The rhythmic whack-whack of ball on hardwood; the  adolescent shriek of cheerleaders; the rich aroma of popcorn overlaying everything. In the very words "sectional week," you can hear the snarl of a buzzer and the bleat of an official's whistle, and see shreds of nylon in the fists of teenagers at the end of it all on Saturday night.

I'll tell you something you can see, here in the first week of March: Bullstuff walking.

Remember last week, when Major League Baseball declared if a new collective bargaining agreement couldn't be reached by end of business Monday, they'd start canceling regular-season games?

Well, that was exactly what almost everyone thought it was: MLB playin' chicken with the players.

Because here it is Tuesday morning, and, gee, they're still talkin'. Opening Day, and any subsequent Days, are still on. Apparently, there has been "movement" in the talks, which is another way of saying everyone's quit screwing around and decided to get serious.

This happens so often in these deals a lot of us just shrugged when MLB laid down its ultimatum last week. You knew, instinctively, that it wasn't really an ultimatum. It was just more off-Broadway theater, a little chest-thumping pantomime before everyone inevitably settled down and said "OK, let's do this."

As of now, apparently, both sides are still talking. The sense here is they won't stop talking until they have a deal. Even with baseball's legendary brain-cell deficit, it's hard to believe the principals would be so witless as to submarine the start of a season in an era when the game is struggling as it is to maintain relevance.

I mean, what if they canceled Opening Day, and nobody noticed?

Because that could happen. And that's got to be a lot scarier for both sides than talking to one another.