Strange and stranger

 The Oakland A's have lost all three of their games so far on opening weekend in the Bay Area, and only 22,784 fans showed up for those games. This will happen when you deliberately put a minor-league product out there and charge major-league prices, which is what A's owner John Fisher is doing.

Fisher, see, wants desperately to get the hell out of Oakland, despite the fact the A's have called it home for almost 60 summers.

He wants to move the team to Las Vegas, even if the A's don't have a ballpark there yet, may never have, and are in negotiations with Sacramento and Salt Lake City for temporary accommodations.

He wants to move the team there even though Vegas seems profoundly lukewarm about the idea -- the mayor even said Fisher should try harder to keep the team in Oakland -- and Oakland just offered to extend the team's lease for five years with a three-year opt-out. This would keep Fisher from moving the team to temporary quarters.

In other words: Oakland is offering Fisher a measure of security to actually make moving the team to Vegas easier.

Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has unanimously approved Fisher moving the team, even though he's gutted the ballclub and you'd think MLB would want to distance itself from the Vegas crowd now that the best player in baseball, Shohei Ohtani, either got himself mixed up with an interpreter who stole Ohtani's money to place huge bets, or Ohtani was using the interpreter to place bets for him.

Strange days for the former Pastime. Strange days indeed.

In the meantime, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred promises what he hopes is a speedy investigation (and by "speedy", he means, "I hope like hell we can clear Ohtani really fast"). This while the A's-to-Vegas chatter continues apace.

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking it might be time for MLB to cool that chatter for a bit. And maybe investigate John Fisher's ownership of the A's while they're at it.

Or would that not be strange enough at this point?

Still dancin'

 So I look up now, and North Carolina State -- North Carolina State! -- is in the Elite Eight. Beat 2-seed Marquette by nine the other night in the Sweet Sixteen, after leading by double digits most of the way. All this after the Wolfpack lost seven of their last nine games in the regular season, including the last four.

But then the Pack somehow jacked around and won the ACC Tournament, which earned them an 11-seed. Now they play 4-seed Duke to go to the Final Four while 6-seed Clemson takes on 4-seed Alabama -- which means the ACC comprises almost half the Elite Eight, and gets to be all snotty and superior again.

But enough about that.

Let's talk about Your Purdue Boilermakers, for whom North Carolina State might be a cautionary tale if the Boilers weren't already full up with cautionary tales.

Full up ... and fed up.

Because here came 5-seed Gonzaga last night, and here came Zach Edey and Co., saying "Nuh-uh, we've already seen this movie." Saw it last year and the year before that and the year before that, and decided enough with this bull***.

Which is why Edey went for 27 points and 14 boards last night, and point guard Braden Smith, who like all of these Boilers takes no guff from anyone, added a stat line for the ages: 14 points, 15 assists, eight rebounds. Lance Jones and Fletcher Loyer added 12 and 10 points, respectively, and Purdue shot 57 percent and 45 percent from Threeville, and Gonzaga was swept away, 80-68.

Three tournament games; three double-digit wins.  Average margin of victory: 26 points.

And so the Eff You, Doubters Tour rolls on, unless it's the Call Us Chokers, Will Ya? Tour. As has been observed in several quarters since the Madness began, this is one locked-in basketball team. 

Or pissed off basketball team. Or mountain-sized-chip-on-the-shoulder basketball team. Or all-of-the-above basketball team

And look, I don't know what happens tomorrow against 2-seed Tennessee, which is playing some damn good basketball itself. The Midwest region is the only one that's gone chalk to this point, and if it goes chalk tomorrow Matt Painter will be in the Final Four and the knuckleheads who said Purdue should move on from him can just shut the hell up already.

Will it happen? Beats me. The difference between a 1-seed and a 2-seed is virtually invisible, so either way it'll be no shock. And it could, because as North Carolina State has shown, chalk sometimes gets dusted in the Madness. That's why they call it the Madness.

Me, I'm thinking Purdue wins. The Boilers are still dancin', and it's big-mad dancin'. And with apologies to Kevin Bacon, there ain't nothin' footloose about that.

As if.

Lunacy unbound

 Poor old Gonzaga. Here's hoping the Bulldogs have their green cards in order.

And, no, not because Purdue could expose them tonight as a bunch of ILLEGAL INVADERS from, I don't know, Gonzagia, maybe, infecting America like PARASITES and VERMIN. As a certain ranting demagogue likes telling his deranged true believers these days when he's in 1930s Germany mode.

"The hell are you talking about, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now, with some justification.

I'm talking about a certain foot soldier in the ranting demagogue's army, Michigan loon Pete Hoekstra, who tweeted  a photo of Gonzaga's basketball team de-boarding a plane in Detroit with this notation: "Happening right now. Three busses (sic) just loaded up with illegal invaders at Detroit Metro. Anyone have any idea where they're headed with their police escort?"

Um, well, Paranoid Pete, my guess is the team hotel. But then I'm not a BATSHITE CRAZY NUTBAR like you and your ilk.

The Blob generally tries to refrain from generalizations, but it's tough to do when you hear the foaming-at-the-mouth hysteria coming from the increasingly unhinged right these days. And so I'll just go ahead and say that an element of that hysteria, particularly where the southern border is concerned, clearly is racist in nature.

Omigod look at all these awful brown people swarming our border, speaking their dirty foreign language, raping and murdering our (white) daughters ...

Maybe that's not the perception they mean to create, to give them more credit than they likely deserve. But it sure comes off that way when Fearless Leader uses loaded words like "vermin" and "invaders" and "parasites" to describe people who, for the most part, are merely desperate to escape poverty and/or violence in their native countries.

Do some of them have criminal records? Sure. Are some of them bad people intent on committing bad acts? No doubt. Are they overwhelming available security along some parts of the border? Certainly.

But would they be so obviously characterized as subhuman if they were, say, white Europeans?

Well ...

Look. I'm not trying to start a whole thing here. I'm just pointing out how, um, interesting it is that Pete Hoekstra saw several people of color boarding a bus and immediately assumed they were "illegal invaders" imported by the Democrats to bring down America and vote for Democrats -- even though as "illegal invaders", they couldn't do so.

Something to think about.

Hizzoner

 The mayor of our fair city passed away peacefully last night, four months after he was elected to a fifth term and a month after revealing he had stomach cancer and it had spread pretty much everywhere.

Two months ago, his beloved wife died of cancer, too. Which reminds us yet again that cancer is a platinum-grade son of a bitch, because it kills both the good and the bad without distinction.

Tom and Cindy Henry were both on the good side of that ledger, and not by a little. They were as good a couple as the city of Fort Wayne, In., has ever known, and their passing is a double blow that will be felt far beyond the tight circle of their immediate family and friends.

In a lot of ways they were Fort Wayne, and not just because Tom was an exemplary mayor for 16 years. On his watch downtown Fort Wayne went from sleepy backwater to vibrant city center; if no one used to go downtown because, you know, it was just downtown, everyone goes there now. 

All of that you'll read elsewhere today, of course. Here, though, you'll read not  about Mayor Henry but Mayor Tom, who was just a regular guy like the rest of us.

Back in the day, see, fellow sportswriter and longtime friend Steve Warden and I used to bug out for lunch to the Green Frog Inn, a wonderful old place down on Spring Street which was owned by Cindy Henry. We still do it occasionally, though both of us are now retired.

Anyway, one day we're sitting there and here comes Mayor Tom, who recognized us as Journal Gazette staffers. Mayor Tom was limping a bit. We said "Hey, you're limping", something like that, and Hizzoner immediately went into Regular Guy mode.

Which is to say, he spent a couple of minutes telling us about his groin pull.

Now, I don't know how other mayors in other towns do things, but I don't imagine many would regale a couple of newspaper grunts with tales of a, um, rather intimate injury. I mean, it's not like we were lifelong buddies or anything. At best we were casual acquaintances.

But Mayor Tom was Mayor Tom, a Fort Wayne guy with a Fort Wayne lack of pretension who lived his whole life here, and who devoted more than 40 years of that life to serving his hometown as an elected official.

"Man," I marveled to Steve that day at the Frog. "In what other city would the mayor tell two people he barely knows about his groin pull?"

Think we know the answer to that.

Opening Day

 In northeast Indiana it's 31 degrees right now, and there was frost on the lawn when I let the dog out this morning.

This means nothing because the forsythia is blooming.

It means nothing because the grass is green again, and here and there it looks as if it could use a haircut.

It means nothing because, in Baltimore and Chicago and Los Angeles and ten other places, the umpire will shout "Play ball!" today. A pitcher will come set. A batter will step into the box and scrunch his feet around until he feels comfortable.

It may not feel like spring in a lot of places yet, But spring is here because baseball is here again -- and today is either opening day or Opening Day, depending on how you feel about it.

How a lot of America feels about it these days is "meh," and that's unfortunate. It's also proof of the immutable law of the universe that dictates change is the one constant. Baseball, cleaved to its history as it is, failed to change for far too long, and now it's trying desperately to play catchup.

Maybe it will catch up, in time. But right now it's losing the next generation of fans, and its demographic skews older every year. When a significant chunk of your fan base is on Social Security and Medicare, that's a problem.

But enough gloom and doom. Enough, too, about Shohei Ohtani, who continues to claim he was ripped off by his interpreter and is not-not-not covertly betting huge sums even as his sport cozies up to the gambling industry. 

(Latest sign of the apocalypse: On ESPN's MLB website this morning there is a video clip of baseball writer Jeff Passan talking about how the Ohtani mess could haunt the Dodgers all season. Right below it is an item slugged "MLB Betting" offering betting tips for the baseball season. Oh, irony!)

Later for that, however. Today is about balls and strikes and Omigod the Royals/A's/Reds are gonna suck again.

And my Pittsburgh Pirates?

The Cruds open in Miami tomorrow night, if you care ("We don't," you're saying). As far as I know, they did as little as they could get away with in the offseason. Some people think there's reason to believe they'll be better this season, maybe even third-or-fourth-in-the-division better, but I'll reserve judgment.

Instead I'll go shopping for a few nice throw pillows to spread around the NL Central cellar. If my Cruds are going to return to their ancestral home, after all, there's no reason they shouldn't be comfortable.

Play ball!

Shut up and play

 Even Caitlin Clark's dad is fed up with it.

Read something the other day that, as his daughter pissed and moaned her way through Iowa's second-round NCAA Tournament win over West Virginia, Brent Clark appeared to yell at her to shut up and play. And, yeah, OK, apparently he didn't say exactly that, but he did appear to say "Stop" or something along those lines.

