The QB sneak: An appreciation.

 It's always arctic where I am, when I think about the quarterback sneak. You reach a certain age, it happens.

The quarterback sneak, to those of us of a certain decrepitude?

Sure. Green Bay, 1967, 13 below zero. Ball on the 1-yard line. Sixteen seconds to play.

And there's the famous snippet of video, Jerry Kramer and Ken Bowman moving Jethro Pugh aside just enough so Bart Starr can tuck the ball, lower his shoulders and squeeze through into the end zone.

That's what I see in my mind's eye when I think about the quarterback sneak. That's why I think I've never, ever seen it fail, although of course it has.

Not on fourth-and-inches, however.

Twice fourth-and-inches bit the Indianapolis Colts on their way to another loss yesterday, this one more egregious than most. The Colts led Washington 16-7 with four minutes to play this time, at home. They lost, 17-16. And they lost because of two quarterback sneaks that didn't get called.

One was down on the goal line, where it was third-and-inches, if not third-and-an-inch. If they call a quarterback sneak for Sam Ehlinger on that play, it's six points. That close to the goal line, it's literally unstoppable, because all Ehlinger has to do is take one forward step, if not half a forward step. No defense on earth can keep him from doing that, lousy offensive line or not.

Instead, he stepped back -- surrendered yardage, in other words -- and handed the ball to Jonathan Taylor, who got stuffed. The Colts settled for a field goal.

And the second time?

It was fourth-and-inches at the Colts 34, time running out, Washington six points down. Again, run a quarterback sneak there, and it's a first down and the game's likely over. Instead, Frank Reich chose to kick the ball away, and the Commanders hit a big pass to the 1-yard line and scored and won the game.

Two plays, two quarterback sneaks forsaken. And this after the Colts decided to go with Ehlinger at least in part because he could make plays with his feet as well as with his arm.

He never got the chance.

And those of us of a certain decrepitude, seeing Starr squeezing into the end once again in the Green Bay icebox, can only shake our heads. Yeesh.

Crazier by the minute

And now Kyrie Irving is hyping anti-Semitic junk on the interwhatsis, which perhaps is mitigated by the fact Kyrie is a tinfoil-hat-wearing nutjob from way back. So  I suppose this might just be water seeking its own level. 

But we get crazier by the minute here in the land of the free and the home of the loon, and God knows where it ends. With someone trying to assassinate the Speaker of the House, I suppose.

Oh, wait. Someone did try to do that.

Some lint-brained galoot all jacked up on the My Pillow Guy's ravings assaulted Nancy Pelosi's 82-year-old husband in their California home the other night, fracturing his skull with a hammer while shouting "Where's Nancy?"  Had a pocketful of zip ties on him, too, presumably to tie up Paul Pelosi so they could wait for his wife to get home.

Thank God she was clear across the country in Washington.

Scary times. Insane times. And you know what's even scarier and more insane?

That the MAGA/Q-Anon crowd immediately began selling another conspiracy theory about the whole thing, something about a homosexual tryst gone wrong.

Yeesh. There ain't enough padded cells in this country, I swear.

Oh, some of the MAGA Party congress critters did jump on various social media platforms to offer Thoughts and Prayers and other performance-art pieties, like saying violence is never the answer. Of course this week they'll be right back to stoking it with more conspiracy-kook bingo.

But I digress.

("Indeed," you say)

The point is conspiracy-kook bingo is a growth industry here in the 50 states, and for some reason an inordinate number of celebrities and athletes tend to gravitate toward them. Kanye/Ye/Whoever got the ball rolling on the latest round of anti-Semitism with his insinuation that Jews ran the entertainment industry and were stealing from people of color. Kyrie weighed in by posting links to anti-Semitic literature and film on one of his social media accounts. And so it goes, and so it goes.

Any day now I figure the Protocols of Zion will resurface, that ancient anti-Semitic classic.

The Protocols of course are the wellspring of the whole Jews-control-the-world lunacy,  seized on by Adolph Hitler and a bunch of other fine folks as the foundational bedrock of their psychotic ideology. That they have long since been debunked as a forgery never seems to matter to the successive generations who've embraced them.

Coming soon: Kyrie Says Protocols of Zion Are “Revealed Truth"; Claims They've Been "Silenced By The Haters Of Free Speech."

Which of course is another aspect of all this, and even more frightening. People who should know better (hello, Jason Whitlock) have latched onto the notion that if you push back against the poison of the Kyries and Kanye/Ye's, you're trying to "silence" them. Whitlock, once a respected journalist and now just another MAGA foot soldier, even labeled those who dare challenge them as "cowards."

Which raises the question of exactly who's trying to silence whom.

All I know is, there sure are a bunch of folks who know exactly what Kanye/Ye said and Kyrie posted, because they've seen it all over the interwhatsis. This doesn't exactly sound like they're free speech martyrs to me, but what do I know.

I'm actually sane, see. At least periodically.

Here comes the Next Guy

 It's a good thing the Indianapolis Colts gave all that money to Matt Ryan so he could come in and save the day. Otherwise they might have done something useful with it, like lighting it on fire.

Seven weeks in Ryan was leading the NFL in fumbles AND interceptions, and so after the Colts lost to the Tennessee Titans for the umpteen-millionth time (Last Colts victory in the series: 1908), they abruptly announced they were putting the high-priced spread on the shelf. Time to go with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, aka Sam Ehlinger.

So to review: Horsies bring in another solid veteran more long in the tooth than Dracula, puts him behind the Seven Blocks of Grated Parmesan, and discovers that, darn it, 37-year-olds frequently play like 37-year-olds. Well, hey, let's go with the sixth-round draft pick who's never played a real snap!

This is not a slap at Ehlinger, who was absolute fire playing against next week's roster cuts and beige defenses in the preseason. The Blob loved the way he played at Texas, with style and will and the guts of a burglar. And by all accounts, he became a much, much better QB in the offseason simply because he buckled down and worked at it. So it's going to be fun today to see how he stacks up against live ammo.

The Colts have their fingers crossed. Which unfortunately has become a recurring theme in their environs.

Since Andrew Luck abruptly retired they've burned through two Rent-A-Geezers and another guy, Carson Wentz, who only played liked a geezer. Philip Rivers played one season and retired, as geezers will. The Horsies gave up on Wentz after one season. Then it was Ryan's turn.

He didn't even last half a season.

And so, here comes the Next Guy. The Colts hope Ehlinger, more athletic and mobile, will not take as many sacks or fumble as much or throw as many picks. Plus, he's a sixth-rounder, and who can forget that TOM BRADY was a sixth-rounder ...

Brady has always been the patron saint for teams taking down-draft QBs, which is both charming and heartbreakingly naive. Hey, if Brady could do it, the thinking goes, never progressing to the next thought.

Which is that Bill Belichick got flat outright lucky with Brady. It was the dice roll of all dice rolls, because Belichick has been mediocre to plain abysmal since at drafting quarterbacks.

Ehlinger?

Love the guy. Hope he's the guy. But the Colts have been in scramble mode at the position since Andrew Luck abruptly retired right before the season started in 2019, having been at last battered into submission.

The Colts never saw it coming, but in hindsight (which is always eagle-eyed) there surely must have been signs. Luck, to begin with, was a very old 29; as the saying goes, he'd taken multiple beatings, which had not improved morale. And when you consider Luck was always a different sort of cat, with a perspective that strayed well beyond the precise grid of the football field ...

Well. Remember 2018, when the Colts took Quenton Nelson with the sixth pick in the draft?

They could have taken Josh Allen, as an acquaintance pointed out the other day.

We all know what Josh Allen has become. And we all know what Quenton Nelson has become -- an All-Pro pancake machine his first couple of seasons, and now just another gateway to the pocket on the struggling Colts O-line.

One more if-only to contemplate as Slingin' Sam takes his turn the barrel.

Lyrics, schmyrics

 They stuck me down in a room where they keep the between-innings promotions equipment, so it was just me, a bunch of giant balls and my flop sweat. The door closed. The minutes began to crawl past on their hands and knees.

Welcome to a certain June night seven years ago, and my first (and only) public performance of the National Anthem.

Which is to say, I kinda feel for poor Eric Burton this morning.

Last night, see, the lead singer for the Black Pumas sang the anthem in Houston for Game 1 of the World Series. And kind of, well, messed up.

"What so proudly we hail'd, at the twilight's last streaming," is one thing he sang.

Then he sang the same incorrect line again when he should have been singing "O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?" The rare forgot-the-words double error.

Now, Eric Burton is a professional. He's been nominated for a Grammy. And so, this was in essence a sort of life-affirming moment, like when a pro golfer flubs a six-inch putt: Hey, these guys are human, too.

They are. And having done it myself, I can sympathize, because our anthem is a bitch to sing to begin with, and I can absolutely see forgetting the lyrics while you're concentrating on starting in the right key. Because, trust me, if you start the anthem in the wrong key, you're screwed.

"Is that what happened to you, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

Well, no, thankfully.

