Creeping irrelevance

 Marvin Harrison Jr. is the top wide receiver entering the 2024 NFL draft, but you won't see him participating in any drills this week at the annual NFL combine.

According to Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated, he'll meet with teams, but not work out. Neither, apparently, will Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels of LSU, one of the top quarterback prospects.

"Is this because the NFL combine is the Greatest Spectacle In Overthinking Stuff?" you're saying now.

Possibly.

"Is it because they evaluate offensive linemen's 40-yard dash times even though they'll never have to run 40 yards in a game, and it's therefore completely irrelevant to whether or not they can block anyone?" 

Might be a factor.

"Is it because all you have to do is watch game tape to realize Marvin Harrison Jr. is an athletic freak who'll likely be the next Megatron or Randy Moss?"

Ah. Now you're onto something.

It's already been a number of years since top quarterback prospects started declining to throw during the combine, opting instead to do so in private workouts for NFL scouts and GMs. But this is something relatively new: A stickout wide receiver deciding to skip not only combine workouts but Ohio State's Pro Day, on the theory that anyone in the NFL with a working brain cell already knows he can run fast and jump high.

So he's relying on game tape and his reputation as a hard worker, according to Breer. Also his 144 catches for 2,474 yards and 28 touchdowns the last two seasons at OSU.

He's doing this because he's in a unique position to do so, and also because he assumes NFL scouts and GMs have working sets of eyeballs. In other words, the conversation kind of goes like this:

"But, Marvin Jr., how do we know you can play if you don't run fast and jump high in shorts at the combine?"

"You got eyes, doncha?"

This is the problem with the combine, at least where the high-end, high-visibility picks are concerned: In most cases, NFL teams already know if they can play or not. The combine merely gives them more chances to second-guess themselves.

Wow, Bubba Furlong's 40 time wasn't as fast as we expected. He didn't lift very well, either, or jump as high as we thought he could. Also he's an eighth of an inch shorter than his listed height and didn't react very well when the GM of the Pottsville Maroons asked if his mom was a hooker.

Fast forward to draft day, when they pass on the next Peyton Manning and take the next Bobby Douglass instead.

"So you're saying the combine has become completely irrelevant?" you're saying now.

Not entirely. But it surely is for guys like Marvin Harrison Jr. And it's hardly an infallible evaluation tool anyway, given how often teams swing and miss on players in spite of all the evaluating they do in the run-up to the draft.

("No s***," say a couple of guys you might have heard of. I think they go by "Tom Brady" and "Brock Purdy.")

Of course, some NFL writers will say Harrison bailing on the workouts is a red flag that indicates an unwillingness to compete. But once again Marvin Jr. has the appropriate response -- and if you don't know what that is by now, you haven't been paying attention.  

All together now: "You got eyes, doncha?"

The Great Debate. OK, so no.

 Burned through about half the latest season of Netflix's hit Formula One doc, "Drive to Survive," and I am happy to say it's been as fun and soapy as ever.

Alpine drivers Estaban Ocono and Pierre Gasly, who don't like each other, keep wrecking one another. McLaren stinks up the joint and then doesn't. And of course Haas team principal Guenther Steiner, the most entertaining character in the series, drops a few more F-bombs as Haas continues to slide into the abyss.

Know what else was going on while I was watching?

NASCAR put on its best show in years.

The stock-car crowd was in Atlanta over the weekend, and it was hella crazy from green to checker. People were running three-wide and running into each other in interesting ways, and the finish was one we may never see again: Four wide at the line with Daniel Suarez winning almost literally by the width of a coat of paint.

Awesome stuff, especially after the annual four hours of parading at Daytona. And if you're wondering ("Not really," you're saying) how the Blob is going to tie that race and a series about F1 together, have no fear. The interwhatsis did that quite nicely.

It is, after all, the place where stupid lives rent-free, and so here came the NASCAR fans, posting video of the Atlanta finish and asking when has F1 ever seen anything like this? And here came all the snotty F1 fans, saying NASCAR's nothin' but taxicabs runnin' into each other, while F1 is a technical marvel.

"Great, go back to watching Max (Verstappen) winning every race and leading 96 percent of the laps," NASCAR Fan said, or words to that effect. "Oooh, how exciting!"

"You can't possibly compare NASCAR to F1,"  F1 Fan replied, or words to that effect. "That's just ridiculous"

Speaking of ridiculous, allow the Blob to break the tie.

See, I love what NASCAR gave us in Atlanta. It was stock car racing at its best, and what it should be all the time but too often isn't these days.

But I also love F1, even if Max does win every week. That's because a lot of the drama happens behind him, with Ferrari, Mercedes, Aston Martin and McLaren all brawling for podiums and constructor points.

In other words, they're two completely different forms of motorsport, with different mentalities and priorities at work. You really can't compare them, and not because one is better or more compelling than the other. One's primarily oval racing; the other is a road and street course circuit. One of course is a stock car series; the other is an incredibly sophisticated, deeply political open-wheel series.

The cars are different. The drivers are different. The pressures are different, and yet somehow alike when you factor in the goal -- winning, or at least getting closer to winning -- that creates those pressures.

It all boils down to the same thing: Fast guys trying to go faster than other fast guys. It's the common denominator that ties NASCAR to F1 to IndyCar to LeMans to Saturday nights on the local dirt or cracked asphalt.

They have nothing in common. And, of course, they have everything in common.

So why not appreciate each for what it is, not what it isn't?

Saved by the Kel'el?

 Look, I' m not here to tell you Kel'el Ware deciding to show up last night means Mike Woodson will get another season in Bloomington. That would be silly, and not just because I believe Woody bought himself some grace by making Da Tournament the last two seasons.

Three seasons, with one of them crummy, isn't enough for another pink slip. Not when you've pink-slipped four other coaches since Bob Knight forced the school to fire him. Reputations precede you, and Indiana's fast getting one as a school with zero patience and an exceedingly itchy trigger finger.

But enough about that. What I'm here to tell you is how exceedingly weird last night was.

It wasn't just that the Hoosiers jumped up and beat a top-half-of-the-Big-Ten team in Wisconsin, 74-70. It was everything that went with the W.

Like blowing a 15-point lead, then holding Wisky scoreless across the last 2:56, during which the Badgers went 0-of-6 from the field

Like the sporadically motivated Ware pulling a 27-point, 11-rebound, five-block night out of the ether or some anatomical feature that shall go unnamed.

Like the notoriously Clank City Hoosiers shooting a ridiculous 61.7 percent (29 of 47) -- including a completely absurd 42.9 percent (8 of 14) from the 3-point arc, where they usually can't hit water if they fell off that door Kate Winslet hogged in "Titanic."

It wasn't just an aware Ware, in other words. Malik Reneau added 14 points and eight boards for Indiana before picking up a fifth foul so dumb not just Woodson but his assistants were hollering at him as he came to the bench. Mackenzie Mgbako chipped in with 14 more points. And Trey Galloway dished a dozen assists.

This on a night when, to top it all off, play was suspended and Assembly Hall briefly evacuated because someone pulled a fire alarm. Which, you know, isn't weird at all.

"Hey, that's just Indiana," you're saying now.

To which I can only add: The state or the basketball team?

More fan BS

 So yesterday the Blob addressed Fans Behaving Like Idiots, specifically college basketball fans who feel it necessary to storm the court every time Tech State U. wins a home game against a team only marginally better record-wise.

Today's chapter of FBLI isn't about that.

It's about golf.

Specifically, it's about Tiger Woods' 15-year-old son Charlie, who had a hell of a nightmare day over the weekend in a PGA pre-qualifier. Shot 16-over 86, Charlie did, lowlighted by a 12 on the seventh hole. 

Lowlighted, also, by Fans Behaving Like Idiots.

According to a Palm Beach Post story by Emilee Smarr, young Woods was harassed all day by "fans" who either were ignorant of boundaries or believed boundaries didn't apply to them. Undeterred by course marshals who failed spectacularly at their jobs, they invaded the fairway to walk alongside Woods, pursued balls he hit out of bounds and ignored requests by the marshals to stay on the cart path.

"Who are you? The fire marshal?" one of the Idiots said.

To which the Blob, reactionary that he is, says maybe the marshals should have been issued nightsticks. That way the marshal in question could have replied, "Who am I? I'm the guy who's gonna lay this upside your stupid head if you don't get your ass back where it belongs."

"That wouldn't have been very golf-y of him, Mr. Blob," you're saying now.

Yeah, well.  A guy can dream, can't he?

It got so bad, it seems, that as Woods was walking off the 12th green, a fan approached him and asked if he'd sign a copy of Tiger's book "How I Play Golf." While the kid was playing. Right in the middle of his round.

This was so egregious it actually roused one of the slumbering marshals enough that he told the fan to get lost. To which the fan, in his starring role as Another Entitled Jackass, hollered "I live here!"

The Blob knows how the marshal should have responded to that, too.

Alas, it wouldn't have been very golf-y, either.

Storm warning

 Duke big man Kyle Filipowski apparently dinged up a knee yesterday in a loss to Wake Forest, and even if you're a hater of Jerkwater Fan Base U. you had to feel bad for the kid, and perhaps appreciate the irony.

See, Filipowski got hurt after the game was over.

And it was a fan who hurt Jerkwater Fan Base U.'s center.

Filipowski was just trying to get off the floor when a tsunami of delirious Wake Forest fans swept the hardwood, spinning Filipowski around and nearly knocking him down. Had that happened, you really don't want to think about it, because none of the idiots storming the floor were slowing down and Filipowski likely would have been trampled.

