More AI fun

 OK. I'm going to say this one more time, slowly, and maybe the corner-cutting media vultures and spreadsheet vampires will finally get it - although I suspect they do and just don't give a damn:

Machines. Can't. Write.

Writing is a process. It is the product of critical thinking and creativity, and therefore uniquely human. It is not something that can be replicated by some mindless algorithm-in, algorithm-out soft-shoe, because it is as much art as skill and art is beyond the scope of even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence.

I mean, there is a reason they call it artificial intelligence.

Machines. Can't. Write.

You want to know how I know this?

Because this actually appeared in the Columbus Dispatch as a "sports brief" a couple of weeks ago:

Two area high school football teams played a football game on Friday night with one emerging victorious 21-12.

The game was tied going into the opening kickoff but that would soon change when one team would later score.

Both teams hope to learn from this game as they are back in action next Friday night against other opponents.

And, no, before you ask, I did not make that up. It is not a spoof. It is not satire. It really appeared in the Dispatch -- the time stamp tells us it was published at 11:25 p.m. on August 18 -- and at the bottom it  says it was the product of something called ScoreStream, "the world leader in fan-driven sports results and conversation."

My reaction: If this is the world leader, I want to see the rest of 'em. I bet they post in crayon.

Seriously, how could anyone at the Dispatch, an award-winning newspaper of some repute, allow such absurdity to get out on its website? Was no one minding the store that night? Do ScoreStream posts automatically post without any vetting? Where was the ink-stained wretch on the copydesk to say "What the HELL? Who won the f****** game? Who were the teams? 'The score was tied going into the opening kickoff'? What kind of gerbil wrote this crap?"

Of course, given how the vultures and vampires are gutting newsrooms  these days, there probably was no ink-stained copydesk wretch to ask all that. I'm guessing they've all been replaced by EditStream, an AI program that inserts random commas and totally irrelevant parentheticals -- and, unlike real copy editors, doesn't spill coffee on the keyboard or swear at a headline count that won’t fit.

Once upon a time the great Dan Jenkins wrote a novel called "Fast Copy," which centered around a young woman coming back to her tiny Texas hometown to run the local newspaper. The paper had a sports editor named Clarence "Big'Un" Darly, who occasionally pretended he had a bigger staff by writing sidebars under the pseudonym Crew Slammer.

Well. Suffice to say I read that AI post in the Dispatch and immediately thought "Hey,  they musta hired Crew Slammer to write for 'em!"

A fake sportswriter for a fake sportswriting app. What could be more perfect?

Other than imagining how it would have gone had AI been around back in the 1920s, when Grantland Rice was writing purple prose about the Four Horsemen. Why, just think if it had been Grantland AI instead ...

One College Team Beats Another College Team

By Grantland AI

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, a football team beat another football team yesterday. The score was tied heading into the opening kickoff, but that soon changed when the one football team scored, assisted by four men on horseback.

Next week the victorious football team will play some other football team. Probably the University of Navy.

Now that's some writin', boy.

Limboland

 So it's a hostage situation now, apparently.

Wednesday morning, and Jonathan Taylor is not a Miami Dolphin, not really an Indianapolis Colt, not anything but a man who wants out and can't get out. He remains incarcerated on the Colts PUP list -- which stands for either "Physically Unable to Perform" or "Physically Unwilling to Perform", depending whom you ask.

The Colts have moved on, he's moved on, yet nobody's moving. That's where we are here.

You can blame a lot of people for this bizarre limboland, and you wouldn't be wrong no matter who you picked. The Colts are to blame for not rewarding a heretofore exemplary performer, teammate and representative of the brand by reworking Taylor's contract before he logged more carries and his value depreciated. Taylor's agent is at fault for stuffing his client's head with a lot of hoo-ha and souring him on the Colts.

And Taylor?

He's at fault for listening to the man. He's paying the agent, after all, not the other way around.

In any event, it's a hell of a fine mess the Horseshoes have got going. The team is preparing to go to Week 1 with rookie Evan Hull and Deon Jackson as its lead backs, even though its All-Pro RB is still around and still under contract. Taylor is preparing to ... well, who knows?

Haunt the halls of the Colts complex like the ghost of First Downs Past, perhaps. Become Col. Nicholson in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" or Andy Dufresne in "The Shawshank Redemption," languishing in undeserved captivity.

Any day now, I figure, he'll be asking for a poster of Raquel Welch. 

Heads up if he does, Colts.

Donny golf!

 Maybe you missed it while following less consequential sporting events, like the PGA Tour Championship, the start of the U.S. Open tennis tournament and El Segundo, Calif., winning the Little League World Series. But America's favorite Legitimate President, Donald J. "Donny" Trump, has won his golf club senior championship again.

Says he shot a 67 the other day at Bedminster, N.J., site of the Trump National Golf Club, which you can tell he owns because his name is on it. It's one of many championships he's won at the club he owns, and that 67 was completely legit because the club owner said so, and didn't involve any foot wedges out of the rough or 15-foot putts he picked up, saying "That's a gimme."

I mean, who the hell do you think he is, Judge Smails?

Nah. He's the Legitimate President, and also (have you heard?) the owner of the club where he shot the 67. Which (again) was totally on the level and not at all ownership-assisted, never mind all the wedges he tends to spray sideways.

"Now, some people will think that sounds low, but there is no hanky/lanky," Donny assured us in the internet post announcing his glorious victory. "Many people watch, plus I am surrounded by Secret Service agents. Not much you can do even if I wanted to, which I don't."

 Left unsaid is how many of the people watching were club employees and Donny groupies. Or if the Secret Service leaped into action and wrestled to the ground anyone who foolishly blurted "Hey, he's cheating!"

I'm sure none of that was the case. I'm sure Donny, at a svelte 215 pounds, really is a "good golfer/athlete", as he says.

And if you're especially doubting the "athlete" part of that, wait'll you see the completely legit video I hear is out there of Donny undressing Steph Curry one-on-one and absolutely posterizing Joel Embiid. The Prez got hops!

Why are you laughing?

Power failure

 Somewhere Woody Hayes must have been saying "Don't do it, son" for the umpteenth time the other day, and again it was in vain. That's what I'm thinking this morning.

I'm thinking it because some fool assistant football coach at Benjamin Mays High School in Atlanta pulled a Woody the other day, punching one of his players in the stomach during a game Mays High was winning.  Which, if you recall, is how Woody bid sayonara to his decorated career at Ohio State years and years ago.

Punched a Clemson linebacker in the Gator Bowl, is what Woody did. Lost his job very shortly thereafter.

This fool in Atlanta?

He wasn't even a teacher at the school, just some goober the head coach put on his staff. He's not on the staff any longer, of course. This will happen when you slug a kid and then get hauled off in handcuffs by the cops.

Here's the clip, if you're interested. What interests me about it is the player's reaction, and the volumes it speaks about the power of coaches to inflict whatever lunacy they like without retaliation from their players.

What happens is, the player doubles up and staggers away. He doesn't catch his breath and go after the coach who assaulted him. He doesn't instinctively throw hands back at the man. He does what players always do, because Coach is Coach and players are players and the relationship inherent in that is ingrained from peewee football.

And so if you ever wonder why players don't -- or rarely -- fight back even under even  the most extreme provocation, that's why. The power structure in organized sports is grossly unbalanced and absolutely inviolable, and thus has it ever been. And it fairly invites abuse.

The best coaches know that, and are careful not to exploit that imbalance. There are limits to the power they wield over their charges, and the best coaches know where those limits are. There's a self-imposed line of demarcation, and, although sometimes they bump right up against it, they rarely cross it.

Sometimes they do, however. And the more successful they are as coaches, the more they get away with it. it's why they're never going to be picking their teeth off floor or field, no matter what they do.

No one was ever going to take a poke at Bob Knight, for instance, because his college career would have been over as soon as he did. Same with Woody or Bo or even the elfin Lou Holtz, who at 5-9 could berate some 300-pound offensive lineman at Notre Dame from pillar to post and know he wouldn't get any backtalk.

Coaches are absolute czars, in their proscribed world. Which makes what happened in Atlanta last week so heinous, and what happened at a fake high school in Columbus, Ohio, even more so.

The fake high school was called Bishop Sycamore, and it was the brainchild of an absolute sociopath named Leroy Johnson. A skilled con artist with a con artist's slick line of patter, he lured football players from all over the country to his fake school and all-but-fake football program with the promise they'd be joining an elite football academy.

Needless to say, it wasn't. The players were housed in a cheap hotel and often had to scrounge for food. Their "classes" involved one visit to the public library. The football team received virtually no coaching -- and yet Johnson managed to con ESPN into pitting Bishop Sycamore against national power IMG Academy on national TV because he put together what was regarded as a powerhouse national schedule.

On Aug. 29, 2021, IMG crushed "Bishop Sycamore" 58-0. The game was such an utter farce -- and so potentially dangerous for Johnson's grossly unprepared team -- the Ohio high school athletic association finally got off its hump and investigated.

There's an HBO doc about the whole affair running now, and watching Johnson blithely laugh about never paying bills and destroying a bunch of young men's dreams is absolutely chilling. And another example of how easy it is for the unscrupulous and degenerate to abuse the power they have as coaches, because the players barely questioned what seems now such an obvious scam.

"Geez, how could they not have?" you're asking now.

Believe I've already answered that.

Dreamwork

 I have no idea what Louis Lappe does after this, because he's 12 years old and when you're 12 years old all the doors stand wide open -- even the ones you don't yet know are there.

All I  know is what Louis Lappe did yesterday.

Stepped to the plate as the first batter in the bottom of the sixth out there in Williamsport, Pa., and jacked the second pitch he saw out of the yard. Flung his bat skyward. Raised his arms to the heavens as his teammates came boiling out of the dugout behind him.

That's because Louis had just hit a walk-off home run to win the Little League World Series. 

I don't know what any of Louis' classmates in El Segundo, Calif., did on their summer vacations. But no one's beating that.

It's the kind of dreamwork that is the province of every 12-year-old who's born lucky enough to entertain dreams, and it is the fuel that sustains them. We've all been there, on scruffy baseball diamonds or driveway basketball courts or vacant lots where the grass is long and footballs hang in the autumn air, there for the taking if you can stretch out your hands far enough.

You're Travis Kelce in that moment, not just all-time center because you're slower than fossilization. You're Steph nailing the step-back three as the horn blares in Game 7. You're Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani or Mike Trout cranking the walkoff into the upper deck to win the World Series.

