Go figure

 This Indiana basketball season. It's rapidly turning into a miniseries titled "What If I Told You?"

As in, "What if I told you a team that made zero 3-pointers in just nine attempts last time out would haul off and shoot 22 of them in the next game, and make eight?"

As in, "What if I told you this same team still can't hit a barn door from the arc -- 8-of-22 is only 36 percent, after all -- but Gabe Cupps actually hit a three and Anthony Leal, who's played like 12 seconds this season, came off the bench to make three of his four attempts from Triple City and score 13 crucial points?"

As in, "What if I told you this team would throw Iowa down a 17-point hole, then let the Hawkeyes climb all the way out to take the lead down the stretch, then score the last eight points of the game to pull out a 74-68 win?"

These Hoosiers, man. Go figure.

Everything you wrote about them after the last game is absolutely true until the next game, when something else is true. They change narratives more often than Clark Kent changes clothes in a phone booth. 

Sometimes they come out as Superman. Sometimes they come out as Stuporman. Depends on the day.

Now, you could say this is just more evidence that Mike Woodson is incapable of pulling consistency out of his team, and you wouldn't be wrong. You could also say maybe he should be playing Anthony Leal more minutes, and that injuries have played a role in some of the inconsistency.

 Last night, for instance, Kel'el Ware was back in the lineup after an injury knocked him onto the sideline for awhile. But no sooner was he back than Xavier Johnson got hurt again, and linchpin Malik Reneau played only three minutes before he got hurt.

Which might explain why Indiana loaded up from the arc last night.

Or, considering who we're talking about here, maybe not.

Erased, Part Deux

 So remember yesterday, when the Blob wrote about the statue of Jackie Robinson that was stolen from a park in Wichita, Kansas?

The cops found it burning in a trash can.

It was destroyed beyond repair.

And what I'll say about that is there are some sick mother(bleepers) in this country. And what I'll also say is that goes for every jackwagon politician who tries to tell me racism is all in our minds in 2024 -- unless of course it involves a white male getting beaten out for a job by a man or woman of color who are presumed to be "diversity hires" and therefore unqualified.

Ya'll are accomplices to this. You just do your burning with words and innuendo.

Erased

 Only the shoes remain.

Bolted to a concrete base, neatly sawed off at the ankles, they're all that's left of a life-size bronze statue in McAdams Park in Wichita, Kansas. The rest is gone, leaving only two feet in baseball spikes -- some unintentional symbolism, perhaps, or likely just more evidence that America is over-served with idiots these days.

The statue, you see, was of Jackie Robinson.

It stood in McAdams Park because kids play baseball there, and also because ... well, when has anyone needed to explain the significance of Jackie Robinson to both baseball and civil rights in America?

According to this piece by my friend and former boss Justice B. Hill, the statue was one of eight of Robinson around the country.  There's even one of him carrying a football outside the Rose Bowl, a nod to Jackie's days as a two-sport star at UCLA.

And if you're asking now, as are officials in Wichita, what would possess someone to do something so jackass-y as stealing a statue of Jackie Robinson, my response would be I don't know what possesses half of America these days. I mean, I do, but you're not allowed to say it without being tagged as a "woke" Commie-fascist-socialist who hates the good old US of A.

Which brings me to my larger point, and perhaps where the symbolism of Missing Jackie comes in: That in America today the people who scream "cancel culture" every time someone tries to remove the whitewash from American history are the very ones doing most of the canceling.

It's why Nikki Haley's out there selling the absurdity that America has never been a racist country. It's why parents and politicians of a certain ideological bent are bullying school libraries to remove books they deem "inappropriate" -- including, gee, what a surprise, the works of Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. 

It's why among their various bogeymen is Critical Race Theory, an advanced law-school study no secondary or primary school in America is teaching anyway.

Rewriting American history is the goal of all this, and it goes back to the immediate post-Civil War period, when Lost Cause revisionism became the accepted narrative in the South and eventually, as a byproduct of the reconciliation movement, in the North. One of the things reconciled, after all, was that we white folk gotta stick together, though it was never stated so explicitly.

And now it's 2024, and Lost Cause revisionism is experiencing a comeback in your redder states and communities. The Civil War had very little to do with slavery, the narrative goes there. Slavery, in fact, was beneficial because it taught slaves useful skills they could use later on (hat tip to Ron DeSantis for that one). And let's not bring up the less noble parts of American history, because that might reflect poorly on white people and therefore would be "divisive."

The height of absurdity in all this might have been when the state superintendent of schools in Oklahoma said teachers were permitted to talk about the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa by a white mob. But only as long as they didn't say it was about race.

Ay-yi-yi. As a student of history, stuff like that makes me want to beat my head against a wall.

"Gee, Mr. Blob, you sure have wandered a good ways away from a stolen statue of Jackie Robinson," you're saying now.

Yeah, well. I do tend to get carried away. But my point pertains.

Which is, Jackie ain't the only thing that's going missing these days.

Those games

 Alrighty, then: The Chiefs and the 49ers.

That's your matchup in the Big Roman Numeral, and the lesson here is them that's been there usually win. The Chiefs and the 49ers had both been where they were yesterday, multiple times. The Ravens and Lions had not. And you could tell the difference.

The Chiefs and 49ers made the plays that win conference championship games. The Ravens and the Lions made the plays that lose them. 

Throwing into triple coverage. Negating a big gainer by taunting the guy covering you and then fumbling on the goal line. Dropping passes on gambler's-throw fourth-down plays, and not taking the points on those fourth-down plays to begin with in a game where every point was absolutely critical.

The Ravens and Lions did all of the above. The Chiefs and 49ers, when it counted, did not, because they'd been there before and didn't let the moment overwhelm them. They knew that's what it was going to take, and they responded accordingly.

Yesterday, in a nutshell.

Today, a few additional thoughts ...

* The NFL Is Rigged!

Oh, what an absolute hoot it was to watch the MAGAs and Testosterone Bros lose their minds because now we're gonna get two more weeks of Taylor and Travis.

"The fix was in!" they cried. "The woke league and woke networks made sure the Chiefs won because they wanted woke Taylor and woke Travis in the Super Bowl! The NFL is rigged and our elections are rigged (except when a Republican wins) and the justice system is rigged and the WHOLE GOT-DAMN WORLD IS RIGGED!!"

Oh, man. I am weak from laughing. Weak, I tell you.

* The Most Lions Thing Ever

Because who else could so thoroughly dominate a half, the way the Lions did in the first half last night, and then blow a 17-point lead in 10 or 12 minutes?

It was classic Lions, teasing their long-suffering fans with that 24-7 halftime lead ("Omigod! I can't believe this!"), and then handing the game to the 49ers with drops and fumbles and tactical backfires, and even a pass that BOUNCED OFF A LION'S FACEMASK TO A 49ERS RECEIVER FOR A 50-YARD GAIN. ("Omigod! I can't believe this!")

Conclusion: Even God switched sides at halftime. 

Further conclusion: The Curse of Bobby Layne never dies, it just keeps getting more cruel.

* Dan Campbell Is An Idiot

Because he left six points on the field by gambling twice on fourth down and failing, even though gambling on fourth down has been his signature move all season. 

Kick the field goals, and the Lions stay two scores up on the onrushing 49ers and change the way San Francisco has to play as the clock ticked down. Be your usual Swashbucklin' Danny self instead, and a potential 30-24 Lions lead in the fourth quarter is instead a 27-24 deficit with fewer than ten minutes to play.

You can't get greedy in a conference championship game, especially when you're the road team. And especially in this game, when every point was like gold with the 49ers on fire and coming.

* Dan Campbell Is Not An Idiot

Because both fourth-down gambles work if the receivers just catch the ball. In both cases, they'd been schemed open. In both cases, they literally dropped the ball. 

Then again, drops happen. 

Which is why the Blob still thinks you take the points whenever you can.

And last but not least ...

* Patrick Mahomes Is A Golden God. Also, Remember A Couple Of Weeks Ago, When Travis Kelce Was Washed And It Was All Taylor's Fault?

Mahomes on Sunday: 30-of-39, 241 yards, one touchdown, no interceptions. And he was sacked just twice by the hungry Ravens' pass rush.

Kelce on Sunday: Eleven targets, 11 catches, 116 yards, one touchdown.

Never bet against Mahomes in a playoff game. Never, ever, ever.

And if this was a washed, Taylor-distracted Kelce?

We should all be so washed, then. And so distracted.

Just another L

 This is some perilous country Mike Woodson is traveling now, because it's not a country a basketball coach at Indiana would ever want to see or ever should see. That's because it's a country with which Indiana football is entirely familiar.

Call it the Country of Diminished Expectation.

It's a place where alums in Memorial Stadium watch Indiana almost beat Ohio State or Michigan or some other heavyweight on occasion, and leave thinking they've gotten their donation's worth. "Hey, the boys put up a fight," is what you hear in this place. Also, "Look at this, we didn't get pushed around like usual! That's progress, right?"

Listen very carefully, and you heard some of that after Illinois 70, Indiana 62 yesterday.

The boys played hard! They didn't get pushed around on the road by the No. 10 team in the nation! This was PROGRESS!

That sort of thing.

Now, the Bobbyheads and diehards undoubtedly hated that with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. They're probably still grinding their molars to dust over it this morning. And you can't really blame 'em, because moral victories are regarded as shameful cop-out at places like Indiana, where past glories are never really past.

It's why the Hoosiers are on their fifth coach since Bob Knight ran himself off 24 years ago. It's why the bar is set by the more delusional at a height that's absurdly unrealistic in this era of college buckets. 

But you know what?

It's not at all unrealistic to set it higher than it seems to be now.

What we saw in Champaign yesterday was yet an IU team that's glaringly out of step with basketball as it exists in 2024, and that's on Woodson. He put a team together, after all, that can't make a three to save its life. In fact that's exactly what happened yesterday, when the Hoosiers went 0-for-9 from behind the arc and had to rely on an inside game that was missing Kel'el Ware.

Malik Reneau (21 points before fouling out) and Mackenzie Mgbako (12 and 12 boards) did what they could, but getting outscored 21-0 from Threeville was too much to overcome. And just to rub it in a bit, a Fort Wayne kid (Luke Goode) splashed three of the Illini's seven triples. Here's a little present from the Hoosier state, Indiana.

Your bottom line to all this?

You can't win in the era of  Steph Curry 'n' them if you can't hit a barn door from distance.  And the Hoosiers can't.

Woodson can't do anything about that right now. What he can do is demand a consistent effort, and sometimes that isn't there, either. It's why The Boys Played Hard is a balm now for some Indiana fans, soothing syrup to make another L go down easier.