And the consequences of that likely would have been more than just unfortunate.

Little wonder, then, that Duke coach Jon Scheyer was steaming in the postgame, and not because his Blue Devils lost. He wanted court storming banned, and like right now. Pretty much echoed what Purdue coach Matt Painter said earlier this season.

The abridged version: It's out of control, it's dangerous and someone -- player or fan, doesn't matter -- is going to get seriously hurt if whoever's in charge of security at college basketball games doesn't get a handle on it.

The Blob agrees, and not just because I'm old and cranky and all These Damn Kids Today and stuff.

See, I don't mind young people having fun. Never have. I just don't want to see them being as stupid and potentially tragic about it as I was.

Stupid is when you storm the court because you beat not No. 1 or No. 2,, but No. 8, which is where Duke was ranked. And when you beat No. 8 on a homecourt where you're unbeaten this season, as Wake is. And when you beat a No. 8 that only has three more wins than you have.

No, really. Duke is 21-6. Wake is 18-9. Was this really an occasion to storm the court as if, I don't know, you just beat one of John Wooden's UCLA teams? Or one of Coach K's true Duke juggernauts?

Nah. This was just a pretty good Duke team losing to a pretty good Wake team. Not only wasn't it a stunning upset, you couldn't really classify it as an upset, period.

Which suggests the bar for court storming has been lowered to the point of absurdity. 

 Time to rein it in. Surround the court with a SWAT team, issue mandatory expulsions for any court stormer who can be identified, whatever. But do it.

This is America, after all. Someone really gets hurt in one of these deals, you know the lawsuits will follow.

And no Whatsamatta U.'s got pockets deep enough for that.

An almost death knell

 The NCAA lost in court again yesterday, and if that wasn't the muffled thump of a coffin lid you heard, at the very least you can figure the embalming has begun. 

The organization that so long has ruled college athletics like a private fiefdom is dead, or all but. The death knell is warming up; preacher's writin' the eulogy.

And, sure, that might be a touch melodramatic, given it was only a preliminary injunction a judge in Tennessee issued against the NCAA. But it bars the organization from interfering with boosters or athletes cutting NIL deals during recruiting or transfer portaling, which essentially means it's legal now to out-and-out buy the services of said athletes.

In other words, college football and basketball in particular no longer have to play-act.  They can operate as the professional enterprises they are, and frankly have been for a long time. 

The Name, Image and Likeness mechanism approved by the NCAA has in essence been a fig leaf for that, an obvious truth the judge in Tennessee seemed to acknowledge. It's difficult to believe the NCAA's battery of attorneys could come up with a legal argument otherwise that didn't sound ridiculous, not to say out of touch with reality.

All you've gotta do is read the NCAA's official reaction to the ruling to understand that.

"Turning upside-down rules overwhelmingly supported by member schools will aggravate an already chaotic college environment, further diminishing protections for student-athletes from exploitation," the statement read in part.

The Blob's first reaction to that: How quaint. They're still calling them "student-athletes."

Its second reaction: Who does the NCAA think created the "already chaotic college environment"? Santa Claus?

Its third reaction:  "Exploitation"? Really? The NCAA actually went THERE?

It takes some major cojones, not to say next-level delusion, for the NCAA to believe it's protecting "student-athletes" from "exploitation." Hell, it's been the very architect of that exploitation, for decades overseeing choke-a-horse TV contracts and apparel deals among its member schools. As the Blob has noted many times before, schools for years have been cutting sweetheart deals with apparel companies, part of which involved sending their "student-athletes" out there as human adverts, complete with prominently displayed company logos. 

For which the "student-athletes" were paid nothing, of course. Speaking of, you know, exploitation.

Yet the NCAA thinks of itself as a protector from all of that? Who are these people kidding?

Its defenders will say that without the NCAA, there'll be no one to keep vulnerable young people from being preyed upon by unscrupulous boosters and other shadowy NIL operators. But you could say the same thing about the young person coming out of college looking for his or her first pro contract. That's why they hire attorneys to negotiate those deals.

Presumably the vulnerable young people will do the same, because the dynamic in high-end college athletics now is pretty much the same. That horse is long gone, and it's the NCAA itself who opened the barn door. The aforementioned "chaos" is its attempt to stave off a palace revolt by its member schools, who've grown comfortable being corporate entities wholly separate from the university mission -- and who now want even more from that arrangement.

Which is to say, everyone's gotten greedy. And now they've outgrown the organization that nurtured and fed that greed. 

That muffled thump you just heard?

Yeah, it's the coffin lid, all right, closing fast on the NCAA. 

Final verdict: Death by suicide.

A "brief"* history of unis

 (*In quotation marks for a reason. As we shall see.)

Because baseball is baseball and spring training is spring training, the Big Debate these days has nothing to do with RBI or ERA or whether the designated hitter is a crime against nature, or just a way for pitchers with Tee Ball swings to get out of embarrassing themselves.

No, the Big Debate is about something really important: Fashion.

Specifically, it's about the new uniforms Nike and Fanatics have foisted on MLB, which have been marketed as more lightweight and comfortable. Apparently, according to some observers (who might or might not have been observing a trifle closely), they're too lightweight.

Meaning you can actually see through the eggshell-colored pants. Or so those observers claim.

Boxers or briefs used to be the stock example of getting too personal with our athletic heroes, but now it may be a moot question. This assumes the uni pants actually do reveal the secrets beneath -- and if so, God forbid the player who occasionally decides commando is the way to go.

Me, I'm just wondering what some poor sap playing for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1930s would have thought of all this. Which is where our "brief" (get it?) history of baseball  uniforms comes in. 

Know what they used to wear in the 1930s?

Wool. Hot, dripping, weighs-50-pounds-after-a-game wool.

Now imagine wearing that on a 90-degree day in St. Louis, where the humidity seems permanently set on Dryer Vent during the summer. Now imagine playing a doubleheader wearing that.

They used to call the Cards the Gas House Gang in those days. I'm guessing it was more like the Gassed House Gang by the time a day like that was through.

See-through pants?

"Lemme at 'em," Dizzy Dean might have said -- and not just because he was Dizzy Dean and see-through pants might have been his jam anyway.

A more lightweight uniform?

I'm guessing not only guys in the '30s would have been onboard with it, so would players of a later era who had to wear those form-fitting double-knits that to me always looked so incredibly uncomfortable. And let's not forget the Chicago White Sox during their notorious Beer League Softball Period in the mid-1970s.

At least the alleged see-through pants are pants. Those Beer League Sox actually played a game in shorts once.

"We looked like godd*** clowns," at least one of them surely must have said, for publication or not.

And what do the new lightweight unis look like?

Apparently we don't have to guess.

An L of a finish?

 Read the superb Gregg Doyel of the Indianapolis Star this morning about Indiana's latest crime against basketball, and I commend him for not taking the easy way out. He wrote a whole new column when he could have just changed some names and details and recycled whatever he wrote last about IU, because IU just changes the names and details itself at this point.

Another night, another L. Substitute "Nebraska" for "Northwestern", "85-70" for "76-72" and it's all just the same old lost night in Assembly Hell, er, Hall.

This time the Hoosiers didn't even put up a fight until it was too late, falling down 20 at the half before rallying and then collapsing. Again they couldn't hit the broad side of a cruise ship, missing 17 of 21 tries from the 3-point arc and 35 of 61 overall. Again they couldn't even shoot free throws straight, making just 14 of 24.

That's 58 percent for you non-math majors. Shaq and Wilt would be proud.

At any rate, it was same-old, same-old, even in the postgame. Once more Mike Woodson trotted out the Xavier-Daniel-injury line. Also the freshman-point-guard line. Also a bunch of other lines, all of which Doyel chronicled in pointing out that Coach Woody doesn't seem to have a clue what he's doing -- itself a recycling of current themes.

What he wrote that got my attention was this, however: Indiana could easily lose out at this point.

The Hoosiers have already lost their last three games and eight of their last 10. More disturbing, they've lost four of their last five in the Hall. That could easily go to six of their last seven to finish out, because their two remaining home games are against Wisconsin and Michigan State.

Now, the Spartans are down themselves this year, so maybe Indiana wins the latter. And maybe they beat a dreadful Maryland team on the road. But their other remaining roadies are at Penn State and Minnesota, and both are far from gimmes.

The Nittany Lions, after all, have already whipped them by 14 in Bloomington. And Minnesota has always been a notorious black hole for visiting teams.

So, yeah, Indiana could finish on an 0-9 run, as Doyel points out. And then what do you do, if you're IU athletic director Scott Dolson?

It's always been an article of faith in the less hysterical precincts that Woodson would get a fourth season, no matter how lost this one turned out to be. If you're gonna give Archie Miller a fourth go-around after failing to make the NCAA Tournament in his first three years, the reasoning goes, how could you not give a revered son of IU a fourth year after getting Indiana to the Madness in two of his three?

Well ... you couldn't. Not after one bad year, and especially if Woodson gets another crack at the transfer portal to remedy the fatally flawed team he put together this year.

However.

However, there are bad years, and there are bad years. And if you lose 14 of your last 16 games (the end result of that theoretical 0-9 finish), how do you justify not pulling the plug? Especially when it becomes increasingly obvious this is a team that actually seems to be getting worse at aspects that go to coaching?