Louis Lappe actually got to live the latter yesterday.  Reality collided with his 12-year-old's imagination, and it was the best collision ever.

"This is a unique feeling that maybe only five or less people experience in their lifetime," Louis said after the 6-5 win over Curacao. "I feel great. It's hard to beat this feeling."

It sure is. And so for every kid who ever imagined that feeling, savor it, young man. Savor it long and longer.

Today in Calibration Nation

 (In which two women are wounded by random bullets because they decided to go to the wrong White Sox game in Chicago ... and a kid in Oklahoma dies because he decided to go to the wrong high school football game ... and three more people die in Florida because they decided to go shopping at Dollar General on the wrong day)

Anyway ...

Anyway, this is America now.

This is a country I no longer recognize,  because in 40 years as a sportswriting grunt I went to hundreds of high school football games and a fair amount of professional baseball games, and being in the line of someone's fire was never something I thought about. It literally never crossed my mind, in the way "Tonight I might get hit in the head with a meteor" never crossed my mind.

It never crossed my mind the two nights in Cleveland I sat in right field to cover the Indians and Red Sox in the ALCS.

It never crossed my mind all the times I stood on a sideline at Zollner or Spuller or Luersfield or John H. Young Field in New Haven, night coming down fast and the air turning cool in that particular way you only feel when summer's dying and fall -- real, actual fall -- waits just offstage.

Hell. It never crossed my mind whenever I went to church or the movies or the grocery store, for that matter. 

Now the only reason it never crosses my mind is because I make a conscious effort not to let it. The difference is subtle, but I can't tell you how much I hate it.

I can't tell you how much I hate realizing that America has become a place even the Wild West of myth and legend would find appalling. For all the dime novels and Zane Grey westerns and Saturday mornings with the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers, see, it was never the shootout-a-minute reality America seems to be now.

There were laws; Wild Bill Hickok himself once was charged with enforcing a firearms ban when he was the marshal of Abilene, Kansas. There was also a code; you might shoot up the local saloon on Saturday night, but you never shot up the Methodist church on Sunday -- and if you ever shot a man in the back, why, you were nothing but a goddamn coward.

There is none of that in our new Calibration Nation, where everyone's packing and no one's allowed to question the sanity of that, lest the Second Amendment hysterics start up their tired refrain: They're comin' to take our guns!

In this America, there seem to be no boundaries, none of the mental breakers that in a civilized society tell us certain things are not just wrong but obscene. Crazy people backshoot other people all the time, in this America. Cops backshoot more people because they don't know anymore who's packing and who's not, who's crazy and who's not.

Shoot up a school, kill a bunch of kids? Walk into a movie theater and start blasting away? Open fire in a synagogue, in a church, in a grocery store, at a traffic light?

Sure. Why the hell not?

And so we get a high school football game in Oklahoma that turns into the last night of  young man's life. We get a White Sox game where two women minding their own business are hit by bullets that seem to come out of  nowhere. We get three black Americans dead in Jacksonville, Fla., on the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s  "I Have A Dream" speech, because a kid sick with hate decided to armor up and go kill some black people at Dollar General.

The Wild West of myth and legend?

Got news for ya. We're living it for real these days, in real time.

God help us.

Saturday returns

 Chris Schenkel always rhapsodized about those beautiful Saturday afternoons in the fall, but it's modern times now. These days we get Saturday afternoons in August, too.

You can crab about that all you want. But keep it down.

See, I'll be watching college football this afternoon, calendar be hanged. We've got the Notre Dame Fighting Irish coming at us live from Dublin, Ireland, even though they're about as Irish as schnitzel these days. On the other side of the field will be University of Navy, as Lou Holtz used to call it. The Midshipmen aren't especially Irish, either, 

No matter. It's Notre Dame vs. Navy for the umpteenth time in history, which is what makes college football special even in its current professional-in-all-but-name form. The NFL is the Titans-vs.-Jaguars since, um, 1999; college football is Notre Dame-Navy since 1927, when Calvin Coolidge was president, Charles Lindbergh was the man of the hour and Babe Ruth was hitting 60 home runs. 

Incredibly, they have played every year since except for 2020, when Covid shut them down. Today will mark the 96th meeting.

By the time the Titans and Jaguars get to 96 meetings, they'll be the Budapest Titans and the Prague Jaguars. Or something like that.

Which is only to say the NFL might claim it has tradition, but the college game has tradition. Some of its most hallowed rivalries stretch back not just to the last century, but to the century before that. 

William Kinley was president the first time Ohio State and Michigan met in 1897. Texas-Oklahoma goes back to 1900 and has been continuous since 1929. Purdue and IU have been fighting it out since 1891; Harvard first played Yale in the ivy-est of Ivy League rivalries in 1875 -- seven months before Custer got his at the Little Bighorn.

It's not remotely the same game as it was then, of course, and you're permitted to hate that a bit. The Ivies and some of the other lesser conferences still require their students actually be students, but the mega-conferences are little more than NFL developmental leagues now. The universities merely provide the football program with a brand in some of those places.

And yet, still I will watch this afternoon.

Notre Dame vs. the University of Navy. The 96th meeting. Only thing missing will be Chris Schenkel -- or perhaps Lindsey Nelson, eternally informing us that Navy failed to move the ball, and so they punted to Notre Dame.

Color me there.

The defiant ones, Part Unbelievable

 You'd think people would be smarter, after all this time. But then you look at what's happening across the pond in Spain, and you think "Nah, we're just as dumb as we were when we were sitting in caves staring at fire."

Remember earlier this week, when the Blob speculated that Spain's women's team, which just won the World Cup, might get a second W when it came out that the head of Spain's soccer federation (the RFEF), Luis Rubiales, slapped a lip-lock on Spanish star Jenni Hermoso in the post-match celebration that was at the very least improper?

The women were already at odds with Rubiales for treating them like second-class citizens and saddling them with a coach they couldn't stand. But for this, Rubiales got called in front of the federation's general assembly.

Maybe this was the end! Maybe they'd finally be rid of a functionary they despised! Mayb--

But, nooooooo,

Instead, Rubiales doubled down, refusing to resign, claiming Hermoso was lying, saying he was the victim here. And rather than punish him for being such a prize sexist pig, you know what the RFEF did?

It actually backed the guy they called on the carpet to begin with. 

In the face of a widespread boycott by players, the RFEF threatened to sue Hermoso for lying, saying there is conclusive evidence "the President has not lied," and claiming that the whole thing was a campaign of "fake feminism."

It also issued a veiled threat to the other national team players -- plus 50-some more, plus even a few men's players -- who have said they would never again play for Spain as long as Rubiales was president of the RFEF. The RFEF responded by saying the players had "an obligation" to play for the national team "if they are called for it."

All of which illuminates why the women's side has been at odds with Rubiales and the RFEF to begin with. Could there possibly be a clearer demonstration of the organization's lack of respect, not to say gratitude?

Hey, thanks for winning the World Cup, ladies! Now get back in line, you bunch of f****** liars. Especially you, Hermoso.

Good God. That is some galaxy-level asshat-tery right there.

At this very moment, in fact, waves of it are probably spreading across the vastness of space, reaching Alpha Centauri and Vulcan and maybe even the Romulan home world -- where the Romulans are no doubt thinking, "Geez, these people are even bigger douche canoes than we are. Better steer clear of THAT planet."

Look. I suppose this could all be a miscommunication, this kiss thing, to play the devil's advocate. Maybe Rubiales hugged Hermoso and thought it would be OK to give her a peck on the lips. Maybe Hermoso didn't have time to say no before Rubiales moved in. Maybe his definition of "peck" was the full-on grab-her-face lip-lock to which Hermoso rightly objected.

Maybe all of that. Or none of it.

But wouldn't someone with an ounce of common decency have profusely apologized once he realized it made Hermoso uncomfortable? Wouldn't he not have tried to pressure Hermoso, and (through a proxy) her parents to make a public statement saying he was a fine fellow and it was all cool? Wouldn't he not have been such an unrepentant jerk about it, and wouldn't his federation not have compounded the stupid by essentially saying Hermoso was the jerk?

All over Sportsball World right now, universities and professional teams and  ruling bodies are discovering there are consequences for not taking seriously complaints about sexual assaults and unwelcome advances. That news, however, apparently has not reached the RFEF.

Something tells me it's about to get an education.

The defiant ones

 It's too bad Spanish soccer capo Luis Rubiales isn't an American. Donald J. "Donny" Trump, the guy who still thinks he's President, would snap him up in a heartbeat to run as the Look At Us He-Men Walking Tall ticket.

They're both coming at the world from the same launch point these days, which is that they're both noble freedom fighters standing up to the Man. For the former-who-still-thinks-he's-President, the Man is the THOROUGHLY CORRUPT AND WEAPONIZED BIDEN JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, which is out to get him because he STOOD UP FOR ELECTION INTEGRITY, and they VIOLATED HIS FREEDOM OF SPEECH BECAUSE ALL HE DID WAS OFFER AN OPINION ABOUT THE 2020 ELE-

Sorry. Can't hang with Donny when it comes to hollering. I also can no longer keep a straight face while I'm doing it.

Let's hop over to Spain instead, where Donny has a kindred spirit indeed in Rubiales. Hauled on the carpet before his federation's general assembly, he was as arrogant and asshat-y as ever, continuing to insist his forced kiss on Spanish women's player Jenni Hermoso was consensual, refusing to resign and saying he'd "fight to the end". Called himself the victim of "social assassination."

They so love to play the martyr card, these guys.

Which is why the synergy between Rubiales and Donny is so perfect. The new mantra for Donny's impassioned groupies, after all, is "Never Surrender" -- exactly the stance Rubiales has taken, and which takes its cue from the groupies' fearless leader. 

The best part of that being, of  course,  Donny captioning his mugshot with it after surrendering yesterday. 

You can't make this stuff up. You really can't.

Why, T-shirts are already hitting the streets bearing Trump's gangsta-glower mug and "Never Surrender."  Of course, as with almost everything Trumpian, it's unintentionally comic to anyone with a reasonable amount of sanity or perspective. 

(Me, I think the man was going for the chilling Jack Nicholson glower in "The Shining." Trump being Trump, though, it comes off  more like a pouty child trying to look tough.)