To begin with, I wound up in that room in Parkview Field because I have a singing voice I'd best describe as serviceable, and because I got it in my head to write a piece for a local magazine on how the Class A Fort Wayne TinCaps select their anthem singers. And so, that March, I went to the tryouts. 

Talked to some folks. Tried out myself, just to see what it felt like. Didn't think another thing about it.

Until, that is, I got a letter from the TinCaps informing me I had been selected to sing the anthem the night of June 10.

"Hey, wait," I said, or something like it. "This wasn't part of the plan."

But I didn't want to look like a weenie, so I said "OK." Started singing the anthem in my car, in the shower, whenever I was alone and it wouldn't look weird. And the night of, waiting back there with all the promotions paraphernalia, I sang it again, over and over.

Pretty soon the door opened and they were escorting me down the tunnel to the diamond, like the warden escorting a condemned man to Old Sparky. I was as nervous as a Vespa owner in a biker bar. But then I was walking out into the sunlight and standing in the on-deck circle and the microphone was staring me down, and -- here we go -- I opened my mouth and sang.

And it went OK.

I didn't forget the words. I started in the right key. It was, well, a serviceable performance.

"Hey, you need to do this again," one of the TinCaps promotional folks said when it was over.

"No freakin' way," I said, or something to that effect.

Fast forward to last night, and proof I made the right decision. And also proof that omens do exist.

Because after Burton botched the anthem, the heavily favored Astros botched a 5-0 lead and lost 6-5 in ten in Game 1. 

Da prediction

 The World Series begins tonight in Houston, and let me be the first to say I hope it snows n Philadelphia next week, because that'd learn MLB about the absurdity of letting the October Classic stray into November.

OK. Senior moment over.

On to the Blob's prediction, which like all the Blob's predictions comes with a warning label: Results May Vary. This is especially true here, because the Blob is going to do what it should never do in these scenarios.

It's going to let its heart wrestle its head to the ground and pin it.

My head, see, would make this an easy call: Astros in five or at most six. They've been to the World Series four times in the last six years. They have a killer bullpen. And they won 19 more games than the Phillies -- which makes this, on paper, the most mismatch-y of mismatches since 1906.

That season, the Cubs, winners of 116 games, played the White Sox, who won 93. The Cubs were a juggernaut; the White Sox couldn't hit water if they fell out of a boat. Yet the White Sox shocked, if not the world, at least Chicago, by winning the Series in six games because their pitching shut down the Bearcubs.

This is not exactly why I'm picking the Phillies. But I've always been a sucker for historical symmetry, so it's part of it.

The dynamic, after all, is pretty much the same, only reversed. Philadelphia finished third in its division but got to the Series because they overwhelmed the Cardinals, Braves and Padres with their bats. They mashed baseballs into goo, is what they did. Occasionally they got some decent pitching, but mostly they launched more suborbital flights than NASA.

The Astros, by contrast, were simply bloodlessly efficient. They were the best team in the American League and they've played like it; going into tonight they're 7-0 in the playoffs and have resembled, in their ruthless inevitability, the Yankees from their now-ancient dynasty years.

This year's Yankees they swept in four straight. 

So, yeah, logic says they're going to mop the diamond with the Phils. But I'm picking the Phils because they're a bunch of bearded galoots who remind you of Sesame Street's Animal, and for the same reason you picked against the Yankees back in the day.

Because you knew they were going to win, but (bleep) that.

Plus, the Astros might still be cheating. You never know with those guys.

In any event: Phils in seven.

Reverse role models

 I know who Aaron Rodgers is now, unless he's Clint Eastwood's snarly Walt Kowalski from "Gran Torino." He's Leon.

You remember Leon, right?

Leon was the archetypal me-first athlete in those old Budweiser ads, the guy who says this in one of the spots. In one of those moments when life imitates art, it's remarkably similar to what Rodgers said this week about the Packers woeful loss to the Washington Commanders.

He went on Pat McAfee's radio show and said, right off, that he got the highest grade he's gotten all season from quarterbacks coach Tom Clements. The implication was you couldn't blame HIM for what happened. It was all those goobers around him.

"A couple of missed throws, but ... we're behind the sticks, you know," he went on to say, absolving himself again. "It's second-and-20, third-and-25, way too many penalties. Way too many drops."

Now, Rodgers defenders will likely say that's just a leader holding everyone accountable for their play. But it's also a leader separating himself from his teammates. In Aaron's world, HE was being accountable. The problem is no one else was.

This is the part where the Blob is compelled to say, "Kids, don't try this at home."

There are role models, see, and there are also reverse role models. Rodgers has become the latter. And so if you've got a kid who's his team's quarterback -- a leadership position like few others -- you say "Don't be like Aaron Rodgers." You say, "As quarterback and leader, when you lose you take the blame in public and hold your teammates accountable in private. You don't do what Aaron Rodgers does." 

Because, listen, Rodgers has been griping publicly about his young receivers all season, which is not likely to help their confidence. He should be mentoring them instead of hectoring them. But apparently that's not who he is.

Apparently, at almost 39, he really has become Walt Kowalski, a crotchety old man shaking his bony fist at those damn kids who keep dropping balls on his lawn and screwing up his stat line. And of course he's become Leon -- who in another Bud spot responds to "There's no 'I' in team" by saying "There ain’t no 'we' either."

Nor is there an "Aaron," it seems.

Today's lesson on how not to do it, kids.

Kanye gets his

 That was one weary refrain Kanye West (or Ye, as he's now rebranded himself) trotted out a couple of weeks ago, and he got the usual hell-yeahs from the usual suspects. Neo-Nazis. No-We're-Not-Fascists Quasi-Fascists. Other fringe righties who, even when they knew better, tried to justify what the man said because by God this is 'Merica and he has a right to say anything he pleases, and besides some of what he said was true. 

Yes, sir. Kanye/Ye sure does run with the hip crowd.

Because, listen, anti-Semitism, ancient as it is, never really dies, and it never really dies because there will always be plenty of  skeevy folks to defend it. And so here was Kanye/Ye invoking the same tired tropes about Jews (They're sneaky! They control everything! They steal our money!) a couple of weeks ago, and there, on a freeway overpass in L.A., was a bunch of  white dudes giving the Nazi salute above a banner that read KANYE IS RIGHT.

Only the best people, as they say.

Thankfully, there are still plenty of decent people in the world, and there are a lot more of them than the Kanye/Ye's. And so, one-by-one, they exercised their right to say what they please by dropping him like a hot rock from his various business deals. And the other day, NBA star Jaylen Brown and NFL star Aaron Donald announced they were severing their ties with Donda, the agency founded by Kanye/Ye.

Apparently anti-Semitism ain't their thing. Imagine that.

Of course, the neo-Nazi/Quasi-Fascist/fringe righty response to this is that it's all just  the self-righteous ganging up on poor Kanye/Ye. One black former journalist I once respected even said it was "the system at work" against him. Which veers perilously close to the stuff Kanye/Ye himself said.

It's a standard position for this crowd when one of theirs says something reprehensible, and it reveals their real attitude toward free speech, for all their championing of it. Free speech, see, means free speech for them. Exercise your own by clapping back, and it's, you know, persecution. It's the "woke mob" trying to "cancel" someone. It's, yes, "the system at work."

Ay-yi-yi. This country, I swear.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 7

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the Blob's Feature of the Unexpected of which critics have said "Gosh, I never expected THAT!", and also "Wait ... what?":

1. "Wait ... what?" (America, after the Bears went to Foxborough and didn't Bears it up, instead laying a 33-14 rump-roastin' on the Patriots)

2. "Gosh, I never expected THAT!" (Patriots fans, after their new favorite, Bailey "Frank Zappa" Zappe, threw a touchdown pass, then threw two picks and lost a fumble to help the Bears win)

3. "OK, so maybe he's not our new Tom Brady." (Also Patriots fans, sounding all mopey and disappointed)

4. In other news, the Indianapolis Colts!

5. Lost to the Titans again. Said "Matt Ryan is our quarterback, 'cause we paid a lot of money for him and he played in the Super Bowl once." A day later, said "Nah, dog, just kidding. This sixth-round dude, Sam Ehlinger, is our quarterback now."

6. "Wait ... what?" (Colts fans)

7. The Packers lost to the Commanders. The Buccaneers lost to the Panthers. The Jets won, the  Giants won, and the Seahawks, who also won, now lead the NFC West with a 4-3 record.

8. Oh, and Geno Smith now has thrown 11 touchdown passes against three picks, has an absurd completion rate of 73.5 percent, and has a passer rating of 107.7.

9. "Wait ... what?" (America, even Seahawks fans)

10. "Well, at least we saw THAT coming." (Also America, watching the Lions Lions it up again and the Browns Browns it up again)

Bad day at the old folks home

 Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers both lost yesterday, but the good news is, no tablets were harmed in the making of their latest humiliation. Brady didn't even scream at his offensive linemen like the Youth Sports Parent From Hell. 

Perhaps he's given up.