Not that another L should ever go down easy, in B-town. Nor should The Boys Played Hard be anything but a given.

That the first seems to be happening, and the second is not, should be what keeps Woodson awake nights. And probably does.

And your Super Bowl will be ...

 ... a football team, and another football team!

OK. Enough seventh-grade boy jokes.

Just delaying who I actually think will be in Super Bowl Whatever Roman Numeral We're Up To, because it's conference championship day and as usual the heart is having a furious argument with the head. This happens every time I want to pick someone really badly, but I know I should pick someone else. Today the argument sounds kind of like this ...

Heart: OK, so I'm picking the Lions because they are a Team of Destiny. They are America's Sweetheart if America's Sweetheart was big and sweaty and liked to haul off and kick you in the nuts every so often. They're mean, they're focused, they carry the hopes and dreams of a city that's starving for a winner and thinks the Curse of Bobby Layne has gone on entirely too lo-

Head: You know Deebo Samuel is back, right?

You know it's going to be a perfect day in San Francisco today, not a monsoon like last week, right? Which means Brock Purdy will be a lot better than he was against the Packers, and Deebo and George Kittle and Christian McCaffrey will run unencumbered through the lush meadows and sunny glades of Levi's Stadium. You know this, right?

Heart: But the Lio-

Head: Yeah, yeah, we know all about the Lions and their heart and their soul and Jared Goff and their terrific young players, like Aidan Hutchinson and Jahmyr Gibbs and Sam La Porta. It's a sweet story. It is, in fact, the sweetest story to come down the pike in years. But it ends today because the 49ers have been the best team in the NFC all season and they're not going to stop being the best team in the NFC just because you, Mr. Heart, want to wax nostalgic about Alex Karras and Mel Farr and Lem Barney and Eric Hipple for the next two wee-

Heart: Hey, don't forget Billy Sims and Errol Mann and Megatron! And Greg Landry. Good ol' Greg Landry.

Head: Whatever. Bottom line, the Niners have the veterans and the Lions don't. In this situation, you go with them that's been there every time.

Heart: Hey, that sounds like a Taylor Swift lyr-

Head: Oh, no. No, no, no, NO. Tell me you're NOT picking the Chiefs in the rain in Baltimore today. Please tell me that.

Heart: Well ... you were the one who said you go with them that's been there. And who's been there more than Patrick Mahomes? Guy's never not played in an AFC championship game, not once in six years. Lamar Jackson, on the other hand, may be your hands-down league MVP, but he's never played in this game. And the rain might slow him down today. And, again, how many times do you make bank by betting against Mahomes?

Just ask Buffalo. 

Head: Hey, thinking critically is MY gig, buddy. Lay off.

Heart: Heh.

Head: Yeah, you laugh now. But you won't be laughing when the Ravens pass rush runs Mahomes all over Maryland. The Ravens pass rush vs. the Kansas City O-line is a baaaad matchup for Chiefs Kingdom. Didja see the way they ruined C.J. Stroud and a good Texans team in the second half last week?  Rolled over 'em like a big wheel. And this is Lamar's time, you can feel it.

Heart: "You can feel it"? Now who's stealing whose gig?

Head: Yeah, well. Enough jawing. I'm calling it Ravens 24, Chiefs 17, and San Francisco 34, Detroit 24. The two best teams in football prove it today.

Heart: And I'm saying Chiefs 24, Ravens 21, and Detroit 31, San Francisco 30. Can't bet against Mahomes, can't bet against destiny.

Aaand there you have it. Or not.

Bill of (no) sale

 Poor Bill Belichick. Nobody wants the guy.

We're deep into the NFL hiring cycle, and Jim Harbaugh is an NFL head coach again, and Raheem Morris is, and Antonio Pierce is sticking around in Las Vegas. Oh, and  Buccaneers offensive coordinator Dave Canales is the new head coach of the Carolina Panthers, the poor guy.

Meanwhile, there sits Bill with his resume hanging out.

So far the guy with six rings in 24 years with the New England Patriots has interviewed with just one team, the Atlanta Falcons. The Dirty Birds went with Morris instead, reportedly because they didn't see Belichick as a long-term solution.

That's because Bill has one item on his resume he can't defend: The calendar.

The calendar says he's 71 years old, and he's been coaching in some capacity for about 50 of those, and he's been a head coach in the NFL for 29 of those. That's a long time in the barrel, unprecedented success or not. I suspect that's why a lot of NFL teams look at him and, like the Falcons, mainly see an expiration date. 

Maybe what everyone also sees is what happened when Tom Brady left, and Bill was left to his own devices. It hasn't been pretty. The Patriots went 7-9 in the first post-Brady season, then they were 10-7, then they were 8-9 and, in Belichick's last season in Foxborough, 4-13.

That's 29-38 when you add 'em up. And no AFC East titles. And one playoff appearance, a wild-card loss to Buffalo.

I don't know if any NFL teams looked at that. I think they mostly looked at the fact he's 71 and has been coaching forever and if you hire him, how much longer can you reasonably think he'll be around?

Whatever the reason, the Falcons passed on him, and no one else seems remotely interested even though several jobs are still open.  And now some people are speculating he might take a year off and try again next year. 

I can't see how how that would make him more employable, frankly. He'll be a year older and will have been out of the game for a year. If no one's biting on him now, why would they then?

"But after Eberflus ruins Caleb Williams, the Bears job might be open!" you're saying now.

Like that's incentive?

No, if the Blob had Belichick's ear (and God knows how that would ever happen), its advice would be to kick back and enjoy retirement. Sleep in. Move somewhere warm and sun yourself on a rock like a gecko. Get yourself one of those cushy analyst gigs like Cowher and Urban Meyer and Jimmy Johnson. 

After all, it's not like Bill's legacy isn't firmly cemented. He's already on Coaching Rushmore with Shula and Lombardi and Noll and Landry. He's in the Hall of Fame as soon as he becomes eligible. What is there left to do except screw up his winning percentage?

Word is he wants to pass Shula as the NFL's all-time winningest coach, but second acts for icons like Belichick rarely play out well. And I'm guessing NFL teams are aware of that, too.

In any case, Bill's phone ain't chirpin'.  And it doesn't seem likely to any time soon.

Sound like a sign from the football gods to me.

Inevitable

 You saw this jailbreak coming, if you didn't bleed maize-and-blue. Jim Harbaugh was always going back to the NFL, because too many people there wanted him and he was too successful there, And there was little reason left to stay at Michigan, no matter how big a wad the university threw at him.

He'd done what he came to Ann Arbor to do, which is bring the Wolverines a national title. He'd also been suspended half the championship season for various hijinks that happened on his watch, And it's likely the NCAA wasn't done with the school yet.

None of that will be an issue for Harbaugh in Los Angeles, where the chronically underachieving Chargers have an A-list quarterback and a lot of other juicy pieces. It's a scenario all but hand-delivered for a guy like Harbaugh, whose reputation for resurrecting tumbledown organizations in a hurry is well established.

Even a decade after leaving San Francisco to answer the call of his alma mater, it's doubtful anyone's forgotten what he did there. He took a 49ers franchise that had missed the playoffs eight straight years and put them in the Super Bowl in four years. The 49ers went 44-19-1 on Harbaugh's watch and reached the NFC championship game three times.

It took him a bit longer at Michigan, but eventually he got the Wolverines there, even if he didn't do it clean. But in his last season the Wolverines ran the table with a school-record 15-0 record, beat Alabama in an epic CFP semifinal and then handled undefeated Washington with ease in the title game.

Lots of Michigan diehards were convinced it was the beginning of a Harbaugh dynasty, especially when Michigan reportedly offered to make him the highest-paid coach in college football history. One of those diehards, just a few days ago, told me "He's not going anywhere," and then proceeded to lay out why: The family loved Ann Arbor, and the NCAA had already taken Harbaugh and Michigan off any additional hooks, and the interviews with the Chargers, Falcons and others were just Harbaugh's yearly flirtations to drive up his price.

It all made perfect sense. Until it didn't.

Until, of course, you understood Harbaugh was never going to be a college football lifer -- he'd already jumped from the former to the pros once -- and that the national championship was the perfect place to close this particular book. And whether or not the NCAA is done with Michigan over the Connor Stalions illegal scouting scheme sounds only like more whistling past the graveyard by the Michigan faithful.

Maybe the Wolverines are in the clear. Maybe they're not. But why would Harbaugh stick around to find out?

He wouldn't, of course. And didn't.

Today in versatility

 Colorado Rockies standout Todd Helton went into the baseball Hall of Fame yesterday, and score one for the parents of athletic children who resist the siren song of specialization. This one was for all of you who've said, "Nah, my kid's not gonna play AAU ball all summer every summer because he once hit two 3-pointers in a Biddy Ball game."

Good for you.

Because you know what?

Helton spent his summers playing baseball growing up. But he spent his autumns on the football field.

In fact, Helton played both football and baseball in college at Tennessee, Excelled in both. In the fall of 1994, he even started three games at quarterback for the Vols, completing 36-of-66 passes for 406 yards and two touchdowns. Then he got hurt, and a freshman replaced him/

That freshman's name was Peyton Manning.

Who's now in the pro football Hall of Fame. 

And who attended his old Tennessee teammate's last game at Coors Field.

But back to the original point: Playing multiple sports as a kid is a positive good, not a negative bad, in the development of a young athlete.

It's why so many of the high school coaches the Blob encountered in its 38 years in the sportswriting business not only encouraged their athletes to play other sports, but in some cases insisted on it. Those coaches correctly surmised that doing so made them better football/basketball/baseball/whatever players. And they had decades of precedent to back them up.

The Blob saw it, too. Troy Lewis, for instance, Indiana's co-Mr. Basketball in 1984 and later a buckets star at Purdue, was also a terrific baseball player for Anderson High School. Rod Woodson was a world-class hurdler at both Snider and Purdue. And over at Wayne, Roosevelt Barnes was a three-sport star: Football, basketball and baseball.

Like Woodson and so many others from the Fort, he wound up playing in the NFL.

Look. Specialization works for some, no question. But it's hardly the only path to fame, fortune and even the Hall of Fame. Or even the best way, necessarily.

Today's plug for versatility.

Conspiracy mania

 Back ... and to the left. Back ... and to the left.

-- Kevin Costner, as Jim Garrison, in "JFK"

Everybody loves a good conspiracy wallow. That's why Oliver Stone made "JFK" to begin with, right?

It's the all-time champeen of cinematic conspiracy wallows, and give Stone credit: It accurately predicted our future. Because if nothing else, "JFK" was a precursor to today's America, where conspiracy kooks have so hijacked the national narrative they're given credence even by people who once were too level-headed to buy the snake oil.