In the days since, social media has taken its cue from Dad, and, because it's social media, it's been far less gentle about it. And now there's talk in some precincts that Caitlin is only getting ripped for it because she's a woman and women aren't supposed to be quite so, um, fierce about things, and therefore the criticism of her is a misogynistic double standard.

Let me first say that tends to be true when society reacts to the way men move through the world and the way women do. You can deny it, but you'll just sound silly and, well, misogynistic if you do.

Now let me say something else:

In this particular case, there is no double standard. And it's a load of horse pucky to say there is.

Look. I get it. I'm just a male of the species, so what do I know. But I'm also a male of the species who spent almost 40 years working the sports beat, and I have an intermittently good memory. So when I say ripping an athlete for constantly bitching and moaning is an ecumenical proposition, I have data to back it up.

In other words, I remember Christian Laettner.

Who was, like Caitlin Clark, an incandescent talent. And who was, or could be on occasion, an absolute horse's ass. And was duly slammed for it with as much vehemence as Clark is being slammed for it now.

As was Bill Laimbeer, a notorious whiner and flopper. As was Rick Barry, whose prima donna bitching at the zebras was legendary. As were any number of other male whiners and floppers down through the years. 

No one I can recall said they were all just fierce competitors, as some of the double-standard people are claiming ("If Caitlin were a man, she'd just be a 'fierce competitor'"). No one's saying anything about Clark they didn't say about Laettner or Laimbeer or anyone else. They were cut no more slack because they were men than Clark has been because she's a woman.

The lesson here is nobody likes a whiner, and that sentiment is not gender specific. The other lesson is when you reach a certain level of fame, the number of people who call you out on your whining -- and the volume with which they do so -- is going to rise exponentially.

Right now Caitlin Clark is the face of college basketball, men's or women's. With that comes a level of scrutiny that is sometimes unfair but not exclusive to either gender. And social media has raised that level of scrutiny to heretofore unimagined heights.

 And you know what?

That's not going to go away.

It comes with the territory when you lift public awareness of your game the way Clark has for women's college buckets. The women's game is experiencing an unprecedented surge of popularity which has been a long time in coming, and good on that. But with more popularity comes more exposure, and with more exposure comes the realization that the women's game is just as fierce and competitive and entertaining as the men's -- and that those who play it are just as prone to being jerks sometimes.

America picking on Caitlin Clark for being a whiner?

That's not misogyny. That's success.

Because once upon a time, no one would have cared enough to pick on her.

The return of Coach K. Er, Coach C

 The University of Kentucky is bringing back John Calipari for another crack at losing to Whatsamatta U. in next year's NCAA Tournament, and that must frost the cookies of every Wildcat fan from Harrodsburg to Hunters Hollow.

You lose to St. Peter's and Oakland in two of the last three years, and fail to make much of a splash in a whole lot of other years stretching back a decade or so, the true believers start hauling out the torches and pitchforks. Welcome to Wildcat Country -- or Hoosier Country, or Tar Heel Country, or Jayhawk Country, or any other Country whose beating heart is a basketball thump-thumping hardwood.

Know what, though?

Over at the Lexington Herald-Leader -- UK's hometown paper -- they're probably rejoicing. That's because they'll get another crack at spelling Calipari's name right.

Maybe you missed it, maybe you didn't, but the Herald-Leader published a big ol' front page story about Calipari's buyout the other day. Problem was, the H-L spelled his name "Kalipari" in the headline.

Now, you'd think when a guy's been around for 16 years and won you some national titles, "Calipari" would be the ONE name you would never get wrong. But there was "Kalipari' in great big bold type, christening Coach Cal the new Coach K or some such thing.

And the best part?

In the cutline of the photo above the story, "Calipari" is actually spelled correctly.

Now, I could go on a rant here about how this is what happens when you whittle your newsroom down to skeletons and outsource your copy editing to Kalamazoo or wherever, but I've already ranted about that ad nauseum. Suffice it to say print journalism has gone the way of the dinosaur, and all that's left are hedge fund vultures picking over the carrion for every last scrap.

Journalism? Serving what once was regarded as the noble purpose of keeping the local community informed and enlightened?

Pffft. How 1970s.

Anyway, all that leads to "Kalipari", which is hilarious until you consider the boots still  on the ground at the H-L likely were the only ones mortified by it. The parent company prolly is too busy counting its cash to notice.

Quick story.

Way back in the early 1980s (or late 1970s, I can't remember exactly which), when the Blob was still a puppy sportswriter occasionally peeing on the carpet, the paper for which I worked, the Anderson Daily Bulletin, ran a story about the death of a local high school athletic director. Esteemed sports editor Mike Chappell wrote the story, and quoted a school official as saying "We've lost a dear friend." Great quote, and so we used it as the headline for the story.

Except.

Except the headline came out reading "We've Lost A Dead Friend."

The journalism gods were benevolent that day, however. Because for some reason I was wandering around the backshop where they were pasting up the pages (yes, boys and girls, newspaper pages were physically pasted up in those long-ago days), and I caught the error. Or maybe it was Mike, I can't exactly recall.

At any rate, a new, corrected headline was rolled out. And the readers were none the wiser.

But you know what?

At least that never happened when we were writing about Bob Night. 

I mean, "Knight."

Galactic wrongness

 Hey, it's not like I haven't been wrong before. I mean, I thought Pauly Shore was gonna be the next Brando.

(No, not really)

I've picked various Andrettis to win the Indianapolis 500, for heaven's sake. Said, "Well, they'll be good again someday" when my Pittsburgh Pirates traded Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla 30-some years ago.  Was sure Lance Armstrong was clean because DAMMIT HE SAID SO.

But there is wrong, and there is epically, galactically wrong. There is, um, yesterday wrong.

When, sometime around 1 o'clock in the afternoon, I tweeted this: "Can't shake this feeling Utah State pulls the upset today ..."

After which Purdue Pete hit me in the head with his hammer and said, "The hell is wrong with you, son?"

Dunno. Temporary insanity, perhaps? 

Because of course Purdue went out and paved Gainsbridge Fieldhouse with the Utah States, winning by 39, 106-67. Zach Edey scored 23 points and took 14 rebounds in just 25 minutes. Fletcher Loyer put up 15 points on nine shots and dished six assists. Trey Kaufman-Renn scored 18 and yanked eight boards. Purdue outrebounded Utah State 49-26, and none of Purdue's starters played more than 31 minutes.

Yeah, boy. Some feeling I had there.

"Apparently it was just indigestion," one of my friends tweeted helpfully.

Apparently. And a big ol' honkin' case of the terminally stupids, besides.

See, I totally missed what now seems obvious: That Purdue is still big mad about getting chortled at for last year's catastrophic first-round fail against a 16-seed. The Boilermakers won their two games in Indy by an average of 33.5 points. And Edey, placid demeanor and all, flipped the world a double-barreled bird by going for 53 points and 34 rebounds in the two blowout wins.

"'Just tall', huh?" you could hear him saying, were he so inclined. Which he's not.

In any case, this is a Purdue team that's clearly been waiting a whole year to hit back at its tormentors, and this weekend the Boilers threw a Joe Frazier left hook. They entered the Madness this time with a sneer on their lips and a heartfelt invitation to kiss their hindparts, and woe betide anyone who doubts how deadly serious they are this time around.

Which would include me, it seems. And so, sorry, guys. It won't happen again.

Oh, look. Zach Edey just answered with another middle finger.

Uninformed question of the day

OK, so explain this, Formula One fans.

Ferrari's Carlos Sainz just won the Australian Grand Prix because Max "I Win Every Race" Verstappen had a rare engine failure five laps into the event.

Sainz is the only driver other than a Red Bull driver to win an F1 race in almost two years. He also gave Ferrari F1's only non-Red Bull victory last season when he won in Singapore.

Nevertheless, he's a lame duck at Ferrari, which has announced it's dumping Sainz at the end of this season to make room for Lewis Hamilton.

Meanwhile, Ferrari is keeping Charles Leclerc as Hamilton's teammate, even though Leclerc hasn't won a Grand Prix since Austria in July 2022.

My question is two-fold, therefore.

What did Sainz do to piss off Ferrari?

And, what does Leclerc have on Ferrari?

That is all.

Pre-emptive strikeout

 Kim Mulkey ought to know by now how all this works. But apparently not.

How it doesn't work, see -- how, in fact, it turns into a boomerang and smacks you in the gob -- is what LSU's lightning-rod women's basketball coach did yesterday.

What she did was hijack an NCAA Tournament presser to complain about, and threaten the Washington Post, over a story she hasn't read and that hasn't even been published yet.  Called it a "hit piece" (even though, again she hasn't read it yet) and she would sue for libel if she deemed it untrue.  Complained that the reporter working on it has been trying to interview her for two years, and that this week she sent a list of questions on Tuesday requesting her to answer them by Thursday "right before we're scheduled to tip off."

"Are you kidding me?" she said.

What a coincidence, Coach. That's exactly my reaction.

First of all: Two years? You've been ducking the guy for two years?

Gee, Coach, I don't know, but seems to me you've been given ample opportunity to present your side of whatever story the Post is working on. And you said, "Nah." And then claimed on Saturday that sending a list of questions during the first week of the NCAA Tournament was "an attempt to prevent me from commenting."

Two years, Coach. Two ... freaking ... years. 

I dunno. But that sounds like you're the one who's been preventing you from commenting.

Instead you're blaming this reporter, claiming the Post was just trying to "distract" LSU from the tournament. And trundling down that tired path about how this is what's wrong with media and why no one trusts it these days and blah-blah-blah.

To quote Mulkey herself: Are you kidding me?

Well, speaking as a former ink-stained wretch myself, I've had a bellyful of all this enemy-of-the-people stuff promulgated by a certain former president/wanna-be tinpot autocrat. It's an attempt to muzzle the free press -- a pre-requisite for any autocrat -- by cherry-picking media flubs and using them to smear an entire class of decent, earnest people just trying to do their jobs.

Which is to inform, enlighten, and, yes, expose. 

Surprise, surprise, it's the latter wanna-be autocrats get apoplectic about -- and there is scarcely any position more autocratic than that of a college basketball or football coach.

Well, to hell with that. And to hell with Kim Mulkey -- whose pre-emptive strike was actually a strikeout, given that it was so astoundingly, unfathomably stupid.

