Name Game time!

Exciting news from the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League's Washington Football Team, which has been generic since the team's foof owner, Daniel Snyder, was forced to drop its previous name, the Racist Slurs, because all his sponsors were dropping him.

The team will unveil its new nickname and logo on Groundhog's Day. That's only three or so weeks away!

So, the same day the groundhog sees his shadow and we have sixteen more years of nuclear winter is the same day the Football Team renames itself. This is huge here at the Blob, which loves nothing more than coming up with suitable nicknames (and mascots!) for athletic teams.

Unfortunately, some of the finalists have already been identified, and they're BORING. You've got all the predictable candidates, like Commanders and Admirals and Armada and Brigade and Sentinels and Defenders and, of course, Presidents.

Blah. And why are there so many military suggestions for a team in our nation's capital? I know we fetishize our military here in the US of A -- look how many of our tax dollars we throw down the bottomless pit of defense -- but I'd like to think Washington D.C. stands for more than just being able to blow people who annoy us off the face of the Earth. Another Blob for another time, perhaps.

In any event, the Blob, as you knew it would, has some alternatives it finds more suitable, even if none of them would ever be considered:

* The Fightin' Matlocks, Attorneys At Law.

Because the Washington Football Team is going to need some Matlockin' now that we know about all the slobbering misogynist creeps their front office has been harboring. Oh, yeah, and pimping out their cheerleaders, that was some outstanding work, too.

Suggested mascot: A giant Andy Griffith with a briefcase in one hand and a wad of hush money in the other.

* The Fightin' Bob the Builders.

Because apparently the Washington Football Team needs some, seeing how FedEx Field became MedEx Field after a railing collapsed Sunday and dumped a bunch of fans on top of some photographers and Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts. Which means the Washington Football Team not only harbors sexual predators, its stadium is a dump, too.

Expect more litigation.

Suggested mascot: A giant Andy Griffith wearing a Bob the Builder hardhat.

* The Fightin' January Sixers.

In honor of the failed Yahoo Coup a year ago today. Few things would represent our nation's capital better than saluting the freedom-loving Americans who tried to violently disrupt the certification of a democratic election. 'Merica!

Suggested mascot: Wingnut representative Lauren Boebert with a giant papier mache head,  waving a couple of guns in the air.

Oh, wait. She already does that.

* The Fightin' Logos

Because another thing that represents our nation's capital are the corporate shills who buy the favor of our elected representatives, and the willingness of those representatives to be bought. Someone once said they should all wear sponsor patches like NASCAR drivers so we would know exactly in whose pockets they reside, so why not a football team named  the Logos?

Every week the team could wear the logo of a different special interest. You could have Oil and Gas Week and Gun Week and Silicon Valley Week and Pharma Week. You could even have Putting Small Local Businesses Out Of Business Week, sponsored by Wal-Mart and a passel of other big-box entities.

Suggested mascot: Remember the talking bill from "How A Bill Becomes Law"? That.

And last but not least ...

* The Redskins

Except instead of a Native American, the logo (not original with the Blob, mind you) would be a redskin potato. The mascot would be a giant papier mache potato named Tuber Tommy, who would engage other root vegetables in a race at halftime (Tommy would always win, of course, after various shenanigans). And instead of the tolling bell you hear at Colts games when the home team defense is on the field?

The PA system would break out "Monster Mash" instead.

Come on. You know you love it.

Geno the graceless

The Blob once observed that if Notre Dame really wanted to win a national championship in football again, the school should hire women's basketball coach Muffet McGraw as its football coach. 

After all, she was the best coach on campus. And as a two-time national champion, she knew the way.

I point this out as full disclosure that this is a precinct with a definite Muffet McGraw bias. And so you should take that into account when I say what I have to say this morning.

Which is, Geno Auriemma is a graceless jerk.

He's also the best women's basketball coach in history not named Pat Summitt, and the dynasty he's built at UConn is perhaps the last true dynasty in American sport. It's also not a wholly owned subsidiary of ESPN, despite what Muffet said as a guest on Kate Fagan's and Jessica Smetana's podcast the other day.