They booed the home team off the floor last night, once an unthinkable occurrence in the Hall. How much louder do you think  that will get if IU loses out and Dolson brings back the architect of that anyway?

Invest in some earplugs, Mr. AD. Because you'll need 'em if that happens.

Naming names, and stuff

 Once upon a time there was a wonderful country gentleman named Dally Hunter who coached high school basketball in Lapel, In., which is a quasi-bedroom community for Indy now but back then was your basic go-to-market farming community.

Anyway, one year Dally's Lapel Bulldogs got knocked out of the Anderson sectional, which happened fairly frequently but hardly ever without a fight. Dally's best player -- we'll call him "Johnson" -- was a pretty good scorer but not as proficient on the defensive end. We knew this because Dally told us.

"Hell, Johnson couldn't guard that door over there," is how Dally put it, in so many words.

Here's the thing, though: He didn't say it for publication. And we all understood that.

Odds are good he'd said the same thing to Johnson, but he did so behind closed doors, out of earshot of the inquiring minds of the media. That's because in those days you could be as tough as a $2 steak in the privacy of your own locker room or gym, but you never embarrassed your players publicly. It just wasn't done.

Today?

Today it's almost required, or seems to be.

This after Indiana coach Mike Woodson came out in the postgame the other day and basically said Malik Reneau stunk up the joint in the Hoosiers' loss to Northwestern. And this after St. John's coach Rick Pitino came out in his postgame and named names, too, saying so-and-so was too slow and this other so-and-so was too slow, and his players in general were too slow. Needed heart transplants, too, after blowing an 19-point lead and losing to Seton Hall.

Somewhere in there he also said St. John's had "sh***y" facilities, just to make sure he didn't leave anyone out.

Some people cheered this, saying finally here was a coach who was willing to hold his players accountable. And I guess that's one way of looking at it.

Me, all I heard was Pitino whining about the crap program he inherited, as if he didn't know that's what he was getting when he took the job. Which to me says Pitino was willing to hold everyone but himself accountable.

This is not to say I don't get what Pitino was trying to do here. I didn't spend almost four decades watching coaches work without learning a thing or two. So I figure a lot of what he said was aimed at lighting a fire under players who probably needed a fire lit under them.

Which is kind of what Pitino said the other day, doubling down on his earlier comments.

"I was not ripping anybody," he claimed. "I sometimes want my players to hear my words and read my words. That was my intention."

Fair enough. But, come on, Coach. You were ripping pretty much everybody, and you know you were.

And I still don't think you single out guys in doing so. Maybe that does in fact piss them off and make them play harder. But maybe it also just pisses them off, and leaves you with fences to mend  and, in some cases, a team that goes south on you.

I've seen it happen both ways. Which is why you shouldn't do it.

Daytona 25

 William Byron won the Daytona 500 yesterday in the 24 car Jeff Gordon made iconic, and it was a great day for Hendrick Motorsports and Chevrolet because Byron and runnerup Alex Bowman gave Hendrick a 1-2 finish, and four of the top five finishers were Chevies.

I know this because I watched it. 

Well, OK. I watched the last ten laps of it.

Which is all you really needed to watch, because it was Daytona and a plate race and plate races are nothing but a three-hour-long freight train until the last ten laps, when everyone commences getting crazy.

And so, right on cue, there was a huge demolition derby in those last ten laps that collected 23 cars and red-flagged the race for 15 minutes. After that there were four laps to run and if you thought there wasn't going to be one final wreck, you've never watched the Daytona 500.

Of course there was one final wreck. It happened precisely as Byron crossed the line to begin the 200th and final lap, and thus the race finished under yellow. Had everyone started running into each other just a few more yards back, there would have been a green-white-checker finish -- also a Daytona staple.

So good for William Byron, who's only 26 and got his start playing racing video games. And good for all of us who adhered to the Daytona Principle, which says you can safely miss 475 of its 500 miles because everything that matters happens in the last 25 miles.

The Daytona 25.

Now that's your Great American Race, by golly.

Your Moment of Back In My Day

 Somewhere Phil Buck must be having himself a laugh. Let's begin there this morning.

Bucky is gone now, God rest his wonderful soul, but before he went to his reward he was a hell of a high school basketball coach, and one hell of a man. He was at once gruff and funny as a crutch, and as old school as inkwells. And back in the 1970s and 80s he coached one Indiana Mr. Basketball (Ray Tolbert) and sent a bunch of kids off to college from Madison Heights High School in Anderson, where he was only a legend.

Sent Tolbert, Stew Robinson and Winston Morgan to Bob Knight at Indiana, Buck did. Sent Harry Morgan to Indiana State, and Brad Duncan to Illinois State.

But back to why he's laughing today.

He's laughing because the girls semistate was played over the weekend, and the coach of one of the teams that lost -- undefeated Eastern Hancock, which was upset by Brownstown Central in the championship game -- was saying what a disservice it was to make kids play two games in one day. Shari Doud's team had to go overtime to beat Sheridan in the morning round, see, and she cited fatigue as a factor in the Royals' stunning loss.

"This is not a sour grapes thing, but the IHSAA does an injustice to any semistate tournament for any team  by playing two games in a day," Doud said. "It's ridiculous ... Win or lose for either team, it's too much in one day for these kids."

This is where I hear Phil Buck laughing.

Because, listen, back in Buck's day (and mine, too, OK?) teams didn't just have to play two games in one day in one round of the state tournament. To win a state title, they had to do it three weekends in a row -- at regional, semistate and state. And somehow they managed to do it.

Too much for these kids?

I asked Buck about that once, years ago. And as I imagine him doing now, he laughed. Then he said something like this: "Ah, Benny (he was of the few people who could get away with calling me 'Benny'), these kids play eight hours a day in the summer. Two games in one day is nothing."

Now, that was then, and this is now. So maybe kids don't spend all day hooping on the playground in the summer the way they used to.

But a lot of them do play AAU ball, which sometimes compels them to play two or three games a day during summer tournaments. Yet suddenly they can't handle two games in a day in February or March?

Now I'm laughing.

Oh, no! Not more pointless whining!

 The East "beat" the West last night in the NBA All-Star "Game" by the absurd score of 211-186, and now folks in the Great Cloud Of The Interwhosis have their boxers in a bunch about what a joke it was.

Why, even Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe, grand pasha of NBA media that he is, was spluttering about how if you weren't "personally offended by this disgraceful farce, you don't love or understand basketball." Which is a weird thing to say for someone who clearly does love and understand basketball, and so ought to know about All-Star games.

A "disgraceful farce"?

Well, hell, yes, it was a disgraceful farce. What, you thought you were gonna see Game 7 between Bird and Magic?

Every All-Star game to some extent is a disgraceful farce these days, because every major sport long ago became a Product. They're nothing but entertainment vehicles now, with the sport part relevant only because the entertainment part is built around it. And it's been that way since teams started paying players entertainer money and not just athlete money.

That's made them more financial asset than worker bee, because without them there is no Product. The Kansas City Chiefs, for instance, invest in Patrick Mahomes the same way tech companies invest in, well, technology. It keeps the Product viable and the bottom line pleasingly plump.

And so of course they don't want their investments squandered on some glitzy empty-calorie extravaganza. Of course they don't want their assets damaged in meaningless All-Star Games, just as the assets themselves don't want to get damaged.

That's why the NFL Pro Bowl is now a flag football game. And it's why -- gasp -- no one plays a lick of defense in the NBA All-Star Game, because it's just an exhibition, and who wants to tear an Achilles playing lockdown D in an exhibition?

And so, yeah, everyone jogged up and down the floor unimpeded last night, and hoisted a scandalous number of threes (168 between the two teams) while making a ridiculous 67 of them. Your game MVP, Damian Lillard, scored 39 points, jacking 26 shots in 28 minutes and making 11 of 23 from behind the arc -- sometimes from well behind the arc.

You couldn't call it basketball, exactly. But then it wasn't supposed to be, remember?

No, as is every All-Star extravaganza, it was entertainment, a celebration of the Product. Think Ford or GM rolling out their new lines at some big-deal auto show, and you've pretty much got the vibe.

Which means whining about it is like whining about Captain Crunch having too much sugar. It's supposed to have too much sugar. That's the point. And so it's point-less (and stupid, really) to complain about it.

"But it's not basketball!" you're saying now, for the umpteenth time.

Exactly.

Daytona eclipsed

 The Daytona 500 goes off this afternoon in Florida, if it doesn't rain. Which it might, I'm told. Or might not. I honestly don't know.

This is something I thought I'd never say.

I thought I'd never say it because it implies I don't care enough about the Daytona 500 to see what the weather's like down there, and that is a sad admission. It reflects my overall disinterest in NASCAR in general, which has been building by slow degrees for years now.

Just as America's seemingly has, I might add.

Time was NASCAR was a growth industry so spectacular it briefly fancied itself the nation's fourth major sport, but that was a quarter century ago. It's still a national sport that plays everywhere from the Los Angeles Coliseum to Martinsville, Va., and Bristol, Tenn., and it still commands a hefty national television contract and audience. But it's no longer the appointment viewing it once was.

The Bristol night race, one of NASCAR's marquee events and toughest-to-get tickets, was still hawking "Good Seats Available" almost until race time a few years back. Crowds for the Brickyard 400, one of Cup racing's crown jewels but a consistently sleep-inducing bore, dwindled to the point IMS and NASCAR moved it to the road course a couple of years ago. 