This is highly unlikely, of course, given that Brady is such an uber-competitor. But it was hard to deny it was a bad day at the old folks home. He and Rodgers came away from it looking longer in the tooth than usual, and heartily sick of the poop sandwich this season has so far been for both. 

Brady, after all, is 45 years old and his wife is leaving him and he's playing for a sub-.500 team that couldn't muster a touchdown against the dog-ass Carolina Panthers, who just traded their best player, Christian McCaffrey. Plus, Brady doesn't even have Gronk around anymore to make him laugh. Life must be a drag.

And Rodgers, who's two months away from his 39th birthday?

He threw a couple of touchdown passes that didn't mean a damn thing, because the Packers lost 23-21 to the dog-ass Washington Commanders. Rodgers had no running game whatsoever; the Packers rushed the ball just 12 times for 38 yards even though Aaron Jones and A.J. Dillon were both healthy. Also, all of his young receivers continue to not be named Davante Adams.

The game ended with Rodgers face down on the turf, having been the last man with the ball in a desperate attempt to rugby the thing into the end zone as the clock ran out. 

Remember that iconic photo of a bleeding and bowed Y.A. Tittle on his knees, helmetless, looking old and beaten?

Rodgers face down on the ground in Landover yesterday sort of  reminded you of that.

Later he said he wasn't worried, even though the Packers are, like Brady's Buccaneers, 3-4. You have to wonder if he actually believed it. You also have to wonder if, like Brady, he's lost the locker room, given how he publicly carped earlier about his receiving corps.

In any event, it sure doesn't look like either of them is having any fun right now. And just think, there are only 10 more games to go.

Oh, goody.

Hey, look! It's a World Series!

 So it'll be the Phillies against the Astros in the Fall Classic, and only one is supposed to be there. Which means the casual observer is sort of obligated to root for the Phillies, because the Astros are like reruns of "The Big Bang Theory": You've seen 'em all a million times, and the Sheldon territorial couch bits are getting stale.

See, this will be the fourth World Series in the last six years for the 'Stros, and how boring is that if you're not a deathless Astros fan? You've got your Altuve and your Bregman and your Yordan Alvarez and your requisite New Kid, Jose Pena, and then there's that whole cheating thing, which everyone says the Astros aren't into anymore.

Yeah, well ... maybe. Or so the cynics (the Blob, raising its hand) will always say.

Logic says the Astros should win this, because they won 106 games during the regular season and they've got all these guys who've been to the World Series so often it's like going to the 7-Eleven for a gallon of milk. Plus, they've got better pitching than the Phils. Which means you can see the Philly bats that have been sending baseballs on transatlantic flights in the playoffs falling silent.

Yeah, well ... maybe.

Me, I think the Phillies are just new enough to all this they'll keep mashing, oblivious to the fact it's not an August series with the Cubs. Hey, they finished third in their division, and now they're in the World Series. It's all gravy now, and has been for awhile.

So raise a glass to Bryce Harper and Rhys Hoskins and Kyle Schwarber and all the rest of 'em. May their bats be mighty and their balls, um, plentiful. And thanks to the Astros for sweeping the Yankees, which is always an enjoyable part of October baseball.

But that's where our gratitude ends, 'Stros. Sorry.

Parity, schmarity

 The NFL season entered its seventh week Thursday night, and for once the football didn't make you want to watch reruns of the "Big Bang Theory." Arizona beat New Orleans 42-34, Kyler Murray did some running-around Kyler Murray things, and Andy Dalton threw two pick sixes for comic relief.

What all that meant is the Cardinals are now 3-4 and last in the NFC West.

They're also, um, only a half game out of first.

Yes, boys and girls, welcome to the NFL for which its architects have always pined, where on any given Sunday any team can be as average as any other. Just look at the NFC West, where San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle are all tied at 3-3. Or how about the AFC South, where Tennessee (3-2) plays Indianapolis (3-2-1) for first place tomorrow?

Now there's a big-time clash for you.

After six weeks only one team in the league remains unbeaten, and it's a team (the Eagles) no one expected to be unbeaten. The Giants, whom no one expected much of , either, are 5-1. and the Dallas Cowboys are 4-2.

That makes the NFC East by far the best division in the NFL right now.

Elsewhere, for the most part, it's a festival of blah. Tampa Bay and Atlanta are tied for the lead in the NFC South at, you guessed it, 3-3. Same in the AFC North, where Pittsburgh and Cleveland, two not-very-good teams, are 2-4 but only a game out of first because Cincinnati and Baltimore are tied for first at (here we go again) 3-3.

The Buffalo Bills, meanwhile, are the class of the conference at 5-1. Kansas City, the Chargers and the Jets -- the Jets! -- are all 4-2.

"Look! Parity!" the NFL must be saying.

"'Parity' is just another word for 'cruddy football'!" the rest of us are saying.

Meanwhile, those arthritic former Dolphins who crack open the champagne every year when the last unbeaten falls have already got it on ice. And it's not even Halloween.

I don't know what they're thinking. But I have a pretty good idea.

Geez, guys. At least make it INTERESTING.

A rivalry resumed

 So Indiana and Kentucky are going to play each other again in basketball, and that is all about setting the buckets universe right. It's ridiculous, after all, that they've spent the last decade-plus ducking one another. It would be like Notre Dame and USC ducking each other in football, or Army and Navy, or Michigan and Ohio State.

Rivalries are the staff of life in college athletics. Without them, they're just another bloodless business proposition, like the NBA or NFL.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Aren't college athletics already a bloodless business proposition, like the NBA or NFL?"

Well ... yes. But stay with me here. 

My point is, without traditional rivalries, college football is just the Broncos vs. the Cardinals, and college hoops is Jazz-Nuggets for the tenth time this season. Rivalries give college athletics weight and texture, and is the only discernible difference anymore between them and the professional slog.

In college basketball, that means North Carolina-Duke. And it means Indiana-Kentucky, the only rivalry that approaches it. 

Why they stopped playing after 2011 frankly was stupid, with a bit of craven thrown in for good measure. 

They quit playing because of Watford For The Win, that magical night when Christian Watford hit The Shot II (the first Shot being Keith Smart's baseline J in New Orleans that won Indiana the 1987 national title) to upset the No. 1 Wildcats in Assembly Hall. Kentucky coach John Calipari apparently decided the Hall was bad juju after that, and Kentucky proposed the series be moved back to a neutral site, as it was when the two teams played in the old Hoosier Dome every year.

Indiana, on the other hand, wanted to keep the home-and-home intact. An impasse ensued, and the traditional December meeting was canceled.

"They scared!" Indiana fans said of Kentucky.

"THEY scared!" Kentucky fans said of Indiana. 

The Blob's position has always been that they were both right. Calipari was chicken because he didn't want to play in Assembly Hall every other year. Tom Crean was chicken because he didn't want to permanently play away from Assembly Hall. So, there you had it.

Two chickens. One dead rivalry.

Eleven years later, thankfully, it's back on again, or will be. Calipari announced at the SEC basketball media days an agreement has been reached in principle to resume the series in the 2025-26 season. A key piece in that is Indiana coach Mike Woodson, whose stated philosophy is that Indiana basketball ain't duckin' nobody anymore, and who also has a long-standing  relationship with Coach Cal.

That's not all, of course. Woodson, after all, played in this rivalry. He knows what it means. He knows how absurd it was that it wasn't happening anymore. Why let Duke and Carolina suck all the oxygen out of the traditional rivalry room?

"What's all this lyin' around s***?" one imagines Woodson saying, quoting Bluto from "Animal House." "We gonna play, or what?"

They're gonna play. 'Bout time.

Crazy people saying crazy things, Part Infinity

 Sometimes I still see Dale Earnhardt's devilish smirk, beneath that sandy cookie duster of his. This is one of those times.

See, NASCAR suspended Bubba Wallace for a race yesterday.

It did so because, during Sunday's race, Kyle Larson wrecked Bubba, after which Bubba dove down the track and wrecked Larson.

Afterward, a still-steamed Bubba crawled out of his car and went after Larson physically. Pushed him two or three times. Typical good-old-boy NASCAR stuff.

Therefore, most of us who know the sport and have been watching it for years shrugged, and agreed that the one-race suspension for wrecking Larson was probably appropriate. Then we sat back and hooted at the overreaction.

And of course there was an overreaction, this being 2022. and all. 

Folks who likely never saw a stock car race in their lives were jumping on the Magic Twitter Thingy to say Bubba should be THROWN OUT OF NASCAR for this.  They were saying McDonald's should DUMP HIM AS A SPONSOR, and even that he should be CHARGED WITH ASSAULT. 

This is where I see the Intimidator smirking.

In my mind I hear his famous line about people who said he played too rough out there: Tie a kerosene rag around your ankle so the fire ants don't crawl up and eat your candy ass. I hear Petty and Pearson and the Allisons and ol' Cale Yarborough chuckling and nodding. I dial up the end of the 1979 Daytona 500 again, speaking of the Allisons and Cale, and watch Cale and Donnie Allison wreck each other and climb out of their cars, and Bobby Allison stop his car to get in on the fun.