Nothing, after all, suggests an individual has some lively skeletons to hide than complaining about a rumored expose before it becomes an expose. And does so on a national stage, which gave the Washington Post more free pub than it could have dreamed. Mulkey couldn't have sold more copies of this reporter's story if she'd stood on a busy street corner shouting "Read all about it!"

General American craziness notwithstanding, not much renders the Blob more slack-jawed than how little people understand the function of journalists in a free society. And how even those who've spent their entire careers dealing with journalists don't get it.

When Mulkey said the Post was deliberately trying to "distract" her team, for instance, all I could do was shake my head and laugh. Egged on by demagogues and fear-mongers like the aforementioned wanna-be tinpot autocrat, people actually believe the Post reporter and his editor gathered in a boardroom somewhere and had this conversation:

Editor: OK, so how can we screw with LSU's women's basketball team?

Reporter: I know! Let's send Kim Mulkey a bunch of questions two days before the NCAA Tournament starts! That'll mess 'em up good!

Ay-yi-yi. And gee willickers and holy moley besides.

Look. I'm not going to sit here and tell you reporters and editors don't have biases. They're human, so of course they do. And the ones who don't do their jobs right occasionally let those biases skew their work to an embarrassing degree.

But those who do their jobs right try like hell to keep those biases out of their work. Because it's the work that matters, and obvious bias tends to diminish that work by making it less credible. 

That's a boon to the autocrats, because credibility is what they fear most. It's why certain former presidents and current women's basketball coaches declare the free press "the enemy of the people" and threaten to sue even before a story hits the streets. Because that sort of intimidation is their only weapon against a well-sourced, meticulously reported piece of journalism.

Yeah, well. Good luck with that, Coach Mulkey.

And way to sell those papers.

Gamblin' with the game

 It was so much simpler in the day, if you were Organized Baseball. You posted a warning, big as you could make it, in every clubhouse up and down the food chain. You cast Pete Rose into outer darkness for consorting with gamblers (and betting on the Cincinnati Reds while he was their manager, and maybe before).

The shadow of racist old Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who made Joe Jackson and seven other Chicago White Sox his pitiless object lesson in taking on the gangster fixers, still shaded baseball's attitudes about gambling and gamblers.

And now?

Now it's the shadow of online betting services, gambling kiosks outside ancient ballparks and moving venerable franchises to, ye gods, Las Vegas, that shades those attitudes. 

The erstwhile Pastime that for decades stood foursquare against gambling has now fully embraced it, and for the usual reason: Because it represents a gushing revenue stream. And these days not even a tradition as bedrock as baseball's will stand against the insatiable pull of Even More Money.

So MLB now has Official Betting Partners, and the old strictures are fodder for archeologists.  Place a bet on the Cubs right outside Wrigley Field? Sure, why not! What were once Connie Mack's A's moving to the capitol of American gambling? You bet!

Get it? "You bet"?

It's all good, it seems. Except ...

Except chickens have an odd way of coming home to roost. And, boy howdy, does MLB have a particularly nasty one on its hands right now.

You might have missed it, maybe you didn't, but a few days ago the interpreter for newly-minted Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani was fired by the club over $4.5 million in wire transfers sent from Ohtani's account to a shady bookmaking operation into which the feds have been sniffing. Even worse, Ohtani's story on this has already changed once.

First it was reported he was paying off the interpreter's debts. Then it was, oh, wait, the interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had actually stolen the money.

And if you're thinking here this smells like Mizuhara being scapegoated to protect Ohtani, well, your olfactories are in fine working order. That's exactly what it smells like. And now MLB has a hell of a scandal on its hands, and says it will look into the whole mess.

And if MLB discovers it was actually Ohtani using his interpreter as a beard to place his own bets? What does baseball commissioner Rob Manfred do then, considering Ohtani is the best player in the game?

Especially when baseball virtually guaranteed something like this would happen by climbing into bed with gamblers to begin with?

My guess is the "investigation" will make Mizuhara the fall guy, and either exonerate Ohtani or find a way not to banish him for life. The alternative is unthinkable, because it would force the game either to re-evaluate its cozy relationship with gambling, or be viewed as a farce not to be taken seriously anymore.

All I know is this: Somewhere Pete Rose is laughing. 

No, not laughing. Saying, "What the (bleep)?"

Worst part about that?

America's saying it with him.

Not this time

 Well. I guess that answers that question.

The question being, "Will Purdue choke in the first round AGAIN?"

Sorry, haters. But no.

This time, Zach Edey would have a monster game -- 30 points, 21 rebounds, meaning he was just two rebounds short of matching the entire Grambling team. First 30-point, 20-rebound game in the Madness in 29 years.

This time, Braden Smith would score 11 points, dish 10 assists, and not turn it over a single time. Like, zero-zippo.

This time, he, Fletcher Loyer and Lance Jones would make seven threes and combine for 24 points. And Loyer and Jones would play barely half the game -- Loyer 24 minutes, Jones 21.

This time, the final score was a traditional 1-vs-16 final score: Purdue 78, Grambling 50. A 28-point rip in which the Boilers would limit Grambling to seven points across the last eight-and-a-half minutes.

So, you know, ya'll can stop bringing up Fairleigh Dickinson now.

Especially on a day when upsets again gave Da Tournament its traditional seasoning.

The highlight was 13-seed Yale stunning 4-seed Auburn, a bit of delicious schadenfreude because Auburn's an SEC school and the SEC has just two teams left after starting Thursday with six. Which makes SEC commish Greg Sankey look silly for suggesting last weekend that more worthy Power 5 schools should have opportunities in the Madness.

Oops.

In any case, Yale bouncing Auburn wasn't the only little-over-a-big. Two 12s (James Madison, Grand Canyon) beat two 5s (Wisconsin, St. Mary's), the former by 11 points and the latter by nine.  Another 12 (UAB) made another 5 (San Diego State) sweat before losing by four. The littles, in other words, represented enough to give Da Tournament the kick they always do -- a kick it wouldn't have without them.

Not to belabor the point or anything.

Upsets, and alerts

 They closed the book on Day 1 of the Madness last night, and damn right there were upsets. Some squared-jawed kid who looked like he stepped out of the 1950s shot down 3-seed Kentucky. A 13-seed, Samford, made lordly Kansas pee its pants before losing by four. 

Three 11s (Duquesne, Oregon and North Carolina State) beat three 6s (BYU, South Carolina and Texas Tech). And then there was that 14-over-3, Oakland from the Horizon League showing John Calipari's crew the door -- led by the aforementioned squared-jawed kid, Jack Gohlke, who drowned the Wildcats beneath a rain of 10 threes.

And today?

Today, or rather, tonight, the object lesson of Day 1 presumably will not be lost on Purdue. 

It is, after all, the demon that has both haunted and driven the Boilermakers for a solid year, and tonight they confront it at last. The ghost of Fairleigh Dickenson either gets exorcised for good, or it morphs into the ghost of Grambling and another year's bedevilment. 

The upsets of Thursday, traditionally, become the upset alerts for Friday in these first days of Da Tournament. But for Purdue, a 1-seed in against a 16-seed once more, the upset alert for tonight happened 12 months ago, when the Boilermakers lost to the aforementioned Fairleigh Dickinson and their rep as  pre-eminent March chokers became cast in some base metal.

The world being the mean and twisted place it is, there are folks practically lusting for a Fairleigh Dickinson repeat, because nothing makes you a figure of loathing like success. Two straight Big Ten titles and two straight No. 1 seeds comes with its own forbidding territory, and so Purdue has become a villain in some quarters, led by a 7-4 monster named Zach Edey -- whom the uneducated say is Just Tall, and the unobservant miss what a decent young man he is.

Radio tonsil Dan LeBatard called him a "plague" the other day, and said in so many words that the way Purdue plays makes him ill. Some other radio tonsil got on the air and said if Purdue doesn't make the Final Four THIS time, the school should part ways with head coach Matt Painter.

Which proves that just as there's no accounting for taste sometimes, there's also no accounting for stupidity. And there's a lot of it out there to account for these days.

The flip side to all that is how many people are saying this isn't the same Purdue team as last year's, and how much that is a Mr. Obvious pronouncement. Edey is even more a force than he was a year ago, and he plays on a team for which he doesn't have to be. Braden Smith has gone from callow freshman to one of the nation's best point guards. Fletcher Loyer found his shooting touch from the three-point arc, lost it, and then resumed arc-welding.

Transfer Lance Jones gives the Purdue backcourt an element of athleticism it didn't have a year ago. The bench is deeper and can come at you in more ways. The Boilers who died at the arc last year knock 'em down regularly now.

Conclusion and/or fearless prediction: Grambling is not going to be this year's Fairleigh Dickinson.

Conclusion and/or fearless prediction, the sequel: Purdue has put so much weight on this moment, invested so much energy and grim purpose, that real Upset Alert might be awaiting it Sunday.

If the Boilers win tonight, see, they'll get either nine-seed TCU or eight-seed Utah State. If the chalk holds, it'll be Utah State. The Aggies are 27-6 and have four double-figure scorers, and they have two guards (Ian Martinez and Darius Brown II) who've made at least 48 threes this season. And they have four guards who play heavy minutes (24 minutes or more per) and average 8.5 points or better.

In other words, the Aggies are guard-driven. And it's guard-driven teams who tend to give Purdue the most trouble.

Not sayin'. Just sayin'. 

And alertin', as it were.

A-portaling they will go

 The college basketball transfer portal is officially open, and presumably Indiana head coach Mike Woodson and his staff are hard at work reaching out to prospective transfers, seeing how sending texts to those prospective transfers was going to consume so much time the Hoosiers couldn't possibly play in the NIT.

Oh, calm down. I jest. 

Besides, it seems Woody and his guys already have their hooks in a juicy prospect, and his name is Magnus Pelkowski.

Big guy. Got some skills. Could develop into an effective power forw-

OK, OK. I jest again. Every IU fan knows Magnus Pelkowski played for the Hoosiers way back in the 1980s.

What I really meant to say is they've got their hooks in a kid named Mike Giomi.

Fine. I'll stop now.

What I will say in all seriousness is the Hoosiers are looking at pretty much anyone with a pulse, given that three current IU players -- Kaleb Banks, CJ Gunn and Payton Sparks -- have entered the portal themselves. That means the Hoosiers now have six schollys available, because Xavier Johnson and Anthony Walker have exhausted their eligibility  and Kel'el Ware is expected to enter the NBA draft.