The 10-race end-of-season playoff, meanwhile, more and more is fully eclipsed by the ravenous NFL beast, which puts everything else in shadow in the fall.

I didn't watch a single playoff race last fall, for instance. Didn't even watch the finale in Phoenix, where Ryan Blaney gave Roger Penske the Cup championship to go with Josef Newgarden's win in the Indianapolis 500.

And Daytona?

I still watch it every year, but it's not like it used to be. Used be it was an Event, one of those days when you got together with friends and pounded beers and cheered for Jeff or Jimmie or Ryan Newman or the Intimidator. Wasn't quite like the Super Bowl, but it was close.

Now I watch it by myself, and it's the only NASCAR race I watch each year. And I watch it as much for what it represents to me -- the first whisper of spring during the gray weary winter -- as for who wins or who doesn't or who triggers the multi-car demolition derby NASCAR types call The Big One.

Today I might not even do that.

Today I can't even tell you if it will rain or not, and I for sure can't tell you who I think will win. All I can say is the guy on the pole, Joey Logano, probably won't.  That's because the pole winner never wins Daytona, or at least hasn't since Dale Jarrett did it 24 years ago. And that's because it's a total crapshoot that almost always comes down to who gets the right push at the right time, same as any other restrictor plate race.

So I'll just go ahead and pick some guy named Christopher Bell. Why not?

I mean, I don't know a thing about him, but that's no surprise. I don't know a thing about William Byron or Tyler Reddick or Austin Dillon or Ross Chastain, either, or various and sundry Erik Joneses and Daniel Sanchezes. They're all just names to me, which is part of NASCAR's problem right now. 

The names geezers like me knew -- Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson and now Kevin Harvick -- have retired or mostly retired. The new names have yet to become Names. And so I know who Austin Cindric is because his daddy's Tim Cindric and he won Daytona in 2022.  And I know who Chase Elliott is because his daddy's Bill Elliott and he won the Cup a couple years back. And I know Logano and Kyle Larson and some of the others who've been around for awhile.

Christopher Bell I do not.

But he sounds like a good dude and I hear he turns a pretty fast wheel, so what the hell. I  just hope he's up there in the lead freight train when I finally tune in with 20 or so laps to go -- because that's all you really need to watch every year, and, besides, I've got other stuff going on this afternoon.

IU-Northwestern comes on at 3 p.m., you see. And my wife loves her Hoosiers, even when they don't love her back. 

The Daytona 500?

Eh. It'll keep.

Golf is silly

 Jordan Spieth was DQed from a golf tournament the other day for signing an incorrect scorecard, and now there are people on the interwhatsis saying, well, that's just silly, why should that even be a rule in an era when machines can do all the counting for us?

Those people are missing the point.

The point is, of course it's silly. It's golf.

Which is to say, there's a lot of silly to be had out there in this world, and golf has never been shy about claiming its share. Spieth getting kicked out of a tournament for signing an incorrect scorecard only scratches the surface.

(Although the Blob halfway understands this particular bit of silly. I mean, how hard can it be to keep track of your score? You make a 3, you write down 3. You make a 4, you write down 4. A third grader could do it.)

(Also, it was only some Velveeta/Hedge Fund/Whatsamajigger Open. How about the late Roberto de Vincenzo costing himself a spot in the playoff at the 1968 Masters because he signed an incorrect scorecard? I can see de Vincenzo shaking his head in the Great Beyond already: "Yeah, gee, tough break there, Jordan. You wanna talk about signing an incorrect scorecard? Lemme tell you about signing an incorrect scorecard.")

Where were we again?

Oh, yeah. Golf, and silly.

It's a game whose very foundation is etiquette, and the etiquette, like the game, goes back centuries. That's why so many of its rules and unwritten rules seem so antiquated, which is just another way of saying "silly." That this may reflect more about us and our times than it does about the royal and ancient game itself is hardly complimentary. 

And yet ...

And yet, the very propriety and antiquity of golf makes it a funny game sometimes. If not out-and-out bizarre.

Some years back, for instance, Dustin Johnson was docked a couple of strokes for grounding his club in a bunker at the U.S. Open. Now, I don't know why you can't touch your clubhead to the sand in a bunker. I can't think of any conceivable way it would give you an advantage over someone who didn't touch the sand with his club.  And isn't that the primary objective of any rule?

Thing is, this particular course was loaded with bunker-like sand. And so this bunker didn't even look like a bunker. It just looked like a weedy patch with a bunch of sand in it. Maybe that's why spectators, before Johnson's ball arrived on the premises, were actually standing in it.

So Johnson didn't play his ball as if it were in a bunker. And the course marshals on site didn't say. "Hey, DJ, that's a bunker, you know." They just waited until he grounded his club and said "That's a two-stroke penalty."

Silly, right?

But, hey. At least, at the end of the day, DJ's addition was right when he signed his card. Small victories are still victories.

God laughs ...

 OK. So, chuckles, at least.

Chuckles, because here in Indiana it's been the Winter The Forgot How To Do Winter.  And then the NBA All-Star Weekend lands in Indianapolis, and what happens?

Thaaat's right. Winter suddenly snaps its fingers and says "Oh, right! I remember how to do this now!"

Which is to say, Indy got seven inches of snow yesterday, and that must have been God chuckling because he remembered the last time Indianapolis did one of these extravaganzas, a dozen years ago now. See, America came to town for the Super Bowl back in 2012, and that was in February, too. And of course it went off without a hitch because that's what Indy does with these deals.

Super Bowl? Pffft. What, you think a city that's played host to the Pan-Am Games and a fistful of Final Fours and welcomes the biggest single-day sporting event in the world (the Indianapolis 500) every year is gonna get its shorts in a bunch over a mere football game?

I covered three Supes in my time, and Indy's was easily the most well-oiled. And part of that was the weather, which was bizarre even for Indiana.

The week of the Super Bowl, see, it was 60 degrees in Indianapolis. In February.

Now it's 12 years later, and you get where I'm going with this, right?

Last week, see, it was 60 degrees in Indy again in February. A week later the NBA brings its yearly glitter show to town, and what happens?

Winter happens. 

More snow in one day than we've seen, total, the rest of this new year. Cosmic payback, maybe, for all that outrageous good fortune 12 years ago.

"Not this time, suckers!" you can imagine the almighty saying.

And then that chuckle.

Endless debate

 Caitlin Clark became women's college basketball's all-time leading scorer the other night -- with a logo three, of course, the hell did you think? -- and now Shaquille O'Neal has gone on record saying she's the greatest women's player ever.

Oh, Big Aristotle. Why'd you have to go and open that can of worms?

Because whenever you use the words "best ever", people are going to commence pounding their fists on tables and saying Ah, that's bull**** and, Yeah? Name someone better, and it's all ultimately pointless, because "best ever" is ultimately a subjective judgment. Hell, it virtually marinates in subjectivity.

To be sure, you can run the numbers and analytics until Bill Nye the Science Guy says knock it off already, but there's no real satisfaction in that, either. If Player A did this and Player B didn't, it's because Player B did it in a different day with different styles of play and emphasis. And if Player B did this, and also this, back in that different day ...

Well. Let's just say memory is imperfect. 

Which is my way of saying Michael Jordan missed far more potential game-winning shots than he made back in the day, no matter how we choose to remember it. You can look it up -- and at this point, you probably need to.

But back to Clark.

I don't know if she's better at Iowa than Diana Taurasi or Rebecca Lobo or Breanna Stewart was at UConn, or Cheryl Miller at USC, or Candace Parker at Tennessee. Is she even better than some of her contemporaries, like Sabrina Ionescu at Oregon or Aliyah Boston at South Carolina -- the latter of whom plays for the Indiana Fever now, and who could well be Clark's teammate next season?

Impossible to say, at least in this precinct. My totally rational, carefully science-ed up judgment is only that she's damn good.

I also know Caitlin Mania is a real thing, because she's selling out arenas wherever she goes and tickets to Iowa's game against Michigan the other night -- the game when Clark broke Kelsey Plum's scoring record -- were going for $500 a pop on the street. And of course that's controversial, too, because we live in a country and a time where everything is controversial, and eventually devolves into some sort of fevered zero-sum game.

See, Caitlin Clark is white. And she's also straight.

And so when a black coach or player says anything improperly worshipful about Clark, or even mildly suggests part of Caitlin Mania may have something to do with her pigmentation, the usual brigade of social media yahoos start yowling about "reverse racism" and "they're just hatin' on her 'cause she's not a lesbian, and especially a BLACK LESBIAN." 

No, really. People are saying all that out loud now. Which of course reveals their own bigotry, because why else would you bring up both race and sexual orientation in a discussion where both should objectively be irrelevant? 

Unless you had a problem with it, that is. Or some political agenda.

At any rate, the whole business just makes me shake my head, which I'm finding to be an increasingly chronic affliction. As the legendary songwriter John Prine once put it, it's a big old goofy world out there these days. 

A big old goofy world in which we can't even appreciate a young woman's excellence without making it a thing. Lord have mercy.

Our America

 Every damn day now. And every damn where.

And I am all out of words, people.

I am  out of words and outrage and shock or even surprise, because this is our country now, this is our America. It's perfectly normal for 22 people, a lot of them kids, to get shot because the Kansas City Chiefs won another Super Bowl and had a parade to celebrate. It's perfectly normal to go to school or the movies or the grocery store or church. for God's sake, even church, and not come home again because the people who could change that think "inconvenience" and "infringed upon" are the same thing.