Punches were thrown. Donnie took off his helmet and tried to hit Cale with it. Cale even tried a half-assed karate kick.

None of them got thrown out of NASCAR for this. No charges were filed. No sponsors were lost.

Hell. Bobby and Cale are even in the NASCAR Hall of Fame now.

But that was 1979, and this is 2022. Rationality is out; hysteria is in. You'd like to think in this case at least part of the hysteria isn't because Bubba Wallace is black, but let's be real:.  Certain things only show up on certain people's radar when it's black folks behaving badly. And we all know why.

The guy who said Bubba should be kicked out of NASCAR, for instance, is a political commentator and author of, shall we say, a particular ideological bent. I doubt this person even knows what NASCAR stands for. He's likely never given it a single thought. Wonder why now?

Don't answer that. We already know the answer.

It's right there, three paragraphs above this one.

What needed saying

 Maybe it took someone whose skeletons are out and about to call a bully's bluff. Maybe it took a flawed and occasionally strange man to say what needed saying when no one else had the sack to do so.

Because what could Daniel Snyder. the mobster who runs the Washington Commanders, have on Jim Irsay that we all don't have?

Irsay's skeletons came out of the closet in the skinny hours of a March night eight years ago, when the cops pulled him over in Carmel and charged him with OWI.  No one but Irsay will ever know if this was a cry for help, but it certainly functioned as one.

Fast forward all these years later, and here was Irsay, flaws a matter of public record now, telling the world there was merit to removing Snyder as an NFL owner. You didn't hear Jerry Jones saying that -- tough old Jerry, telling Robert Kraft "don't f*** with me" after voting no to Roger Goodell's new contract, the only owner to do so. 

Well. Tough ol' Jerry hid under his bed when the story broke that Snyder allegedly had hired private investigators to dig up dirt on fellow owners, including Jones himself. Jerry's response was heck, no, he and Snyder didn't have any issues between them. They were still best buds.

Kraft didn't say anything either, in the wake of the latest allegations about Snyder. Nor did any other owner. Perhaps that was decorum; more likely they were all wondering if Snyder did hire snoops, and who they were snooping on, and what they might find.

Everyone's got secrets, after all. Everyone's got skeletons.

Only Irsay, who faced his down eight years ago, decided "To hell with this guy and his threats. Bring it on."

Likely that's not how he phrased it, of course, but that's the substantive gist. Snyder's mouthpieces immediately fired back, calling Irsay's  comments "highly inappropriate, but not surprising", an apparent shot at Irsay's eccentricities. Eh, guy's a kook, what do you expect? He doesn't speak for anyone but his own kooky self.

Except he does, undoubtedly. He's just the only one who'll actually speak.

"The imperfect man pitched a perfect game," New York sportswriter Dick Young once wrote, on the occasion of Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series.

Well. This time, the imperfect man spoke the perfect words.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 6

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the tantrum-y Blob feature of which critics have said "Stop that tantrum-ing this instant!", and also "If you don't stop that tantrum-ing, I'll hold my breath until I turn blue!":

1. It's Tuesday morning and Tantrum-y Tom Brady is still yelling at his offensive line.

2. "You're all worthless and weak!" Tantrum-y Tom is saying.

3. "A PLEDGE PIN on your uniform??" he's also saying.

4. "Now you just sit there and think about what you've done. I've got another walk-through to skip or whatever other stupid crap this job entails,"  he also said.

5. Meanwhile, Aaron Rodgers!

6. Did not get tantrum-y. He just looked sad because the Packers got turned into grated gouda in Lambeau by the Jets. The Jets, for God's sake!

7. "Hey, we're 4-2 now, BUDDY." (The Jets)

8. "Yeah, and we're 5-1!" (The Giants)

9. "And we're STILL UNDEFEATED and even beat the greatest football team in the entire eons-long history of football, the Dallas Cowboys!" (The Eagles)

10. "Yeah, well ... WE needed a last-gasp touchdown to beat Jacksonville at home, but we DID beat them, and Matt Ryan did not get sacked once in 58 pass plays. So neener-neener-neener, haters." (The Colts)

Chaos! Shenanigans! Wonderfulness!

 That was one fun Saturday in college football, and Alabama fans, stop that blubbering. Y'all are part of a larger tapestry here, and besides, haven't you won enough?

The larger tapestry celebrates college football in general, and last weekend it was predominantly orange. Tennessee got Nick Saban's mighty legions down there in Neyland Stadium, and Hendon Hooker threw five touchdown passes, and the Vols strapped half-a-hundred on the Crimson Tide in a 52-49 win. 

It was the first time Tennessee had beat Alabama in 22 meetings, and that they did in the best game of the season so far only added to the wonderfulness. The students stormed the field, chaos reigned, and then shenanigans happened when they tore down the goalposts and paraded them in pieces through the streets of Knoxville.

Meanwhile, No. 7 USC was beaten for the first time this season, losing to Utah. TCU upended No. 8 Oklahoma State in two overtimes. Four other lower ranked teams beat their presumed betters.

Oh, yeah. And 1-4 Stanford beat Notre Dame 16-14 in a game that echoed down through the mighty halls of Irish lore for as long as it took the Domers to get back to their tailgates and start slamming beers again.

This was a bad Stanford team the Irish lost to, and there was no papering over that. The Cardinal hadn't beaten an FBS school in over a year. It's only win this fall, going into Saturday, was against Colgate in the season opener. And it came to South Bend with the 111th-ranked scoring defense in the nation, giving up a generous 32.6 points per game.

And yet Notre Dame, which had won three straight seemed to have found an identity with its three-headed ground-and-pound running game, managed just 14 points, all in the second half. In Notre Dame Stadium.

Which doesn't seem to intimidate anyone anymore, given that the Irish also lost to Marshall from the Sun Belt Conference there this season. And the next week, they escaped 24-17 against a Cal team that's 3-3 and seventh in the Pac-12 right now.

Notre Dame is also 3-3, with no indication it's going to get a lot better this fall. As Marcus Freeman is discovering, the learning curve is steep in the higher elevations of college football.

But as Tennessee could tell the Irish right now, the view from there is stupendous. And very orange.

Armed, and thus dangerous

 So the 111-win Dodgers are done, brushed aside by a team that finished 22 games in its wake. And defending World Series champion Atlanta is outta here, too, shown the gate by a Phillies team that finished third in its division, 14 games adrift of the Braves and Mets in the NL East.

This means it's an 89-win team (San Diego) against an 87-win (Philadelphia) in the NLCS, and ain't October glorious? October is the month when the maples blaze and the baseball verities come out to play. It's the month when the landscape becomes an artist's rendering, and In a short series, pitching is everything.

Because, look, San Diego won because it had better pitching, having gone out and gotten maybe the best closer in baseball (Josh Hader) to go with a dependable collection of starters. And the Phillies won because, yes, they can pound baseballs into misshapen lumps, but also because they had Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler and a bunch of other guys throwing seeds from the hill.

So, yeah, arms are dangerous when the nights turn cool and the playoffs heat up. And you know what confirms this, other than the Padres and the Phillies?

The fact it's Monday morning and the New York Yankees are still breathing.

Down 2-1 in the best-of-five ALDS to the young Cleveland Guardians (who, yes, have some pitching, too), the Yanks sent Gerrit Cole out there to save their season, and Gerrit Cole did Gerrit Cole things to do just that. He gave the pinstripes seven peerless innings last night, scattering six hits and striking out eight, and that gave his wounded, tattered bullpen a rest. It also allowed the Yankees to force a game five with a 4-2 win.

That brings it all down to tonight in New York, when the Guardians send Aaron Civale to the hill and the Yankees start Jameson Taillon, who took the loss in game five. 

May the best appendage win.

A man and his brain, revisited

 Herschel Walker showed up for his debate with Raphael Warnock last night brandishing a police badge he apparently got from a box of Lucky Charms, and again what I mostly felt was pity. I think he’s not a well man, and he’s being used by the MAGA party as nothing more than a compliant vote to Own The Dems in Congress.

That he is profoundly unqualified for the job he seeks is obvious to anyone who listens to him for five seconds. But he’s a Trumpian true believer,  so who cares? That’s all that matters anymore to the morally bankrupt remnants of what used to be called the Republican Party.

I find all of this unutterably sad, as I’ve said before. And little has changed since I wrote the following back in May:

http://andonethingmore.blogspot.com/2022/05/a-man-and-his-brain.html?m=0

Got nothing more to add to this. Except being aghast that Georgia may well send him to Washington.

Good God almighty.

Thursday Night Foofball, Part Deux

 Two right decisions in a row ought to qualify a man for seer status in this day and age, but in the Blob's case all the preceding wrong decisions likely make that impossible. A track record is a stubborn thing to erase.

So I won't gloat too much about seeing the matchup for Thursday Night Football this week, and thinking "Movie night."

 Bears vs. Commanders was an easy call, after all, just as Broncos-Colts was a week ago. I figured those games would be dogs, and both were. A whole kennel full, it turned out.