Costner running and re-running the moment in the Zapruder film when JFK's head explodes -- all while intoning "Back ... and to the left" like some magical incantation -- is nothing but 9/11 kooks seeing an inside job and 1/6 kooks seeing evil Nancy Pelosi and the evil FBI trying to make deranged Trump cultists look bad. Slow down the video, edit it just so, and you can see whatever your imagination compels you to see. It's remarkably simple to do if you want to do it badly enough.

Which brings us, in the Blob's usual meandering way, to Caitlin Clark getting run over by an Ohio State fan in Columbus two days ago.

Like the Zapruder film, we've all seen the clip, and in real time it looks exactly like what it is: Clark running across the court toward the locker room, OSU fans rushing the court, Clark and one particular fan colliding.

Down goes Clark. And out come those who see something entirely different.

Slow down the video, see, and you can construct a narrative where Clark deliberately runs into the fan and then flops like a hooked trout. What a jerk!

Of course, this begs the obvious question, which is why on earth she would do that. It also ignores how quickly it happened in real time, and the fact Clark's head is turned right before the collision, and the fact she therefore had about a nanosecond to think "Imma run into this fan here, and then I'm gonna go down on the floor like I'm either Bill Laimbeer or I've been shot, because ... because we just lost and I'm mad and I want to make SOMEONE FROM OHIO STATE LOOK BAD."

Really, folks? I mean, really?

I don't know how we got to a place in this country where we immediately assume bad intentions, particularly if we're trying to advance a pet agenda. (I mean, I do know, and I know who's largely responsible, but that's another Blob for another day.) But technology has only ramped up that process, because everything everywhere winds up on video now and can be dissected any way you want.

So, Caitlin Clark flops and then, in a subsequent clip that shows her clearly hurting as she's being helped off the floor, fakes that, too. Because you've gotta believe the latter if you believe the former.

Me?

Hey, I get caught up in seeing stuff I want to see occasionally, too. Mea culpa. 

I just don't see it here.

A history deal

 So, then: Detroit, San Francisco, Baltimore, Kansas City.

Them's your final four, and no crabbing from the crabby misogynist brigade about OH MY GOD ANOTHER WEEK OF TAYLOR SWIFT. Yes, another week of that damn woman who's wildly successful and uses her success in threatening ways, such as encouraging people to vote. Deal with it, ya grumps.

Deal with it, because what we got here is a veritable Historypalooza, which you might find boring but which the Blob of course finds especially gratifying. Because what history nerd doesn't appreciate a good history wallow, especially if it goes back to 1992 and, gasp, 1957?

Speaking of which, let's begin with the Detroit Lions, who beat Tampa Bay Sunday as all of Detroit howled and bellowed, and who are now a win away from the Super Bowl. Read that last again: The Detroit Lions ... are now a win away from the Super Bowl. Weren't we all supposed to be dead before that happened?

Well, we're not, and it is happening, and the last time the Lions were this close to the big prize was, yes, 1957, 67 years ago. Ike was president then. Cars had big ol' tailfins. The Russians were coming to get us with Sputnik ... and Elvis and his pelvis were horrifying our parents ... and hula hoops and coonskin caps were still a thing.

Nineteen fifty-seven was also the last time the Lions won a road playoff game. It happened to be the NFL championship game. And you know who they beat?

The 49ers. In San Francisco.

Which is who they play in the NFC title game, and where they play it.

Can you say "karma", perhaps?

Well, they sure can in Buffalo, where the Bills lost to Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in another playoff classic Sunday, which is something we seem to say every year. Mahomes vs. Josh Allen has become the marquee playoff matchup, and once again it did not disappoint. And, yes, karma showed up for this one, too.

What else do you call it when the Bills lose it in the last 90 seconds because Tyler Bass' field goal attempt sailed ... wide right?

Wide right! The bane of the Bills existence since 1991, when Scott Norwood's game-winning attempt sailed wide right in Super Bowl XXV, and Buffalo lost 20-19 to the Giants. The Bills have never come as close since.

So, yeah, there was some karma in frosty Buffalo, and here was some more as Mahomes beat the Bills in the playoffs again, and here was a little history on top of it because, while Mahomes is now 6-0 in divisional round playoff games, this was the first playoff game he'd ever won on the road.

Now it's on to Baltimore, where the Ravens wadded up the Texans 34-10 and Lamar Jackson made a little history himself. He accounted for four touchdowns Saturday, and now he'll be playing in the AFC championship game for the first time. And the city of Baltimore will be playing host to a conference title game for the first time in 53 years.

That was in 1971, and the home team was not the Ravens but the previous tenant, the Colts. John Unitas, the immortal Johnny U., was the Colts quarterback then. They were on their way to beating the Cowboys in Super Bowl V, a comically sloppy game neither team frankly deserved to win.

Jim O'Brien finally won it with a 32-yard field goal.

.Fifty-three years later, Buffalo is surely jealous.

Trigger (un)happy

 Mike Woodson said at the top of the week he knew the fans love Indiana basketball, and he just hoped they still loved him. Then his Hoosiers laid down in Assembly Hall and let Zach Edey leave tire tracks on them for two hours, and went up to Wisconsin and embarrassed themselves in a variety of ways.

And now FireMikeWoodson.com is a thing, surprise, surprise.

Just like FireMikeDavis.com was a thing.

Just like FireKelvinSampson.com was a thing.

Just like FireTomCrean.com was a thing, and also FireArchieMiller.com, as if any IU fan could forget that.

Indiana's fan base is one of the most delusional in America, we all know that, pining as it does for the good old days when the boys never played like bums (they did, occasionally) and Sir Bob of Knight delivered national championships every other year (he didn't). So the candy-stripe brigade's stridency over what happened this week was as predictable as sunrise.

You get floor-waxed in the Hall by your fiercest rival, then go up to Wisky and not only lose but look like an unmade bed doing it, the wrath is a-comin'. Some of it actually is warranted; some of it is as unhinged as fan wrath always is.

Case in point: All the howling about how undisciplined Woodson's program is, a lot of which centered on CJ Gunn's Flagrant 2 ejection for elbowing Wisconsin's Max Klesmit. It was Indiana's seventh flagrant this season, the most in the nation. Disciplined teams don't do that, the howlers maintain, and it's hard to argue otherwise.

However.

However, the Blob has finally seen a clip of this latest crime against Indiana basketball. And it's a damn parking ticket.

Not only wasn't it a Flagrant 2 or anything remotely close, it shouldn't have been a foul. period. Watch it, rewind it, and watch it again, and all you're gonna see is two guys jostling each other the way basketball players do a hundred times a game. Klesmit leans into Gunn with his head  (not "wiping his sweat on him", as the narrative has it); Gunn pushes him away with an "elbow" that Klesmit sells like a vaudevillian.

Why the game official didn't just walk over and say "Knock it off, you two" is beyond me. Because that's all the whole thing warranted. 

Unfortunately, when you lead the nation in flagrants, you get a reputation, and reputation sometimes earns you a whistle. It's a reputation the Indiana fan base hates, because it violates everything IU fans believe about their program. And mostly they're right in thinking that.

But the rest?

Seems a tad over the top, a place with which the candy-stripers seem well familiar. Yes, these are not the Bob Knight Hoosiers, and they don't play the way the Bob Knight Hoosiers played, for the same reason no one shoots set shots anymore. Yes, they play sometimes without discipline or a visible plan or, worst of all, passion. And, yes, Woodson too often seems to downplay all that, vacillating wildly between either letting his players off the hook or throwing them under the bus.

In short, there's no consistency. About that, the fan base is right.

But to begin grumbling that IU needs to move on from Woodson three seasons in, as the FireMikeWoodson contingent already is doing?

That's the over-the-top part. Also the not particularly bright part.

It's now been 24 years since Sir Bob finally pushed IU into firing him, and Indiana is on its fifth successor. That's a new regime every five years on the average -- slightly less, actually. That's no way to bring back the glory days, which get more glorious in fable than in fact every passing year.

Continuity means something, or used to, but for a quarter century IU has shunned it like you shun your crazy Uncle Fred. With the exception of Sampson, a cheater who left the program a smoking ruin, this restlessness has been Indiana's own doing, driven by the restlessness of its fan base. Only with Crean did IU let a coach stick around long enough to learn his kids' names, and eventually Crimson Nation managed to run him off.

(Crean, it should be noted, took a program of walk-ons and had it ranked No. 1 in just five seasons. In his last five seasons, he won two undisputed Big Ten titles -- Indiana's first in a 20-year span that included Knight's final seven seasons -- and made the NCAA Tournament four times. Throw out the first two seasons, when the program was utterly prostrate, and his record in Bloomington was 150-89, a .627 winning percentage. But it still wasn't enough.)

Anyway ... Crean left, and Indiana hired Miller, and that didn't work. And then they hired Woodson, a former Knight player. And three years in, the bloom is off that rose, too.

Look. I get it. The landscape of college basketball is all different now, with the unfettered transfer portal and NIL turning it into a virtually lawless 24/7 bidding market. That's heightened the impatience that always been there in certain places, Indiana among them.

But it's also turned college buckets into more of a democracy than it's ever been, in the sense everyone has players now. That's why there have been six different NCAA champions in the last six years, and why there hasn't been a back-to-back champ since Florida 17 years ago. And why schools like Florida Atlantic are getting to the Final Four.

Florida Atlantic, which is coached by Dusty May, an IU grad.

Dusty May, whom some IU fans are already convincing themselves is Finally The Guy.

Can FireDustyMay.com be far behind?

SI, with a sigh

 It's been gone for awhile now, truthfully, like the wallpaper from my child's bedroom. The wallpaper consisted of Sports Illustrated covers, a bunch of them, torn free and Scotch-taped in place. Like the magazine itself, they have long since vanished.

And so climb aboard the geezer train with me, boys and girls, and let me tell you what it was like when we all wanted to drink young scotch and write like Dan Jenkins, or be as suave and skilled at crafting long-form narratives as Frank Deford, or be as hip and quick with a line as Curry Kirkpatrick.

These were your rock stars if you were a kid with no discernible skills besides hammering nails crooked and putting words together on paper, which was basically me back in the day. Jenkins and Deford and Kirkpatrick -- and later Rick Reilly and Steve Rushin and Gary Smith -- were proof positive that putting words together was something to be admired, and to get paid for. It meant I might not wind up digging ditches for a living after all, as my fretful mother always seemed to think.

I never made it to SI, and the pay was never anything to write home about. But I got to write about sports for a living, and it was every bit the blast it seemed to be for those giants whose work came in the mail every week.