I'm out of words for those people, except for "congratulations." You've given us the country you've always wanted us to have. You've given us a country of Thoughts and Prayers and calibration and a hefty bottom line for the gun industry, which provides you with all the proper bullet points -- bullet points, get it? -- whenever you need them.

You wanted the Wild West, you got the Wild West. Except even in the Wild West they made you surrender your shootin' irons at the city limits in some communities.

Imagine if a community tried to do that now.

Imagine the howling from the usual suspects, the caterwauling about the Second Amendment and freedom and how the Liberal Communist Socialists Are Comin' To Take Our Guns, and all the other paranoid lunacy that keeps the gun manufacturers in clover.

I'm out of words for those folks.

Let 'em say what they want in a country where it's as easy to gear up like an Army Ranger as it is to go down to the 7-Eleven for a gallon of milk. Let 'em celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace by posing the wife and kids in front of the Christmas tree brandishing military-grade weaponry. Merry Christmas from the Johnsons here at LZ-X Ray!

Let 'em say that.

Me, I'm done talkin'.

I'm done after some crazy person marched into Joel Osteen's mega-church a few days ago and started spraying rounds, pop-pop-pop-pop. I'm done after thousands of dads and moms and kiddos in their Mahomes and Kelce and Chris Jones jerseys came downtown on an unseasonably warm February day to celebrate Chiefs Kingdom, and then pop-pop-pop-pop, people screaming, people running, a young woman dead and 21 others wounded.

Eight hundred cops downtown yesterday. God knows how many Good Guys With Guns, because this was Missouri and Missouri is one of those red states where packing as much heat as you want anywhere you want has the force of law behind it.

Allegedly that makes Missouri safer. Um, guess not.

I don't own any firearms, but I grew up with a father who collected guns. I grew up with an uncle who was an avid hunter. I grew up in a gun household, grew up with the gun culture, and I understood it and didn't fear it.

This I do not understand. This I do fear. Because I hear the Second Amendment absolutists say law-abiding citizens having to jump through a hoop or two to buy a firearm is the same thing as infringing on their right to bear arms, and I wonder where we got to a place where that makes any kind of sense at all.

It's not the guns, these zealots say. It's mental illness and the absence of fathers in homes and the person wielding the gun, not the gun itself. All of this might be true, but it's also camouflage for the larger issue -- which is that these same zealots back lawmakers who keep making it easier for those persons to wield that gun. 

And I am out of words for all of it. The only thing I have left is a great weariness, and the realization that football players who just won a Super Bowl could wind up, two days later, comforting trembling children as the world went pop-pop-pop-pop around them.

That actually happened yesterday, in Kansas City, Missouri, US of A. That actually happened in Our America.

God bless it. Because at this point, I can't think of anyone else who'd want to.

Rhymin' time!

 It's Valentine's Day, Blobophiles, and you know what we got for you? 

"Your timely demise?" you're saying.

No! Gushy poems! (Or "poimes", if you prefer pronouncing it that way)

And, yeah, I know what a character in a Dan Jenkins novel once said: "Don't write me nothin' that rhymes." Ordinarily, I would agree. But it's Valentine's Day, and I'm all out of hearts and flowers. So here are a few Sportsball World poimes to make you never want to visit this Blob again:

* You remember a few days back, when Formula One told the Andrettis it didn't need one of the most revered names in motorsport joinin' the club? Well, here's the love poime that accompanied that:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue.

We don't need your kind here,

So kindly get screwed.

* The Super Bowl just played Vegas, and the Raiders are now in Vegas, so apparently the NFL loves Vegas now. And of course everything that comes with Vegas, such as gambling, which Roger Goodell still says is very, very bad even as his league rakes in jack from all those sponsoring online gambling sites. And so ...

Roses are red,

And gamblin' is bad.

Except, well, not really,

When there's dough to be had.

* Travis Kelce apparently issued a public apology for chest-bumping Andy Reid and screaming at him on the sidelines during the Super Bowl, for which he was rightly castigated as a giant douche. Apparently he has calmed down now, though, and realizes that wasn't cool ...

Roses are red,

I'm so sad we got tense.

Now please do not scheme me

Out of your o-ffense.

* Purdue is 22-2 now against the toughest schedule in the country, which has attracted the sort of sour-grapes sniping that always seems to follow such success. This has especially centered on 7-4 center Zach "He's Just Big" Edey, who seems remarkably unperturbed by all the putdowns ... 

Roses red,

And you're right I'm just tall.

But from up here, you know what?

I can't hear you at all.

* Alabama just hired another former IU assistant (Nick Sheridan), which means Tuscaloosa is now B-town South. This must frost Crimson Tide Nation's cookies, given Alabama's storied heritage and Indiana's, well, less than storied heritage. But new head coach Kalen DeBoer (another former IU assistant) has some soothing words ...

Roses are red,

And don't look so morose-o.

'Cause our new quarterback

Is named Harry Gonso.

And last but not least ...

* The NBA All-Star Weekend is coming to Indy this week, and among the State of the Association topics might be all the points teams are piling up this season. No one, it seems, is playing any defense. Which of course will prompt commissioner Adam Silver (code name: "Nosferatu") to send out this valentine to grumbly fans ...

Roses are red,

We do so D-up some.

Oh, look, there goes Luka 

Hitting a 3-ball from his bum.

Whispering spring

 Hey, I can read a calendar. I know where I live, too.

The calendar says it's February 13.

And I live in northern Indiana, where the weather is always on the "Hey, ya'll! Watch this!" setting.

So I know just because we brushed elbows with 65 degrees the other day, and the mercury's been hanging out in the 40s since, like, forever, it's all a tease. I know this isn't an early spring we're experiencing.

It's Whoopee Cushion Spring, is what it is. Practical Joke Spring. Northern-Indiana-Just-Screwing-With-Us Spring.

But you know what?

The other day, I stepped outside and heard birdsong. And now I'm looking out the window here in the den, and there are birds everywhere, winging through the air, hopping from branch to branch in the big tree out front, strutting around the lawn.

What this tells me is, even if spring is a cruel hoax right now, winter is not going to last forever. It tells me real spring is out there whispering, and we can begin to hear it, faintly. And not just in the twittering of birds who have suddenly reappeared as if by magic.

If I turn my ear to the south, for instance, I can hear it in the blare and rumble of muscled up Detroit and Tokyo metal, gaudy vehicular billboards driven by speed freaks who can't wait to start tearing around 31-degree banking in Daytona, Fla.

If I turn my ear south and west, meanwhile, I can hear the pop of horsehide smacking leather, see acres of green grass laid out in its familiar geometry all across Florida and Arizona.

Which is to say, this is Daytona 500 week.  And we're now within days of pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training beneath the high desert sky and the Florida palms.

Daytona means NASCAR is back and spring training means baseball is back, boys of summer returning to their appointed tasks. Sunday we'll turn on the TV and see the familiar Daytona freight-training, as if it were June or July; not long thereafter, we'll look up at the tube and the Cubs will be playing the White Sox or someone, as if it were high summer and so hot you could fry an egg on your forehead.

They're coming, those days. They are a touchable reality again -- same as they become this time every year, at least for me.

So, yeah, lie to me, February. Juke me like Barry Sanders, giving me a leg and then taking it away. Show me birds on the lawn and jacket weather, and then bring back single digits and wind-whipped snow just to show me winter ain't done with me yet.

I don't care. Because you know what?

The leadfoots are filling the air with their sound again. The bats and gloves are coming out of storage, accompanied by the smell of growing things and all that alphabet soup baseball talk, RBI and WAR and RISP  'n' them.

You do you, Whoopee Cushion Spring. Me?

Shoot. I'm crankin' down the car window, and crankin' up the tunes.

Super thoughts*

 (*Includes the standard rebuttal: "Ha! You've never had a super thought IN YOUR ENTIRE BLEEPING LIFE!")

Welp. Superb Owl 58 is in the books, and it was one hell of a football game. The Chiefs won in overtime, barely, because they're the Chiefs and they've got Patrick Mahomes and you never, ever, ever bet against Patrick Mahomes when the day gets late and the desperation is thick enough to cut with a baloney sandwich.

Anyway ...

What we did learn, boys and girls? What did we learn?

"Never bet against Mahomes?" you're saying now.

My, you're quick.

"Brock Purdy is pretty damn good himself, was as cool as an October breeze and made enough plays to win if that hadn't been Mahomes on the other side of the field? So shut up about him just being a 'game manager' and 'well, he's got weapons' and all the other stuff that's true of virtually every other quarterback who's ever come down the pike?"

Right.

"The 49ers defensive scheme was brilliant and befuddled Mahomes the way the Chiefs D befuddled Lamar Jackson, until the game got critical and Mahomes started Mahomes-ing?"

Yessir.

"After three Lombardis in five years and back-to-back Supe wins for the first time in 20 years, it's not just media hype to say the Chiefs are now a dynasty or something like it?"

Correct-a-mundo.

And now that we've gotten all that out of the way ... some thoughts:

* The best part of the Chiefs coming from behind to win the Super Bowl was seeing Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift embrace and realizing that the MAGAs and the rest of America's most ridiculous people were at that very moment losing their shite.

* The same aforementioned people who also lost their shite when Kelce got in Andy Reid's face and screamed at him need to chill the hell out. Yeah, Kelce was an ass, but there's a reason Reid wisely didn't overreact. It's because he's been around the game forever and understands the heat-of-the-moment emotion it sometimes generates -- which is why both he and Kelce laughed it off later.