("Never Surrender", meanwhile, just reminds me of "Galaxy Quest." Remember Captain Jason Nesmith's constant refrain? "Never give up! Never surrender!"?)

So, yeah. Trump and his Spanish doppelganger see themselves as knights in armor taking on tyranny; I just see Tim Allen in a "Star Trek" parody. Or maybe Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier chained together in "The Defiant Ones."

That was no farce, but if you cast these two in the remake it could be nothing else. You'd just have to change the title a bit.

"The Defiant Ones," meet "The Derp-fiant Ones."

Messi(in') around

 Thirty or so years ago, right here in my hometown, there was this local sportscaster. His name was Greg. Greg had this bit.

The bit was, he'd take on various locals in various sporting events they'd become good at. The bit was called "I Challenge Greg." And sometimes the locals who challenged Greg were kids.

Which occasionally led to the spectacle of Greg, a grown-ass man, beating little kids at, I don't know, ping-pong or something. (Although sometimes the kids won).

Anyway, I'm reminded of all this every time I watch clips of Lionel "Leo" Messi, in the hot pink of Inter Miami of MLS, playing soccer in America.

The Argentine soccer god couldn't make a deal work with his European club Barcelona, so he decided to come to America to play in MLS. You would be correct in assuming this is essentially a retirement gig for him -- although Messi, now 36, is far too classy to say so.

Watching even an aging Messi toy with the competition here, however, it's impossible not to think that. Or, for me, not to think of Greg vs. some kid.

Messi has only played eight games for Inter Miami and he's already scored 10 goals and assisted on three others. Two of those assists came last night, as Inter Miami beat Cincinnati FC -- the top team in MLS this season -- to reach the U.S, Open Cup final against Houston.

If Messi and Inter Miami win there, it will be their second championship of the season. They won the Leagues Cup last weekend by beating Nashville FC on penalties. Ahead lies the MLS Cup, for which Inter Miami can qualify by reaching ninth in the standings. They're currently dead last in 15th.

Of course, that was B.L. (Before Leo). So don't count 'em out.

After all, after just eight games Messi is already third on Inter Miami's alltime goal list. What further miracles could he produce, seeing how Messi vs. MLS looks a lot like (one would imagine) Fernando Tatis Jr. coming back to the Fort Wayne TinCaps to take a few more hacks in the Midwest League?

I Challenge Leo To Make The Playoffs.

Sounds like a great bit to me.

Double dub?

 Raise your coffee cup again this morning to Spain's women's soccer side, which won the World Cup the other day and -- indirectly because of that -- could now be closing in on another win.

Call it the Double Dub, and it involves Luis Rubiales, despised head of the Spanish soccer federation and general asshat.

The women's national team has been at war with Rubiales for awhile now, mainly because he backs the equally despised national coach, Jorge Vilma, who created a culture of hail-fellow-well-met so lacking in hail-fellow-well-met 15 national players refused to play for him. The consensus therefore is the Spanish women won in spite of him, not because of him.

And then they got a bonus: Rubiales behaving like Rubiales.

First, his federation stuck a thumb in the women's collective eye by tweeting out "Vilma In!" immediately after Spain's victory -- an unveiled shot at the "Vilma Out!" message the players have been preaching.

Then, during the on-field celebration, Rubiales went full asshat.

At the final whistle, he grabbed his crotch right in front of Queen Letizia of Spain and her 16-year-old daughter, Princess Infanta Sofia. Awhile later, while congratulating the players, he grabbed Jenni Hermoso's face and planted a kiss full on her lips.

You can probably guess from everything you've read so far that Hermoso did not enjoy this.

Rubiales, true to form, blew it off as an emotion-of-the-moment thing, lying that Hermoso did not object. When he was criticized for it, he called those who objected "idiots and stupid people." And when finally compelled to apologize ...

Well. Then he really ramped up the asshattery.

First, he tried to pressure Hermoso into appearing in a smooth-the-waters video with him. (Needless to say, she told him to get bent)

Then, he had his boy Vilma go to Hermoso's parents to try to pressure them. (Which didn't work either, again needless to say)

Now Rubiales' own federation is convening an emergency General Assembly meeting today to discuss the whole wretched business. Which you might guess cannot be good news for Rubiales, but who knows.

Will they suspend him? Send him packing? Tell him "don't do that again" and congratulate him on bringing Spain the World Cup?

The Double Dub awaits. Or not.

Left in the lurch

 Saw the news on the Magic Interwhatsis that the Indianapolis Colts are officially shopping their abruptly disgruntled All-Pro running back, and here's where the Blob makes one of its famously quirky side trips.

Remember those GI footlocker toy soldier sets they used to sell in comic books?

("Wait ... WHAT??" you're saying)

Well, I do. The ads for them always included a list of what the footlocker included -- soldiers, tanks, jeeps, everything but latrines -- topped by some form of the phrase "Here's what you get, kids!"

It suddenly occurs to me the Colts could present such a list to Anthony Richardson, the prize first-round QB they're planning on shoving straight into the fire even though he's barely 21 years old and has played only 14 games since high school. I figure it would read something like this:

Welcome, Anthony Richardson, to your Indianapolis Colts GI footlocker! Here's what you get, kid!

* A receiving corps straight off the side of a milk carton.

* A high-priced offensive line that suddenly forgot how to block as soon as it became high-priced.

* One (1) All-Pro running back who's coming off an ankle inju-

Oh, wait. Forgot. We're gonna trade him. Instead, you get:

* One (1) Evan Hull.

Yikes. I mean, the least the Colts could have done is throw in an extra jeep or halftrack.

Instead, they're shopping Jonathan Taylor, Mr. Abruptly Disgruntled, because they won't give him a new deal before his old one runs out. Which frankly seems a trifle uncharitable given what he's done on his rookie deal.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, Taylor has a nimrod for an agent. He actually thinks, or seems to, that there's a market for running backs that will pay Taylor more than he could get from the Colts. This means Taylor's agent apparently lives in a sensory deprivation chamber, because even people who think the NFL stands for .Naturally Fluoridated Lager know running backs now have the approximate value of your Uncle Merle's bottlecap collection.

Still, Taylor is Taylor, and Evan Hull. a fifth-round rook out of Northwestern is not. Neither is Deon Jackson, the presumptive No. 1 back. Neither is Kenyan Drake, a journeyman the Colts picked up on the side of the road. Those are Anthony Richardson's top weapons at running back now.

No matter. The Colts are gonna throw AR out there anyway. Hell, they're so confident his physical gifts will overcome all obstacles (self-inflicted and otherwise) they didn't even play him a down in the second preseason game -- pissing off the home fans who jammed Lucas Oil Stadium presumably to see Richardson take a few snaps.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Shouldn't a 21-year-old with next to no college experience be getting all the live snaps he can?"

Yes, you would think. But I guess they don't want to risk him getting hurt before he gets hurt in the regular season running for his life looking for a receiver or running back defenses are obliged to respect.

"But ... if they're worried about him getting hurt, why didn't they find some more receiving threats in the offseason?" you're saying. "Why didn't they lock up Jonathan Taylor before everything got sour? Hell, if you're worried about a guy getting hurt in the NFL, where everyone eventually gets hurt, why even draft him?"

Damn. You guys ask really good questions.

Throwdown time

 We're two games deep in the superfluous NFL preseason now, and you know what that means, Blobophiles.

Come on down, drunks throwin' down!

Yes, that fine end product of malted beverages, team jerseys and excessive testosterone produced the inevitable in San Francisco the other night, when the 49ers played the Broncos and fan enthusiasm was so high guys in Niners and Broncos jerseys started punching one another in the face. Hell, some guys in Niners jerseys were punching other guys in Niners jerseys, they were so excited to have the NFL back.

And this was preseason, when the games don't even count! Don't try to tell me the NFL doesn't have the most passionate fan base in sports, boys and girls.

Now, the Blob bears no grudge against passionate fan bases, but what happened in San Francisco is a big reason why you'll never catch me at an NFL game. One, I couldn't afford the parking, let alone the tickets and concessions. Two, if I could afford the tickets, it would have to be the nosebleed seats where the drunks in their team jerseys live.

Which means, three, I'd have to wear a full-face helmet, body armor and a rainsuit as protection from the flying fists and beer.  And I hate wearing all that in public.

You know the NFL's motto, right? "Football, Fun and Kevlar"?

Whenever I see fights break out in the stands at a sporting event, I always wonder what triggered the flying fists. Given the presumed level of intoxication, I figure it's not some high-minded disagreement over macroeconomics, or the geopolitical implications of Swiss aggression against its neighbors.

Likely it's sounds like this:

"Niners suck!"

"Broncos suck!"

"Brock Purdy sucks!"

"Sean Payton sucks!"

"You suck!"

"No, YOU suck!"

"Your mother su-"

At which point the discourse ends and the punches begin.

As, way down there on the field, some dude the Niners will cut next week runs for two yards and gets tackled by some dude the Broncos will cut next week.

Such fun.

Joy, interrupted

 All the world wanted to be Olga Carmona yesterday.

All the world wanted the pureness of her joy, the crystalline feel of the rarified air of the mountaintop in her lungs, the knowledge that, by scoring the only goal in the women's World Cup final, she passed from mortality to legend as the toast of her nation.

They'll put up statues of her now, maybe. They'll remember her name forever, surely. It was the best day of her life, just as surely.

Until it wasn't.

Until, after the goal in the 29th minute and the victory and the dancing beneath the confetti and getting her hands on what she'd worked and sweated all her life to get her hands on -- the World Cup trophy -- she learned one person was no longer around to share it all with her.

She learned her father had died. On Friday, two days before the final.

He died after a long illness, apparently, and it was the family's decision not to tell her until after the final. You can debate the propriety of that if you want, but I will not. There are no rules when there's a death in the family, and the only impropriety is trying to say there are. 

In any case, I can't imagine what it was like for Carmona, finding out her father was dead at the height of the most joyous moment of her life. I am 68 years old, well aware of my mortality, and it is unfathomable to me. Carmona is 23, when you are bone certain you're going to live forever. So, yes, it is beyond me to even guess.

All I've got is Carmona's response on social media was that "without knowing it, I had my own star before the game even started." And there did seem to be some mystic currents colliding out there in the cosmos. 

Her father dies on Friday, and Sunday she scores the biggest goal of her life and in the history of women's soccer in Spain. 

She score that goal while wearing an undershirt with the word "Merchi" on it, honoring a close friend's mother who herself had recently died.