(Quick aside from the totally biased perspective of a proud Ball State grad: Every time I saw Sparks, the former Cardinal, languishing on the IU bench this season, I thought, "What were you thinkin', son?" 'Cause if he'd stayed at Ball State he'd have been one of the top players in the MAC this season and given pro scouts a hell of a lot more to go on than he did as a warm practice body in Bloomington. He might as well have taken an entire year off for all the playing time he got. And now he's moving on again?)

Anyway ...

The Hoosiers have already contacted a bunch of players in the portal, and let me tell you, there are some big names from some big schools on the list. Just to single out three: Michael Ajayi from Pepperdine, Marcus Foster from Furman, and Ja'Kobi Gillespie from Belmont. Also Tre Dinkins from Canisius, Amari Williams from Drexel and Dakota Leffew from Mount St. Mary's.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," you're saying now. "Those aren't big names from big schools, Mr. Blob!"

OK, so what about Deyton Albury from Queens University, then?

"Queens University? What the hell division does Queens play in?" you're saying.

Well, the Royals play in D-I, if you must know, as a proud member of the Atlantic Sun Conference. And Deyton Albury averaged 17 points a game for them this season. So there.

Dinkins, meanwhile, is a 6-2 guard who was Canisius' leading scorer at 15.4 points per game. Williams is a 6-10 forward who is a three-time All-Coastal Athletic Association Defensive Player of the Year, and who averaged 12.2 points, 7.8 rebounds and 1.8 blocks this season for Drexel.

Leffew, meanwhile, is a 6-5 guard who put up 17.5 point, 4.3 rebounds, 3.9 assists and 1.5 steals per for Mount St Mary's, which plays in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC).

So can any of these guys play in the Big Ten?

I don't know. And because everyone has players now, even Canisius and Mount St. Mary's and Queens University, who really does know?

"I'd feel better if  IU could land another guy from Oregon or someplace, like Ware," you're saying now.

Yeah, well. Mike Giomi played at Indiana and North Carolina State. How about that?

Last jest. I promise.

The right play

 Look, I don't know what kind of NFL quarterback Anthony Richardson is going to become. The skill set is huge but the sample size was too small last season to make any sort of informed prediction.

Here's what I do know, however: His skill set as a human being is pretty huge, too.

This after a young man named Parker Suddeth and his girlfriend had a blowout on I-65 the other day, leading to every motorist's worst nightmare: Trying to change a flat tire on a busy interstate.

For 20 minutes, Suddeth said, he tried to flag someone down. No dice.

Finally a car pulled over. Out climbed this big guy with dreads and a LeBron James T-shirt. He proceeded to drive Suddeth and his girlfriend to an auto parts store and gave them $200 without ever mentioning who he was until Parker asked him what he did for a living.

"He said 'football' and I asked him who he played for and he said 'the Colts', and I was just like 'Oh wow'," Suddeth told WRTV in Indianapolis.

Turns out, of course, it was Anthony Richardson. Making the right play, as it were.

So if you were looking for a reason to root for him, there it is.

March Blecch-ness

 Well, THAT was not must-see TV.

If you stayed up for it, and hopefully you didn't, we got Colorado State vs. Virginia in an NCAA Tournament play-in game last night, and boy was that premo entertainment. In case you were doing something more productive, like sleeping, Colorado State won 67-42. Virginia scored 14 points in the first half on 5-of-29 shooting. At one point the Cavaliers missed 16 shots in a row.

But, yeah, what the Madness needs is more Virginias.

That's the contention of SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who last weekend created something of a firestorm not by suggesting the NCAA Tournament will one day be the Power 5 conferences and no one else, but by not not suggesting it. In other words, he said no situation in college athletics these days is static.

Which I suppose is true.

But then Sankey went on to say this: "We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from smaller leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of (conference) expansion ,,,"

OK, first of all: "Giving away"?

Second of all: "Highly competitive opportunities"?

Opportunities for whom, exactly? And for what?

If Sankey is indeed suggesting the tournament be expanded to 80 teams (as some have), then, sorry, no thanks. As was abundantly made obvious last night, Da Tournament does not need more Virginias. It does not need more "highly competitive opportunities" for Power 5 cruds  who can't get out of their own way. 

If watching Virginia soil the game last night didn't convince anyone that the Da Tournament might actually have expanded too much already, then perhaps this will: The obvious fact that no one plays hooky from work the first two days of the tournament to watch the No. 8 team in the SEC play the No. 7 team in the Big Ten. As Mad magazine taught us to say, blecch.

No, sir. The reason the hooky-players pack sports bars at noon on a Thursday or Friday in March is because they want to scarf wings and drink beer and watch, say, a Yale scare the crap out of a Kentucky. Or Princeton take down UCLA, as happened several years back. Or Mercer knock out Duke, or Fairleigh Dickinson or St. Peter's shock Purdue, or Bucknell wreck Kansas -- all of which has happened across the years.

That's what makes the Madness, the Madness. It's what separates it from every other Just A Buncha Guys Tournament. It's what gives Da Tournament its uniqueness and its hook, and no one who watched last year's tournament could argue otherwise.

After all, who made Da Tournament last year? Who was the One Shining Moment of One Shining Moments?

Thaaat's right. It was your Florida Atlantic Owls.

UConn cut the nets, but the Owls were the story. Years from now, when the 2023 NCAA Tournament is just a page in the book, it's going to be the Owls' run to the Final Four everyone will remember about it.

And who will remember Virginia shooting 25 percent, missing 14 of 17 from Threeville and losing by 25 to a team that finished sixth in the Mountain West?

Think you know the answer to that.

Da (non) Prediction

 I know it's Madness Week again because again people are making tragic assumptions, and I'm talking mainly about the assumption that certain people have a certain expertise because they had a certain job for a very long time.

I'm talking about me, of course. Male, American, professional sportswriter for 38 years and occasional professional sportswriter since.

Because of that, people think I know stuff. And this week what they think I know is who's gonna win the NCAA Tournament -- aka the Big Dance, aka the Madness, aka That Thing Purdue Never Wins, Much To The Delight Of Mean IU Fans.

"I have no idea," is my stock answer.

"Oh, come on," they say.

"No, really. I don't," I reply.

Then I tell them in all the years I used to fill out a bracket, I picked the winner one time. Once. And it was Duke, which hardly counts as a prediction.

This year?

This year I haven't the faintest.

That's because the transfer portal and NIL have earthquak-ed the landscape into a cataclysmic jumble. Everyone has players now, and who has what players from year to year is an ever-shifting kaleidoscope. And so a kid that maybe was playing for, I don't know, Bemidji State last year is helping, say, North Carolina or Arizona to the Final Four. Or Florida Atlantic or San Diego State, for that matter.

Both made the Final Four last year. Both are back in the field this year, but don't bet on either getting to the Final Four again.  This year it'll probably be St. Mary's or Utah State or some other outlier.

"Aha!" you're saying now. "So you are making a prediction!"

No, not really. I just picked two teams at random as an example of how wonderfully capricious this tournament is likely to be.

But if you insist, here are a few things I'm sure to be wrong about. Call it my Elite Eight:

1. The Big Ten will crap out again.

(Because it's the Big Ten and it always does)

2. Purdue won't make the Final Four but won't lose in the first round again.

(Because that Big Ten thing)

3. Houston will probably make the Final Four and may win the whole schmear.

(Because the Blob does not want to see the national media roll out some stomach-turning Kelvin Sampson Redemption story, so of course it will probably happen)

4. Auburn will probably get to the Final Four and may win the whole schmear.

(See "3", vis-a-vis Bruce Pearl, who's kind of slimy, too)

5. UConn could repeat if head coach Dan Hurley doesn't pop an aneurysm. 

(Because he's an excitable boy)

6. Teams with quick, athletic, veteran guards will fare better than teams without.

(Because they almost always do)

7. Duke will not win the title unless Kyle Filipowski trips a few more guys.

(Because Kyle is a Dukie and that's what Dukies do)

And last but not least ...

8. Iowa State will win it all.

(Because the last time I picked Iowa State, the Cyclones got knocked out in the first round and incinerated my bracket. So what the hell, this year they'll probably go all the was just to taunt me)

The Madness. Some thoughts.

 I'm gonna miss Robbie Avila this week.

I'm gonna miss Indiana State's big galoot of a center, with his dad body and Revenge of the Nerd goggles and A-rating game. Looks like a stiff; plays like a stud. Guy has the whole package going for him -- even the nickname, Cream Abdul-Jabbar -- and had Indiana State made it past the velvet rope into Da Tournament, he would have become part of March Madness lore.

Alas, Indiana State, the 28-6 Missouri Valley regular-season champion, wasn't granted entry. Michigan State, which won nine fewer games and finished 10-10 in the Big Ten, is the nine-seed in the West. So the Sycamores don't get in, and MSU, which had exactly the same number of conference and overall wins as Indiana and lost the head-to-head to the Hoosiers, goes Dancin' while the Trees opt for the NIT and Indiana turns down an NIT invite.

Life isn't fair.

And on that note, the Blob presents a few more thoughts on the upcoming mayhem, instead of just shutting up and going away:

* The Long Haul loses again.

Which is to say, one of the reasons ISU will be NIT-ing instead of Dancin' is because North Carolina State came out of nowhere to win the ACC tournament and San Diego State did the same in the Big West and UAB and Montana State did the same in their respective conference tournaments.

Collectively, those four schools lost 56 games this season, with Montana State finishing 17-17. That they're all imposters someone smuggled past the Madness guards goes without saying.

This is why the Blob has long maintained, against all reason, that it's the winner of a conference's regular season title who should get the automatic bid to the Madness, not some down-standings team that pulls three or four wins out of its hindparts after stinking it up for four months. And if this renders the conference tournaments moot for the mid-majors, so be it.

As John Wooden once sort of said,  they're nothing but cash-flow window dressing for the conferences anyway. And that's especially true for the Power Five conferences, which are going to get multiple bids no matter what.

OK. I'll get off my soapbox now.

* Who will Purdue lose to this time?

The Boilermakers landed the No. 1 seed in the Midwest, which means they'll play in Indy Friday night, which means their loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten semis didn't mean diddly. As didn't 1-seed North Carolina losing in the ACC final or 1-seed Houston getting blackjacked by 28 in the Big 12 final.

Anyway, it's on to the Madness, and on to a first-round matchup Purdue has weirdly (or not so weirdly) been pointing toward all season. They got laughed off the big stage last year after lowly Fairleigh Dickinson knocked them out in the first round, a 16-seed taking down a 1-seed for only the second time ever. The ridicule stung, and it's given the Purdues a nasty edge they were missing last season.