* Best ads: Christopher Walken/BMW; Dunkin with Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Matt Damon and Tom Brady; E*Trade babies playing pickleball; Ah-nold/State Farm; Michael Cera/CeraVe; Jason Momoa/Flashdance sendup.

* In a related note, how do we know Tom Brady is retired?

Because he's in, like, every ad now.

* In a further related noted, that PAC ad for Robert Kennedy Jr. was damn near as weird as he is.

* Halftime show: Great cavalcade of artists, horrible sound mixing, totally lost on way-too-old geezers like me. Also, rollerblades were a nice touch.

* Show of hands: When it got to halftime and the Chiefs were down 10-3, who else was thinking they had the 49ers right where they wanted them?

* Show of hands: When it was 19-19 and went to overtime, who else was thinking "The Chiefs got this now"?

And last but not least ...

* Kelce in the first half: One catch for one yard. Kelce in the second half: Eight catches for 98 yards.

Apparently the screaming worked.

Hammer, nail, etc.

 That was some platinum-grade history they rolled out in Mackey Arena last night, and, no, not because it was Troy Lewis Bobblehead Night (with a special appearance by the real Troy Lewis). It was because Zach Edey something he'd never done before.

He hit a 3-pointer!

Yes, he did. Right there in the second half. Set a pick for Braden Smith, popped out to the arc, got the rock back from Smith. And then Edey squared up, lofted a Skylab of a not-really-a-jumper, and banked it in off the glass. Banked it in.

Mackey went nuts. OK, so more nuts. Even the Purdue bench players were jumping up and down, because Edey had never made a three in his entire college career and here he not only made one but banke-

I'm sorry, what?

Oh, yeah. Also, Purdue smacked Indiana around again, 79-59. Led by 28 with six minutes to play before C.J. Gunn hit a few too-late threes for the Hoosiers. And yada-yada-yada, nothin'-to-see-here-folks, rivalry-what-rivalry.

Remember back in the day, when Mackey used to thunder like few places thunder as IU and Purdue clawed at each other to the bitter end?

Well, it thundered plenty last night. But down toward the end, before and after Edey launched a three that by that point could only be described as whimsical, Mackey was mostly ... laughing.

Edey laughed. The Paint Crew student section laughed. Everyone laughed, because this Indiana team couldn't remotely hurt this Purdue team, and everyone knew it.

They laughed because Edey and Purdue were just horsing around by then, having long since rendered Indiana helpless. Except for the first five minutes or so, this was never a game, let alone a rivalry game. Smith drove through what passed for Indiana's defense for three straight layups, Purdue went on a run, and the thing was over.

The Purdues led by 12 at halftime. They scored the first 10 points of the second half to pump the lead to 22. Then they made their exceedingly merry way home.

And now they've beaten Indiana twice in a month by a total of 41 points, the first time in 90 winters they'd beaten the Hoosiers twice by 20 or more points. Hammer, nail, etc. Dog bites man. No film at 11, because it's no longer news that Purdue is the premier basketball program in the basketball state, and has been for awhile.

Yes, the Hoosiers beat them twice last season, mainly because they had one of Indiana's all-time greats, Trayce Jackson-Davis. That was likely to be enough for Mike Woodson to survive what is demonstrably a down year. Everybody has 'em, after all, even the late Saint Bob of Knight.

But Purdue has now won 15 of the last 19 meetings, with Matt Painter regularly replacing the Boilermakers' own TJDs with a fresh crop of TJDs while IU hits and misses almost every year. It's a big reason why Painter has now beaten Indiana 21 times in 33 meetings across 20 seasons as Purdue's head coach.

Someday that trend might reverse itself, college buckets being the transitory creature it is. But for now, Purdue dropkicking Indiana hardly qualifies as a news item.

Only an occasion for mirth.

Da prediction

 Everyone wants to know who I think is going to win the Big Roman Numeral tomorrow, which is what happens when you spend almost 40 years scribbling about sports. People think you know stuff, like there's some secret Sportswriter Vault O' Knowledge we all tap into.

I never have the heart to tell them that, if there is, it's more like Al Capone's vault than an actual vault, full of broken bottles and the faint aroma of flop sweat.

What I tell them instead is this: "I'm picking Door No. 1, so you should definitely drop a bundle on Door No. 2."

"Enough procrastination, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Who ya got?"

Well ... I got the Chiefs. Even though they're not the better team.

The better team is the 49ers, who have been one of the two best teams in football all year. They can run on you all day long with Christian McCaffrey, and Brock Purdy can make plays with both his arm and his legs if you let him, and if he uses the arm guys like Deebo Samuel and George Kittle will be there to catch it.

After that, they send their defense onto the field, and their defense can be scary. Just ask the Lions in the second half a couple weeks ago.

There's one thing they don't have, though.

They don't have Patrick Mahomes. 

Whom you don't ever, ever, ever pick against in these games, no matter what he's done or hasn't done in all the games before. Playoff Mahomes is not Regular Season Mahomes, as the Blob has learned to its chagrin. Playoff Mahomes has magical powers unknown to mere mortals. You can't even explain what they are, except at the end of the day you look up at the scoreboard and he and the Chiefs are on the heavy side of it again, and you're sitting there saying "Wait, what?"

That was me after the Chiefs went on the road and beat the Bills, even though I was sure the Bills finally had 'em where they wanted 'em. And that was also me after Mahomes and Co. went on the road again and beat the Ravens, who were the best team in the AFC and had Lamar Jackson -- whom the Blob confidently predicted was finally going to break through because this was his time.

Well, forget it. Mahomes did Mahomes things. The Chiefs defense, which has carried the team all season, came up big again. Andy Reid and the K.C. braintrust were two steps ahead of John Harbaugh and the Ravens all day, mainly because Harbaugh and the Ravens put together an inexplicable game plan that almost entirely ignored the best running game in the league.

Ran the football just six times, outside of Lamar's scrambles. Six. Times.

And so here the Chiefs are in the Super Bowl again, and I'm picking them because of all of the above, plus the fact they've been there four times in the last five years. They know the drill. They know the routine. And they have Mahomes and Travis Kelce and hard-running Isaiah Pacheco and a wide receiver or two who's finally stopped dropping the football, and a defense that has outperformed the 49ers' D in the playoffs.

In three games, two of them on the road, the Chiefs D has given five touchdowns while facing Tua Tagovailoa, Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson. Tua threw for 199 yards, one touchdown and one interception. Allen managed 186 yards and one score. And Lamar threw for 272 yards, one touchdown and one pick, and was sacked four times by the blitzing Chiefs' D.

None of the three managed a quarterback rating higher than Allen's pedestrian 86.

And, sure, teams have run on this D, which means McCaffrey likely will have a big day.  But the  Niners D has been remarkably listless on occasion in the playoffs so far, and Purdy has never, been in this situation before, and ... well, it all adds up to your first back-to-back Super Bowl champions in two decades.

Call it Chiefs 31, 49ers 27.

And get your money down on the Niners today.

Reality, checked

 The Blob is no fan of Rick Pitino, and not just because he once lied to my face. But you can't fault the guy's vision.

It's 20/20, at least where college basketball is concerned in this year of our Lord 2024. He sees where it is, and he sees where it's headed, whether any of us like it or not.

This after he came out the other day and said, look, it's time Power 5 college buckets stopped pretending it's 1930 and there are still laces on the ball. Which is to say, it's a business now, has been for a long time, and the fuddies who cling to the fiction that it's still sis-boom-bah and get-that-degree need to clear out and let the grownups have the room.

"Do away with letters of intent, make athletes sign a (two-year) binding contract, no different then professional athletes -- which they are," Pitino tweeted, advocating for a salary cap decided upon by the various conferences, who would take over running the sport from the NCAA.

"I believe the NCAA should be taken out of the equation and the (conference) commissioners put into it as the NCAA loses more cases than the defense lawyers on "Law & Order'," he tweeted.

That's not hyperbole. Courtroom reverses have already led to the transfer portal and NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) deals that have irrevocably altered the college athletics landscape. And not for the good, given the haphazard way the NCAA has implemented both.

In the seeming blink of an eye, after all, the organization has gone from "You'll play where we tell you to play and here's your college education in lieu of pay" to "Aw, hell, go to however many schools you want and make all the bank you can while you're at it."  The result has been not so much freedom but anarchy, a far wilder West than even the most egregious cheaters of years past could have envisioned.

And it's still, for some, about trying to be what you no longer are and never will be again. The latest blow to all that came at the top of this week, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled Dartmouth men's basketball players are employees of the school, and as such should be allowed to be recognized by a local union. 

Thus the door has been cracked for the unionization of  college athletics. And the schools and their ruling athletic bodies have brought it on themselves, because the first time they signed some chunky broadcast or apparel deal they were declaring themselves open for business, with the "student-athletes" the employees of that business.

You can love that or you can hate it. Doesn't really matter either way, because reality is reality and this is the reality now. 

Which is kind of what Rick Pitino, to his credit, was telling us this week.

Guaranteed diminishment

 Roger Penske is 86 years old now, so perhaps the past lies closer to the surface for him than the present these days. Your pile of days gets so high, that tends to happen.

So, yes, could be he's re-living 1995 -- the year May at Indianapolis slapped him around just to show it could do it to anyone, even Roger Penske.