I am neither a theologian nor a spiritualist, so I won't begin to try untangling the metaphysical implications of all that. But perhaps the bard was right when he wrote that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Or perhaps is was just a young woman's joy and a father's death, the one lending meaning to the other.

Britannia drowns

 ... which is the Blob's way of saying it's been a good run of years since Britannia ruled the waves, or anything else. Ah, the glory days of the empire. when the British Lion went into something like a World Cup final simply assuming it would all turn out right.

Well. Not so much anymore.

That's because Britannia did drown this morning, or least the Lionesses of England did. Favored by many to carry off a World Cup for the first time since the men did it 57 years ago, they instead came up confounded and silent against Spain. Olga Carmona's strike in the 28th minute proved the only tally of the match, as La Roja won 1-0 and England did what England does best these days, which is disappoint.

Spain, on the other hand, becomes only the second national side in World Cup history to win both the men's and women's championship (the men won it all in 2010). Germany became the first when the women won the first of their two World Cup titles in 2003.

First George Washington, then Gandhi, now Olga Carmona. It's been a rough 250 years or so for the Brits.

Wagerin' madness

 It was George Patton who said (at least in the movie) "God how I hate the 20th century." But that was only because he never saw the 21st. 

PGA golfer Max Homa has. And deep down I suspect he's right there with George, even if he never said so.

What he did say yesterday was he thinks it's cool people can gamble on golf these days, even live on their phones thanks to 21st century technology. What he doesn't think is cool is knobs trying to win their bets by warping the competition.

This happened yesterday at the BMW Championship in Illinois, where Homa is among the leaders after 54 holes. Some knob in the gallery shouted "Pull it!" as Homa drew back on a 5-foot putt because, it turned out, he had a bet with some other knob that Homa would miss the putt.

Fortunately for Homa, he jarred the 5-footer. Then he pointed at the knob who yelled and yelled at him, calling him a clown and "maybe another word." 

Which we can all take to mean he called him a "mother(bleeping) clown" or something similar.

In any event, the knob was ejected from the premises. But it does make you wonder how often this is going to happen in the future with the advent of instant betting by phone.

You can sit in a sports bar watching a football game now, after all, and bet on the outcome of drives and even individual plays. Thing is, you're not in a position to influence the outcome there. Fans in a golf gallery, however, can influence it simply by yelling in the middle of a guy's putting stroke or backswing.

And there's no real way to police it unless the price of your ticket includes giving up your phone while you're on the golf course. This of course will never happen given how many knobs have knob lawyers who'd take the PGA to court for violating their free speech rights or some such thing.

Don't laugh. Look how many self-described free speech martyrs are out there right now filing ever-more-ridiculous lawsuits claiming their inalienable right to just make stuff up. Blatant lying is protected speech, it seems, no matter who it hurts.

Ah, the 21st century. Turns out Georgie Patton was a century off.

Some Final thoughts

 Saw King Charles' message the other day to the Lionesses of England and the Matildas of Australia after the Lionesses crushed Australia's dream of a home-team women's World Cup title. It was all very kingly and proper, saluting the Brits while praising the Aussies for their fine and noble effort.

The Blob being the Blob, of course, I couldn't help imagining that beneath all that hail-fellow-well-met, Chuck was secretly thinking this: "Neener-neener-neener, ya bloody convicts."

OK. So probably not.

If nothing else, after all, Chuck has always been a gracious sort, except when he was catting around on Diana.  But you know elsewhere in England they're raising lukewarm pints to their Lionesses, and taunting Spain ahead of tomorrow's Final by chanting "1588! 1588! 1588!"

OK. So that's probably not happening, either.

It's probably not happening because hardly anyone these days would understand what 1588 meant, given that history in the time of social media is whatever Donald Trump said yesterday. But for those of us who know, England-vs.-Spain inevitably calls up that epic clash in 1588, when the Spanish Armada was blown to smithereens by a providential storm, proving that God was an Englishman like everyone thought.

So we've got Spain-England tomorrow, and the Armada, and 1588. And, oh, yeah, here's another date: 1966

Which is the last time any British footie team reached a World Cup title game.

That's a long damn stretch of fail in a nation that lives and dies with City (Manchester City),  Spurs (Tottenham Hotspur) and Gunners (Arsenal) every Premier League season. Why, half the hooligans beating up Spanish fans in Sydney right now weren't even born the last time England won the World Cup. Probably never heard of Bobby Charlton, the hero of that 'Cup run.

I'm trying to imagine right now what the British national men's side is thinking as they watch the Lionesses ascend to a place no men's team has seen since the Beatles were all the rage. That the Lionesses clearly seem the class of the field, and likely to beat a Spanish side at war with its own national leadership, surely must stir mixed feelings.

On the one hand, they're Brits, and so you know they're cheering as loudly as anyone else. But don't you think some small part of them -- way down the gut, where it can barely be acknowledged -- is saying: "Damn, even the women are better than we are. We suck."?

No?

OK, so it's just me, then.

In any event, hail Britannia, which I can say with all proper charity considering we kicked their limey asses out of our country back in 1776. And somewhere in England right now, I imagine 85-year-old Bobby Charlton is saying the same thing, along with one more thought: "About damn time."

OK. So probably not.

Light it up

The weather boys and girls are telling us we could sideswipe the 40s tonight in these parts, and what you can say about that is either summer's over or fall's sneaking in on a fake ID. It is, after all, still August, and that industrial steam heat we all know and loathe here in Indiana is lingering just off stage, waiting to come back with a vengeance.

What I say is to hell with that noise.

What I say is the schoolbuses are running and the air conditioning's off and fall begins tonight, because the lights are coming up again. They'll be flanked by cornfields out in the country where you can see 'em for miles, and they'll be beacons among the thousand lights of the cities and 'burbs. And beneath them, footballs will corkscrew across the night, and young men will put a hat on a hat, and there'll be glory and heartache and everything else that comes with fall, and with high school football.

Almost a decade out from a 38-year run as a working sportswriter, it's the night, and the season, I miss the most. For the most part I don't miss it at all after nine years, much as I loved it. But when those lights come up and  high school football returns,  I still think I should be in a pressbox somewhere, still think there's some lede I should be writing in my head as Snider or North Side or one of the Bishops, Luers and Dwenger, have at it. 

Or maybe Leo or East Noble or my alma mater, New Haven.

One opening night it was Carroll vs. Snider out at Carroll, and I was sitting in the parking lot knocking out my gamer as I waited for the traffic to clear. Other years it was Bishop Dwenger at Zollner, or Homestead out in Aboite, or Heritage down by Monroeville and Hoagland -- where one night I was inadvertently locked in the stadium and had to scale an eight-foot fence to get out.

It's not just a job, as the recruiters say. It's an adventure.

Across the decades I  covered games when it was so cold you could literally see the field turning white with frost, and when it was so foggy you couldn't see the far side of the field even from the near sideline. Once I covered a playoff game at Eastbrook High School when wind-driven sheets of rain turned 100 yards of pristine grass into a churn of liquid mud within minutes. 

And then there was that opening night, years ago, when the lights came up at Madison Heights High School in Anderson and fall commenced on the hottest day of the year.

It was 95 degrees that night at game time, and a pile of openers in central Indiana were postponed. But the Pirates of Madison Heights forged on, with frequent official timeouts for water breaks. 

Time has erased who won the game or even who Heights was playing; my only memories of  that night are visceral ones. Rivulets of sweat stinging my eyes. Pints of it soaking my shirt. Looking to my right at the local radio announcer -- an Anderson legend named Sam Roberts -- and seeing his shirt unbuttoned to his navel as he barked out the play-by-play.

No offense to Sam, who's been gone almost 20 years. But that was not the prettiest thing I ever saw.

Know what, though?

It was opening night of high school football. It was the first whisper of autumn, nuclear heat or not. It was the lights coming up all over Indiana, and me feeling lucky to see 'em from my privileged spot.

All that begins again tonight.

Light it up, fellas. Light it up.

Hollywood fail

 They call 'em fairy tales for a reason, it turns out. And feel free to curse the loss of innocence that comes with that.

They call 'em fairy tales because  -- like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and, yes, fairies -- they exist only in the minds of forever 5-year-olds. And of course in the boardrooms of the movie studios, where fantasy is the business model and innocence (or at least a willful suspension of disbelief) the coin of the realm.

Which brings us, in the usual meandering way, to the 2009 film "The Blind Side," and the unraveling fairy tale on which it was based.

If you haven't seen it you've probably at least heard of it, if only because Sandra Bullock's scenery-gnawing performance in it earned her a best actress Oscar. She played Leigh Anne Tuohy, a former Ole Miss cheerleader and matriarch of a rich white family who welcomed a young black man into their home because the kid was something of a lost soul whose birth mother was a junkie.

It's a heartwarming tale, albeit with some uneasy undertones of white paternalism. The private school the Tuohy kids attend takes him in only because the football coach drools over his size and athleticism. The Tuohys take him in because they're goodhearted people who see in him a way to "give back", as people say. A multi-tissue story ensues.

Except ...

Except, as with all such Hollywood creations, this one is not quite true. And now it's coming apart at the seams.

Michael Oher is now suing the Tuohys because he claims they lied to him about adopting him -- he was 18, but in Tennessee, where they lived, legally they could have -- and tricked him into signing a conservatorship that made them millions off the film of his story. While he, Michael Oher, got nothing.

The Tuohys say they made zippo off the film, only a pittance off the book on which it was based. And they split it evenly among the family members, including Oher.

Their attorney goes further than, accusing Oher of trying to shake down the Tuohys for $15 million by threatening to go public with his allegations if they didn't pay up.

So either Oher is turning on the quasi-family who took him in (out of the goodness of their hearts!), or the Tuohys cashed in on his rags-to-riches tale. And it's all mixed up somehow with the film, which backed up the falsehood that the Tuohys adopted him and, according to Oher, portrayed him as something of a dummy when he was actually quite intelligent.

That still wounds him, Oher says. And finding out the Tuohys didn't actually adopt him was the last straw.

And so this becomes a very human story, full of anger and hurt feelings and, let's face it, naked greed. Oher feels betrayed. The Tuohys feel, no pun intended, blindsided. But at the bottom of it all, per usual, is money - large sums of which will now go into the pockets of their respective attorneys. 

Some fairy tale.

Party poopers

Well, crap.