So, anyway, beware, whoever wins between 16-seeds Grambling and Montana State. Purdue wants your livers on a stick. The Boilers want to feed you a steady diet of elbows, posterizations and a hard rain of three-balls. 

It's nothing personal. And, of course, it's entirely personal.

* Little Guy alert!

Every year the Blob picks out a tiny no-hoper to root for, because Da Tournament is all about the tiny no-hopers and sometimes the tiny no-hopers win. So who are the Little Guys That Might this year?

Well, you've got your Bigger Little Guys, like Yale and Colgate and Vermont and even Your St. Peter's Peacocks, last seen knocking Purdue into the offseason a couple years ago. They've all been here recently, as has Grand Canyon, WAC champion and Madness participant for the second straight year. And so they can almost be considered Madness regulars. 

However ...

However, it's the Littler Little Guys I'm looking at, the underdogs of underdogs. And there are a few.

I'm talkin' Samford, to start with, and Wagner, and Stetson, whose star player is Jalen Blackmon from Fort Wayne and Marion. There's Howard and James Madison and Longwood and, yeah, Long Beach State and Montana State.

I'm not in the tank for any those, however.

No, sir. This year, my heart belongs to Duquesne.

And, yeah, I know, you probably don't think of Duquesne as a Little Guy, because a lot of people have heard of it. It's a private Catholic research school in Pittsburgh that opened in 1878, so it's been around awhile. Its athletic teams are called the Dukes and they play in the Atlantic 10, and the university has a campus in Rome, the big one in Italy. Which is kinda cool if you think about it.

That's not why I'm rooting for the Dukes, however.

I'm rooting for the Dukes because they haven't been Dancin' in 47 years. In fact the last time they won any sort of postseason national title was in 1955, when they cut down the nets at the NIT.

That was 69 years ago, for those of you keeping score at home. Sixty-nine years -- and 47 since they've even been a part of the Madness.

Forty-seven years! Man, that was 1977, the back half of the Decade Taste Forgot. Disco was big. Fashion was fake-silk shirts with 747 wingspan collars and leisure suits made from fabrics not found in nature. Music was the BeeGees and The Night Chicago Died and Bobby Goldsboro singing "Honey" and "Watching Scotty Grow."

 (But also Steely Dan and other cool stuff)

In other words, it was a long damn time ago. And now the Dukes are BACK, baby. And they're an 11-seed in the East, which means it won't be a monumental upset if they knock off 6-seed BYU in the first round.

After which they probably get washed by 2-seed and Big Ten tournament champ Illinois, although it's a Big Ten team and we all know how Big Ten teams like to poop the bed in the Madness. So who knows?

In any event: Go, Dukes. Make us all proud.

Underdog of underdogs

 I know who I'm rooting for when the Madness descends this week, and it's not Vermont or Howard or Samford or Wagner -- or even St. Peter's, despite the fact the Peacocks have the coolest nickname in the field of 68.

No, sir. I'm rooting for the real underdog.

His name is Dan Monson, and he's the head coach at Long Beach State, at least until he loses this week. That's because Long Beach State has already fired him. 

Did it last Monday after State wrapped up an 18-14 campaign that included five straight losses to end the regular season. Did it, according to all parties, mutually, Monson himself saying that after 17 seasons the program "needed a new voice."

Maybe that's why Long Beach State agreed to let him see the season through to the end, which presumably would be until The Beach got ousted from the Big West tournament.

Except ...

Except Long Beach State then hauled off and won the thing. 

Whipped UC Riverside, top-seed UC Irvine and finally UC Davis to cut down the nets, and now The Beach is headed to the big show. And Dan Monson, the lamest of lame ducks, gets to go out the way someone who's given 17 years of his life to an institution deserves to go out.

He and his team will likely get bounced in the first round. But wouldn't it be great if they didn't?

Wouldn't it be great if, a week-and-a-half from now, they're in the Sweet Sixteen? Wouldn't it be great if they became the story of the tournament, because it's always the Little Guy Who Could that puts the madness in the Madness every year?

Sure it is. And you know what?

Dan Monson isn't just the Little Guy Who Could. In the larger context, he's also the Little Guy Who Can't.

Turn that page

Well. Alrighty then.

Guess we know now why the Chicago Bears signed All-Pro running back D'Andre Swift this offseason, and picked up tight end Gerald Everett from San Diego, and just a couple of days ago went to the Chargers well again to scoop veteran wideout Keenan Allen, who caught 108 balls for 1,243 yards last season and was leading the league in receptions when an ankle injury shut him down with four games remaining.

Guess we know it wasn't because they were going to stick with Justin Fields and were giving him more weapons to work with. No, sir. It was because they were giving presumptive No. 1 pick Caleb Williams more weapons to work with.

This after the Bears dealt Fields to the Pittsburgh Steelers yesterday, and were apparently so all-in on moving him it cost the Steelers only a provisional sixth-round draft pick. This soft market was interpreted as either a league-wide lack of enthusiasm for Fields' skill set, or an unwillingness to add a guy with that skill set who's in the last year of his rookie deal.

The Blob's take is it was probably a bit of both. 

The Blob's take is also that the Bears are clearly turning the page here after a 7-10 season in which Fields put up some of his best overall numbers essentially to no avail. So they've bookended DJ Moore with Allen and added oomph to their run game with Swift, and beefed up their tight end room by adding Everett to Cole Kmet. And now -- unless something extremely weird or extremely Bears-like happens -- they'll hope Williams is That Guy. 

I'm not sure he is. Then again, I'm not sure he's not.

But the Bears are shoving all the chips to the middle of the table betting he is, and, listen, if you're not getting a deja vu vibe from all this, you either don't live in Chicago or have some short-term memory issues. Because the Bears are right back to where they were three years ago, when they were moving on from Mitch Trubisky and betting Justin Fields was That Guy.

Turns out he wasn't, although the jury may still be out on that. All I know is the jury's definitely still out on Williams, who after all has yet to take an NFL snap.

And so we're right back to a familiar mantra with these Bears: Guess we'll see.

Fight, hold the flight

 Your Purdue Boilermakers survived a '90s-style bludgeonfest against Michigan State yesterday, winning 67-62 in an ugly crawl in which blood was literally spilled and the Spartans did what the Spartans do in March, which is refuse to go down easy.

At one point, Purdue also seemed to do what Purdue does in March, which is arrive with a less-than-adequate supply of good luck.

A lot of oh-crap gasps emanated from Boilermaker World when point guard Braden Smith went down clutching his knee at one point, and then disappeared up the ramp to the locker room. With the obvious exception of Zach Edey, after all, Smith is the one indispensable man for Matt Painter's bunch, the engine that drives what has been an absolute juggernaut this season.

Ah, but a few minutes later, back came Smith, declaring himself good to go. And back onto the floor he went.

It was at this point the Blob (and other observers) had a heretical thought: Why?

Look, I get it. Matt Painter is as competitive as competitive gets, and his team takes its hard-nosed flavor from him. It's the trait that most separates this year's Purdue model from last year's, and it's been evident since the first tip back in November.

They're a nasty, pugnacious, bring-it-on lot, these Boilers. And that's largely been fueled by the fact they're sick to death of hearing they're a bunch of chokers whose throats get narrow at the very thought of March.

So, yeah, they fought like hell yesterday, and, yeah, they'll fight like hell against Wisconsin today, and if they win that they'll fight like hell in the Big Ten championship game tomorrow. But the question persists: Why?

Because Braden Smith going down, and then coming back in, illuminated an obvious and inconvenient fact: If you're Purdue, why worry about a quarterfinal conference tournament game when the tournament that matters is next week?

After all, if Painter had parked Smith after he went down, and Purdue had lost, it would have zero bearing on what happens next week. The Boilers are a lock No. 1 seed, and they were going to be a lock No. 1 seed no matter what happened yesterday in Minneapolis. So all that's really at stake for them this weekend is the chance to collect another shiny knick-knack for their trophy case.

And, yes, I know, that matters to them. But enough to risk losing a vital cog right before the big show?

No one in charge of the multiple-bid conferences wants to hear this, but their conference tournaments matter only to the financials and the bubble teams. The Purdues, the UConns, the Houstons aren't going to be affected an iota by whether or not they win or lose in their conference tournaments. And so, in the case of the Big Ten, this week was crucial only to the Michigan States, the Ohio States, the Nebraskas and the Wisconsins. And maybe to the Indianas, the Northwesterns and other riders of the cusp, too.

Purdue?

Purdue could have sat out the whole schmear. But of course the Boilermakers wouldn't be in a position to do that if they were the sittin'-out kind.

So buckle up, Wisky. No take-it-easy in these Purdues. 

Over and out

 In the end, Mike Woodson turned his back on it all.

In the end, he walked away from his bench, from his staff, from his team with 5:20 to play and Nebraska leading his Indiana Hoosiers by, I don't know, eleventy gazillion points. Got the heave-ho after his second technical foul in less than four minutes, Woody did, which suggests it was less a spontaneous outburst than a deliberate act of I-can't-watch-this-anymore.

Hardly anyone could, if you bled cream-and-crimson. Any hopes Indiana had of getting its season beyond about 11:30 last night was swept away in a torrent of Nebraska 3-pointers, same as in the previous two meetings between Hoosiers and Huskers.

 Once again, Kesei Tominaga -- who is either the Big Ten men's version of Caitlin Clark, or she's the women's version of Tominaga -- toasted Indiana's perimeter D like a marshmallow over a bonfire, dropping four threes and 23 points. Brice Williams joined in with four threes and 23 points of his own.

All told, the Huskers made 14 threes in 23 tries, a 43.8 percent clip. They were an even 50 percent from everywhere, 30 of 60. And they ended whatever suspense there was going to be by scoring the last 17 points of the first half, ballooning a six-point lead to 23.

Tore the heart right out of Woodson's Hoosiers, who'd won five straight coming into Friday with mostly heart and grit. The second half was just marking time until the end -- or, for Woodson, until he just couldn't watch anymore.

This will happen when you see your team getting wadded up like scrap paper. It will happen when you see the opponent's lead climb to 33 points before settling in to a 27-point scalding, 93-66.

A lot was made in the postmortem about Kel'el Ware and Malik Reneau not showing up and the Hoosiers, without Trey Galloway and then Anthony Leal after the latter twisted his ankle, once again being helpless defensively at the arc. But this was less about what Indiana didn't do than what Nebraska did, especially during that 17-0 rip that ended the half and, effectively, the game.