So last night I dialed up a flick, and the Bears and Commanders dialed up whatever that mess was. Football, I believe they called it.

In the end the Commanders "won", 12-7, as Carson Wentz came out on top in the Do Not Try This At Home quarterbacking duel with Justin Fields. Wentz completed 12-of-22 passes for a scintillating 99 yards and no touchdowns; Fields ran for 88 yards, got sacked five times, got smacked a bunch of other times, and threw one gorgeous 40-yard touchdown pass to Dante Pettis.

Aside from that, it was the festival of "meh" most of us thought it would be. Washington led 3-0 at halftime and didn't score again until the fourth quarter. The two teams got to the red zone all of five times between them; the Bears failed to score all three times they visited, and the Commanders were 1-for-2. Scaling Everest was easier than getting inside the other guy's 20 for these two.

Oh, and also, they were a combined 7 of 24 on third down.  

Oh, and Wentz and Fields averaged 4.1 yards per pass between them. 

Air Coryell (for those who remember the Dan Fouts Chargers) this was not. Hell, it was barely Air 1869, judging by the numbers and the comments of the eyewitnesses.

"My God, this game is really trying to be worse than last week," Robert Griffin III tweeted.

"Anybody know if Amazon Prime can deliver a same-day touchdown?" he also tweeted.

"It's so sick that they make us watch this with the rest of America. Let us be sad in peace," BearsNation tweeted.

And from Old Hoss Radbourn, one of the Blob's favorite Magic Twitter Thingy follows: "Which version of Commanders-Bears would you rather watch? A) this football game B) 5 captains of British ships of the line, armed with 50 rounds of powder and shot and several stout blades, marooned in Nova Scotia, with a soggy ursine army following them. It is so cold."

The Blob's take: At least "B" might make for a good movie.

The highlight of the night, apparently, was when Al Michaels, no doubt bored to distraction, said on the air that Daniel Snyder -- Commanders owner and de facto Corleone -- should step aside for the good of the game. This after ESPN rolled out an investigative piece that portrayed Snyder as a mobster bagging to associates that he's got dirt on commissioner Roger Goodell and the other owners and he'd "blow up" any of them who tried to pry his franchise away.

Note to Goodell: Beware of horse heads turning up in your bed.

As for the rest of America ...

Beware of Thursday nights.

A criminal act. Or not.

 You learn to keep your head on a swivel, when you're among large men of an athletic disposition. It's Rule One for journos who roam football sidelines or sit courtside at basketball games or otherwise hang as close to the action as possible.

So I'm of two minds about the ESPN photographer who walked into Raiders wide receiver Davante Adams as he came off the field Monday night.

One is the keep-your-head-on-a-swivel thing.

The other is keep your head, period, because Adams shoved Photographer Dude out of the way, and Photographer Dude went down, and now he's saying he sustained a headache, a possible minor concussion and whiplash.

(Which, I'm sorry, unavoidably reminds me of the classic courtroom meme of the guy involved in a minor fender-bender showing up in court wearing a huge neck brace. Just how my mind works.)

Anyway, all of that has resulted in Adams being charged with misdemeanor assault. And as much as I reflexively side with my journalistic brethren in these matters, I'm having a hard time not seeing that as a stretch.

This is because I've seen the incident from two different angles, and it looks like two different things. In one, the photographer stumbles into Adams path and Adams gives him a legitimate full-on shove. In the other, taken from behind Adams, the photographer walks into Adams, who stops briefly and pushes him away. It happens so quickly you don't even see the push.

Is that assault?

I don't know. I 'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV. But it sure as Jack McCoy doesn't look like assault to me. It looks like the sort of schoolyard shove that happens every day on every playground in America.

This one wasn't, of course, which is why the league should hand Adams a lengthy sitdown,  and take some of his money while they're at it. And the photographer should file a civil suit on top of that, because you need to answer for it with your wallet if you decide to go shoving photogs and/or reporters around.

But a criminal act?

Opinions vary. But I'm not seein' it.

Timeout for baseball

 We're midstream in October now, the month when nature gets drunk on color and throws its entire dazzling palette at us. It's a glorious month, NFL officiating notwithstanding. And part of why it's glorious is October baseball, which somehow always finds a way to redeem everything.

And so in a world of phantom penalties and football players shoving photographers and the general insanity of a dismaying chunk of our citizenry, baseball offered us a needed timeout yesterday. It offered us Yordan Alvarez.

Who brought the Astros back from near death in the first game of their ALDS series with Seattle yesterday, and did it in a way that makes you remember why baseball does drama better than almost any other sport. Down 7-3 to the Mariners entering the eighth inning, the 'Stros got back within two on Alex Bregman's two-run swat, then put two more runners on in the bottom of the ninth.

After which Alvarez launched a majestic 438-foot rocket to snatch the W, 8-7.

Here's how it looked, boys and girls. Enjoy.

Another link departs

 They're all stepping off the mortal coil now, because time is remorseless, surprise, surprise.   Lenny and Stubby and big Cal Purinton, all gone in the last year. And now George Drysdale, the man who saw it all.

 He died Sunday at 95, a full measure of years, on the day before the Fort Wayne Komets opened training camp for their 71st season. This was altogether neat, because George had been around for all 70 of the previous ones. He played on the first Komets team and scored the first goal in franchise history, and then he stuck around and became something even more valuable.

He became our link to an origin story that had become old-timey and sepia-toned, as rascally time did its thing. It was a team photo looking out at you from a dead time until George, by his very presence, gave it life and color and context. He was the living, breathing conduit between the then and the now, the guy who could tell you what it was like back at the beginning.

As such, he was also a hell of an ambassador for Komet hockey, as it added weight and narrative and permanence.

For years and years it was George who greeted you when walked into the pressbox on game night, an incorrigibly sunny soul and constant reminder that what you were there to cover was an institution that demanded your respect. It's easy to take that for granted sometimes, after 71 years. You come to think of Komet hockey as something that's always been there and always will be, because (except for one brief month 30-some years ago) it always has been. 

Well, it hasn't been, and George was your reminder of that. He'd been in Fort Wayne as long as the Komets had, but before he came here he was just a kid from Toronto playing for the Chatham (Ont.) Maroons of the IHL, where he'd been an all-star. In Fort Wayne that first season, he wore the captain's C, and, on Oct. 28, 1952, he scored that first goal in a loss to Grand Rapids.

Seventy years to the day from then, the 71st edition of the Fort Wayne Komets will play the Savannah Ghost Pirates in the same Allen County War Memorial Coliseum where George Drysdale, the kid from Toronto, skated all those years ago. Would have been nice to hear him reminisce about that anniversary, to repeat the story for the umpteenth time. 

But umpteen-and-one will never happen now, sadly. And when it doesn't, we'll look around, and feel the loss, and it will be our loss, too.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 5

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the two-hand-touch, tag-you're-it, soft-as-butter Blob feature of which critics have said "You soft as butter, son!", and also "Now, don't you hurt anybody making that tackle, Little Lord Pantywaist!":

1. "OH MY GOD! THEY'VE TACKLED TOM BRADY!" (Football viewers)

2. "OH MY GOD! THAT BIG GUY CRAWLED OVER DEREK CARR TO GET TO A LOOSE BALL!" (Also football viewers)

3. "The hell is THIS?" (Actual football viewers, with the satirical filter removed, watching two guys who were just, you know, playing football, getting flagged for completely bogus roughing-the-passer calls)

4.  And now, this helpful PSA from the NFL explaining the rules about tackling quarterbacks. 

5. Click! (The sound of actual football viewers subsequently turning off the NFL in response)

6. Meanwhile, from London, here's some video of Aaron Rodgers roughing the tablet in a loss to the Giants.

7. Who are 4-1 now, and the Jets are 3-2, and God is in his heaven, saying "Hey, guys, watch this! Imma build up all these New Yorkers hopes and then make both teams collapse in multiple cruel ways down the stretch! Hee-hee!"

8. "And that goes for the Cowboys and Eagles, too!" (Also God)

9. Meanwhile, Frank Zappa!

10. Oops, make that "Bailey Zappe". Who was 17-of-21 for 188 yards and a touchdown and didn't hurt the Patriots, who smothered the Lions 29-0 in Foxborough. After which Zappe did not say, but could have, "Enough with the Frank Zappa jokes already!"

Searching for a rivalry game

 Was all revved up Saturday to watch what they used to call the Red River Shootout, but that was before a pile of gun-toting yahoos started shooting schoolkids and such down there in Texas (because, Texas), and suddenly "shootout" sounded in poor taste.

In any case, it was Texas vs. Oklahoma, one of those blessed college football rivalries with lore hanging off it like tinsel. And then the Longhorns and Sooners hauled off and ruined it.

The Longhorns because they were just too good. The Sooners because they've suddenly become plain lousy.

So it wound up Texas 49, Oklahoma 0, and, guys, this NOT how you do rivalry games. Rivalry games are supposed to be all bared teeth and growls and hand-to-hand combat. They're supposed to be two teams punching each other until they can't lift their arms. With certain exceptions -- like the Old Oaken Bucket game a lot of years when Purdue was semi-good and Indiana was Indiana -- they're supposed to be, you know, competitive.