Fagan and Smetana asked Muffet if UConn had an "outsized" influence on women's college basketball, and Muffet, now an analyst for the ACC Network, said absolutely it did. Of course, she then went on to say what UConn has done is "amazing," and how the Huskies are the standard for everyone else in college buckets (including for Notre Dame), and how everyone is trying  to "emulate" them.

That's when she stepped in it.

"But I think it goes over the top with ESPN," she said. "That is Connecticut's network. Notre Dame has NBC. Connecticut has ESPN."

OK, first off: The ACC Network is owned and operated by ESPN. So it's Muffet McGraw's network now, too.

Secondly, most of UConn's games are not broadcast by ESPN, but by SNY. And the conference tournament for the Big East, of which UConn is a member, is a Fox property, not an ESPN property.

All of which Auriemma pointed out in his rebuttal to McGraw's comments. And if he'd stopped there, he'd have been fine.

But Geno can't help being Geno. So he had to go full jerkwater.

"I guess Muffet's bored," he all but sneered. "I guess she doesn't have a whole lot to talk about. Usually when she was coaching, when she did talk, nobody listened anyway. I guess she figures she's got a platform now."

He didn't stop there, of course. He pointed out that 11 championships (UConn) are more than two (Notre Dame), because he learned that from Sesame Street. He even got in a shot at the Irish football program, saying, "I'm just glad we don't go 30 years between winning championships. So maybe NBC ought to help them a little more."

Look. I get it. Geno felt compelled to defend his program, even though Muffet praised his program to the skies. But then to get personal about it and say "nobody listened" when she talked as a coach at Notre Dame went beyond the pale -- something Auriemma's always been good at.

Not to mention he was as wrong as wrong gets. Plenty of people listened to Muffet McGraw when she was Notre Dame's coach.

The last time the Irish were in the Final Four, in 2019, for instance, someone asked about why she wasn't hiring men for her coaching staff anymore. And her answer was that there was no dearth of coaching opportunities for men in women's basketball, but there was for women.

"When you look at men's basketball, 99 percent of the jobs go to men, why shouldn't 100 or 99 percent of the jobs in women's basketball go to women?" she wondered. "Maybe it's because we only have 10 percent women athletic directors in Division I. People hire people who look like them. That's the problem."

She went on to say that maybe all the girls who play sports in America now should have more role models to look up to when it comes to leadership. There aren't enough of them, she said. When does that change, she asked, and those role models become the norm and not the exception?

Lots of people listened to what she had to say that day (including the Blob), no matter what the asshat in Storrs thinks. And they listened because people do sometimes actually listen to truth-tellers, and that was some absolute stone truth she was laying down.

For Geno Auriemma to belittle all that because Muffet McGraw was wrong about the whole ESPN-UConn thing was classic Geno. Which is to say, classically boorish. 

I would say it was beneath him. But past performance proves it wasn't.

The dumbest thing you'll read today ...

 ... comes from Chip Towers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Congratulations, Chip!

The astute Mr. Towers points out here that, by golly, it gets cold in January in Indianapolis, where the CFP national championship game between Georgia and Alabama will be played Monday. Like, really cold (Eighteen degrees on Friday, Chip says. That's COLD!). Also, there's much more to do in, say, Louisville, which is where some Georgia fans are opting to stay because, you know, Indy is all penguins and glaciers and British explorers dying of exposure and stuff.

I'm trying hard to think of something Louisville offers in January that Indianapolis doesn't. Nope, sorry. Got nothin'.

But, wait, there's more!

Mr. Towers also points out that lodging will be much, much cheaper in Lullville, and ticket prices for the national championship game will be SO EXPENSIVE YOU CAN'T BELIEVE IT.

I'm trying hard to think of somewhere else that wouldn't be true if that somewhere else were the site of the national championship game.

Nope, sorry. Got nothin'. 

Fortunately for any warm-blooded Georgians or Alabamians, Lucas Oil Stadium, the game site, has a retractable roof. And everyone's been assured it will be closed, which means the game-time temperature will be 72 degrees or so.

"That's COLD!" Chip says.