On the defensive end, the Huskers got into Indiana's preferred passing lanes, stealing or disrupting its entries to Ware and Reneau time and again. And on the offensive end, it was lightning ball movement more than lazy defense that got Tominaga, Williams and the rest open looks from Threeville.

And they knocked 'em down. Hell, they even knocked down looks that were only semi-open, and what are you gonna do about that?

As for Woodson ... well, sometimes optics matter, and the optic of his receding back was as bad as it gets. It suggested (or really more) a commander abandoning his troops. It suggested, or more, that he was simply done with this season -- and maybe done with this team.

Now we get to see if this team is done with him.

All that's certain at this point is Leal and Galloway have signed on for another hitch, and beyond that, no one knows nuttin'. The Hoosiers only recruit, 6-7 stud Liam McNeeley, bailed on his tentative commitment a week ago, and Woodson's got no other recruits on the hook anyone knows about. Ware will go to the NBA, and maybe co-Big Ten Freshman of the Year Mackenzie Mgbako, and God knows what Malik Reneau will decide to do in the era of the transfer portal.

Which seems to be the only thing Woodson's banking on right now.

It's gonna be a hell of an offseason, in other words. To state the obvious.

Survivin', advancin'

 Time to come clean this a.m., you citizens of Candy-Stripe Nation. When it got to halftime up there in Minneapolis last night, did you lapse into Scooby-Doo mode?

As in: Ruh-roh.

Because here was Penn State just five points adrift of Your Hoosiers, and the Nittany Lions had just spent 20 minutes sending out search planes for their missing shooting eye. The Nittanies were 7 of 33 from the floor in those 20 minutes. They missed 13 layups in 14 tries. They almost literally couldn't have shot any worse if you'd blindfolded them and spun them around five times.

And they were only down five.

Which meant Your Hoosiers had mostly wasted a glorious chance to blow this second-round Big Ten tournament game into the stratosphere and moon-walk into the quarterfinals. And without Trey Galloway, who was in streets on the bench with a bum knee.

Instead ...

Instead, it turned into the usual grind in the second half, with the good news being Indiana suddenly has an appetite for grinding. And so down to the end it went, and here came Anthony Leal to play the hero again, and Indiana survived and advanced, 61-59.

Kel'el Ware, again playing as if Indiana coach Mike Woodson was holding a family member hostage, put up another double-double (18 points, 14 rebounds), blocked three shots and caused a lot of those missed Penn State layups by altering a pile of others. Malik Reneau added 12 points and eight boards; Mackenzie Mgbako scored 11 points, took five rebounds, blocked two shots and dished a couple of assists: and Xavier Johnson put up a four-point, six-rebound, five-assist stat line while turning it over just three times.

And then there was Leal, the Hoosiers' Swiss Army knife, who got 17 minutes thanks to Galloway's absence and turned them into eight points, four rebounds, a steal and the tip-in with five seconds to play that got the Hoosiers the win.

After which he successfully kept the ball out of Penn State standout Ace Baldwin's hands on the ensuing inbounds pass.

And so on Indiana goes to the quarters today, lugging a five-game winning streak mostly notable for its scruffiness. If Woodson's crew has spent most of the winter looking for a definable brand, they seem to have at last found one: Winning ugly.

Which, of course, is better than losing ugly.

Today?

Today the Hoosiers get Nebraska, who has handled them easily in two previous meetings. Logic says the Cornhuskers should do so again, especially if Galloway can't go and the depleted Indiana backcourt has to deal with Huskers star Keisei Tominaga, who's already mulched the Hoosiers twice this season.

In other words, this could get ugly. Or it could get, you know, ugly.

The latter being what Indiana does these days. And for which, consequently, Candy-Stripe Nation should have its fingers crossed.

Greed's revenge

Nick Saban wants to save college athletics, but Nick Saban is not the guy to do it. Neither is Dabo Sweeney or Kirby Smart or any other marquee college football or basketball coach, for one simple reason.

It's because they're a big part of what college athletics needs saving from. 

Saban took part in a Congressional roundtable the other day on What To Do About College Sports, and he lamented that one of the reasons he walked away from Alabama was that "all the things I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics."

Then he said it was his wife, Terry, who opened his eyes to this one day, asking him why they were still doing this when all these kids today cared about was money.

Made Nick Saban sad.

Nick Saban, whose last contract with Alabama paid him $11.4 million a year to coach football.

Nick Saban, who coached in a conference which negotiated with ESPN to create its own TV network as a fresh revenue stream, and which regularly raids other conferences to add more big-money schools to that stream, and which seems intent on turning high-end college athletics into a Gilded Age monopoly with room only for itself, the Big Ten and perhaps one or two other conferences.

But, OK, sure. It's these damn kids whose greed has ruined college athletics.

Truth is they're just young people doing what young people have always done, which is follow the example of their elders. If they're now saying "Where's mine?", it's because all the grownups around them were saying "Where's mine?"

What Nick Saban and others like him wring their hands over they created themselves, see, and it didn't start the first time a school paid a coach like a CEO instead of an educator.  It started the first time that school took a pile of dough to outfit its athletes in Nike swooshes or Adidas stripes, all the while cutting them out of the deal because, after all, they were student-athletes, not employees.

The astronomic TV money and CEO contracts and gutting fellow conferences because enough just wasn't enough swiftly followed, as night follows day. And suddenly the "student-athletes" were demanding to be paid like employees because that's how their schools had come to see them.

Oh, nobody said that out loud, mind you. They all kept up the fiction about education and what-not, even as it got more vaudevillian with every year. Truth is, the "student-athletes" were a workforce like any workforce, generators of massive wealth for what had become a purely corporate entity. Was it really a shock they would eventually begin to think of themselves as a workforce?

And that the corporate entity would be forced to tacitly admit as much, which is how the whole Name, Likeness and Image kerfuffle came into being?

NIL was a half-measure hurriedly conceived and sloppily applied by the NCAA, and it was widely regarded as a sop to keep the full-on professionalism its member schools have courted for decades from overwhelming a shared delusion. Little wonder, then, that it's devolved into a virtually lawless hellscape, with the delusion gone and the NCAA as an enforcing entity thoroughly neutered.

And they've all got no one to blame but themselves. Greed's revenge, you might call it. 

Give Nick Saban this much: He at least recognizes the barn door is open and the horse has fled, which is why the other day he said he has no problem with athletes making bank on their name, likeness and image. But he doesn't want to see college athletics become an all-out professional model in which athletes play for pay.

Perhaps someone should tell him that horse is long gone, too. And that it's Nick Saban, former CEO of Alabama Football Inc., who along with his peers turned it loose.

Crickets in Chicago

 And now this from the NFL free agent market, where up is now down, and down is now up and, wait, Russell Wilson is what now?

A Steeler. Russell Wilson is a Steeler.

Also, Saquon Barkley is an Eagle, the Giants having Giants it up again and let him escape to a division rival.

Also, Aaron Jones is a Viking, the Packers having let him go to a division rival only because they just got Josh Jacobs from the Raiders.

And, um, let's see: Kirk Cousins is a Falcon now, and Derrick Henry is a Raven, and Joe Mixon is a Houston Texan, and Jameis Winston is a Brown. Oh, and Gardner Minshew is now a Raider, which means the Indianapolis Colts are in the market again for a backup to Anthony Richardson.

Justin Fields, meanwhile, is still a Chicago Bear.

For now. Or longer. Or ... well, nobody really knows.

Only the Bears know, and they ain't talkin'. Or maybe they don't know and they are talkin', but just not publicly. Again, the only sound coming out of Halas Hall is crickets.

For now, all anyone knows is they haven't traded away the No. 1 pick in the draft, which presumes they might hang onto it and take Caleb Williams, which would mean they'd have to move Fields. But so far they haven't, so either they're still trying to decide what to do or they've decided and are just waiting for the right time to spring it on all of us.

Now, they have made a couple of moves so far. They've signed All-Pro running back D'Andre Swift and re-upped their All-Pro corner, Jaylon Johnson, and they picked up tight end Gerald Everett from San Diego. The Swift and Everett deals suggest they're either keeping Fields and giving him more weapons, or they're adding more weapons in anticipation of more fully enhancing Caleb Williams' expected skill set.

I don't know. You don't know. And again, maybe the Bears don't know.

Maybe at this very minute their brain trust is sitting around a conference table, playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors" to decide what to do.

Bears GM Ryan Poles: OK, here's the deal. If Joe here wins, we trade Justin and draft Caleb Williams. If I win, we trade the No. 1 pick and keep Justin. Rea-

Anonymous Third Guy (interrupting): What if I win?

Poles: Aw, hell, then we trade Justin for Mitch Trubisky and start all over again.

Could happen.

Aaron the Veep

 Well, one thing's for sure, if so little else is these days. Kamala Harris will never be able to find a seam in the Cover Two the way Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s possible running mate  can.

Comes now that presidential "candidate" RFK Jr., running on the Certified Loon ticket, has been in talks with -- wait for it -- Aaron Rodgers to possibly be his running mate. Yes, that Aaron Rodgers. And, no, that is not the setup for a punch line.

Although it could be.

Why is Aaron Rodgers running for Vice-President?

Anything to get away from the Jets.

Or:

Why did RFK Jr. pick Aaron Rodgers as his running mate?

He needed a guy who could find the seam in a Cover Two.

Sheesh. Life comes at you fast these days, and when it does you say "Are you insane?"

More and more the answer is, "Why, yes, I am.

Although on some level an RFK Jr./Aaron Rodgers ticket would make all kinds of sense. Both believe the Covid vaccine will either kill you or turn you into a newt; both buy into every goofy conspiracy theory that trundles down the pike. And of course both are nuttier than granny's fruitcake.

Both, frankly, sound as if they've spent a long time alone in the dark in a cabin in the woods.

Oh, wait. Aaron already did that.

"Hey, no fair, I thought of that first!" RFK Jr. might well have responded.

Or maybe it was Ted Kaczynski.

Uncommon indecency

 You can go ahead and give Utah State a gold star this morning. And not the good kind of gold star, either.

No, sir. Utah State gets a gold star for "Most Appalling Cheap-Shot Firing For 2024." You're No 1, Utah State-ians!

This after Aggies women's basketball coach Kayla Ard had to announce her own dismissal last weekend during the postgame of Utah State's 80-49 loss to Boise State in the first round of the Mountain West tournament. Someone asked how she was going to rebuild after a disastrous 5-25 season, and Ard said she didn't know because she'd just coached her last game at Utah State.