This?

This wasn't Texas vs. Oklahoma. This was Texas vs. Rice.

And so those of us who love our college football must trudge on in pursuit of a rivalry game worth its name, and thankfully there are a few on the horizon that might have potential. Right now, for instance, I'm thinking of a couple in particular.

One would be USC vs. UCLA, the ultimate crosstown grudge match.

Once upon a time it was O.J. Simpson vs. Gary Beban, John McKay vs. Tommy Prothro, No. 1 vs. No. 2. And then it wasn't. 

UCLA won eight straight in the 1990s, and then USC had a stretch where it won 12 of 13, and now it's going back and forth again. But quite a few years have passed since the annual meeting had any sort of national relevance.

It might this year. Halfway through the season, both teams are 6-0; USC is ranked 7th and UCLA 11th. By the time they meet on Nov. 19, both could be ranked in the top ten.

A week later, Michigan plays Ohio State. 

Like USC and UCLA, both are 6-0. Ohio State is No. 2. Michigan is No. 5. No one else in the Big Ten seems anywhere near as good.

In other words, welcome to the Wayback Machine.

It's the early 1970s again. It's Bo vs. Woody again. The only difference is, in 2022  we won't get three hours plus of Wolverine Walt and Buckeye Billy endlessly running the same off-tackle play -- which made UM-OSU, for all its national import, one of the most boring rivalry games in America every fall.

Well. Not this year. 

He said, with fingers crossed.

The Rules*

 (*As apparently imagined by NFL officials in regards to Tom Brady -- or, in proper English, TOM FREAKING BRADY)

By now, all of America has seen it. 

Wait. You haven't?

OK, here it is, then. What an NFL referee ruled was a personal foul for roughing the passer yesterday in the Atlanta-Tampa Bay game, during which hands were laid on TOM FREAKING BRADY in a manner sane people simply would call "a tackle."

Nope. Referee Jerome Boger flagged the Falcons Grady Jarrett, explaining later that Jarrett "grabbed the quarterback while he was still in the pocket and unnecessarily throwing him to the ground."

This sounds exactly like the definition of a sack, at least to me. But what do I know

In any case, Boger denied he flagged Jarrett because the league had told him to watch hits on quarterbacks after Tua Tagovailoa's two concussions in four days last week. He also denied he dropped the laundry because it was Brady.

Well, conspiracy kooks like myself ain't buyin' THOSE groceries. Which is where The Rules* come in.

The Blob, see, has secretly obtained a super-secret copy of the super-secret Rules, because we're a full-service Blob and that's what we do here. We're passing them along because we wouldn't want you to think the Brady call was just another awful NFL call, of which there are many these days and why you should never, ever, ever bet on NFL games.

Anyway ... here they are:

The Rules

1. Defenders must not wrap up, grab or otherwise employ even normally legal means to tackle TOM FREAKING BRADY. What are you, animals?

2. If a defender causes any part of TOM FREAKING BRADY to touch the ground, other than the soles of his feet, it's an automatic first down and the defender will be shunned by his friends and family for all eternity.

3. Rather, defenders who wish to approach TOM FREAKING BRADY in the pocket must do so with the deference they would accord anyone of such advanced years. A gentle pat on the shoulder is acceptable, as is a friendly "I believe I got you, sir." (Pro tip: Avoid the more pejorative "old-timer.")

4. Also, you may simply pull TOM FREAKING BRADY'S flag. Excessive jostling while doing so, however, will not be permitted.

5. Lastly, defenders must always be aware of TOM FREAKING BRADY'S value to the league. This also applies to Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, Justin Herbert and Joe Burrow, among others. Never forget that they're the stars, and you're just a faceless cog in a mighty financial colossus. 

You animals, you.

Punch drunk

 So, remember all those times when you and your sibling got into it over something really dumb (because that's what siblings do), and your mom finally said "That's enough! Can't you two find something else to argue about?"?

Well ... these days I feel like Mom every time I enter the wonderfully stupid world of social media.

Know what folks are arguing about these days on the Magic Twitter Thingy and Instablab and TikGram?

Whether Draymond Green sucker-punched teammate Jordan Poole in practice the other day, or if he just regular-punched him.

If you've seen the leaked video -- and the "leaked" part has become a thing, too, because of course it has -- you see Draymond and Poole standing around several feet apart, and then Draymond walks over to Poole and gets in his grill, and then Poole pushes him away.

After which Draymond decks him with a single right cross.

Some people are saying it was a sucker punch, because who expects a simple jawing session to escalate to Ali-Frazier? 

Others are saying it can't be a sucker punch, because Poole shoved Green first.

Still others are saying this is a Very Serious Matter that NBA commissioner Adam Silver will now Have To Deal With; yet MORE others are saying whoever in the Warriors organization leaked the video should be fired immediately, because that's the real issue here.

The Blob's take is it's 2022, and everything gets leaked now, so get over it. Also, it's not like it's the first time a teammate has punched another teammate, as Warriors coach Steve Kerr -- once famously punched by Michael Jordan back before everything was a thing -- well knows. Also, Draymond Green is a dick.

That said, he and Poole have probably already kissed and made up. And if they haven't, this whole business could be easily handled by Kerr calling both players into his office and saying, "Guys, don't do that s*** again. Now kiss and make up."

After which, stupid social media will begin a new debate: Did Green and Poole really make up? Is there a serious rift there? Could this whole deal DIVIDE THE LOCKER ROOM??

Sigh.

Thursday Night Foofball

 I watched a movie last night, rather than Thursday Night Football.

This was not a conscious boycott on my part, even though I think making NFL teams play two games in four days amounts to workforce abuse. Even though a couple of weeks ago it became Thursday Night Brain Trauma when Tua Tagovailoa was reduced to a twitching mass of synapses on national TV.

I watched a movie last night because the Colts were playing the Broncos, and I guessed it would be awful football. This is because neither team can get out of its own way right now. Also the coaching matchup, Frank Reich vs. Nathaniel Hackett, was not exactly Shula vs. Lombardi.

Well, I was wrong.

Turns out it wasn't awful football. It was supremely awful football.

Kept seeing social media posts from people about just how supremely awful it was, and all I could think was, "Then why are you still watching?" In the end, the Colts "won" 12-9, with neither team scoring a touchdown. It even went overtime to enhance either the viewing experience or the cruelty, it's hard to say which. 

Me?

I was watching "Elysium," a "meh" dystopian action flick with Matt Damon and Jodi Foster playing against type as an evil fascist bureaucrat (She really nailed it). The film itself wasn't all that good, but at least Matt Damon didn't go for it on fourth down from the 5 in OT instead of kicking the chippie to tie it.

It was the Broncos' Hackett who did that, unaccountably dialing up a pass play on fourth-and-a-foot. Russell Wilson of course threw an incompletion, and the Broncos left with an L instead of a T-for-tie.

This morning I looked at the stats, and they were still giving off a stench. Between them, the two teams went 0-for-6 in the red zone. They were a combined 6-of-31 on third down. Wilson threw two picks and was sacked four times; Matt Ryan threw two picks and was sacked six times.

Throw in 15 penalties between them, and this was Thursday Night Foofball at its finest.

It was two really bad football teams going at it under the Thursday night lights, and making America wish it could have turned the lights off. One of those teams (the Colts) is somehow 2-2-1 now, and, because it plays in the spectacularly underwhelming AFC South, might somehow jack around and make the playoffs. 

Me? 

If that happens, I might opt for another movie instead. 

"Blazing Saddles" is on one of my streaming feeds right now. At least with Gabby Johnson, I'd get some authentic frontier gibberish.

Half a loaf

 The baseball regular season is officially over, and faithful Blobophile(s) know what that means.

"No!" you're saying. "Not another post about your stupid Pira-"

Ha! Yes! Another post about my stupid Pirates!

Who did NOT win the Battle For The Cellar this season, but only tied for it. After 162 games, my Cruds were forced to sublet the bottom of the barrel to the equally cruddy Reds, who were four games clear of last place in the NL Central a couple of weeks ago before collapsing down the stretch.

Or, "collapsing more than they'd already collapsed," to be more accurate.

So, both the Cruds and the co-Cruds finished 62-100, and I guess half a loaf is better than none. It's the second season in a row the Cruds have lost 100 or more games, something not even their co-Cruds can say. Unfortunately, this will probably have zero impact on the Cruds light-running cheapo ownership, which now will have something of an out.

"Hey, we only SHARED last place!" the Blob imagines principal owner Bob Nutting saying. "Our 20-year plan to be only partly instead of completely a joke is WORKING! And look how pretty our ballpark is!"

Yeesh. Please, Bob, end this nightmare. Sell.

Today in stupid (and vile) stuff

 And now a one-time-only-but-who-knows Blob feature, My Country 'Tis Of WTH, in which we highlight the weird and mindlessly cruel doings that make America the home for the mentally unhinged we know and love, God bless it.

Let's start at the Santa Clara, Calif., Police Department, shall we?