Failed to make the show that year, Penske did. Came with the wrong setup, never got it right, failed to qualify for the 500 a year after Al Unser Jr. and Emerson Fittipaldi dominated for the Captain, with Little Al ultimately winning. It was the story of the month that May.

Thirty years later, the Speedway and IndyCar are both part of Roger Penske's empire. And now the Captain, along with Speedway CEO Mark Miles and IndyCar president Jay Frye, are mulling a revamped series membership structure that would grant active full-season teams certain guarantees -- including, perhaps, guaranteed starting spots in the Indianapolis 500.

The latter being something Penske has advocated for since before he bought the Speedway and series, overwhelming opposition be damned.

 I don't know how much 1995 colors that advocacy. But if it does, he's reliving the wrong year.

He ought to be reliving 1996.

Which was the first year of the infamous Split, when Tony George launched his Indy Racing League essentially because he thought the ruling body of the sport, Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) had gotten too big for its britches. CART, obviously did not agree. And so that May there were competing 500-mile races on Memorial Day weekend, one for the fledgling IRL guys at Indy and one for the CART guys at Penske's track up in Michigan.

Not long thereafter, George came up with the idea Penske now thinks is A-OK: Guaranteed spots in the 500.

Twenty-five spots would be reserved for IRL regulars. Eight would be open to anyone else who wanted to try to qualify. CART, including Penske, howled mightily, as did virtually everyone else in the racing community.

The opposition was so universal, in fact, that the 25-and-8 rule didn't last long. And yet now IndyCar and the Speedway might be contemplating the same basic thing?

Lousy ideas tend to have a long shelf life, and this was one of Tony George's lousiest. And nearly 30 years haven't scrubbed any of the lousy off it. It stunk like roadkill then, and it stinks like roadkill now.

That's because, as Roger Penske knows better than anyone, no event lives off its past the way the Indianapolis 500 does. There are 113 years of past to draw from, after all. And for 112 years of those years, with a handful of exceptions, the field was has been 33 cars  -- the fastest 33, as the Speedway has long promoted it.

It might make business sense to mess with that, and in truth business interests have already messed with it and gotten away with it. There are two races at Indy in May now, after all. There's only one weekend of qualifying, and its very structure has undergone radical changes in the last decade or so.

But race day has always been where the messing around stops. And race day belongs to, yes, the fastest 33 cars, determined by the nerve and will of 33 drivers.

Guaranteeing spots fundamentally changes that, which is why it was met with such universal disdain when Tony George tried to do it. And it's unnecessary, besides. The reason everyone, including Roger Penske, remembers what happened in 1995 is because it almost never happens. And that's even more true today than ever.

Imagine a scenario, for instance, in which Penske or Andretti or Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan or Ganassi or Arrow McLaren fails to put a car in the field. Or, hell, even Ed Carpenter's team or Dale Coyne's or A.J. Foyt's, or any of the ten full-series teams.

It's virtually impossible, because hardly anyone gets bumped from the field anymore at Indy. The way qualifying, and IndyCar, is structured these days, there isn't even an official Bump Day. It generally comes down to two or three or four drivers -- and if, as was the case with Graham Rahal last year, those drivers are series regulars, the team itself almost certainly has already put another driver in the field.

So for what do you need guaranteed starting spots?

A good question in 1996. A better question in 2024.

One petard, hoisted

 You gotta love it when a guy who has it coming gets it in spades. It's a reminder that sometimes there is justice in the world, even if its won-loss ain't nothin' to write home about these days.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, may we re-introduce you to Oakland A's owner John Fisher, currently being hoist by his own petard because he'd like to move his team but can't because of his own greed. 

He's let their current venue, the Oakland Coliseum, fall apart because he refused to make even rudimentary improvements to it. And he's cheapo-ed the ballclub, too, to the point where it's become the laughingstock of baseball. 

Or maybe there's another word to describe a team that went 50-112 last year and was the worst team in the majors by six games.

How does anyone with an ounce of business sense think this is the way you pitch a product to a new market? Especially when that market is Las Vegas?

It's as if Gordon Gekko started to tell those investors "Greed is good" and then was strangled mid-sentence by his own Windsor knot. Greed is - GAACK!

Anyway, no surprise there's virtually zero enthusiasm for the A's in Vegas, which has indicated in every possible way it has very little interest in Fisher's gas-station sushi of a ballclub. Part of this is because, yes, the product stinks; part of it is because Fisher's trying to swing a deal for a ballpark on a plot of land right off the Strip, a location absolutely no one thinks is feasible.

Not only that, but Fisher hasn't helped matters by refusing to share the artist's renderings of said ballpark with city officials. Soaking the taxpayers for $380 million of the proposed cost isn't going over very well either. 

Little wonder, then, that this happened yesterday: The mayor of Las Vegas -- the mayor -- came out and basically told the A's, "Yeah, no, we're good. Try to work something out with Oakland."

"I just think there's an appetite (in Oakland)," Carolyn Goodman said on the Front Office Sports Today podcast. "I run into people from Oakland all the time. They want to keep the team ... I love the people from Oakland. I think they deserve to have their team."

Hell of a Bat Signal there, by golly. When even the mayor of the city to which you want to relocate is advocating for the city you're trying to leave, how much clearer can it be that THEY DON'T WANT YOU?

Yessiree. Greed is-GAAACK, right, John Fisher?

Down, up, down. Reprised.

 (A very brief coda to yesterday's post about the up-again, down-again Indiana Hoosiers, who rallied from 18 points down in the second half -- on the road, against an Ohio State club that desperately needed a W -- to steal a win with a display of heart, grit and all those other things people said three days ago they didn't have):

See?

Down, up, down. Rinse and repeat.

 OK, then. I think I have this figured out now.

Until I don't, that is.

Which will probably happen tonight.

Which will probably happen because, really, who has Your Indiana Hoosiers figured out? Including Mike Woodson?

The Candy-Stripe Brigade is howling for his head now, and it's getting harder and harder to dismiss it as just the demented raving of lost-in-the-past geezers pining for the good old days of 1987.  Not after Saturday.

Not after the Hoosiers soiled Assembly Hall with that 14-point crater job against a sub-.500 Penn State club. 

Not after Woodson sounded thoroughly clueless in the postgame, lamenting how flat his guys were without acknowledging that he's the one who's supposed to un-flatten them.

He's put together a team with two excellent big men and no one who can either shoot the three or defend it. Worse, he's put together a team that leaves its heart in the locker room occasionally, and sometimes seems to be following Coach's lead when it does.

That's harsh, admittedly. And probably unfair. But when the Hoosiers no-show the way they did Saturday, it would be refreshing to hear Woodson punched a hole in the whiteboard at halftime and threatened to make them run the Assembly Hall steps until they stepped on their tongues if they didn't un-stick their heads from their hindparts.

Instead, all he did was call them out in the postgame. And absolved himself with one of the lamest "All I can do is coach 'em" laments ever.

Here's the thing, though:

I think tonight the Hoosiers go into Columbus and give the Ohio State Buckeyes everything they can handle. Maybe even win on the road in the Big Ten for the first time this season.

I say this because it's been the pattern with Indiana lately, as the Hoosiers have lost six of their last nine. The three they won, though, came after disheartening -- and heartless -- losses.

Lost by 16 at Nebraska; beat Ohio State 71-65. Lost by nine at Rutgers; beat Minnesota 74-62. Lost by 21 to Purdue, by 12 at Wisconsin and by eight at Illinois; beat Iowa 74-68.

Down, up. Down, up. Rinse. Repeat.

Now they're coming off by far their worst loss in Woodson's three seasons, so of course they're going to push an Ohio State team that's lost seven of its last eight, including its last two home games. Heck, I'll crawl out on the limb and say IU hangs the W tonight.

And then gets washed Saturday night by Purdue in West Lafayette. Because, you know, down ... up ... down again.

Poor Candy-Stripe Brigade. On top of everything else, they must be hella seasick.

Roger the Dodger

Super Bowl Week kicks off today, and what a week it will be. Fun. Zaniness. Glitzy parties that HELLO YOU'RE NOT INVITED TO. Supreme acts of moral cowardice.

Wait, what?

Yes boys and girls, that last fits, too. It happens today, in fact, when Roger the Hammer Goodell becomes Roger the Dodger by conducting his traditional Super Bowl news conference A) before a lot of the media has yet to arrive, and B) by making the event invitation only.

Handpicking journalists for a presser is never a good look in an allegedly free nation with an allegedly free press, smacking as it does of state-run media in totalitarian regimes. But it's especially reprehensible, and gutless, for a private entity that benefits hugely from public money to do so in a week when it already controls so much of the message.

And if you're saying now "Mr. Blob, how do you know whom Goodell invited?", I'll say I don't. But I can add. And if the NFL making Goodell's "media availability" invitation only isn't an attempt to weed out reporters who might ask Roger the Dodger uncomfortable questions, then two-plus-two doesn't equal four.

And there are uncomfortable questions.

Like, what's up with all the inconsistent officiating that continues to plague the league, and what does the league plan to do about it? And what about the league getting so cozy with gambling -- for God's sake, they're in Vegas this week -- when for decades it kept the gambling industry several arms' lengths away? And why does a multi-billion-dollar industry need to strong-arm the taxpayers to underwrite its teams?

Because every time someone hits up the public to help subsidize some swank new palace to lure an NFL franchise with a wandering eye, that's essentially what's happening. And how much did the taxpayers kick in for the swank palace Vegas built to steal the Raiders from Oakland, anyway? And in which they'll be playing the Super Bowl in six days?