Apparently she was informed she was canned a microsecond after the horn sounded. Or maybe she was told prior to that and Utah State just didn't bother announcing it, which frankly seems all kinds of weird.

 Either way, the school clearly hadn't informed anyone publicly yet, leaving Ard to do something she never should have been expected to do. It was classless and cruel.

Look, 5-25 is what it is. It's going to get any coach fired. But if you're Utah State, and Kayla Ard has (presumably) worked her tail off on your behalf, don't you think it's simple common decency to let her go in such a way that she retains a little dignity? Don't you think you owe her that much, instead of giving her a heapin' helpin' of uncommon indecency?

Apparently Utah State didn't think so. Apparently common decency is not a thing there.

And you know what? 

If you're a coach angling for a head coaching position, and you see the Utah State job is open, how do you look at that and think "Yeah, boy, that's the place for me"? How does the way it treated Kayla Ard not give you at least a little pause?

It sure ought to. And if you go ahead and apply for the position anyway, it ought to be the first thing you address in any interview process. 

Or so it says here.

Indiana, being Indiana

 Your Indiana Hoosiers holstered their fourth straight W yesterday, on Senior Day, and because they're Your Hoosiers they raised as many questions as they answered, same as ever. Indiana is always gonna Indiana, it seems, and you might as well just accept that, Perpetually Disgruntled Fan Base.

These Hoosiers, see, will make you wonder "Where did this come from?", occasionally for minutes at a time. Then they'll make you wonder how Mike Woodson still has a job. Then they'll jack around and win the game while you're still wondering the former.

It's just what they do, at least currently. It's what they did yesterday.

They were in against Tom Izzo's Michigan State Spartans, and for about 15 minutes, give or take, they looked like the best team in America not quartered in Houston or West Lafayette. Blew a 17-point hole in the narrative with maniacal D and domination in the paint, Your Hoosiers did. And then ...

And then, I don't know, they wandered off to smell the roses or whatever.

Which is to say, the Spartans put the 17-point deficit on a diet, getting it down to five by halftime. Then they blew past Indiana like it was a stalled vehicle, building a seven-point lead early in the second half. Then the Hoosiers bestirred themselves, fought back, got it even, and on down to the end it went.

Finally it was 65-64, Indiana, and Michigan State had the basketball, and a shot went up and the ball got batted around and finally a Hoosier emerged with it. And, hey look, another W.

Once again Kel'el Ware was a monster, going for 28 points and a dozen rebounds on 13-of-19 shooting. Low-blocks sidekick Malik Reneau had 16 to go with five boards and five assists. Mackenzie Mgbako, the third Musketeer, added 13 and six boards.

Indiana outrebounded MSU 39-33. The Hoosiers limited Michigan State to 38.5 percent shooting (25 of 65) and 32 percent (8 of 25) from Threeville. And they did it with their senior point guard and catalyst, Trey Galloway, playing spectator for all but seven minutes after he dinged up his leg.

And now they're 18-13 overall and 10-10 in the Big Ten, same as Michigan State and good for sixth place in the final conference standings. They'll thus escape having to play a Wednesday game in the Big Ten tournament in Minneapolis this week, and will likely face 11-seed Penn State, which plays conference bottom feeder Michigan on Wednesday.

Penn State's already beaten the Hoosiers twice this season, by 14 and nine points, respectively. But that was then, and this is now.

Now they potentially look like this year's version of last year's Nittany Lions, who surprised everyone by reaching the title game of the conference tournament after coming in as an afterthought.

Except ...

Except Penn State was a 10-seed last year. Indiana's seeded four spots higher. So maybe the Hoosiers have played their way out of that analogy.

Or, you know, not. Because remember who we're talking about here, and what their theme is.

It's Indiana. And -- once more, with feeling -- Indiana gonna Indiana.

The (late) winter of their discontent

 The best motorsport series in America launches its 2024 season today down in St. Petersburg, Fla., and, no, NASCAR fan, I don't want to hear "Yeah, but we still have more eyeballs," or "Yeah, but what about that finish in Atlanta?"

That finish in Atlanta was great. NASCAR is great, even if it's not what it was before the corporate money rolled in and Dale got killed and Jimmie and Jeff and Dale Jr. 'n' them retired.

And yet ...

And yet, the Blob is an IndyCar guy. The Blob has always been an IndyCar guy. So you're not gonna win this argument no matter how hard you try.

Even, mind you, as I acknowledge that IndyCar has been crapping where it eats for the last going-on-30-years. And continues to do so to this day.

Case in point: St. Pete this weekend.

Down there today, defending Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden sits on the pole and Felix Rosenqvist  sits next to him, and not far behind them sit Pato O'Ward and Colton Herta and Romain Grosjean and Marcus Ericsson. That's five different teams represented in the top six spots on the grid, from Penske to Andretti to McLaren to relative non-powers like Meyer Shank (Rosenqvist) and Juncos Hollinger (Grosjean).

Lurking a bit further back, meanwhile, are Alex Palou and Scott McLaughlin and the grand old men of IndyCar, Scott Dixon and Will Power.

The sport is healthy, in other words. It's as healthy and competitive as it's been since Tony George and CART staged their big greedfest showdown and blew it up 28 years ago. There's more talent on the grid now, much of it still young, than there's been since the early 1990s.

So why is everyone coming into the weekend pissing and moaning?

Michael Andretti started it off by complaining that the Penske conglomerate, which owns the series, wasn't spending the money to properly promote it, and if Roger Penske wasn't willing to do so he should sell the series. Juncos Hollinger co-owner Brad Hollinger then backed Michael's play, favorably comparing IndyCar's competitive product with Formula One's Max Verstappen/Red Bull Tournament of Roses parade.

"We have by far the best product, the racing is spectacular," Hollinger said in an Associated Press piece. "It's phenomenal. Just compare it to what's going on literally right now in Saudi Arabia (where Verstappen and Sergio Perez made it two 1-2 finishes in a row for Red Bull to start the F1 season) ..."

"Here you can have 15 to 20 guys fighting for the top position," Hollinger went on. "But the way it is packaged and promoted needs to be dramatically enhanced. And the way to do that is to get more money into the program."

None of this is new, of course, and predates Penske's ownership by years. IndyCar's marketing of IndyCar has been ham-handed since the Split, lowlighted by the time it tried to cash in on Danica Mania by making Danica Patrick, a one-time career IndyCar winner, the face of the sport.

It was hugely unfair to Patrick, and served only to alienate everyone else in IndyCar. Now everyone's pissed off again -- and once more it adds up to IndyCar not being able to get out of its own way.

That's because, while Andretti and Hollinger and whoever else might have a legit point about Penske's handling of the series, this weekend was not the time to bring it up. This weekend should have been about celebrating what IndyCar is, not griping about what it isn't. Yet the very people dinging the series leadership for not promoting the product better chose opening weekend to ... not promote the product better.

Instead they've spent their time publicly running it down, or at least running the leadership down. And this when, according to Penske Entertainment, merch sales are up 30 percent and attendance for St. Pete is expected to be the largest ever.

To be sure, there's a hint of self-satisfaction in that, and it perhaps lends credence to the criticism that the current leadership is a tad complacent. But how cotton-headed do you have to be to choose now to pick that fight?

Or to put it another way: Does IndyCar always have to IndyCar?

Cold discomfort

 I once watched two NFL teams wallow around in the mud for three hours.

It was Thanksgiving Day and 1968 and I was 13 years old, and end-of-the-world rain had turned the Detroit Lions' field into the world's largest tuna noodle casserole, minus the tuna. And the Lions and Eagles mucked around in it until the previously winless Eagles prevailed, sort of. 

The final score was 12-0. All the points came on four Sam Baker field goals. Although it might have been the Lions who kicked four field goals, because by the end of the game you literally couldn't tell the teams apart.

They were both dressed exactly the same: Liquified Mother Earth. Came in any color you liked as long as it was brown.

Anyway, it was horrible football. And it was glorious football. It was football exactly the way God and Knute Rockne 'n' them intended.

I bring this up because reports are coming out of a Missouri hospital that dozens of people have been treated for frostbite and at least a dozen had to have fingers or toes amputated because of a brutal cold snap in January. At least some of those treated were fans who attended the Kansas City Chiefs' playoff win on January 13, when the temperature was minus-4 and the wind chill was minus-27.

This has prompted scattered cries in some quarters for the NFL to do something about extreme-weather games -- although as long as the Great Monolith insists on scheduling its entire playoff schedule in the dead of winter, extreme weather will happen. That's why some NFL media is insisting every new NFL stadium from here on out should either be roofed or have a retractable roof.

The Blob's crotchety-old-man take on this is if that's the case, the NFL should stop calling it football and start calling it arenaball in the interests of truth in advertising.

The Blob's take is football, like baseball, is an outdoor game and it should be played outdoors, and if that means you wind up with a playoff game in minus-27 windchills, then shorten the season so you're not playing games in the dead of winter. But since the NFL is never going to do that -- hell, they just recently went to a 17-game regular season, and already they're lusting after an 18-game season -- then live with the consequences.

Yeah, I know. This sounds heartless given that no mere game should cost someone an extremity or two. But if you take the elements out of football, it's no longer football. It's just Patrick Mahomes and Brock Purdy pushing aside the furniture and spending a Sunday afternoon rough-housing in the living room.

Besides, you lose a big chunk of what makes football (or baseball, for that matter) memorable, if you take nature out of the equation. It's no accident that an inordinate number of the most memorable football games in history are memorable because of the conditions in which they were played..

Michigan and Ohio State playing in a blizzard in 1950. That Lions-Eagles Casserole Bowl. The Bengals and Chargers having it out in the cryogenic chamber that was Riverfront Stadium in January 1982, when the game-time temperature was minus-9 and the windchill was minus-59.

Coldest game in NFL history, that one was. Second-most iconic to the Ice Bowl in Green Bay six days after Christmas in 1967, when the game-time temperature was minus-13 and the Packers beat the Cowboys 21-17 on what was literally frozen tundra.

I don't know how many fans suffered frostbite at those two games, or if any fingers or toes were lost. I do know the fans dressed for the weather; in my memory, the stands in Lambeau Field were a vast sea of parka-ed up Michelin Men and ski masks. The only clue they were actually alive were the plumes of frosted breath that chuffed out of them like smoke from a power plant.