Where, Tuesday afternoon, the goofball who ran out on the field during the Monday night NFL game between the Rams and the 49ers, waving flare emitting pink smoke, filed a police report against Rams linebacker Bobby Wagner. This is because, after the goofball eluded security, Wagner came off the sidelines and introduced him to the NFL's concussion protocols.

The goofball is now claiming Wagner assaulted him.

The rest of us are simply saying this: "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

Also, here's a live look at the police officer who filed the report. 

Less hilarious, and considerably more disgusting, is what's happening in the domain of the il Duce of Florida, Ron DeSantis. Among other oppressive edicts, the high school athletic association in il Duce's domain is now requiring girls who want to play high school sports to answer five questions about, um, their menstrual cycles.

The Blob's first thought about this is there are some sickos in the Florida High School Athletic Association who have an unhealthy fascination with the menstrual cycles of teenage girls.

My second is there are a lot of folks sick in their souls in il Duce's domain, starting with il Duce himself.

DeSantis, after all, is the one who pushed through a law that bans transgender youth from participating in high school sports. That's what's led to the FHSAA's over-the-line questionnaire, because oh, my God, what if those sneaky transgenders try to RUIN GIRLS SPORTS with their sneaky transgender ways?

As someone who has friends with transgender kids, I find this beyond just disgusting. I find it damn near criminal in its cruelty for cruelty's sake. Considering there are so few transgender athletes out there, it's a solution in search of a problem that amounts to simple  fear and loathing of those Not Like Us.

I mean, what's next? Making transgenders wear a cloth "T" on their clothing?

This is of course an exaggeration to make a point, but not that much of an exaggeration. The point is there's a whole segment of America out there that regards transgenders as less than human. And we all know what a dark path proceeds from that.

In Florida, it's leading to questions that violate not only privacy but a young girl's sense of self. If I were a girls coach, I would instruct all my athletes to scrawl "NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS" across the five offending questions. Then I'd tell my school administrators, sorry, guess we won't have girls sports anymore. 

Thankfully, this sort of resistance is already happening, of a fashion. Parents and doctors in Florida are raising unshirted hell, and the Blob imagines enough of them refusing to cooperate that it will render the FHSAA's edict unenforceable.

One can only hope. 

A plattah that mattahs. Or doesn't.

 Or to put it another way: When is a record not a record?

This because Aaron Judge hit No. 62 last night, and now Roger Maris and everyone who ever played in the American League before is in his rearview. He's the single-season home run king of the AL, and you're not.

But he's still only No. 7 on the alltime MLB list. No matter how fervently some are trying to rewrite history this morning.

The sticking point for these folks, as always, is the Steroids Era, when MLB secreted more juice than a ripe peach. Back when  Barry Bonds was hitting 73 home runs (the actual record) and Mark McGwire 70 and Sammy Sosa 66, the majors were crawling with PEDs because the majors had no coherent policy about them. And so baseballs kept artificially jumping out of ballparks.

Because of that, the endless debate is on again. Do we count Steroids Era records? Or should we bring back the asterisk and affix it to Bonds, to McGwire, to Sosa?

The Blob says that's absurd. And here's why.

It's because Bonds and McGwire and Sosa and the numbers they put up are the products of their time, just as Aaron Judge's 62 dingers is the product of its time. The latter happened in an era when everyone is swinging for the fences on every pitch; the former in an era when a good portion of the majors was juicing on some sort of high-octane chemistry.

If Bonds and McGwire and Sosa and their contemporaries were artificially muscling up, so were the pitchers throwing to them. And PEDs didn't help them make contact with the BBs being flung by those supercharged arms. It only ensured the ball would travel farther when they did.

Everything is what it is. Babe Ruth, the guy everyone once chased, hit 60 home runs in an era when he never had to play at night and never had to play against blacks. Maris eclipsed the Babe because MLB had expanded the season from 154 to 162 games, and Maris swatted No. 61 in game number 162.

Baseball commissioner Ford Frick wanted a notation acknowledging that (not an asterisk, despite the mythology) placed in the record book. Folks were outraged, and should have been.

Not so, at least in some quarters, about judging Judge the "real" home run champion.

He's not. Just as the Babe was not, once Maris sent No. 61 on its way.

A matter of trust

 I don't know what happens now at Huntington University, but I do know the folks there have some explaining to do. You turn a portion of your student body over to a manipulative charlatan, there will be questions.

If you haven't read about former women's distance and cross country coach Nick Johnson and how he played destructive head games with some of his athletes, you need to read this. It's the result of months of dogged reporting and exemplary work by my friend David Woods of the Indianapolis Star, and it's not pleasant reading.

It's a sordid tale of sexual exploitation and Lance Armstrong-esque coercion of runners to ingest likely PEDs, told  by former runners who have come forward with those accusations.  Astoundingly, the runners say Johnson's wife, Lauren, knew about her husband's intimate relationships with some of his runners, and she backed his play, saying he had a "sexual addiction."

And yet, amazingly, Huntington made Lauren Johnson the new head coach after firing her husband. I don't imagine that will stand now, but how could Huntington officials have elevated her to begin with, unless they just didn’t care about a situation of which some of their athletes had made them aware?

Because this is the country we live in now, I can already hear the MeToo backlash brigade warming up: I feel sorry for these women, but why didn't they just say no? If they didn't want to have sex with this coach, why did they? Why didn't they refuse to take the illicit (or at best unfamiliar) drugs he pushed on them?

The answer isn't a simple one, admittedly. But it goes to the dynamic between coach -- especially a charismatic one -- and athlete, a dynamic built almost entirely on trust. You do what your coach tells you to do because you trust him or her, and you trust him or her because that's what's been pounded into you since the day you popped out of the womb.

Good coaches understand that, and will never exploit that trust. Coaches without scruples or conscience will use that trust, and the emotional bond that comes with it, to serve their own corrupt ends.

That two of the women in Woods' story -- Hannah Stoffel and Emma Wilson -- stuck with the program until 2020 and 2021, respectively, indicates just how powerful that trust is, and how hard it is to break it. Especially when the coach in question had built their program  into the sort of national powerhouse a school can use as a recruiting tool.

The nation's fastest high school miler, after all, de-committed from Colorado to Huntington this summer, largely because Lauren Johnson had taken her under her wing. How big a get was that, for an NAIA school like Huntington, to land Addy Wiley?

Hard to say what Wiley does now, in the wake of this bombshell. But Stoffel and Wilson both say their individual national championships, and Huntington's team championship in 2020, should be wiped off the books.

As for the university, it finally fired Nick Johnson not for anything their own athletes had accused him of doing at HU, but for a felony arrest in December 2020 after Johnson, posing as a University of Oregon recruiter, spirited a high school athlete off to Oregon for a weekend in which he had sex with her.

Then they put Johnson's wife, who’s culpable in this, too, in charge of the HU program. Which pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would still have some contact with Huntington athletes. So ...

So, if you're the parent of a gifted athlete, how do you trust anyone at Huntington now, let alone its coaches? Because it does all come back to trust, ultimately.

Trust in coaches. Trust in administrators. Trust in the Christian values Huntington University officials claim as bedrock principles, and how diligent they will be in making sure those principles are not betrayed.

As it sure appears they have been.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 4

And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the Blob feature that champions frontier justice, and of which critics have said "That's not justice! That's just MEAN!", and also "You ain't no Bill Hickok! I knowed Bill Hickok, and you ain't him!":

1. "Look, Hiram, Bobby Wagner just laid out the Olympic torchbearer! That's just MEAN!" (America, watching the Rams linebacker go all Mike Curtis on some fool running around the football field last night with a pink smoke flare)

2. "Hey, look! Bobby Wagner just went all me!" (Mike Curtis in the great beyond, watching with delight as Wagner laid out the fool the way Curtis once laid out a fan who got on the field during a Colts-Jets game)

3. "Does Wagner get credit for a tackle there? 'Cause he should get credit for a tackle there." (Some fantasy team owner who has Wagner on his roster)

4.  Meanwhile, the Bears!

5. Lost again. Let Daniel Jones run for two touchdowns, for God's sake. The usual.

6. "Daniel Jones? Hell, I could tackle that guy!" (Some Bears fan, who undoubtedly couldn't)

7. "Gee, I wish I could do that. And I bet I could if I WEREN'T SO BLEEP-DAMN OLD!" (Tom Brady, watching Patrick Mahomes do Patrick Mahomes things)

8. "Omigod, we almost lost to FRANK ZAPPA!" (Packers fans, watching Patriots third-string quarterback Bailey Zappe make the Pack go overtime to beat undermanned New England in Lambeau)

9. "Omigod, we almost lost to FRANK ZAPPA!" (Aaron Rodgers)

10. "Hey, remember that other quarterback we had, Dak What's-His-Face? Whatever happened to that guy, anyway?" (Cowboys fans, watching backup Cooper Rush win again)

Relic-fest in Indy

 Watched Patrick Mahomes perform some magic tricks last night on the teevee, a few hours after watching Josh Allen perform some in Baltimore. In Philadelphia, meanwhile, Jalen Hurts kept the Eagles unbeaten, and in Houston the Chargers bounced back behind Justin Herbert, and in Cincinnati, on Thursday night, the Bengals looked more like the Bengals again behind Joe "Cool" Burrow.