I write all this not as an obit for SI, which all the obits flooding the Great Interwhosis-sphere in the last 24 hours seem to imply is finally cold on a slab. That was the basic reaction, or overreaction, to the news that the vandals who own what remains of SI are apparently about to lay off the entire staff in a licensing dispute with the vandals who run SI. Thus all the RIPs and eulogies and doesn't-he-look-like-himself mooning over the dear about-to-be-departed.

Not me. I'm writing this not because of what happened yesterday, but because of what began to happen almost 30 years ago.

That's when SI, our SI, really vanished, as I said at the top. It became a casualty of  both corporate greed and technology, and the impatience bred by both.

Great journalism -- the sort of superb reporting, writing and photography that made SI so iconic -- demands a certain investment of time, on the part of both those who create it and those who consume it. Those who create it were more than willing to invest that time; increasingly, those who consume it and those who bankroll it were not.

The bankrollers, outsiders without a lick of insight into their investment, were only looking for a fast buck. And the consumers, conditioned more and more by the internet to quick reads and quick hits and one-click shopping, were only looking to feed their dwindling attention spans.

The world changed, surprise, surprise. And SI didn't change with it, or at least didn't change quickly enough. And the boys and girls holding the purse strings didn't care as long as the balance sheet came out right, because quality doesn't matter when you don't understand the business and the value it places on quality.

Want to know who runs the show now at SI?

Something called Authentic Brands owns the licensing. Another something called Arena Group runs the magazine. Sound like media people to you?

Me, either. Therein lies the problem.

And therein lies SI -- its time as past as all those magazine covers, papering a smitten young man's bedroom.

Eternal senior

 A tight end at The U (Miami, Fla., for the uninitiated) is coming back this fall for his ninth* season as a college football player, and the Blob has questions, so many questions ...

(*Not a misprint. Apparently the tight end in question, Cam McCormick, had season-ending injuries four years in a row, and also was granted a COVID year, so, yeah. He still has another year of eligibility left, even though he was in the same high school recruiting class as Jalen Hurts and Nick Bosa.)

Anyway ...

On to the questions:

* Do the freshmen and sophomores on the team send him out to buy booze for them?

* How many times a day do they tell him "Dude, that's so 2019"?

* Does he belong to a fraternity, and is he now older than its charter?

* How many times has a teammate said "Cam McCormick! Hey, my dad played against you in high school!"?

* What's his proudest moment at The U.? Running out on the field for one last season, or getting his doctorate two years ago?

* Do all his fellow adjunct professors wear his jersey, sit together at games and chant "Cam, Cam, he's just like us! You should see his syllabus!"?

And last but not least ...

* When he finally leaves, will that one guy on campus who's changed his major ten times and is now a 30-year-old sophomore sneer and say "I knew he had no staying power"?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Questions

 And now another foray into Nerdy Journo Pontification, which means you are excused, Blobophiles. Especially if you have a note from Epstein's mom.*

(*If you're mystified by this reference, look it up. I'm not in a 'splainin' mood today.)

Anyway ... today's pontificating begins with a woman in Tampa.

She's a local TV reporter, and the other day at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers media availability with head coach Todd Bowles, she asked a spectacularly dumb question. She asked, since the Bucs will be playing at Detroit in a divisional playoff game this weekend, how the team was preparing for the cold weather.

Not knowing, apparently, that the Lions have been playing in an indoor facility for, like, 40 years.

Lots of veteran sports journos (including, mea culpa, this one) asked how in the hell an NFL reporter could not know the Lions played in Ford Field, and before that the Silverdome, which are/were roofed facilities? If you don't know even basic stuff like that, how the hell are you covering the NFL? And also, do a little research, for God's sake!

Well ...

Turns out the reporter in question works for a station that apparently once had a three-person sports staff, but decided at some point it didn't need no stinkin' sports staff. It was probably because the fat cats who own the station thought their pile wasn't fat enough, but that's just blue-skying on my part. 

(Bet I'm right, though.)

In any event, this woman got plucked from the remaining litter to go cover the Bowles presser. Now, I have no idea if she'd been sent to a Bucs presser before, or if she had any appreciative knowledge of the NFL. Maybe she had, and did. Maybe she didn't. Maybe her boss stepped out of his office, looked around the room, pointed and said "You. Bowles presser. Go."

In which case I can understand how she could ask such a clueless question. 

(Although if she were any kind of reporter at all, and she knew what she was going to ask, she should have looked up Ford Field before asking it. That part you can't excuse.)

Again, maybe it didn't go down that way. But given this is the era of the Magical Shrinking Newsroom, it's a pretty realistic assumption. And that part of it is on the soulless media congloms who've sucked the life out of American journalism and turned it into a side hustle manned by underpaid, overworked skeleton staffs.

As someone who spent a good chunk of his newspapering career during a time when covering the news actually mattered, it makes me want to weep.

Know what else makes me want to weep? 

That it's 2024 and there's still a healthy crop of lint-brains coming at us from, I don't know, 1950 or something.

One of the most disgusting sidelights to this incident, see, is how many knuckle-dragging Neanderthals have come crawling out of their social-media holes, saying, well, she's a WOMAN, and so she must have been a DIVERSITY HIRE. And she asked such a stupid question because WOMEN DON'T KNOW NOTHIN' ABOUT SPORTS.

Really? We're still dealing with this bullshite, all these years later?

Listen, women have been reporting on sports since before I started doing it, and that was a long damn time ago. Some of the smartest, funniest and toughest reporters I ever shared a pressbox with were women. And some of the dumbest, most clueless reporters I ever encountered were males -- mostly, because it was that kind of time, white males.

Yet here the lint-brains are, in 2024, using words like "diversity hire" to diminish the former. All while never using words like "white guy hire" to describe the sportswriters who asked dumb questions in the decades sportswriting was a white male bastion. Now, why is that, I wonder?

(Rhetorical question. We all know why that is.)

Look. I get it. "Diversity" has become the new bogeyman of the rabid right, because the rabid right always needs its bogeymen. It almost comically ignores American history, because no nation on earth has ever drawn so much of its character from the diversity of its people. That the usual creatures now cry sexism/racism because there's just too damn many women/people of color getting jobs only white males used to get is almost as comical.

They never say it that way, of course. But the sentiment sure seems clear.

White male oppression: It's what's for dinner these days at the Lint Brain residence.

And, yeah, I know, I've gotten well off track again. It happens. Tangents are kinda my thing. But in this case, it seems to me, the tangents are held together in a common weave.

And from where I'm sitting, it ain't a pretty one.

Boil(er)ed up and eaten

 You gotta feel a bit now for Mike Woodson. These are not exactly his palmy days.

I mean, shoot. Now he can't even beat Purdue.

Excuse me, did I say "beat" Purdue?

I meant "compete" with Purdue.

Because whatever that was in Assembly Hall last night, it wasn't the death-grip fight Indiana-Purdue usually gives us. It was Whatsamatta U.-Purdue, is what it was.

By that I mean it was 87-66 at the finish, and over by halftime. Purdue left the floor at the break with a 51-29 lead, and Indiana left the floor to boos from the Assembly Hall faithful. And if that never should happen in the Hall, the worst part was this: The Hoosiers deserved those boos.

The IU bigs, supposedly the strength of the team, couldn't stop Zach Edey without fouling him. Mackenzie Mgbako, Indiana's best player right now, picked up two early fouls, and so did 7-foot center Kel'el Ware. The Indiana guards, meanwhile, were their usual ineffective selves -- and Xavier Johnson again disgraced himself, proving he'd learned nothing from Woodson benching him.

In 19 wretched minutes, he had zero points, zero assists, two rebounds and a couple of steals. Oh, and three fouls -- including one flagrant (and flagrantly stupid) foul when he stepped away from his man to hit Edey with a forearm shiver as Edey cut past him to the basket.

This was not helpful on a night when Ware and Malik Reneau combined for just 13 points, and Edey went for 33 points and 14 boards. And it especially wasn't helpful on a night when the Purdue backcourt ritually undressed Indiana's -- Braden Smith penetrating at will and dishing nine assists, and Fletcher Loyer and Lance Jones torching the Hoosiers for a combined 36 points on 12-of-18 shooting, including 7-of-11 from the 3-point line.

Indiana, meanwhile missed 16 of its 24 attempts from the arc, and shot five percentage points lower than the Purdues all told. The Hoosiers also were outscored 22-4 at the stripe, which IU fans might be inclined to crab about (They shot 20 more free throws than we did in OUR HOUSE! How is that possible?) unless they were, you know, actually watching the game.

In any event, it boiled, or Boiler-ed, down to this: Purdue was Purdue. And Indiana was ... well, whatever Indiana is now.

One night the Hoosiers look like they might have a clue, finally. The next they lose by 21 at home to their fiercest rival -- the biggest Purdue win in Bloomington in 90 years.

No, sir. Not the palmy days at all for Mike Woodson.

If he thought the IU basketball crucible was uncomfortable before -- remember him joking this week he hoped Crimson Nation still loved him? -- he ain't seen nothin' yet. You lose like that to Purdue, right in front of the Nation, the crucible becomes more than just uncomfortable. It becomes damn near intolerable.

Yes, his team is still young. Yes, the two guys who made them go last year -- and who were the major reason Woodson beat Matt Painter twice last year -- are in the NBA now. And, yes, until last night, Woodson was 3-1 against Purdue.

Now he's only 3-2.

But holy crow. What a "2".

On (or off) the clock

 Here's a brief video clip for you, on this well-chilled Tuesday morning. It's supposedly from a high school basketball game in Ohio. What do you notice about it?

Yes, the kid with the basketball is kneeling near center court, dribbling, dribbling, dribbling. Apparently he did this for 2 1/2 minutes, according to the folks who posted the video.

What else do you notice?

How about that there isn't a defender within 10 feet of him?

The only opposing player in the clip, in fact, is standing stock still with his hands on his hips. Apparently this is what his coach wanted him to do, for some unfathomable reason. So who's at fault for letting this happen, really?

I say it's that coach, and listen, I'm no basketball genius. But it seems to me if you don't want an opponent to stall, don't let them. 

Pressure the basketball. Force the ballhandler to go where he doesn't want to go. You know, all those defense-y type things.

What whoever posted this sees is Example A for why high school hoops needs a shot clock. What I see, mostly, is a coach who's afraid to play man D.

This does not mean I'm utterly opposed to a shot clock in high school hoops. It's a current hot topic here in Indiana, where Kyle Neddenriep of the Indianapolis Star recently addressed it, citing a survey that showed a healthy number of coaches -- most of them from larger schools -- would be in favor of a shot clock.