Conversely, I just saw a crowd shot from that Refrigerator Bowl in K.C. Lots of fans in Chiefs jerseys over several sweatshirts and stocking caps, bare faces hanging out beneath them. One guy in the photo wasn't even wearing gloves.

This is not to say people in Green Bay in 1967 were smarter than people in Kansas City are now. OK, maybe it does say that.

In any event, when Jim Cantore or whoever says it's so cold out there exposed skin will freeze in minutes, believe him. Unless you want Roger Goodell to swoop in and decree that Arrowhead Stadium be transformed into another charmless, sterile NFL living room.

 Mother Nature sold separately.

Those de-commit blues

 Poor old Mike Woodson. Guy just can't catch a break.

Here he is, after a season of fits and starts, finally getting his Indiana basketball team to resemble an actual basketball team, with the Hoosiers having won three straight, including two on the road. Xavier Johnson, back in the lineup, has been the catalyst Woody's been saying he was all along. Trey Galloway has become a real boy at point guard; Kel'el Ware and Malik Reneau are killing it on the low blocks; Mackenzie Mgbako is playing like the blue-chip recruit he was.

And what happens?

A day after absolutely dismantling an 18-win Minnesota team on the road, Woodson's lone prize recruit for next season de-commits.

That would be 6-7 Liam McNeeley from Montverde Academy, who Thursday reopened the floor to potential suitors. This happened a day after not only the Minnesota win, but the announcement that Woody would be back in the coach's chair next season.

You can speculate cause-and-effect between that news and McNeeley's de-commit if you like. Me, I'm wondering if the unending torrent of discontent from the chronically discontented fan base might have had something to do with it.

It's been a gusher of negativity all season from the Chronically Discontented, and truthfully a lot of it's been warranted. (Mea culpa: The Blob hasn't exactly been sunshine and roses on the subject of Woodson and IU buckets, either.) But when you've got long-time fans saying the team is trash, the coach is trash and they've stopped caring about IU basketball, why would you expect Liam McNeeley to care about it?

Just a theory, but I'm sticking it. Mainly because the irony of it would be so delicious.

As The Wrench Turns, Part Deux

 So the other day the Blob harrumphed at some length about the ongoing soap opera that is Formula One racing, in particular Formula One racing at its current dominant team, Red Bull.

Well, here's some exciting news, sportsball fans: There's a new episode out now!

In this chapter Red Bull, having "investigated' a female employee's allegations that team principal Christian Horner was sexually harassing her, not only cleared him but -- on the day before International Women's Day, no less -- decided to suspend his accuser for accusing him. 

Or, in so many words: How dare you accuse Christian, you lying trollope! You're suspended. backstabbing witch! Don't ever say anything about him again! And that goes for you, too, other women employees! Stay in your lane! Know and appreciate your place!

Ay-yi-yi. Do these people not have a public relations staff? Have they never heard of the concept of optics? And what does Max Verstappen think of all this?

Mercedes must be looking better and better to him.

To mention another rumor that's being floated by the drooling European media, busily stoking (inventing?) all the drama they can. They didn't particularly need any more help, but, gee, thanks, guys!

Stay tuned for our next episode.

Timeout for OT

 Liberty Center, In., is a humble little place that like a lot of humble little places used to be less humble and not quite as little, though it was never what you could call a thriving metropolis down there in Wells County. These days it's a four-way stop and a gas station/convenience store and the Methodist church and a weedy railroad crossing, and that's about it, that's all y'all.

Once upon a time, though, a high school stood where the church parking lot is now.

The teams that played in its tiny bandbox gym were called the Lions.

And one weekend in March -- 60 years ago this week, in fact -- the Liberty Center Lions made themselves immortal.

Went down to Marion, the Lions did, to play a regional game against the Swayzee Speedkings, themselves now long vanished. The Speedkings had a kid named Jack Saylor who did a lot of their heavy lifting; the Lions countered with a kid named Dick Harris. And that afternoon they played and played and played some more.

Eventually, Saylor and Swayzee prevailed. 

In nine overtimes.

That's still a record in the freighted history of  the Indiana high school basketball tournament, and it's why Liberty Center (and Swayzee) will forever be remembered though both schools were swallowed by consolidation decades ago. I know about it because I have family down that way; my mom grew up on a farm three miles south of Liberty and went to high school there, and a longtime family friend, Bruce Stanton, actually played in the nine-overtime game.

That's not why I'm bringing this up today, however.

I'm bringing it up because this week the young man who coached the Liberty Center Lions in that epic game passed, and God bless him.  His name was Richard Butt, and he went on to coach high school basketball in Indiana for years and years, including a good stretch of time at Leo High School here in Allen County. 

That he passed during regional week exactly 60 years after that regional week lends a symmetry to his life not often seen, a circularity that takes you from here to that long-ago afternoon in Marion and back again. If the end of a long and fruitful life can ever be described as somehow appropriate, Coach Butt dying at this particular time in this particular year fits the description.

I can't remember if I ever talked to Coach about that singular day -- surely I did, but time does cruel things to the memory -- but I know I talked to Stanton and several others who were there. It's how I know Dick Harris fouled out in the waning seconds of regulation, and after that whoever got the tip in overtime simply held the ball for one shot.

Shot; miss. Shot; miss. That's how it went as every nerve in the place was stretched thin and my granddad (or so family lore goes) kept leaving the gym and coming back because he couldn't stand the tension.

Finally, in the ninth OT, the staredown ended and Swayzee hit a couple of shots and that was it. It's unlikely there will ever be another game like it, especially if the forces pushing for a high school shot clock in Indiana get their way.

In the meantime, there's a wide spot in the road in Wells County that forever will be remembered in Indiana high school basketball history. As will the young coach who was there for it.

Rest well, Coach Butt. May you discover nine overtimes only seemed like eternity, and that the real thing is infinitely better.

The worm. Turned.

 (Well, maybe)

So, remember just a couple of weeks ago, when we were all wondering if this Indiana basketball team might actually lose the rest of its games, and if this Indiana basketball team lost the rest of its games, AD Scott Dolson might have to make the difficult decision to pink-slip favorite son Mike Woodson after just three seasons?

Ah, nostalgia.

Because last night Your Hoosiers won their third game in a row and second straight on the road, poleaxing an 18-win Minnesota team by 12 in ancient Williams Arena, and again doing all these things they hadn't been doing all season, like shooting the lights out (even from the 3-point line!) and distributing the basketball for points.

No, really. They did that.

Trey Galloway, for instance, who looks more and more like a real point guard every game now, dished 11 assists. Xavier Johnson dropped five more dimes and Anthony Leal four. Indiana as a team had 28 assists on 30 made baskets.

Oh, yeah, and Kel'el Ware put up another double-double (26 and 11), and he and Mackenie Mgbako (15 points) were a combined 5 of 7 from behind the arc, and Indiana was 5 of 8 total from Threeville, which is 62.5 percent, which is ridiculous.

Also, the Hoosiers shot 54.5 percent overall. Also, they were 5 of 7 from the stripe.

I don't know how much any of this had to do with reports that Mike Woodson would indeed be back in the coach's chair next season, even though no one with a working brain cell ever thought otherwise unless the Hoosiers lost out. 

Of course, they didn't. Of course, they look like a real basketball team, suddenly.

And, of course, this encourages the Blob to more and more think he might be right about what he wrote the other day, which is Indiana as it's currently playing could be this year's Penn State in the Big Ten Tournament a week hence.

A tough out, in other words. A dangerous lower seed the higher seeds might not want any part of if the Hoosiers show up on their line in the bracket.

Of course, this being Indiana, that "maybe" still applies.

Of course, even though it sure looks as if the worm has turned for Your Hoosiers, it might yet be an optical illusion.

Guess we'll, um, see.

Soap opera time!

 (Formula One edition)

(In which three-time reigning world champion Max Verstappen's Sports Dad From Hell, Jos, says Red Bull team principal Christian Horner should step down because he either was or wasn't shtupping/sexually harassing a female employee, prompting Red Bull to "investigate" and then exonerate him, and now the overheated European media is howling that Max is leaving and Red Bull is falling apart, even though Max just won Bahrain by 22 seconds and Red Bull finished 1-2 same as always ...)

Whoa. Whew. Lemme catch my breath here for a second.

Now lemme say there's always drama like this in F1, which is why the "Drive to Survive" series is so endlessly compelling, not to say the best long-running soap opera since "Days of Our Lives" or "As The World Turns." But when I say "drama like this", I'm not talking about drama like this.

That's because this drama involves the most dominant team in F1, a team so machine-like it's turned the actual on-track product into a parade at the top of the grid. Max wins pole, Max wins race, everything interesting happens back in the pack. Rinse and repeat.

That sort of dominance makes the dominating force, if not complacent, at least arrogant. And thus confers a sense of entitlement in areas where entitlement should never go.

That's the story here with Horner, and, listen, let me say right up front I have no idea if he did what he's been accused doing. If he did, then he's Horner the Horndog and worse. If not ...

If not, then you've got to wonder how much of this kerfuffle is real, and how much of it is a bored press corps pumping it full of helium to keep itself from falling asleep. 

A sex scandal involving the Lord of the (Nurburg)Ring, and every other F1 venue? Trouble in paradise? The BEGINNING OF THE END OF RED BULL??

Yes, please!

Helping along this wistful hysteria, of course, is that, like all hysteria, there are kernels of truth buried within. Jos Verstappen did indeed call on Horner to quit, because he does indeed dislike the man. That's gotten Formula One chief Mohammed Ben Sulayem -- himself the target of allegations that he jimmied the results of the 2023 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix -- taking the unseemly action of inserting himself into the inner workings of his sport's dominant team. 

He even pulled Max Verstappen aside last weekend (with the standard caveat of "allegedly") and chastised him for not publicly supporting Horner as Sulayem requested. Verstappen, to his credit, basically told him to buzz off -- or, failing that, to investigate Horner himself.

Meanwhile, the whole Horner/Jos Verstappen rift has stoked rumors (with Jos allegedly doing the stoking) that Max will leave Red Bull for another team, even though he's under contract until 2028 and any team he'd go to at this point would be a step down. And as for Max himself ...

Well. All he wants to do is race, or so it seems.

Publicly diplomatic, he leaves you wondering what he's thinking privately.

"Dad, will you please just shut the hell up?" would be one educated guess.

"Overheated European media, will you please just shut the hell up?" would be another good one.

Either way, Max seems to be the only one behaving like a grownup in all this. Which means he wins again.

Big surprise there.