It all left me wondering why the Indianapolis Colts can't have nice things like this.

The Horsies lost again yesterday to the Titans, and the only people who didn't see that coming weren't fully conscious. Being gifted a W by the uncharacteristically charitable Chiefs last week can't obscure the fact this is a bad football team. All it did was provide some camouflage for the easily fooled.

In this one, the Titans piled up a 24-3 lead and then coasted home, as the Colts tried and failed again behind 57-year-old Matt Ryan. (And, yes, I know he's only 38). Ryan's numbers looked good on paper -- 27-of-37, 356 yards, two touchdowns -- but he was sacked three more times and fumbled twice more, his eighth and ninth in four games. 

It got me thinking again why the Colts keep trolling rest homes for their quarterbacks while so many others are drafting guys with a spring in their step.

It's been a regular relic-fest in Indy since Andrew Luck decided he got tired of getting hit with 2x4s, and you've got to wonder why. First the Colts went with Philip Rivers in his auld-lang-syne season; now it's Ryan in his sunset years. In between they had Carson Wentz, a younger guy who just plays old.

Meanwhile Mahomes and Allen and Burrow and Lamar Jackson are running around out there making plays with both their arms and feet. Heck, even Daniel Jones ran for two scores for the Giants Sunday, although it was only against the Bears.

The obvious question here is when are the Colts gonna go after their own springy guy at QB.

The obvious answer, maybe, is they've always been just good enough not to get a crack at one of those in the draft, although some folks would like to see Sam Ehlinger get a shot after he lit it up in the preseason. This doesn't mean they couldn't trade up, of course. They just haven't seemed interested.

Instead, they've gone the Rent A Senior Citizen And Also Carson Wentz route, for reasons that make sense only to them. It makes you wonder when Jim Irsay will finally realize his current GM, Chris Ballard, is not the magician he thought he was getting.

You pay for David Copperfield; you wind up with The Amazing Myron instead. It happens.

Meanwhile, there's always Brett Favre. I hear you can get him for a song these days.

Business decisions

 Wisconsin fired its football coach yesterday, five weeks into the season, three weeks after Nebraska fired its football coach, and three years after Paul Chryst's Badgers had won 10 or more games for the fourth time in Chryst's first five years.

This proves a few things.

One, that college football is a purely business enterprise whose priorities largely begin and end with the financial ledger.

Two, that past performance does not guarantee future employment.

And, three, that major football schools are more than willing to flush an entire season in order to secure a return to profitability. See: Purely business enterprise.

That there is no sentiment nor patience in what was initially imagined as a mere diversionary part of the college experience is a story decades old now, and there remains nothing revelatory about it. Offloading coaches before the season's barely begun only reinforces that reality.

At Wisky, Chryst won 67 of the 93 games he coached plus a Cotton Bowl, an Orange Bowl and three Big Ten West titles. The Badgers slipped to 4-3 in 2020, but rebounded to go 9-4 and beat Arizona State in the Las Vegas Bowl last year.

But this season got off to an awful start, with a loss to Washington State (4-1 now, with only a three-point loss to Oregon), a 52-21 humiliation to an Ohio State powerhouse that humiliates everyone, and a 34-10 loss to 4-1 Illinois on Saturday.

So the Badgers are 2-3 now, with more than half the season in which to improve. It's happened before, and not just at Wisconsin. And a whole lot more than just once.

But five games was all Wisconsin decided it could spare, even for a native son -- Chryst was born in Madison -- with a mostly sparkling track record. Which makes you wonder if there's something more going on here that management (oops, I mean "the administration") isn't saying out loud.

In any case, if this all sounds heartless to you, well, that's how the business world works, surprise, surprise. And this was a business decision.

Loyalty doesn't enter it. Never has.

Where football is serf

Indiana went out to Nebraska and dropped a big ol' cowpie last night, and now a couple of questions beg to be asked.

Just how bad were the three teams the 3-2 Hoosiers beat to start the season?

Also, what is the definition of  "disarray", and who exactly meets it now?

Because Nebraska is supposed to be the photo in the dictionary next to that word, having fired its head coach after two games and turned the rest of this season into a holding pattern. The Cornhuskers are an awful team with no incentive not to be, and presumably easy pickings to which IU could help itself.

And then ...

And then, the Hoosiers had to call timeout on the very first play of the game because quarterback Connor Bazelak couldn't get a play changed.

Varying levels of ridiculousness followed, and, instead of easy pickings, Indiana got picked clean, 35-21.

Just which team meets the definition of "disarray" is now on the table.

Consider: Indiana lost by two touchdowns to a team that was flagged 12 times for 111 yards in penalties. It lost to a team that lost at home to Georgia Southern and, last week, was humiliated 49-14 by ancient rival Oklahoma. 

It lost to a team whose only win, until last night, was against FCS school North Dakota on Labor Day. The week before, the Cornhuskers traveled all the way to Ireland to blow a 28-17 lead and lose to Northwestern, which has subsequently lost to Duke, an FCS school (Southern Illinois), a MAC school (Miami) and Penn State.

Indiana lost to those same Cornhuskers in traditional Indiana fashion, through gaffe and general helplessness. It countered Nebraska's hanky-fest with 11 penalties of its own, totaling 92 yards. The Hoosiers managed just 14 first downs; couldn't run the football (67 yards on 2.9 yards per carry); and couldn't convert third downs (2-of-15). 

And in the second half, where games are decided?

The Hoosiers managed just two first downs, were outscored 14-0, and had the football for just  28 snaps.

And if you're thinking here this just sounds like IU football returning to its natural state -- a diversion until basketball starts -- understand that it's 2022 and the world has changed. Everything that drives corporate college athletics is is almost exclusively about football now, which is why Indiana has poured some much dough into the program and its physical infrastructure in the last decade or so. 

In other words, football is king. No Power 5 school can afford for it to be a mere serf anymore.

At Indiana, of course, the latter is pretty much what football has always been. But the tolerance for that -- tolerance for cutesy stunts like Lee Corso calling timeout to take a picture of the scoreboard after IU scored first against Ohio State back in the day -- is exhausted. Which is why Tom Allen's hefty buyout is likely the only thing that will keep him around for the time being, two years after being named the national coach-of-the-year.

It was all a deliriously fun ride, that pandemic-shortened season. But it can no longer be a single happy chapter. It has to be the driving narrative.

And at Indiana, it appears, they're still waiting on that narrative.

Room, meet elephant

 The images keeps coming back to you, two days later. Or maybe just to me.

Tua Tagovailoa lying on the ground, his hands frozen into claws.

The ten interminable minutes it took medical staff to get him on a stretcher, because they were being very, very careful.

The stretcher rolling off the field there in Cincinnati, as America watched in (one would hope) horror.

OK. So maybe that was just me, too.

But go back four days, and you'll see much the same scenario in Miami. You'll see Tua's head bounce off the turf, and then see him stagger like a drunk, falling back to his knees, and see him shake-shake-shaking his head ... and, hey, who you gonna believe, the Dolphins or your lying eyes?

Because the Dolphins, and Tua, say the problem was his back, and that he passed the concussion tests by the "independent neurologist". And yet, none of it erases the visual evidence.

Straight skinny, the Dolphins sent a concussed player back onto the field, because he wanted to be there and because they needed him there. And four days later he was concussed again. 

And this is where the elephant enters the room.

Why was he playing again four days later?

Because the Dolphins were playing again four days later.

Two concussions four days apart shouldn't have happened, frankly, because no one should be playing professional football four days apart. That's more true in 2022 than it's ever been, with men the size of Volvos delivering foot-pounds of force unheard of 40, 30, maybe even 20 years ago.

But the NFL compels two teams to play football on Thursday night now, and has for some time, because the league poobahs understand theirs is a product for which its consumers have an insatiable appetite. So now the abomination that is Thursday Night Football airs on Amazon Prime, which no doubt paid good money for it. And the league adds to its already considerable stash. And player safety?

Player safety is just a platitude wrapped in a PR campaign.

Oh, there are rules now about helmet-to-helmet hits and targeting, and a "concussion protocol." But it's all a neat bit of gloss that obscures the fact the league doesn't really give a damn about player safety. If it did, there would be no Thursday Night Football.

If it did, Tua Tagovailoa wouldn't have been concussed twice in four days.

But the Dolphins needed him back out there on Sunday, and also Thursday. And Tua, of course, wanted to be back out there, as players always will. And, let's face it, the league wanted him back out there, because Dolphins-Bills was one of their marquee games last Sunday, and Thursday Night Football is a marquee event, too.

Now the league will likely investigate all of this, because PLAYER SAFETY. Someone will likely catch hell. And the irony will sail over the league's head like a freaking pterodactyl. 

Because the league itself ought to catch hell, too.