I get that. Believe me I do.

See, I covered one of those stall-ball games once. It was a sectional game here in the Fort. The final score was 16-14, and it happened more organically than usual, in the sense it didn't look planned.

Instead, the pace of play seemed to slow down in, well, slow-motion. Eventually it came to a full stop, both teams holding the ball for increasing lengths of time. It was like the Stall-Ball Vortex was gradually sucking them in.

What I hated about that is there wasn't much play-by-play to fill out my game story. What I loved about it is it was the quickest high school game I ever covered. I believe it was over in hour, including the halftime break.

 A shot clock would have considerably lengthened the game. It also would have considerably lifted the entertainment level, which in this case was somewhere around Watching Snails Mate.

 So, I get the shot clock argument. The only viable objections against it are the cost (particularly for smaller schools), and the extremely rare occasions when a shot clock would even factor into the proceedings.

I'm not going to say "never." But in almost 40 years of covering high school basketball, I got that one lone stall-ball game. If that's not never, it lives next door to it.

But, sure, bring on the shot clock. I don't see the harm in it.

Unless you're scared to play man D, that is.

What we learned

 A synopsis, now, of what we've learned so far in the NFL's Wild Card Weekend, with Tampa Bay-Philly and Buffalo-Pittsburgh yet to come -- either today, for the latter, or Tuesday, or, hell, who knows when ...

* If it's the playoffs, you know the Cowboys are gonna Cowboy it up.

* C.J. Stroud is a god among men.

* Ditto Jordan Love.

* Mike Tirico crowing about the ratings for an NFL playoff game a lot of the country either didn't see, or had to pay extra to see, was one of the most clueless examples of bad form ever. All that was missing was Gordon Gekko in the booth saying "That's right, Mike! Greed is good, baby."

* If I hear one more misogynist jackwagon complain about seeing Taylor Swift during a Chiefs game again, I'm gonna send Matthew McConaughey and Jack Nicholson over to his house to gets his mind right. If I can get the former off the Texas sideline and the latter out of his courtside Lakers seats, that is.

Celebs have always been part of the sporting landscape. Always.

Of course, when it's an outrageously successful woman they're showing on TV ...

* And now, in honor the Lions first playoff win in 33 years, here's "Detroit Waves" by Matt Nathanson.

One brave soul

 I remember Kalen DeBoer. Vaguely.

I remember looking across a high school football field in the sleepy wilds of southwestern Tennessee, and seeing this young guy pacing the opposing sideline. I remember watching his football team, the University of Sioux Falls Cougars, beat the team I was covering in the NAIA national championship game, the University of Saint Francis Cougars from Fort Wayne.

It was the third straight year Saint Francis was playing in the title game. They were coached by a platinum-grade legend, Kevin Donley. Sioux Falls was coached by DeBoer -- a 31-year-old alum who'd played wide receiver there, and was in only his second season as a head coach.

That was 18 years ago, in 2006. DeBoer went on to go 67-3 at Sioux Falls and win two of the next three NAIA titles, giving him three national championships in four years.

Now he's 49 years old, and the head coach at Alabama.

Which makes him one brave soul, by the Blob's lights.

He's a brave soul -- the bravest of the brave, maybe -- because the man he's replacing, Nick Saban, is perhaps the greatest college football coach of all time. In his head coaching career, he won seven national titles -- six of them at Alabama, where he spent 17 seasons.

What that means is more than a third of time Saban spent in Tuscaloosa, the Crimson Tide finished as the No. 1 team in the land. It's why there's a statue of him outside Bryant-Denny Stadium now.

In other words, those just aren't big shoes DeBoer has agreed to fill. Those are freaking gunboats, the USS Legacy and the USS Icon. 

And, yes, between head coaching gigs at Sioux Falls, Fresno State and Washington, he's won 11 games in seven of nine seasons and has an overall record of 105-12. At Washington, his high-octane offense turned Michael Penix Jr. into a top-shelf NFL prospect, took Washington to the last Pac-12 championship and transformed the Huskies into a juggernaut that went 24-3 in two seasons, and didn't lose this year until Michigan ground them down in the CFP title game.

All of which obviously dazzled the folks in Tuscaloosa, who waited all of three days after Saban announced his retirement to hire DeBoer.

Some might regard that as a tad hasty, despite DeBoer's glittering resume. It smacks a bit of Alabama doing precisely what legacy programs should never do, which is hire the flavor of the month to replace a legend.

The Blob is not saying that's what DeBoer is. But it does acknowledge that he'd better be as good as the evidence suggests if he's not going to wind up as the dreaded Guy Who Follows The Guy.

Those Guys do not have an enviable track record, historically speaking. Which gets back to why DeBoer is the bravest of souls, because following the Guy is yea more difficult in the era of NIL and the transfer portal, which compels coaches -- even legends like Nick Saban -- to constantly re-recruit their own players.

Which means DeBoer's got a hell of a selling job ahead. And much else, of course/

"Brave" might not be a strong enough term.

Cheap laugh for today

 The Blob earnestly strives never to be tawdry in its attempts at humor, but this does not mean it won't make the occasional play for the cheap laugh. OK, more than occasional.

OK, pretty much ALL THE DAMN TIME.

Anyway ... did you see what happened in Kansas City last night?

The Chiefs took care of business against the Dolphins, 26-7.

It was so cold  Andy Reid's walrus moustache became an ice sculpture, and Patrick Mahomes' helmet turned so brittle a chunk of it shattered after a head-on collision with a Miami tackler.

It was so cold Hell froze over.

Which brings us to today's cheap laugh:

How can you tell Hell froze over in Kansas City last night?

Because a Chiefs wide receiver caught eight passes.

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. At least for one night, a Chiefs wideout was not a wooden-handed Pinocchio, but a real boy.

His name is Rashee Rice, and he's a rookie, and on the last night anyone would expect a wide receiver to have a big night (let alone a Chiefs wide receiver), he had a big night. Eight catches, 130 yards, one touchdown and 16.3 yards per snag.

And the Blob got a face-palm joke out of the whole deal. Life is good.

Boo bird(brains)

 Look, I don't know know what possesses people sometimes. I barely know what possesses me on occasion.

So I can only venture a guess what got into some Bulls fans in Chicago last night, who thought it would be a cool deal to boo the widow of Jerry Krause on a night when the '90s Bulls dynasty was honored. Booed the wife of a dead guy. That was some class stuff right there.

I can only assume those fans were making a play for Chicago to overtake Philly as the most s***headed sports town in America. You guys threw snowballs at Santa Claus? Yeah, well, watch THIS.

Yikes.

In any case, it confirms the Blob's long-held position that fans (some fans) are idiots, and will always offer proof if given the opportunity. Stupid is as stupid does, as Forrest Gump famously said, but in the case of sports fans (some sports fans), stupid is a genetic condition.

So they booed Jerry Krause's widow as a proxy for Jerry himself, who was beyond mortal reach. I presume they were booing Jerry because he dismantled the Bulls dynasty after six titles, and because he used to get in spats with Michael Jordan. But he also mantled (is that a word?) the Bulls dynasty to begin with -- something for which MJ should have been more grateful than he was, seeing how without Scottie Pippen 'n' them his fingers would have a lot less jewelry.

Jordan and Pippen, by the way, were no-shows last night.

Maybe they were afraid they'd get booed. 

Cold discomfort

It's supposed to be zero degrees with a windchill of minus-30 in Kansas City tonight, and as a fan of Football The Way It Oughta Be -- outdoors, under God's sky, battling the elements as well as the opponent -- I am all for that.

I want to see Patrick Mahomes try to throw a football with the aerodynamic properties of a brick, and see Travis Kelce try to catch it.

I want to see the Miami Dolphins yelping "What the (BLEEP)!!" for three solid hours.

I want to see the Ice Bowl, the Frozen Tundra Bowl, the Frostbite's Just Another Word For Survive And Advance Bowl.

Final score of the latter: Kansas City 5 Lost Fingers, Miami 4 Lost Toes.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I won't see any of that.

I won't see it because I'm a stubborn old coot, and because the NFL is a grasping Mr. Potter squeezing every dime 'til its lung collapse. I won't see it because the NFL, a $12 billion industry with more money than God, is putting a playoff game on Peacock, which is the pay-per-view streaming vehicle for NBC. 

Thus we have the answer to the age-old question "How much is enough?"

The NFL's answer: "Define 'enough'."

So, no, I won't be paying NBC, and the NFL, a few extra dollars so I can see Andy Reid turn into Frozen Jack Nicholson on the Chiefs' sideline. And, no, I don't care how few those dollars are.

A man has to draw the line somewhere. And this is where I draw it.

And, yes, I know we started down this road a long time ago, when ESPN and other cable entities started buying up the rights to bowl games and playoff games and even the  Stanley Cup Final, which was aired on TNT, TBS and Tru last year. Or you could shell out a few dollars for Sling and watch it there.

Heck. You can even go further back than cable, if you're of a mind to. Maybe this really all started when boxing started putting all its big fights on pay-per-view. And that happened, when, the 1970s? The 1960s?

I did the pay-per-view thing one time, and never again. One of my friends convinced a few of us to kick in (if memory serves) 35 bucks apiece for the Buster Douglas-Evander Holyfield fight. It lasted about four minutes before Buster laid down and took a nap.

Never again. And that includes tonight.

The only way to put a stop to this sort of thing, in a for-profit society, is to make it unprofitable. Greed only works if you feed it, after all. And so consider tonight my lonely man's attempt to starve the greedheads of at least a few more dollars.

"Sure, like they'll miss them," you're saying now.

Yeah, well. Sometime you just gotta tilt at that windmill.

Fields of gray*

 (*A semi-intentional nod to musical virtuoso Bruce Hornsby, who has a song by that name. It's on "Harbor Lights." Give it a listen, it's awesome)

Math is not in the Blob's wheelhouse. Today's Mr. Obvious observation.

It's not in my wheelhouse, or outside in the wheelhouse's yard, or anywhere near the wheelhouse's neighborhood. This is especially true if you throw x's and y's in there, like in algebra or calculus or trigonometry.

Tell you what is in my wheelhouse, though.

One-plus-one equals two. That I can do.

One-plus-one equals two where I am these days with Justin Fields, whose future with the Chicago Bears is indeed a gray area. Will they move on from their third-year former prize? Will they ditch three years of development so they can start over again with Caleb Williams, who's got skills but has yet to take an NFL snap?

I'm leaning toward no. And that's because, yes, I can add one-and-one and get two.