England 3, Australia 1 in the women's World Cup semis this morning, and there goes all the fun. The Matildas got behind, leveled it with Sam Kerr's ridiculous rip to the far top corner off a run, and then ...

And then England scored. And then England scored again. And the worst part, other than the Brits pooping on the everyone's party but theirs, was you knew somewhere some snobbish Sir Topham Hatt, Earl of Nose-In-The-Air-Shire, was sniffing contemptuously and smiling an indulgent smile.

"Well, of course, we beat the Aussies," you can hear him saying. "Riffraff, after all.”

Which refers to Australia's roots as a penal colony, where England used to banish all the riffraff when they got in the way of the latest fox hunt. That the riffraff were more interesting, and gave the Brits character while they ran around subduing Boers and Zulus and the Irish, was perhaps why most of us were rooting for the Matildas.

They put up a game fight. the Matildas did. But England ruled again.

Well, crap.

And your QB1 is ...

... Anthony Richardson, Indianapolis Colts fans.

Does that make anyone else feel both intrigued and queasy at the same time? No?

Well, it must just be me, then.

It must just be me, because Colts head coach Shane Steichen has seen waaay more of AR than I have, and if Steichen is convinced he's ready to step into maybe the toughest position in sports, then he must be ready. And even if he's not ... I mean, what, you thought the Colts were going to go with Gardner Minshew just because he used to have that way-cool Fu?

Nah, man. If AR truly is the generational athletic freak we've all been told he is, the time to find out is now, not when the Colts get good again. This is a team that at best looks like its headed for a head-on collision with 8-9 (maybe even 9-8 if the cards fall right!), so what's the harm in letting Richardson get all those rookie mistakes out of the way while it doesn't count?

Worked for Peyton Manning, right?

The Sheriff threw 28 interceptions for a trash team his rookie year, and then, as the team got better, he got better. And then of course he got ridiculously, Hall-of-Fame better.

Richardson has as different a skill set as a bandsaw has from a jackhammer, but the principle is the same. And yet the thought of throwing Richardson to the wolves straight off makes my stomach do sitspins.

Maybe it's the age thing. 

No. Definitely it's the age thing.

What brought me up short yesterday when the Colts announced Richardson would be their week one starter was  the realization that just four years ago he was preparing to be the week one starter for Eastside High School in Gainesville, Fla. And that, since playing his last high school game, he's played in just 14 games. And that he's only 21 years and three months old, which means in a lot of states his first legal beer would still be current events.

And, sure, of course, I knew all that. But it didn't really hit me how young this kid is until now.

I hope he's ready for this. I hope he learns and grows and learns and grows and becomes everything he's projected to be. I hope, mostly, that the Colts didn't set him up to fail by putting so much on him so quickly,

From everything I've read about his maturity and his willingness to learn and his level-headedness, it's a good bet the Colts didn't do that. But as we've observed since the night Andrew Luck abruptly retired, stuff tends to happen with this franchise.

So, yeah, I can't wait to see this. And pass the Pepto.

J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets!

 The Hype Flight is backing away from the terminal, and if you're not on it yet, America, too bad for you. You'll have to wait for the next Flight. Oh, wait, that's overbooked, so on standby you go.

What, you didn't hear the call for final boarding?

It came, presumably, the instant the New York Jets signed four-time Pro Bowl running back Dalvin Cook to a one-year deal north of $8 million yesterday, and after break-out 2022 rookie RB Breece Hall walked off the physically unable to perform list (i.e., PUP) this morning. 

Dalvin Cook! Breece Hall! Punch One and Punch Two for Aaron Rodgers, who now has just oodles of weapons -- oodles, I tell you -- to make the NFL  cry uncle this year!

Altogether now: THE JETS ARE LOADED! THE JETS ARE SUPER BOWL FAVORITES NOW! THE HYPE FLIGHT IS ON THE RUNWAY, POWERING UP FOR TAKEOFF!

Whew. All that yelling, it takes it out of the vocal chords.

But you're gonna hear more of it now, the Blob predicts, just like you heard it when Aaron fled Green Bay forJets green. He may be 39 now, but he's 29 at heart. He's got a whole new attitude! He smiles now! He EVEN GIVES BACKUP ZACH WILSON THE TIME OF DAY!

Sorry. I'll dial it down a notch, I promise.

This is because I've seen Hype Flights like this before, and they almost always get re-routed to Elmer P. McGillicuddy Airport in Hog Nuts, Iowa. Also these are the Jets we're talking about. They've been living off Super Bowl III and Joe Willie for 54 years now, invariably Jets-ing it up year after year and decade after decade since.

And so I know what's going to happen next, probably, just like everyone who's not Fireman Ed knows in his or her heart of hearts what's going to happen.

Breece Hall or Dalvin Cook or both will get hurt.

EarthyDaddy Aaron's receivers will start dropping a pass here and there, and he'll start sulking again, and everyone will suddenly remember he's been to one Super Bowl in 18 seasons, and last year he threw for fewer than 4,000 yards for the first time in six seasons, and threw double digit interceptions (12) for the first time since 2010.

The Jets will lose to Belichick twice because  they're the Jets and they always lose to Belichick.

They'll go 10-7 or 11-6, get into the playoffs as a wild-card and lose on the first weekend.

After which Earth Daddy Aaron will start pouting and being a general pain in the tuchis again, and the Jets will eventually get as sick of him as the Packers did and ship him off to, I don't know, the Pottsville Maroons or someone.

You know what you'll hear next.

THE MAROONS ARE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL!

Oops. Got carried away again.

The Great Escape reimagined

 Look, I don't know if Jim Harbaugh lied to the NCAA about some relatively minor infractions at the University of Michigan. Maybe he really is that dumb -- although I've seen no conclusive evidence of it.

After all, the guy came to Michigan proclaimed as a savior, and, after a few years of wallowing around, he seems to have gotten comfy in the role. He finally beat Ohio State and got the Wolverines to the College Football Playoff last year, and yesterday Michigan was ranked No. 2 in the preseason Associated Press poll. Even got a couple first-place votes.

In other words, if he's as soft in the head as the NCAA seems to intimate, he hides it well.

But if he did lie to investigators, perhaps we should re-open the floor. Because that turned what were a series of Level II infractions -- contacting recruits during the Covid 19 dead period, having too many people participate in on-field coaching, stuff like that -- into a Level I infraction. And that initially got Harbaugh a four-game sitdown to start the 2023 season.

Except ...

Except the other day, the NCAA called a do-over and decided to look into the Harbaugh case further. That process likely will last well into 2024.

This means Harbaugh is off the hook, at least for now. He'll coach the entire 2023 season. And if he's craftier than the NCAAs give him credit for being, he'll slither off the hook for keeps, even if the reopened investigation finds more shenanigans.

I mean, he's already flirted with NFL suitors the last two or three offseasons. Talked to the Panthers and actually flew out to Denver to meet with the Broncos this time.  So you've got to wonder what happens if the NCAA comes back with more dirt on Harbaugh's program, and if he might already have a reimagined Great Escape back to the NFL in the works.

Steve McQueen had a motorcycle in the movie. Harbaugh would have ... I don't know, a sweet multi-year deal with the Cardinals or the Texans or some other bunch of sadsacks all set up on the down-low.

That would leave Michigan holding the bag for his misadventures, which wouldn't be the first time that happened. Coaches at Harbaugh's level are opportunists; that's how they got to that level. Even the most seemingly loyal have one ear cocked for the whistle of the train headed out of town should things go south.

So ... yeah. Why does my inner cynic think Harbaugh's already working on a run for the NFL border?

Other than I suspect he's not nearly so dense as the NCAA seems to think. 

Back to the snoozer?

 Michael McDowell won the Verizon 200 yesterday on the road course at Indy, continuing one of the oddest careers in the annals of NASCAR. In 16 years and 453 Cup races, he's won exactly twice, and both were iconic.

His first win was the 2021 Daytona 500.

His second was at Indianapolis yesterday.

So the man knows how to pick his spots, even if it's taken a long time for him to pick 'em. Kinda the way it took NASCAR a long time to pick its spot at Indy.

For 27 years it ran the Brickyard 400 on Indy's thick-with-ghosts-and-history oval, while interest waned and fans began to yawn and finally stopped coming. In 2021, it finally made the move to the road course, which made the race there no longer as iconic but a hell of a lot more fun.

Now?

Coupled with McDowell's win this weekend came the news of an imminent Goodyear tire test on the oval, which indicated NASCAR and the Speedway are thinking about reviving the Brickyard 400. Speculation is if the test goes well -- it involves Cup drivers Chase Briscoe, Alex Bowman and Ty Gibbs --  NASCAR could move back to the oval as early as next season.

The Blob's initial reaction to this: "NOOOOOO!"

Its upon-further-review reaction: "Weeellll ... maybe. If they don't overdue it."

By that I mean, revive the Brickyard 400, but not every year. Or, revive the Brickyard 400, but add a second race at Indy on the road course just for comparison's sake.

Maybe three years have been long enough for everyone to forget what a full-on snore the Brickyard 400 became once the novelty of stock cars at Indy wore off. The stockers and the configuration of the oval -- long, long straightaways and tight flat corners -- were  a bad fit, too often turning the Brickyard into 400 miles of nose-to-tail parading. It was like a three-hour-long, one-lane construction zone, only louder and faster.

But the old Brickyard is still the Brickyard, with all that history piled up behind it. Nowhere else on the circuit does NASCAR get to drive a 114-year-old layout that almost literally has seen the entire width and breadth of American racing. Dario Resta won there, and Dario Franchitti. Gaston Chevrolet, and Jeff Gordon in a Chevrolet.

So, I get it. Everyone wants a piece of all that.

But please, not very year. Or at least not long enough to remind the fans why they stopped coming to begin with.

Quiet milestone

 Something happened yesterday you probably missed, because it wasn't NASCAR at the Brickyard or preseason NFL football or even the first Sunday of Premier League soccer, in which Newcastle administered a rousing good 5-1 whacking of poor Aston Villa.

What happened -- also in England, and not that far away -- was a young woman from America rolled in one last birdie putt, then broke out the smile she'd been keeping bottled up for, oh, probably five or six holes.

The young woman from America was named Lilia Vu, a 25-year-old Californian who starred at UCLA before joining the LPGA tour. And her long birdie putt was the dot at the end of the exclamation point on her runaway six-stroke victory in the Women's British Open, the third tour victory for Vu this year.