OK. So he didn't.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 17

 And now the first 2022 edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the Blob feature of which critics have said "Maybe it won't be as stupid this year," and also, "Oh, please, it's going to be just as stupid as ever":

1. "AIEEE! AIEEE!" (Baker Mayfield, running in terror from the Steelers' pass rush, which sacked him nine times in the Steelers' 26-14 win)

2. Live look at the Steelers' pass rush chasing Mayfield.

3. Live look at Mayfield.

4. Meanwhile, the Bengals' Joe Burrow!

5. Is clearly NOT Akili Smith. Or David Klingler. Or A.J. McCarron. Or Turk Schonert.

6. "Yay! We didn't draft any of those guys this time!" (Bengals' fans)

7. "We're gonna clinch a playoff spot today! We're gonna clinch a playoff spot today!" (Colts fans)

8. "Dammit!" (Also Colts fans)

9. The Giants got embarrassed by the cruddy Bears. The Jets almost knocked off the Buccaneers, but of course didn't. Combined record: 8-24.

10. "Yay! Six weeks until pitchers and catchers report!" (New York football fans)

Damaged goods

 You won't get a lot of locker-room moralizing in these precincts on what Tampa Bay wideout Antonio Brown did yesterday. That tire's all out of tread here.

Mostly what you'll get is sadness.

If you follow the NFL and you don't live a hermit's life, you know what I'm talking about. Miffed that he'd been benched, AB stripped off his jersey and his pads and walked off the field bare-chested in the middle of the Buccaneers' come-from-behind victory over the Jets, waving a peace sign at the fans.

Walked off the field, and -- once more -- out of the game.

Tampa Bay head coach Bruce Arians made that clear in the postgame, tersely saying AB was "no longer a Buc." It was abundantly clear that after the civil lawsuit accusing him of forcible rape Brown settled last spring, and the vaccination record he faked, and what happened yesterday, Arians had had enough. And you couldn't blame him, because who'd ever seen anything like that before?

Not me, and I covered Sportsball World for almost 40 years as a professional sportswriter. But what I saw when I watched the video was perhaps not what everyone saw.

What I saw was a drowning man.

A drowning man who keeps clutching at anchors instead of life jackets.

That Antonio Brown has needed professional help for a very long time has been clear for an equally long time, and his bizarre exit yesterday made that as clear as it's ever been. He's an enormously gifted wide receiver with an enormous capacity for self-damage -- the former of which has largely prevented him from dealing with the latter. 

This is because professional football is a bidness, and bidnesses are all about maximizing returns. And so if Antonio Brown can help you win football games, you overlook everything else. That's what the Buccaneers did when they signed him, thinking the grounding presence of Tom Brady would somehow magically solve AB's obvious issues.

It worked for awhile, but yesterday, or something very like it, was always in the cards. Pro football, like any professional enterprise, is very good at shedding assets when they stop being assets. And so off Antonio Brown goes -- off the sideline, through the end zone, out of the stadium, out of the one thing in the world that has kept him at least marginally centered.

A drowning man. And no life jackets in sight. 

Generational echo

Today the Blob could let his inner curmudgeon out to play, growling about how it JUST WASN'T RIGHT that every major bowl game, including the Rose Bowl, was swallowed up by ESPN on New Year's Day, or how CONSARN IT we couldn't even watch the NHL Winter Classic because THAT was aired on TNT, and how because of that a lot of us creaky oldtimers missed out on a lot of cool stuff.

Like, literally, the coldest Winter Classic in history, in which the St. Louis Blues beat the Minnesota Wild, 6-4.

Like, maybe the wildest Rose Bowl in history, in which Ohio State beat Utah 48-45 and put up video game numbers, like quarterback C.J. Stroud's 573 passing yards and six touchdowns, and receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba's insane 15-reception, three-touchdown, 347-yard day.

The inner curmudgeon won't grumble about any of it. That's because ESPN college football commentators Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard already did it for him.

Both of them got to get-off-my-lawning about all the players who were skipping their schools' bowl games to protect themselves for the NFL Draft, which became an even more relevant issue later in the day when Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral -- a projected first-round draft pick -- went down with an injury in the Sugar Bowl. Herbstreit and Howard went full These Kids Today on all of it, crabbing about how players in 2021 just don't love football the way they did, because 30 years ago neither of them would have dreamed of skipping a  bowl game.

Of course, 30 years ago, bowl games actually were a reward for a successful season, not participation trophies the way so many are today. But Herbie and Desmond didn't mention that.