One, the Bears fired Luke Getsy, their offensive coordinator, the guy who was charged with putting Fields in a position to succeed and who largely failed.

One, the Bears also decided to keep Matt Eberflus as their head coach.

Add one plus one, and this brings us to two -- that they're also going to stick with Fields.

Because if you were going to go in a different direction why would you bring in a new OC and keep Eberflus running the show?

If you were going in a different direction, wouldn't you completely erase the whiteboard and start with a blank slate? Bring in a whole new regime to go with your new quarterback and declare a fresh new day?

I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe they'll trade Fields anyway. Maybe both my math and my logic are off-kilter here.

Maybe they're being colored by my own lean, which is Fields has shown enough that you can build around him. You've got two top-ten draft picks, including the No. 1 pick. Take Marvin Harrison Jr. at one to pair with D,J. Moore, use subsequent picks to scoop some qualify offensive linemen, and suddenly Fields becomes a waaay better QB. 

Or so it seems to me. 

I mean, in 13 games this year he threw for 2,560 yards and 16 touchdowns to go with nine picks, completing 61.4 percent of his throws. All were career bests except for the touchdown passes; he threw 17 last year in two more starts.

He also ran for 657 yards and four touchdowns. So in 13 games, with his arm and his legs, he generated 20 touchdowns. And he had one reliable wideout (Moore) to work with..

Now add Harrison on the other side, throw in tight end Cole Kmet (who caught 73 balls for 719 yards and six touchdowns), and, hey, look, how'd Fields get so good all of a sudden?

Now, it's true the Bears could draft Williams at one and still wind up with Harrison, given that so many of the teams immediately behind them need a quarterback, too. But, again, then you're starting over with a guy who, yes, has a dazzling skill set, but who also has demonstrated a disturbing sense of entitlement. 

And, again, why go shopping for a new OC and keep Eberflus around if you were planning on starting over?

I guess we'll find out if the math works after all.

Triple exit

 Nick Saban.

Bill Belichick.

Pete Carroll.

That's a hell of a 24 hours, boys and girls, and, quick, let's run back Pete's "Let's Disappear Marshawn Lynch" play against Bill, just for nostalgia's sake. Those were the days, by golly. Pete calling a pass instead of a run down on the goal line with the Super Bowl in the balance ... Malcolm Butler delivering Bill another ring with the ensuing interception ...  

Ah, memories.

And now, only memories, with Pete being kicked upstairs by the Seahawks, and Bill reportedly stepping down after 24 spangled seasons with the Patriots, and Saban announcing his retirement as the undisputed champeen of college football coaches.

They're all in their 70s now, so I guess this day had to come. But not, you know, the same day.

It leaves us a truckload of legacy to unpack, and let's start with Saban. The man won seven national titles, including six at Alabama, where not even Saint Bear of Bryant eclipses him. In fact, Bear was a warmup act for the real thing, when you get down to brass tacks. He's probably up there on his heavenly perch right now, saying, "Wish I coulda done all that."

Naturally, Saban retiring now invites speculation, as these things will. Did the torn landscape of college football these days -- NIL money dictating all, and the perpetual free agency of the unfettered transfer portal -- hasten his exit? Or, at 72, did he just decide it was time to hand over the whistle?

He has, after all, been coaching football in some capacity for 50 of those 72 years, and that's a good run for anyone. If the migraine headache that is college football in 2023 -- in which you not only have to recruit, but have to constantly keep recruiting the players you already have -- made that run seem even longer, so be it. The man's legacy is as secure as a legacy gets, and he's more than earned his rest.

Carroll and Belichick, meanwhile, are 72 and 71, respectively, so maybe it was time for them, too. Neither is leaving entirely on his own hook, of course; Carroll moving into an advisory capacity is an especially clear indication ownership thought it had wrung all the coaching juice out of him it could.

As for Belichick ...

Let's face it: He hasn't been the same Darth Hoodie genius since Tom Brady went south in search of sunshine. Mac Jones has never become the successor Belichick thought he might be. And as GM, Belichick has been spectacularly bad at finding talent, which culminated in this season's 3-14 collapse.

Nowhere was that collapse more starkly evident than in Belichick's last game, played in a snowstorm in Foxborough. The woeful Jets, whom Belichick has owned for years like  the Roadrunner owns Wile E. Coyote, beat the Patriots 17-3. Jones, benched a few games back for the supremely undistinguished Bailey Zappe, never saw the field. What did see was a Patriots offense that generated just six first downs, 119 total yards and 2.1 yards per play.

From Tom Brady and six Super Bowl rings to Bailey Zappe and six first downs. That's a hell of a tumble off a hell of a cliff.

But the magic held for a good long time, for Belichick and Saban especially. Spygate and Deflategate and Belichick's grumbly public persona notwithstanding, he departs as the most accomplished coach in NFL history, and the man who oversaw its last true dynasty. His 24 seasons in Foxborough have as few equals as Saban's 17 in Tuscaloosa.

(My best Belichick story: On Media Day for the Super Bowl in Indy in 2012, some Boston radio guy kept hollering at Belichick. "Bill! Bill!" he shouted, waving a red plastic tricorn hat at Darth Hoodie. "Put this on!" To which Belichick, with spot-on Belichick-ean disdain, rumbled "No, I'm not gonna do that.")

Carroll, on the other hand, has a more complicated legacy. He steps away with a Super Bowl ring from 2014, but a lot of smart guys think he ran off Russell Wilson, and even more smart guys think he blew that aforementioned Super Bowl to Belichick. It's been pretty beige since the former, and even more beige since the latter.

And yet ...

And yet, Carroll, Saban and Belichick. All in the same 24 hours.

Exit, Stage Right never saw a more spotlit day.

Lost Tuesday

 Well, I know what I'm going to do, on this morning after. I'm going to fire up "Hoosiers" again to reassure myself Indiana is still The Basketball State.

Because last night it wasn't.

First there was No. 1 Purdue, journeying out to Nebraska and getting whupped from stem to stern by a football school. Which apparently is now a basketball school because the Cornhuskers are 13-3 now and have one of the best guards in the Big Ten in Keisei Tominaga, who dropped 19 on the Boilermakers in a 16-point win.

Purdue got way behind, got back within one, fell back again, and got close again. Then the Boilers got outscored 20-4 down the stretch because Nebraska shot a ridiculous 60.9 percent from the 3-point arc (14-of-23), and also because Zach Edey and Co. didn't dominate the glass like they should have, outrebounding the Nebraskas just 34-30.

The Blob's take on this?

Nebraska probably isn't going to shoot 70 percent from the arc again -- heck, who will? -- so chalk this one up to Purdue losing to a rare phenomenon. Like, you know,  Halley's Comet beats the Boilers or something.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast ...

Yikes, Indiana. Just yikes.

The Hoosiers reprised their own Nebraska trip with a listless 66-57 loss to a supremely underwhelming Rutgers team. Again the Indiana guards were trash; the Hoosiers turned it over 18 times, which means between the Nebraska loss and this one they kicked away the Magic Orange Sphere a mind-boggling 37 times. Thirty ... seven ... times.

Not content with that bit of basketball vandalism, they also shot horribly, missing 19 of their 26 3-point attempts (26.9 percent) and 35 of their 58 shots overall (39.7). Oh, and point guard Xavier Johnson, Indiana's sixth-year alleged floor leader, got kicked out of the game for groin-shotting a Rutgers player -- but not before he'd scored just two points, dished just two assists and turned it over five times in 24 minutes.

The cherry on top was head coach Mike Woodson killing another Indiana lead with that stupid hockey-line-change mass substitution thing, then getting all defensive about it in the postgame.

"I'm not going to sit here and answer that question when it comes to the fans -- or you," Woodson said to a reporter who asked about it.

Wonderful.

The upshot of all this is some people are beginning to whisper the dread words "Archie Miller" about Woodson's regime. Indiana fans have always been a touch divorced from reality ("We won our last national title a thousand years ago, so we're an ELITE program!"), which is not good news for Woodson. Putting a showing like last night's out there is only going to make them louder and more insistent that, like everyone who's come after Bob Knight, he's just not That Guy.

In the meantime, I've got "Hoosiers" to console me.

I mean, Jimmy Chitwood never hit a guy in the nuts. So there's that.

So now what?

 Finally, then, Blake Corum battered his way into the end zone one last time, and the clock ran down, and here were your Michigan Wolverines, champions of college football and situational ethics. They beat Washington 34-13, and it wasn't that close. And nary a discouraging word was heard.

Lots of revisionist history, though.

Because there was Jim Harbaugh, fresh off two stretches in the clink, saying none of that bothered his Wolverines because "we were innocent and stood tall and strong because we knew we were innocent." Which sounded a trifle odd coming from a guy who was suspended half the season for, I don't know, being innocent?

In any case, Michigan woulda won without its coach being shady, and to the victors go both the spoils and the ability to shape the historical narrative. After all, that the Wolverines were the best team in college football this season, with or without shenanigans, is beyond dispute. Last night closed all arguments otherwise.

Offensively, Corum ran for 134 yards and two scores and Donovan Edwards for 104 and two -- Edwards' sixes coming on his first two touches. The Wolverines ground meat to the tune of 303 rushing yards.

And defensively?

The Wolverines never really stopped Michael Penix Jr., but they slowed him to what passed for a crawl. The defensive front exerted enough pressure to make him uncomfortable and disrupt his rhythm, and the Michigan D-backs took away the deep ball and forced Penix to play dink-and-dunk. He wound up with 255 passing yards, but Michigan picked him twice and the Huskies averaged just 9.4 yards per completion.

Ultimately, it was decided where a lot of folks suspected it might be, up front. And Michigan owned up front on both sides of the ball. Telling stat of the night, perhaps: The Wolverines averaged 8.0 yards per carry on the ground; Washington, 2.3.

And now the question becomes, where do the Wolverines go from here?

Or, more specifically, where does Harbaugh go?

He wasn't saying last night -- actually got annoyed when asked, and it was hard to blame him -- but if you're laying money down, lay it on three letters: N, F and L. He has, after all, done what he came to Michigan to do. And, thanks in part to how he did it, the NCAA axe is now hovering over the program.

If the Bears or the Commanders or the Chargers or whoever comes calling, what reason would Harbaugh have for not answering now?

Of course, it would be an asshat thing to do, leaving Michigan to hold his bag. But again, Harbaugh has already shown how capable he is of asshattery. And it wouldn't be the first time a successful coach fled the building just as the flames were spreading.

Shoot. It's practically a tradition for some of them.

So, yeah, hoisting the Big Trophy likely will be the last thing Harbaugh hoists in Ann Arbor, except for his furniture into a moving van. But at least the Wolverines will always have last night. 