Her second happened back in April, at the Chevron Championship. That makes her the first American woman in 24 years to win two major championships in one year.

Twenty-four years!

That's so long ago the American who last did it, fellow Californian Juli Inkster, is 63 years old now.

In the 24 years since, women's golf has become a stronghold for Asian golfers, particularly Koreans. Other Americans have occasionally shared the spotlight, but none has managed to win two majors in one year.

That it's Vu who did it, frankly, is nothing anyone saw coming. Coming into the Open at Walton Heath, after all, she'd missed the cut in four of her six stroke-play events since winning the Chevron four months ago.

But she reached Sunday's final round tied for the lead with the home team, Englishwoman Charley Hull. Then she went out and dropped a 67 on Walton Heath while Hull hiccupped to a 73, and an achievement almost a quarter century in the making was hers.

Now you know.

Tissue time

 Lots of memorable moments last night in Springfield, Mass., where the 2023 Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame class was inducted (congrats, Gene Keady!). But maybe the best was at the end of Dwyane Wade's induction speech.

Here's the vid. The Blob presents it as a public service to any Blobophiles who haven't had their tears jerked lately. 

Enjoy.

Seein' ... things

 The eye of the beholder never got a better workout than it did in Buffalo yesterday.

It was your Indianapolis Colts vs. the Buffalo Bills in the first preseason game, and the Colts newest No. 1 draft pick -- a roll-of-the-dice named Anthony Richardson, out of Florida -- got the start at QB1. 

He played all of 29 snaps across three offensive series. Generated nine first downs. Threw the football 12 times and completed eight, one of which was to Bills defensive back Dane Jackson. Ran through a first-team Bills defensive end and blasted a Bills defensive back on a scramble. Made one eye-opening throw across space and time to Alex Pierce, who dropped it in the end zone.

From that we can conclude ... well, what?

You there, Mr. Jeopardy Contestant.

I'll go with "What is 'nothing'?", Alex.

Ding-ding-ding-ding!

Look. It's beyond obvious that you can't really tell anything from 29 snaps in a no-count game, but because the Colts took Richardson with the fourth overall pick based on potential and not available evidence, people saw what they wanted to see. Some saw the athletic freakiness in the Pierce throw and the scramble in which he ran through a DE two inches taller and 20 pounds heavier. Some said he "struggled".

Who was right, Mr. Jeopardy Contestant?

I'll say "What is 'both'?", Alex.

Ding-ding-ding-ding!

Truth is, it was in the eye of the beholder, and the eye of the beholder saw pretty much the same thing: That Richardson is indeed a project, and thus a work in progress. He showed flashes. He showed non-flashes. He was exactly what you might expect from a kid who started just 13 games at Florida and, again, showed flashes and non-flashes. He is an athletic freak, no question about that, but he was still learning the college game when the Colts drafted him. Now he has to learn the pro game. 

It's gonna take time, as Richardson, an eager pupil, has acknowledged. In the meantime ...

People will see what they want to see. Or what they need to see.

Matilda madness

Women's soccer is not your bowl of cornflakes. OK, so we get that.

Maybe you don't like it because you're an American who hates your own country's team because they HATE AMERICA; why, just look at how they protest racial injustice and don't sing our anthem and espouse all those horrible "woke" values, like diversity and equal treatment and standing up for the marginalized instead of picking on them like a proper American.

Maybe you think no one cares about the women's World Cup because YOU don't care about it, or because it's too "woke" (that word again), or because you just don't like soccer generally.

Well. I've got a name to throw at you, in that case.

Courtnee Vine. 

She's an Australian women's player and last night she turned an entire nation into an insane asylum with one swing of her leg. Deep into the night, after 90 minutes of regulation and 30 more of extra time and an excruciating 19 penalty kicks, she buried the 20th PK of the night, and Australia, the host nation, advanced to the World Cup semifinals for the first time in history.

Cathy Freeman Park in Sydney went bonkers. People standing outside Cathy Freeman Park went bonkers. People in bars, people watching on outdoor big screens, people in airplanes ... they all went bonkers.

It was exactly what sports is supposed to be at its best, what it's supposed to stir in us, how it's supposed to make us feel. And it's ecumenical in a way almost nothing in this contentious world even approaches.

For instance, a lot of those howling and screaming and jumping around last night were men, I noticed. In case you thought only women cared about women's soccer.

Sorry, Gomer. The Matildas are every gender's team, it seems. ("Oh, no!" you're screaming. "Not more woke gender stuff!"). After they upset France last night they had more followers than the Aussie men's team on social media.  

Oh, yeah: And Cathy Freeman Park was sold out for Australia-France. Which has hardly been unusual in this women's World Cup.

You may think women's soccer is boring and irrelevant, in other words. But a whole bunch of other people aren't missing what you're missing.

The difference expectation makes

 Washington Commanders head coach Ron Rivera gave America an inadvertent peek this week why the Kansas Chiefs are who they are, and why his Commanders are who they are.

"I know!" you're saying, waving your hand madly from the back row of the classroom. "The Chiefs have played in three Super Bowls in the last decade! The Commanders are just a team that hasn't done (bleep) in 35 years and used to have a racist nickname! Right?"

Right.

The Chiefs went 14-3 last season and won the Big Roman Numeral. The Commanders went 8-8-1 and finished last in the NFC East, although they did finally shed their pond-scum owner, Daniel Snyder.

The common denominator?

Eric Bieniemy was the offensive coordinator for the Chiefs. Now he's the OC for the Commanders.

Who are mad at him, apparently, because he yells a lot.

Violating the sanctity of the locker room, Rivera told the world that the other day, saying that some players had come to him with "concerns" about Bieniemy's approach. It seems Bieniemy expects results, and the Commanders, being the Commanders, are used to stuff like expectations.

Strange. I didn't recall hearing anything from Kansas City about Patrick Mahomes or Travis Kelce going to head coach Andy Reid  to complain that Bieniemy was too hard on them. 

"He's so MEAN, Coach," Mahomes said, tears welling up in his eyes. "He yells at us if we're dogging it or not running a play right. He makes us do it OVER AND OVER until we get it right! It's just not FAIR!"

Nope. None of that.

And this is not to say the players in Washington are saying any of the above, either. But they are complaining to the head coach about how tough Bieniemy is, how demanding. How, yes, he yells a lot.

And I suppose here's where I could go all old-guy and rail about These Kids Today and their many faults. They're softer than churned butter! They get their widdle feelings hurt if you push 'em to get better! They get the school administration (also softer than churned butter) to fire Coach because he withheld their post-practice orange slices!

I won't do that, because it's mostly nonsense. Lots of coaches yell and demand excellence these days. Most of These Kids Today respond well to it, become better players because of it, maybe even wind up being Patrick Mahomes.

Those who don't wind up being ... well, the Washington Commanders.

Lesson for today class.

Bettin' his life

 The  big reveal is no reveal at all, so there's a chip professional gambler Billy Walters won't cash with his new book. What, you mean Phil Mickelson has a betting jones?

Might as well tell us the man breathes air.

We all knew he'd been wagering giant sums for the last 30 years, although we wouldn't have guessed those giant sums amounted to b-as-in-billion. And we knew Lefty was a gambling addict, because Lefty admitted it publicly.

But the b-with-a-billion part, and the 100 million Walters estimates he's lost in the last 30 years, at least exposes what a load of eyewash Mickelson sold us when he took Saudi blood money to jump to the LIV exhibition tour. Making the world better for golf had nothing to do with it; like any other junkie, Lefty just needed a fresh revenue stream to feed his habit.

So $200 mill from the same fund that bankrolled 9/11? Sounded okey-dokey to him.

Look. It's his money, as his defenders have been saying for the last few days. If he wants to whiz it away, he can do that; hell, if he wants to make paper airplanes out of it and sail them into the Grand Canyon, he can to do that, too.

But when you drop $400,000 on the Ryder Cup while you're playing in it, you're messing with your legacy. Walters claims Mickelson did that in 2012, and says he told Lefty at the time it was  Pete Rose shite and, by the way, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR BLEEPING MIND?

Pete could have told Lefty what sort of hellscape awaited him if he laid that bet, but when the action has its hooks into you as deep as it apparently did (does?) Mickelson, it likely would have just been words in the ether. Of course, Pete remains Pete, a sleaze still on the make after all these years. So maybe he doesn't say anything to Lefty except go with God, my son.

In any event, one of the most popular Tour golfers ever is now just Pete Revisited: A 50-something guy hustling for the next dollar without particularly caring whose dollar it is.  Anything to keep the ride going -- or maybe to keep from winding up in the trunk of a Lincoln Continental with two taps in the back of the head.

Sad, man. Really, really sad.

Apparel fail

 Hey, I get it. I really do.

Pat Fitzpatrick was a terrific coach, a legendary player, a loyal son of old NU. Open his veins, and he bled purple. Cue up some old game film, and you're probably looking at the best football player Northwestern ever had.

But he also, according to multiple accusers and eyewitnesses, seemingly knew about some of the sicko things allegedly going on in his locker room. It was a hazing culture that allegedly featured the simulated gang rape of underclassmen -- and the mindset that gave birth to it seemingly still exists.

This after several NU assistants and staffers wore T-shirts with Fitzgerald's old number 51 on them the other day, superimposed on the slogan "Cats Against The World." Some players defended them as symbols of "team unity," but the message sent was that the program was being persecuted and was now, as the injured party, closing ranks against its persecution.

I still think athletic director Derrick Gragg was in some way complicit in all of this, or at least late to the party. But he hit the nail square in his reaction to the T-shirts.

Said they were "inappropriate, offensive and tone-deaf." Said he was "extremely disappointed" in those who wore them. Said the university stood full-bore against hazing, and allow him to be "crystal-clear" about that.

Good for him.

Now he needs to get rid of the guys who wore those shirts, because their loyalty is to the tainted Fitzpatrick and not to Northwestern. 

Again, I get it. Loyalty is a football program's fuel -- loyalty to the players, to the program, to the head coach. This is especially true of assistant coaches who've been handpicked by said head coach. Everyone in a successful program likes to throw around the word "family," and in truth that's what it's like.

But you can't tear out an entire culture simply by lopping off the head of it. Like any infestation, you have to tear it out root and branch. And how are you going to do that if you still employ some of those who were part of that culture, knowingly or not?