They also didn't mention that these sorts of old-man rants are hardy perennials, generational echoes that have repeated themselves since Rutgers and Princeton first decided to fight over a pig's bladder. Why, the Blob, through the miracle of blatantly making stuff up, has dredged up actual fake quotes to prove this ...

The forward pass? Pffft. Players today have it so soft. In our day we employed the Flying Wedge, and players actually DIED for the game. Kids today just don't love the game enough to do THAT. -- Hiram T. "Skull-Cracker" Abercrombie, Yale '02

The Notre Dame box? Pffft. In our day we didn't resort to a lot of la-di-da trickery to win games, or danced around like that nancy boy Red Grange. We lined up and went at each other like MEN. Kids today don't love the game enough to do THAT. -- Franklin "Slobberknocker" Abrams, Army '13

Lookit that Sammy Baugh, throwin' the pigskin all over the field! My God. I thought this was football, not BALLET. In our day only GIRLS threw the ball around like that. We tucked it in the crook of our elbows and ran off tackle 52 times a game, the way God intended. Kids today don't love the game enough to do THAT. -- Monty "Bronco Nevers" Fleenor, Minnesota '26.

The triple option? What's this crap? In our day we didn't fake people out and run away from 'em. We lined up and hit people in the mouth, and the coaches didn't give us any of these pansy water breaks, and we used to play with broken legs and stuff because in OUR day, they'd run you off the squad if you got hurt. Kids today don't love the game enough to do THAT. -- Griff "Gruffer Than Gruff" Griffin, Texas '57.

And so on, and so on.

And, sure, everything above is parody, but Herbie and Desmond were themselves a parody. And as wrongheaded as they could be, because if These Kids Today didn't love football, they wouldn't be NFL Draft prospects to begin with. What, Herbie and Desmond think that just magically happened? That a whole lot of hard work and sweaty equity, and, yes, love of the game, didn't go into it?

Ridiculous. 

But don't take my word for it. The better commentary on all this comes from Phillip Bupp of Awful Announcing, who took Herbie and Desmond to the woodshed in definitive style. Every word of is the stone truth.

Enjoy.

Competition fail

 Well, that wasn't fun.

Another year, another turn of the odometer, and what's changed? NOTHING. College football is still just the SEC and them others. 

Friday it was Alabama 27, Cincinnati 6 in the Cotton Bowl, and Georgia 34, Michigan 11 in the Orange Bowl, and what was that you were saying about expanding the College Football Playoff? Why? So 'Bama can nail-gun some undefeated schmo from the Mountainous Terrain Conference 57-3 in the opening round?

I mean, we couldn't even get a competitive semifinal game in a four-team playoff. What would a 12-team playoff look like?

I'll tell you what. It would look like women's college buckets a decade or so ago.

Back in that day there was UConn and Tennessee and Notre Dame, and occasionally a Baylor or South Carolina. Mostly, though, there was UConn, which periodically hauled off and won eleventy-hundred straight games, and who was in the Final Four so every-year the Huskies had their own corner booth by the window.

The first round of the women's March Madness was a joke in those days, with the Huskies beating some poor 16-seed 97-35 and what-not. There were no 12-over-5 upsets on the women's side. Their bracket was so chalky it made you sneeze.

Now, of course, things are little different. UConn is still UConn, sort of, but the women's game is much more competitive now. Occasionally an unranked team will beat a ranked team -- or even a No. 1 team, as unranked Missouri did the other day against No. 1 South Carolina.

College football still has a ways to go to reach that enviable point. 

Oh, there was a lot of talk that Michigan might actually knock off Georgia, which had been the top-ranked team all year until Alabama embarrassed it in the SEC title game. And some folks were gulled into believing Cincinnati might actually be good enough to make 'Bama draw a labored breath.

But, nah. 'Bama rolled over the Bearcats like they were the Muncie Central Bearcats. And all the SEC title game loss did was cheese off the Bulldogs, who beat Michigan like it was Michigan Tech. It was a 34-3 game until Michigan scored a garbage-time touchdown late in the fourth quarter -- by which time Georgia head coach Kirby Smart was already game-planning for the rematch with 'Bama.

So, woo-hoo, we get another SEC tilt in the national title game. Oh, goody.

I might watch a play or two. But that's about it.

Not a big fan of reruns, you see.