Future stretch in the Graybar Hotel or not.

The Prediction

 Faithful Blobophiles know this is a certified history nerd zone, and has been from way back. It's not my fault. My dad raised me right, or something.

Anyway, the history nerd in me doesn't necessarily want to happen what I think is going to happen in Houston tonight, but if it does, history will prevail. That's because I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict Michigan's defense will beat Michael Penix Jr.'s offense in the College Football Playoff title game.

And if that happens?

If that happens, it will be the first time in history a coach who was suspended half the season for multiple shenanigans will raise the Big Crystal Football.

I'm talking of course about Jim Harbaugh, liar and rules flouter, who's put together a team that didn't require any lying or rules flouting to get where it is. The lying and rules flouting were just for funsies, apparently.

If Harbaugh's Michigan Wolverines win, however, it will say nothing good about college football in the year of our Lord 2023, except that cheaters do indeed sometimes prosper. The Michigan team will have earned its title, but propriety will take the L.

That has a lot of people rooting hard for Penix and Washington, and, listen, it's not like it couldn't happen. If Penix hasn't faced a defense like Michigan's, it's equally true Michigan hasn't faced anyone like Penix. Not even remotely.

Also, Washington's defense is sneaky stout, and it's facing a team that's not quite one-dimensional but lives just down the street from it. No one yet has been able to stop the Wolverines' mashing run game, but if the Huskies can slow it down a bit, then it becomes Penix vs. J.J. McCarthy. And we all know who wins that.

So ... don't be surprised if Washington, chronically undervalued all season, pulls off the upset. But the Blob still leans toward the cheaters prospering.

Call it Michigan 31, Washington 29. Something like that.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 18

 And now the final edition for this season of The NFL In So Many Words, the never-quit, play-to-the-final-second Blob feature of which critics have said "Jeebus! Quit already!", and also "Come on! You don't need one more! Put your substitute Blob in and call it a day!":

1. "Yay! We won our 12th game of the season!" (Lions fans)

2. "Crap! Why was our regular tight end playing in a meaningless game?" (Also Lions fans, after Sam LaPorta went out with a knee injury)

3. "You want me gone? Fine, I'm gone. But first, watch me lose to the Jets at home, you ungrateful turds!" (Bill Belichick, after the Patriots mustered just six first downs and 119 total yards in, yes, losing to the Jets at home)

4. "Hey, look, we done got us another quarterback!" (Packers fans, watching Jordan Love)

5. "Hey, look, we done got us another quarterback we're gonna give up on so we can draft yet another quarterback we'll give up on!"  (Bears fans)

6. "And how come that never happens to the Packers, those lucky cheese-eating s***?" (Also Bears fan)

7. In other news the Eagles lost by 17 to the sad-sack Giants, their fifth loss in their last six games after starting the season 10-0.

8. "Well, at least we only have to watch these guys one more time." (Eagles fans anticipating the expected loss to the Buccaneers next week in their wild-card game)

9. This just in: Buccaneers 9, Panthers 0. On three field goals.

10. "Boy, you just can't beat NFL football for thrills and excitement!" (America, sarcastically)

 

Almost there

 Possibly overheard on the Indianapolis sideline last night with 1:06 remaining and the Colts at fourth-and-one on the Houston Texans' 15 ...

"I know! Let's throw a pass to a backup running back! They'll never see THAT coming!"

"What's that, Jonathan? Oh, no, that's OK. You need a break. Take a load off, son."

"Yes, that's right, Gardner. It's fourth-and-one and we're gonna throw. What do you mean we should go with a robust set and run a quarterback sneak? That's just dumb."

And of course ...

"Dammit! And it was such a good play we called!"

 But Gardner Minshew's pass was a touch behind backup running back Tyler Goodson, and he dropped it, and the Texans took over on downs. And there was your season, Horsie Nation.

Houston 23, Indy 19. The Texans finish 10-7 and make the playoffs; the Colts finish 9-8 and don't. And if all of Indianapolis and probably America will wonder why Tyler Goodson was in the game down at the end and Jonathan Taylor wasn't ... well, if it was gonna end, it probably had to end with something weird like that.

The season,  after all, was weird in its own way, what with the Colts losing prize rookie Anthony Richardson five games in, and Taylor sideline for a stretch and the Shaq Leonard era ending with such shocking suddenness. Oh, and injuries whittling the defensive backfield down to nothing ... and the Colts , beating the Ravens on the road and losing by 19 to the Falcons ... and Minshew being Minshew -- i.e., a real live NFL quarterback one week, and what-the-hell-was-that the next.

But you know the weirdest thing?

Horsie Nation grinding its teeth to dust at the end last night, because the Colts won only nine games and not the 10th they needed  to win.

And, sure, absolutely, that last play will forever be a head-scratcher, and rightly leaves everyone thinking that once again the Colts blew it. Statistics are for losers, we all know that, but it's hard to fathom how the Colts lost a game in which they outgained the Texans 360-306, and had five more first downs (21-16), and threw Taylor at Houston 30 times for 188 yards. And averaged 6.1 yards per rush and 5.8 yards per play.

The answer is they didn't do any of that when it mattered most, right down to the curious final snap. The Colts were 0-for-3 in the red zone. They were 1-for-11 on third down and 0-for-1 on fourth down. And the defense sacked C.J. Stroud just twice and failed to turn over the Texans a single time.

Sooo ... 9-8 instead of 10-7. Which, drawing back to take the longer view, is hella encouraging given what it could have been, and maybe even should have been.

Back in August, after all, the prevailing wisdom that the Colts were going to suck like a Hoover upright. More than a few of the supposed wise guys were saying they'd be lucky to win five games. Several of those wise guys (including this one) were predicting the Colts would finish 4-13.

And then, when Richardson went down and Shaq Leonard returned from injury a shadow of his former self ...

Well. Four wins looked optimistic.

Until it didn't.

Until, that is, Zaire Franklin emerged as Leonard 2.0, and Minshew turned out to be more than serviceable, and, wait, what? Nine wins and a shot at the playoffs down to the last offensive snap of the season?

The immediate past might sting. But tell me the future doesn't look a whole lot brighter than it did in August, before we found out Shane Steichen could coach and the Colts looked like an actual football team with some actual thought behind it.

And how long has it been since we saw that?

Dumb suffers (and whines)

 He's been ESPN's newest flavor for just five months, but already Pat McAfee is calling out the World Wide Leader. Said one of his bosses, Norby Williamson, is a "rat" who's trying to sabotage his radio show. Said it on his radio show -- right there on an ESPN platform, other words.

Which was either brave or foolhardy, take your pick. As someone once observed, they often look the same.

What the Blob will observe is this looks like another marriage that won't last, and surprise, surprise. A huge part of McAfee's appeal has always been his unruliness, after all. And unruliness doesn't play well at the WWL.

They like their talent in neatly packed boxes there, and McAfee has never been a neatly-packed-box sort of guy. Saying whatever crossed his mind at the moment it crossed his mind is pretty much his stock in trade.

However.

However, in the real grownup world, there are sometimes consequences. And guys like McAfee never seem to deal well with consequences.

A lot of his public sniping at his employer, after all, springs from McAfee's paid lounge act Aaron Rodgers saying something on McAfee's show he shouldn't oughta have said: That talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel was probably on Jeffrey Epstein's list of associates and travel partners. In other words, Rodgers was kinda-sorta suggesting  Kimmel was a pedophile.

This obviously didn't sit well with Kimmel, mainly because it wasn't true. So he threatened to drop a nuclear defamation suit on Rodgers and/or his enabler, McAfee, claiming (with a touch of the drama king, admittedly) that Rodgers had put his family in danger. ESPN promptly rolled out a statement condemning Rodgers' spew, and saying it did NOT reflect the opinion or values of ESPN, blar-de-blar-blar-blar.

McAfee's on-air rant quickly followed. You put two-and-two together.

But remember that business about consequences?

Well, in this case, when you pay a certified loon like Rodgers to come on your show every week precisely because he might say something loony, occasionally he will. And when he does ... well, you get what you pay for. Even if it means a late-night star threatening to sue you for defamation.

Them's  the consequences, Pat ol' buddy. Getting all mad at ESPN for apologizing on your behalf and claiming the WWL is sabotaging your show doesn't change the fact you played with fire and got burned.

And that's the attraction with Rodgers, isn't it?

Because if all the guy did was come on and drone about pass coverages and quarterback play like any other future Hall of Fame QB, how long would he have had a regular gig on McAfee's show? A week? Two weeks?

No, it's the goofiness McAfee was after, and God knows Rodgers has an abundance of it.  Occasionally too much, as McAfee has discovered. But again, you get what you pay for. 

No sense whining about it now.

One golden goose, expired

 The NHL Winter Classic -- a New Year's Day staple for the Blob once the BCS and CFP wrecked the day for college football -- pulled its worst TV numbers ever in 2024. And again it was greed, and the stupidity that greed creates, that was the culprit.

Y'see, the NHL, startled by how popular the Winter Classic was, decided well, hell, this thing is a freaking ATM. Think how much dough we could rake in if we played a whole SERIES of outdoor games EVERY SINGLE YEAR?

So of course the NHL did. And of course what made the Winter Classic a freaking ATM to begin with -- the novelty of seeing two NHL teams play outdoors in the elements, just like the players did on frozen ponds as kids -- thus became just another Tuesday on the NHL schedule. And, poof, the uniqueness that was the Winter Classic's principal attraction vanished, and another golden goose died.

Or at least grew withered and sickly and, this year, was worthy only of a cable presence.

Market saturation has done that to more golden geese than you can shake a drumstick at, and yet allegedly smart people keep on saturatin'. Every gambler in Vegas knows you don't keep pumping quarters into the same one-armed bandit immediately after it's paid off, but not these smart guys. They starting pumping in the quarters faster than before.

"Wow, that's really dumb," you're saying now.

Indeed it is. But greed makes dumb guys out of smart guys all the time. Just about every day in fact.

For instance: A lot of of factors have contributed to the diminishment of the World  Series as a must-see event, and most of those have been well-documented. The over-arching monolith of the NFL, sucking all the oxygen out of autumn ... the abandonment of the next generation of fans ... the lure of football and basketball over baseball for potential future MLB stars ...

And one more, at least according to the Blob: The market saturation -- make that over-saturation -- of interleague play.

Shouting-at-clouds geezers like me never did much care for it, but at least once it was an interesting novelty. Now it's such a regular thing it's completed wiped out one of the elements that used to make the Fall Classic the Fall Classic: The mystery.