Your move, Mr. Gragg.

The day approacheth, N.D. edition

 No scales adorn the eyes of outgoing Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. The train is coming and he sees it clearly, even if it's still a bend away and beyond the sightline of mere mortals.

Swarbrick told Sports Illustrated yesterday that the breakup of Division I athletics is "inevitable," and it's no more than a decade away. Mid-2030s, perhaps. Earlier than that, maybe.

What's going to happen, he thinks, is big-boy college athletics will split along two fault lines: One for schools that still want to at least nominally braid athletics into the university's academic mission, and one for Whatsamatta U. Athletics Inc. 

The latter will be tied to the university as a brand name only. The former will be schools like ... well, like Notre Dame.

Or at least the Notre Dame envisioned by Swarbrick and the rest of the administrative structure in South Bend.

And here's where Swarbrick's vision might get a bit cloudy.

God love him and God love N.D., they still see themselves as an entity whose path is somehow different from SEC Inc. and Big Ten Corp., primarily because they're able to maintain at least the appearance of football independence. But that different path becomes more indistinguishable every day.

Truth is, they're an ACC football school in everything but name, as both a conference member in everything else and a school that plays half its football schedule against ACC opponents. They have a lucrative TV deal, same as all the other major football powers. And they have a national brand -- maybe a more lucrative national brand than anyone else's.

They're as corporate and driven by the financial ledger as anyone, in other words. And their football independence is not long for this world.

As inevitable as Swarbrick finds the dissolution of Division I sports, it seems to me that so, too, is Notre Dame eventually getting swallowed in the realignment tsunami. Before all this is done, it seems to me, Division I will be down to two or at most three giant media conglomerates -- the Big Ten, the SEC and (maybe) the Big 12 -- and they'll have vacuumed up every significant athletic program in the country.

Where does that leave Notre Dame? If the ACC gets cannibalized the way the Pac-12 just was, where do the Irish land? How do they avoid joining the Super Ten or SEC Inc. in football if those conferences have expanded to 20 or 25 schools and no one can afford an open date anymore?

Notre Dame still swings a big club in football because it's Notre Dame, and its longstanding deal with NBC affords it a certain bargaining power. But eventually that club will be a twig compared to the ones the Super Ten and SEC Inc. will be lugging around. Eventually, they'll both be too big for even an eminence like N.D.  to demand the kind of arrangement it has with the ACC.

The day approacheth, in other words. And that right soon, as the good book says.

History lesson time!

 And, yeah, OK, I already hear y'all moaning and complaining.

Aw, dummy up. Sometimes the history nerd in me pushes aside the Sportsball World nerd in me, and if you don't know that by now you haven't been paying attention. ("I'm sorry, were you saying something?" you're saying). Sometimes History Nerd just can't hold his tongue, and this is one of those times.

That's because Indiana's reactionary attorney general, Performance Art Todd Rokita, revealed yesterday that whatever his educational background, it didn't include American history.

Performance Art Todd was banging the drums for the latest installment of the Parents' Bill of Rights, in which he explains what rights parents have regarding their children's "religious freedom." That kids already are guaranteed that freedom by the Constitution, and can already do everything he spelled out (and that the Parents' Bill of Rights spells out) didn't deter him in the slightest. 

There's nothing guys like Performance Art Todd like better than addressing phantom issues, after all. It's damn near a cottage industry for them.

Anyway, in the midst of Performing his Art, yesterday, Todd-o dropped a doozy of a fiction: That the separation of church and state was never a thing until a handful of court cases a few years back, and that it is, in fact, a "myth."

Uh, not so much.

The founders addressed the issue way back at the beginning of the republic, and the seeds of church-state separation actually go back farther than that. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson espoused the principle long before the Constitution was ever put to paper, and the rest of the founders followed suit with the establishment clause in the First Amendment. That clause is entirely based on the separation idea, and the belief (as set forth by Jefferson and Madison) that separation was not only wise but necessary to both religious freedom and the republic's survival as a republic.

Jefferson and Madison, meanwhile, never shut up about it. 

While president in 1802, Jefferson first used the term "wall of separation" so widely quoted by defenders of the establishment clause to this day. Madison, meanwhile, never deviated from his position on the matter, publicly or otherwise.

All of this happened, it goes without saying, quite a few years before those court cases Performance Art Todd cited in trying to claim church-state separation was a "myth."

As usual, he had it backward.

He was the one doing the mythologizing.

August reveries

 Bill Elliott old-man crabbing. There's your memory for this morning.

 NASCAR comes back to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in August this  Brickyard Weekend for the first time since 2006, and straight away I remember Bill Elliott sitting on the stoop of his trailer and crabbing about the heat. He was in the sunset of his career by then, Elliott was, and there he was mopping sweat off his brow and talking about how he wouldn't miss the bleepity-bleep heat -- and how he knew he was getting on in years because it wore on him in a way it never did when he was young.

Meanwhile I was mopping sweat off my own brow and thinking: I'm right there with ya, Awesome Bill.

The heat is what always comes back to me when I remember the Brickyard 400 in those years, the heat and the smell of gasoline and the ear-splitting blare of muscled-up stock cars. It got hot at Indy in May, too, of course, but it was different in August. Then it rose up from the baking concrete -- all that pavement turned the place into a griddle when the mercury leaped -- while that good old Hoosier humidity lay over everything like a collapsed tent.

You sweated a lot, in other words. Which is why sweating is one of my foremost tactile memories of the Brickyard, other than the nap-inducing Tournament of Roses parade racing that made NASCAR and the fabled Indy oval such a poor fit.

(A secondary memory: Legendary motorsports writer Ed Hinton sitting in the media center with his head thrown back, snoring away in the middle of the race one year.)

I banged the drum for years to move the Cup race to the road course, and they finally did, and now NASCAR at Indy is wild and crazy and a hell of a lot of fun in a way it never was on the oval. I understand the drivers who still pine for the oval, because like them I'm appreciative of its unmatched history. But the Verizon 200, which is what they call the Brickyard 400 now, at least will never put you to sleep.

Dwindling crowds and revenue -- and the oppressive heat -- pushed IMS into moving the race around, first to late July and then to September expressly because officials figured it would be a tad cooler then. Now they've brought IndyCar into the mix, because NASCAR alone no longer can carry the weekend and no longer figures to.

Love the idea, frankly. It turns an event into a Great Big Event, brings to town two very different fan bases, gives the Alex Palous and Scott Dixons and Pato O'Wards a chance to hang with the Chase Elliotts and Joey Loganos and Kyle Busches. Likely will never happen, but how cool would it be to see a Brickyard crossover, with one of the IndyCar guys running both races and one of the NASCAR guys doing the same?

I'd sweat a few more gallons in August to see that, by golly.

OK. So maybe I wouldn't.

Today in idiocy

 Baltimore Orioles color man Kevin Brown is one of the best in the business according to those who follow such things, but not even he can avoid the Demon Butt-Hurt Brigade. That's why he'll miss a couple turns in the booth this week.

The O's suspended him the other day, see. His offense, apparently, was accurately narrating a pre-broadcast graphic.

The graphic pointed out, and Brown reiterated, that the O's don't have a great track record in road games at Tampa Bay. In fact, they've historically kinda sucked against the Rays at their place.

Not that Brown said that.

No, all he said was the O's don't have a great track record in road games at Tampa Bay. He also said they had a great opportunity, consequently, to both break that mold and put some distance between themselves and their chief pursuer in the AL East.

"They suspended him for that?" you're saying now. "Come on, you gotta be making that up,"

I am not. And it got me thinking about what social media has wrought, and how ridiculous (not to say fascist) has become the monitoring of said media.

Look. I'm not, and never have been, a big fan of the term "political correctness." This is because the people who most like to trot it out at the drop of every hat use it as an epithet to describe what most of us consider simple common decency. So I won't use it here in the same context.

What I will say is there seems to be an awful lot of over-the-top response these days to so-called offensive social media posts. Or even re-posts.

This last weekend, for example, NASCAR suspended driver Noah Gragson because he liked -- not reposted, merely liked -- an apparently insensitive meme about George Floyd, a black man, who was choked to death by a psycho white cop in 2020. The suspension is indefinite, because Gragson was deemed to have violated NASCAR's social media policy.

This of course gave the MAGA crowd the opportunity to rant some more about the speech police, their new favorite thing since their lord and savior Previous President is screeching about how he's being persecuted for exercising his First Amendment rights. 

(He's not, but the facts never stopped TFG or his acolytes before. Why start now?)

The Blob won't go that far off the deep end. But it does have some serious questions about proportionality and boundaries and the ease with which the Demon Butt-Hurt Brigade gets so butt-hurt to begin with.

Kevin Brown, for instance: Why, instead of such a hysterical response, didn't his bosses just sit him and his producers down and say, um, please don't air a segment highlighting our losses again. 'Kay?

And Gragson?

Same deal. NASCAR was completely within its rights, according to its rules, to do what it did. But an indefinite suspension? Is there no warning phase built into its procedures? Where was the level head in the room to say "Noah, don't do that s*** again or we'll suspend you. And post an apology. I know that seems kinda silly, but you know how people are these days."

Gragson,, by the way, did post such an apology. Took full credit for messing with NASCAR's image, which is tres sensitive for NASCAR particularly when it comes to race. Lots to live down in that area, after all.

At any rate, there seems to be no moderation in these matters anymore, on both sides of the ideological divide.  Absurd overreaction seems to be our national fallback position these days, and it's a damn shame. 

Glad I'm not an Orioles or NASCAR employee, saying that. I'd probably get suspended.

More realignment fun

So I see now that Cal and Stanford are being courted by the Atlantic Coast Conference, as the realignment fun continues. Well, why not.

Geography left the building a long time ago in this greedfest, after all, and no point lighting a candle for it.  Ditto regional identities, common sense, and the welfare of the student-athletes to which Big Football and Basketball used to pay at least nominal lip service. The whole deal is run by network money now, coaches and ADs and university presidents all genuflecting deeply in service to it.

About the only thing left to say about that is what a sharp-witted good friend said the other day: When do Oxford and the Sorbonne get on board?

I mean, if four West Coast schools can join a formerly Midwest conference, and two other West Coast schools can enter talks with a primarily East Coast conference, all bets are off. Get some of those Cambridge scholars out of the rowing shells and into helmets and pads, and soon they'll be playing Michigan in the Big House so the Big Ten can tap  that lucrative BBC market.