Roger ain't gonna like being confronted with his league's naked greed. Hence the  stratagem of minimizing the chances of it happening.

Gutless, like I said. Also lily-livered. Also a bunch of other synonyms for "gutless."

But, hey. Gotta keep that propaganda train rollin', right? And it's not like Roger the Dodger isn't following the lead of folks who are well-versed in shaping their narrative.

I mean, why do you think Russian despot/journalist silencer Vladimir Putin invited  apple-polishing dweeb Tucker Carlson to Moscow for a sitdown? It's because the Tuckster is Putin's favorite American journalist -- which is to say, not a journalist at all, but a crackerjack propagandist.

"I gotta find me one of them guys," you can imagine Roger saying.

Odds are he'll have his pick today.

Capture the flag

 Today is the Pro Bowl, aka the Greatest Spectacle In Ligament Tear Avoidance, which isn't even that anymore because for the first time it won't be tackle football.

"You mean it was before?" you're saying now.

Well, no. But today, for the first time, it will be flag football -- or, in other words, Sophomore Year Gym Class Except Played By Highly Skilled Professional Athletes Who Are Major Investments Team Owners Don't Want Getting Hurt.

I don't know about you, but I find this sort of intriguing.

And, yeah, I know, it's the Pro Bowl, which no one watches except sad cases who'd watch a monkey doing vile things to a football as long as it involved a football. Or, you know, the XFL, USFL or whatever they're calling it now that the XFL and USFL have merged.

But flag football?

I might watch a few minutes of that just to see if someone pulls a hammy or dislocates a finger grabbing a flag. In which case next year they'll be playing either two-hand touch, or a rousing game of Monopoly.

Uh-oh, Dak Prescott just landed on Boardwalk ...

Something like that. 

Anyway, the point is, the Pro Bowl is an idea that outlived its usefulness a long time ago, if in fact it ever had any. This is true of most professional all-star games/weekends, to be honest. The NHL All-Star extravaganza, for instance, wrapped up yesterday and consisted of some actual hockey skills competitions, and then a weird four-team tournament featuring a draft and four teams named after their team captains. 

Team Auston Matthews beat Team Connor McDavid to win it. And don't ask me the score because, hell, I don't know, and who cares anyway?

As for the Pro Bowl, consider the switch to flag football the first step toward doing away with it altogether. There is precedent, after all. The annual preseason exhibition between the NFL champions and a team of College All-Stars eventually went away when it became obvious the College All-Stars were never going to win, and when the All-Star players began hiring agents to look after their interests.

The agents didn't want their clients getting hurt. And the NFL teams which had just shelled a ton of green in the draft for those clients didn't want that, either. So, essentially, the economics of the modern game killed the event.

The Pro Bowl might be next.

Although who doesn't love a good rousing game of Monopoly?

Low blow, cinematic division

 Well, February, that pothole-strewn asshat of months, is off to a bang-up start. It's gone and killed Apollo Creed, is what it's done.

And, yes, I know, it was Ivan Drago who killed Apollo Creed. But that was only in the movies. In real life, on the other hand ...

In real life, Apollo was Carl Weathers, or Carl Weathers was Apollo. Didn't really matter which, because Weathers made that fictional character as real as you can make a fictional character. And now Weathers himself is dead, passing in his sleep at the not-all-that-aged age of 76.

Movie heroes are nothing without memorable villains, which is why "Die Hard" is as much about Hans Gruber as John McClain, and "Batman Returns" is as much about Heath Ledger's Joker as Christian Bale's title character. And therefore "Rocky" isn't "Rocky" without Apollo Creed -- who was never so much a villain as a likeable foil, and even became the hero to Drago's villain in his cinematic signoff.

And so a moment of silence today for Apollo's creator, Weathers, who of course went on to portray a million other characters in the movies and on TV. Yet he will always be Apollo in the public mind, more than anyone else.

Know how we know that?

Because even the man upon whom Apollo was loosely based thought so.

An absolutely true story, which Weathers related more than once: It seems he was sitting at an outdoor cafe in L.A. one day when down the street came this huge entourage. And at the center of it was the real-life Apollo, Muhammad Ali.

Whereupon Weathers suddenly heard this: "APOLLO CREED!"

It was Ali. And the two of them wound up shadow-boxing in the street, to the delight of onlookers.

Now both of them are gone. Which means, sadly, that a movie line has become more than just a movie line, but a requiem of sorts.

Ain't gonna be no rematch.

Enhanced lunacy

 Look, I get that the notion of an all-doped-up athletic competition is an idea well behind its time. Lance Armstrong and his buddies already did it, after all. They called it the Tour de France.

Also, baseball already did it. They called it 1998, the Year of Mac and Sammy 'n' them.

PEDs have been a fact of life in athletics for almost 50 years now, and probably longer. Attempts to keep them out largely fail, because the technology for masking banned substances has always outdistanced the technology for detecting them. The amount of "clean" in any given sport therefore is largely dependent on the integrity of the individual athlete.

Or, in the case of doping mafioso Armstrong and others, the utter lack of it.

That said, all you need to know about the proposed Enhanced Games --  scheduled for December of this year for now -- is that 36 years ago, Saturday Night Live played the idea for laughs.

Dennis Miller and Kevin Nealon spoofed an All Drug Olympics in a "Weekend Update" bit, which ended with Nealon going live from the All Drug weightlifting competition. A Russian lifter was attempting to clean-and-jerk 1,500 pounds after ingesting "anabolic steroids, Novocaine, Nyquil, Darvon and some sort of fish paralyzer."

The attempt ended with the weightlifter tearing off his arms. 

"Oh! He's pulled his arms off! That's gotta be disappointing to the big Russian!" Nealon reported.

Fast forward three-and-a-half decades, and that's not a laugh line anymore. 

Allegedly serious people, it seems, have come to believe an All-Drug Olympics is no joke. In fact, a number of prominent vulture, er, venture capitalists have gotten on board with the Enhanced Games, which would allow athletes to use whatever go-juice they chose if they chose to do so.

A promotional video even pitches the EG as something half-assed noble, using windy concepts like freedom and exploring the limits of human performance.

The Blob thinks that's almost as ludicrous as the SNL skit.

The Blob also wonders what former NFL player Lyle Alzado thinks of that "exploring the limits of human performance" jive.

Oh, wait. He doesn't think anything. He's dead, killed by brain cancer he always swore was the result of years of anabolic steroid use.

Ditto bodybuilders Rich Piana, Dallas McCarver, Andreas Munzer and Anthony D'Arezzo, among others. They all died at 45 or younger after juicing themselves to the moon for extended periods of time.  McCarver was just 26 when he passed; Munzer, 31.

Now here we are in 2024, with a bunch of rich dudes agreeing to bankroll an event that would actively encourage the Alzados and Pianas and McCarvers et al. Many world records undoubtedly would be set in the Enhanced Games, of course. And all of them would be meaningless, because none would be recognized as legitimate by any athletic governing body in the world.

And the athletes who set those "records"?

One would only hope they don't wind up like Lyle Alzado and all those bodybuilders in five, ten, 15 years. Because who would be crowing about the limits of human performance then?

Or playing it for laughs?

Royal(t)y screwed

 It takes a heapin' helpin' of stupid to do what Formula One did yesterday, which is basically tell motorsports royalty to (take) right off. And then to justify it with a standup  routine worthy of Jim Gaffigan or Jerry Seinfeld.

What F1 did, see, is tell Michael Andretti, son of Mario, that it didn't want the F1 package he put together, at least for the time being. Said it wouldn't be "competitive". Said, essentially, that the Andretti name meant nothing to F1, even though Mario is a former F1 champion who made the Andretti name one of the most recognized and revered in all of motorsport.

And by "all of", we mean "everywhere." As in, "not just in the United States."

This is some next-level dumb F1's rolling out here, not to say next-level shooting itself in the foot. The excellent Netflix series "Drive To Survive" has given the sport a heightened presence in the lucrative American market, to the extent that F1 now has three U.S. races -- Miami, Texas and Las Vegas. Adding the Andretti name to its stable would have been one more tap in a potential gusher of a revenue stream.

Instead, F1 once again looked down its patrician nose at America by looking down its nose at the Andrettis. And by reaching new heights of delusion by claiming the Andrettis would more benefit from an association with F1 than F1 would from an association with the Andretti name.

Oh, the howling among motorsports journalists that surely greeted that juicy absurdity.

It was rivaled in the "You can't be serious" department only by F1's other pronouncement: That it turned down the Andretti bid because it feared the team wouldn't be "competitive."

Competitive? You mean like F1 is now?

The sport just concluded a season, after all, in which one driver won 19 of the 22 races, and one team 21 of  22. The only team that stood on the top step of the podium, other than Red Bull, was Ferrari when Carlos Sainz won in Singapore. And except for the odd appearance by Aston Martin Aramco Mercedes (Fernando Alonso) and Alpine Renault (Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon), the only teams to regularly occupy the podium were Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren Mercedes.

Which means half the grid wasn't competitive. Could Andretti perform worse than Haas, Alfa Romeo, AlphaTauri or Williams?

Seems to me the addition of an American team with an American engine manufacturer (Cadillac) would add one more element of interest to distract us from the fact F1 has become The Tournament of Roses Parade Sponsored By Max Verstappen And Red Bull. But what do I know?

I still remember who Mario Andretti is.