Back in the day, when the American League exclusively played the American League and the National League exclusively played the National League, the World Series was a leap into the unknown. How would two teams that had never played one another during the season match up? How distinct were the two styles of play, NL and AL? And which would ultimately prevail?

It may be impossible to quantify how much all of that added to the attraction of the Fall Classic, but surely it added some. And now it's gone, because the two World Series participants likely have played one another half-a-dozen times already during the regular season. The World Series therefore becomes indistinguishable from a divisional or league championship series.

Sad, all of that. And, yes, really, really dumb.

Same (stuff), different day

 Well, that was ... not illuminating.

Indiana went out to Nebraska last night to play another football school, and once again the Hoosiers got abused by said football school.  Lost 86-70, and it wasn't that close. Lost for the same reason they always either lose or struggle, which is where the not-illuminating part comes in.

To wit: Hey, did you hear the Hoosier guard play sucks?

Yeah, only about 500 times so far this season, mainly because it's true and rarely changes. Last night the Indiana backcourt directed an especially unkempt floor game, turning it over a staggering 19 times even though sixth-year senior Xavier Johnson was back in the lineup, at least for awhile.

Alas, he's still the same X, with a layer of rust thrown in for good measure. Which is to say, in 14 minutes he missed all three of his shot attempts, grabbed two rebounds, dished three assists and turned it over four times -- most a result of the sort of ill-advised decisions a sixth-year senior shouldn't be making.

Meanwhile, Nebraska guard Kesei Tominaga flamed the Hoosiers with 28 points in 27 minutes, confirming once again that Indiana's guards can't, well, guard.

How bad was it?

So bad even Mike Woodson, who tends to avoid publicly calling out his players,  declared the obvious in the postgame.

"They outplayed our starting two guards, who were awful tonight," he said.

A recurring theme that, let's face it, shouldn't be recurring this deep into the season.

Woodson keeps talking about how the Hoosiers are still young and unfamiliar with one another, but after 14 games all the tread's worn off that excuse. And the guard play remains the biggest issue, just as it was 14 games ago. 

Only sporadically has it made strides, usually against teams that presented favorable matchups. Against a backcourt led by Tominaga, one of the best guards in the Big Ten, it looked ... well, as awful as ever, to use Woodson's word.

And that, boys and girls, is on the coaching staff.

In the meantime, you can keep spinning the same record with these Hoosiers. Same (stuff), different day.

The silliness of what if

 Saw the other day that Vegas put out a hypothetical betting line on a hypothetical Georgia-Michigan national championship game, and I immediately had two thoughts:

1. I had no idea there were so many butt-hurt, we-shoulda-been-in-the-CFP  University of Georgia grads working in Vegas.

2. Beating a horse this dead is not only sad and pathetic, it's downright silly.

Because, listen, people, and I'll put this in all caps so you'll be sure to hear it: GEORGIA'S NOT HERE. You can wish the Bulldogs were, you can say they were clearly one of the best four teams in college football this season, but they lost the one game they couldn't afford to lose.  

Say what you will about Michigan and its real natty opponent Washington, but they didn't. They ran the table -- Washington in arguably the nation's toughest conference. So they deserve to be right where they are.

Running fake betting lines inserting Georgia for Washington not only disses the Huskies, it's just plain silly.  Harmless, sure, but silly.

Although the implication behind it -- that Georgia is the ACTUAL best team in college football -- presents an interesting exercise in logic if you extrapolate it on out.

For instance ...

* The Texas Rangers won the World Series, but the real champions were obviously either the Atlanta Braves or Baltimore Orioles. They were, after all, the two best teams in baseball this year until, like Georgia, they lost when they shouldn't have. That made the Fall Classic between the Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks the Faux Classic, right? 

* Fairleigh Dickinson beat Purdue last March in a stunning NCAA Tournament upset, but, like Georgia losing to Alabama,  that was just a big ol' fluke so Purdue was your real regional champion and should have assumed its rightful place in the Final Four. I mean, the Boilermakers would have pounded Florida Atlantic or San Diego State, right?

* Wyndham Clark won the U.S. Open golf tournament in 2023, but, come on, it's not like he's better than Rory McIlroy, who finished second by a stroke. Just like, you know, Alabama wasn't better than Georgia, even though it beat the Bulldogs in the SEC title game.

*  The best team in the NHL last year was the Boston Bruins, so they should have been playing Las Vegas in the Stanley Cup Final. They didn't, but they should have been. And, look, even Vegas had them favored over the hometown team in this totally legit fake betting line!

And last but not least ...

* Trump won! Trump won! Even though he lost!

Speaking of totally legit fakes.

A milestone worth forgetting

 So remember last month, when North Dakota State's men's basketball program embarrassed itself by first scheduling, and then beating 108-14, a National Christian College Athletic Association school with an enrollment of 100?

Grambling's women went the Bison one better last night. Or maybe three or four times better.

In case you missed the Grambling women set an NCAA record by beating College of Bible Studies by a Division I women's record 141 points.

No, that's not a misprint. The Gramblings really did win by 141 points. The final was 159-18.

Grambling, which is 6-5 on the season, led 34-0 before College of Bible Studies scored a point. The halftime score was 82-10. They should have stopped it right there, like a referee stopping a lopsided fight.

And if you're wondering here "Who is the College of Bible Studies, and how did the NCAA let Grambling schedule a middle school?", let me be the first to tell you College of Bible Studies is not a middle school. It's a Division II NCCAA school from Houston. It has an enrollment of 431 students, of whom only around 123 are full-time. 

Its nickname is the Ambassadors, and last night the Ambassador women committed 57 turnovers and shot just 18.6 percent (8 of 43).

This is not to shame the Ambassadors, mind you. It's to shame Grambling for scheduling someone it clearly had no business playing.

Perhaps there's a logical explanation for this. Perhaps Grambling, which after all has only played 11 games, is playing only a partial schedule. Perhaps a scheduled opponent had to bail at the last minute and the Tigers had to scramble to find someone to play.

But all that is giving Grambling more benefit of the doubt than the Blob is willing to give it. Beating a College of Bible Studies 159-18 is like Dad beating his 5-year-old daughter 159-18 in the driveway: Pretty disgusting, honestly, and reflecting very little good about Dad.

Shouldn't count as an official W, if the Blob's keeping the won-lost stats. And that record 141-point margin?

One milestone far more worth forgetting than remembering.

A few brief thoughts, College Division

 (In which the Blob opines on Michigan beating Alabama in a Rose Bowl worthy of its distant descendants, and Washington beating Texas in the Sugar Bowl despite trying its darnedest to give it away at the end)

1. Tell me again why Michael Penix Jr. isn't at the top of the quarterback draft board, and Caleb Williams and some guy from North Carolina are. Guy throws darts. Laser-guided darts. Best pro prospect in the country.

2/ Blake Corum's touchdown run in overtime is going straight to the top of every Rose Bowl  montage from here on out. He was not gonna stay out of the end zone on that play. He just wasn't.

3. Alabama shoulda been flagged for egregious use of a timeout at the end of overtime. You delayed the deciding moment to basically call a quarterback keeper into the teeth of the Michigan defense? (And, yes, I know, a 'Bama guy botched his assignment on the play). That was the best Nick Saban could come up with?

4. Somewhere last night there were about ten NFL quarterbacks wondering why they couldn't have nice things -- i.e., wide receivers -- like Penix has.

5. Michigan got fat on a lot of kibble this fall in a kibble-y Big Ten, but down at the end, after 'Bama had dominated the second half, the Wolverines made the plays they had to make to win it. That said something about them.

6. Yeah, the SEC also-rans beat up on the Big Ten also-rans in the bowls. But in the end, the Big Ten won the only head-to-head that mattered. So there.

7. Two national semifinals, two games that came down to one last stop. Hell of a day for the CFP.

8. In a battle of two elite programs that get the sort of linemen who make them elite, Michigan won up front. 'Bama wasn't able to bully the Wolverines on the line of scrimmage the way it does almost everyone else; in fact, Michigan's defensive front bullied the Tide. Must have come as a shock.

9. "Now THAT'S football by God." (Bo and Woody in heaven, watching a Rose Bowl dominated by the run game and defense)

And last but not least ...

10. /After all that, the national championship is just another Big Ten game.

Good riddance

It's New Year's Day on our frail little rock, and I suppose that means resolutions and Little Baby 2024 putting Tottery Old Man 2023 on the street (How cruel we are to our seniors!), and hope in our hearts that the new year won't be as big a shiteshow as we all know it's going to be.

But first, a few last words about 2023.

You really decided to whiz in our cornflakes on your way out the door, didn't you?

One last day to show some damn contrition for all those you took from us across your 365 days, and what do you do? You take one more. And not just any one more, but a freaking legend in his proscribed universe.

You took Cale Yarborough

He died on New Year's Eve, at the well-lived age of 84, and, listen, young'uns, he was a hell of a man. Grew up in little ol' Timmonsville, S.C., where he played high school football and boxed a little and wound up wrestling stock cars around back when NASCAR was Richard Petty and David Pearson and two Yarboroughs spelled different -- Cale Yarborough and Lee Roy Yarbrough, which is how you knew they weren't related. 

NASCAR was a lot cruder in those days, not all corporate and glossy the way it is now. It was Southern boys makin' up for Gettysburg by leadfooting a bunch of Plymouths and Pontiacs and Mercurys and Dodges on both asphalt and dirt, and occasionally settling matters with their fists.

Speaking of which, it was Cale and the Allison boys doing a bit of the latter that took NASCAR national back in 1979.

It was the weekend of the Daytona 500 and half of America was snowed in by a massive winter storm, and the Great American Race was aired flag-to-flag for the first time. With nothing else to do, America watched. And what America saw, down there at the end, hooked it for keeps.

What America saw was Cale and Donnie Allison bangin' door handles on the last lap as each went for the win, and finally crashing one another out. Then Donnie's brother Bobby came screeching to a halt next to them. And then, as Petty took the checkers half a lap ahead, there they all were out of their cars throwing hands and feet and even a racing helmet in a full-on brawl.

"What the hell is THIS?" America thought, presumably.

And kept watching from then on.

And while The Fight might have been how NASCAR and Cale Yarborough wound up on the national radar, the irony was it happened at the end of a decade dominated by the latter. He won three straight Cup titles in the '70s, the first man ever to do so. When he retired after winning six races and finishing second in the points in 1980, he'd won Daytona four times, the Southern 500 five times, and 83 Cup races in all.

In 2012, all that got him into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

And now he's gone, a man from a wholly different era to whom the current era owes much. One last kick in the tender parts from 2023, the treacherous old coot.

Good riddance. Don't let the door hit ya, and all that.