College football, Doctor Who and Fawlty Towers. Now there's a winning trifecta for ya.

It's a silly notion, of course, but silliness is all relative these days. How less silly is it that Rutgers, a MAC-level football school, be allowed to join the Big Ten solely because the Big Ten Network wanted to get its grubbies on the New York media market? Or that Cal and Stanford possibly are in play to become bi-coastal?

And, sure, I get it, this is the new reality, trundling down the path to the ultimate reality: The Power Five conferences become Four, and then Three, and then Two,  eventually evolving into a breakaway entity that reconstitutes itself into what it already is in essence: A semipro rival to the NBA G-League in basketball and a similar developmental league for the NFL.

The NIL and exclusive focus on TV money by university boards and administrators have already put us more than halfway there. Why not go all the way and hammer out deals with the NFL and NBA?

The "non-revenue" athletes can still function in the traditional student-athlete construct. Big Football and Basketball, which are already treated differently, can go their own way, with all the attendant parallels.

Georgia and Alabama become  Falcons/Jaguars properties. Michigan and Michigan State sign on as Lions affiliates. Purdue, IU and Notre Dame become Colts/Bears farmhands; Wisconsin, Nebraska and Iowa feed into the Packers system; Clemson, South Carolina and North Carolina develop talent for the Panthers; and so on, and so on.

What the hey. Go big or go home, right?

Thing is, if you go big, the mid-pack or below schools in Big Football and Basketball get diminished, no matter how heftier their cut of the loot. If I'm, say, Purdue or IU football, how much exponentially harder will life be with USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon coming into the fold? How many times can they be reasonably expected to beat those schools, and how many more rungs down the ladder do they subsequently get kicked?

It won't matter to the Ohio States, the Penn States, the Michigans, the high-end Big Ten football schools. But Purdue just went from third or fourth or fifth in the conference to seventh or eighth or ninth. And Indiana just went from (most years) 10th or 11th or 12th to 16th or 17th or 18th. 

I don't know about you, but "Come get your ass kicked seven or eight times a year," doesn't sound like a great recruiting pitch to me. But what do I know?

I still think Stanford and Cal are west coast schools.

Bitterest end, Part Deux

Well. I guess now we know who really hates America.

It's the super-patriots, the "Woke!"-screamers, the flag-and-anthem worshippers, the MAGA cult crowd.

It's the Americans who gloated when Megan Rapinoe, one of most decorated American soccer players in history, sent a penalty kick so high and wide yesterday she laughed at the absurdity of it.

It's the Americans who reveled in the USWNT's loss, who were practically dancing in the streets when it happened, who drank deeply of the haterade because these women are so unlikeable, so disrespectful and unappreciative, so ... woke.

That's why they cheered when America lost, and mocked Rapinoe's tears at the end of it. And that's why they HATE AMERICA, because only someone who HATES AMERICA would be so happy America lost, right?

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Just because you don't root for your national team doesn't mean you hate America. That's just dumb."

Yep. It sure is.

See, I'm just applying the same logic that certain species of American applies when they say the women's national team HATES AMERICA, and that Megan Rapinoe is the queen of the America-haters (and gay, besides!). I'm just following the same line of reasoning they follow when they offer as "proof" the fact Rapinoe knelt for the national anthem and the team supposedly didn't sing along to it and, a couple of years ago, actually turned their backs on a 98-year-old veteran when he played the anthem on his harmonica.

Yeesh. The stupid, it burns.

Which is why I guess we have to explain all this again, even if the Blob is deathly weary of doing so.

No. 1: No one on the USWNT hates America because they didn't sing the national anthem. Hardly anyone sings the national anthem. Good lord, if that's the metric, 3/4 of the country hates America -- including practically every college or professional athlete, and including most of the super-patriots and anthem-and-flag worshippers.

No. 2: No one who's knelt for  the anthem to protest racial injustice in America hates America. You could argue, in fact, that they love their country more than their critics, because they want it to be better and don't believe the mindlessness of America Right Or Wrong is any way to make it so.

No. 3: Again, for God's sake, NO ONE TURNED THEIR BACKS on 98-year-old Pete DePre when he played the national anthem on his harmonica two years ago. They turned to face the flag and the stadium videoboard, which also had a flag on it. Which was exactly the direction DePre was facing. 

And, finally, No. 4 ...

Enough with the Rapinoe hate.

Yes, she's gay (and don't even try to tell me that's not part of the equation here. I'll just laugh at you). Yes, she spoke up for Those Awful Transgenders, and she holds other "woke" opinions the Certain Species doesn't like, and she was one of the leading voices calling for equal pay for the women, who after all have been the face of American soccer for more than two decades.

Let’s see now: Equal justice, equal pay, respect for and acceptance of those who are different. All values the Certain Species thinks are horrible, apparently.

Of course, Rapinoe also has two World Cup titles and an Olympic gold  medal, and won the Golden Boot and Golden Ball at the last World Cup as its leading scorer and MVP, and by any measure is one of the best players in American history. She represented her nation with distinction in four World Cups, and, whether the Certain Species agrees or not, advanced the cause of women's soccer in this country well through both word and deed.

And, yes, she and a lot of her teammates didn't much care for the previous president, a misogynist and sexual predator from way back.  As proud and accomplished American women, why would anyone expect them to go to the White House for a photo op with such a creature? Especially after he continually trashed them?

It's why the USWNT in general, and Rapinoe in particular, remain enormously popular except with the noisy but relatively small Certain Species enclave. It's why Rapinoe has earned, and deserves, our respect.  And it's why the "polarizing" tag that often gets attached to the USWNT (most recently by analyst Alexi Lalas) is far more a reflection of its critics than their target.

There. Are we done now with all this nonsense?

The bitterest end

 Full redemption was an inch away. Less than that.

It was one swipe at the ball and then another, a millisecond late. It was the tiniest fraction of momentum nudging a stopped shot just past the goal line before Alyssa Naeher got a hand on it to swat it away for keeps.

It was a shot glancing off the goalpost instead of into the goal. A miss here. A miss there. A legend's last shot in anger sailing high and wide.  

Apply any cliche you want to Sweden 1, USA 0 in the women's World Cup this morning. They all fit one of the most remarkable games the tournament will ever see, two archrivals battling to the bitter end and then beyond, and then beyond that, and then beyond that.

And finally the PK Naeher stopped but not enough, the blocked ball spinning across the goal line by the skinniest of margins.

It was the bitterest sort of end for the American women but also redemption in a weird sort of way, The critics who rightly bashed them for their lackluster play in the group stage -- they played without passion, they were too unfocused and immature, even that they just didn't care enough -- got their rebuttal and then some in this game.

Passion? Check.

Focus? Check.

Maturity? Check.

All night long they forced the play against an unbeaten team a lot of folks figured would handle them, given how little they'd shown until Sunday. Were it not for the stellar play of Swedish keeper Zecira Musovic, who made 11 saves, the Americans would have won in regulation.

But they didn't, and they couldn't find the back of the net in the two overtimes, and then Megan Rapinoe, in her last game, missed high and wide on a PK that could have all but sealed it. The two teams were 4-4 on PKs going into the seventh round -- most PKs in women's Cup history -- and then Kelley O'Hara's attempt kicked off the right post and  Lina Hurtig stepped up for Sweden.

We've already told you what happened next.

The shot. The partial block by Naeher. The ball still spinning above the goal line; Naeher batting out the rebound ...

And then the cliches: Gallant effort ... game of "if onlies" .. game of inches ... heartbreaking way to lose ... 

And somewhere in there, "an historic loss", because it was the first time the U.S. had ever bowed out of the World Cup before the semifinals.

Remember it at way if you like. But for the future of the USWNT, it might be worth remembering another way.

That they went out on their feet. And that they answered a hell of a lot of questions in doing so.

Baltimore summer

 Let's hear it out there today for cranky old Earl Weaver, and for Jim Palmer, and for Frank Robinson and Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell and his mighty bat. And for Camden Yards and crab cakes and, hell, Edgar Allen Poe, too, while we're at it.

The Balimer ("Baltimore" in the local dialect) Orioles are a real baseball team again. How about that, boys and girls?

This morning they're 68-42 and clear of the Tampa Bay Rays by two games atop the AL East, the best record in the American League and the second best in all of baseball. Meanwhile, the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees are bringing up the rear in the division -- proving you really can stand the world on its head, even if it's round and looks exactly the same no matter how you pose it.

This is a hell of a thing for both Balimer and baseball in general, because it proves no one gets the soiled end of the stick forever in America's former pastime. (With the possible exception of my Pittsburgh Cruds, who are not quite as Cruddy right now only because the Cardinals, of all people, are Cruddier). Redemption is just an Elly de la Cruz or an Adley Rutschman away. Pitching helps, too.

And so suddenly the O's have Rutschman and Anthony Santander and Gunnar Henderson swinging the bat, and Dean Kremer and Kyle Gibson and Kyle Bradish blowtorching on the bump. And you can almost forget that just five summers ago they went 47-115 and finished an astounding 61 games out of first in the East.

That kicked off a four-year stretch in which they lost 115. 108 and 110 games, a streak bottomless futility interrupted only by the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. And was it only two years ago they were 52-110 and finished 48 games out of first?

You bet it was. 

Now, though, homegrown talent and astute market choices have stirred echoes of the last time the O's were a contender, which was eons ago in baseball years but only seven or so in real time. Remember 2016, when the O's lost in the wild-card round to the Blue Jays? Or 2014, the last time they reached the ALCS?

Sure you don't.

All that subsequent, epic losing tends to wipe the memory, after all. And so you can be forgiven for thinking it's been, like, eleventy-hundred years since the O's were any good -- or, for that matter, the Kansas City Royals, who swept Baltimore in that aforementioned ALCS and went on to lose to the Giants in seven games in the World Series.

And now?

Well, now they're 36-75 and 21 games out of first in the sad-sack AL Central, the worst team in baseball not named the Oakland A's. And the Washington Nationals, who won the World Series just four summers ago, are dead last in the NL East, 24-and-a-half games adrift of the first-place Atlanta Braves.

The lesson: In baseball, the sun doesn't shine on the same dog's hindparts every day, modern player movement being what it is. Nor does the dog pee on the same teams forever, unless they're my Cruds.

Which makes all that corny hope-springs-eternal stuff coming out of spring training every year a bit less corny. And far more true.