Collateral damage

 Brittney Griner sits in a jail cell in Russia right now, a casualty of war and penuriousness. One has nothing to do with the other, and yet they have everything to do with each other.

The casualty of war part ... well, Griner's basically being held hostage by the Russians in retaliation for U.S. and Western sanctions that are in turn retaliation for Russia/s lawless invasion of Ukraine. The official charge is possession of vaping paraphernalia with traces of cannabis oil -- an infraction that carries an absurd 10-year sentence, and which would have been resolved in about five minutes if the Russians weren't reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble.

Griner, after all, is a star basketball player in Russia. I'm guessing that carries weight in a corrupt oligarchy where greasing the right palms is no doubt the national pastime.

And the penuriousness part?

That's on her offseason employer, the WNBA. Because Griner, a future Hall of Famer, wouldn't be a star basketball player in Russia if the WNBA paid its players anywhere close to what it should.

An interesting aside in the news stories about Griner is the fact she makes a cool million bucketing for UMMC Ekaterinburg in Russia. That's four times what she makes playing for Phoenix in the WNBA, even though she's one of the league's most decorated players. A seven-time league All-Star, her resume includes a WNBA championship with the Mercury, two Olympic gold medals and a college national championship at Baylor.

Yet there she is in Russia, supplementing her income. And she's hardly alone. Among other WNBA stars playing in Russia or Ukraine this winter were league MVP Jonquel Jones, and Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley -- last seen leading the Chicago Sky to the 2021 WNBA title.

All of them got out safely. Griner did not. She's collateral damage on two fronts, in a sense.

"Brittney Griner has the WNBA's full support ..." the league said in a statement after Griner was detained.

Pretty words. But words only.

Your Guys In Shorts update for today

 So I'm eating lunch yesterday in a place with lots of sports on lots of TVs, and on one of them they're showing the NFL combine, aka Guys In Shorts Running And Jumping And What-Not. And it's both weird and weirdly compelling.

The weird part is watching prospective NFL tight ends and wide receivers run pass routes against orange cones.

The weirdly compelling part is watching SUV-sized offensive linemen run the 40, even though the only thing that's relevant for an OL is how fast he runs the 5.

Nevertheless, there is this: On the TV screen showing the combine, a man weighing 341 pounds just ran the 40 in 4.87 seconds.

"Wow," I say.

Because, listen, people who weigh 341 pounds cannot normally run the 40 in 4.87 days, let alone 4.87 seconds. Most wouldn't even finish 40 yards. They'd get out there about 20, 25 yards and then say "Ah, screw this."

What this does is remind us that NFL players are not normal, and possibly not human. They do things you and I can't do, and couldn't do without Tony Stark's Ironman gear. 

Forget, for a moment, what it must be like to be 341 pounds and run a 4.87 40.  Imagine instead what it must be like to be on the other end of that 4.87 40. Imagine how it must feel to get hit by something that big moving that fast.

And yet, that happens in the NFL, like, every week. On virtually every play. And somehow the hit-ee (usually) gets up -- and, on the next play, sheds that 341-pound 4.87-second runner like an overcoat on a warm day, runs even faster and collides with another guy who's running even faster.

It's what I think about every time I hear someone say the NFL is like touch football now because no one can hit anyone anymore.

That's only partly true. It's true you can't sack a quarterback with an excess of zeal anymore, or clock a receiver going across the middle, or even bump-and-run him the way you could back in the day. But ...

But that doesn't mean guys still don't get hit. And they're still large men moving very, very fast. And so the layman can't really imagine the level of violence involved in said hits.

I have never stood on an NFL sideline. But I've stood on more Power 5 college football sidelines than I can count, and I've heard what it sounds like when those players collide at full speed.

It sounds like a car crash. I mean, literally, like a car crash.

And that's not anywhere close to the NFL.

So the next time you're compelled to call a guy like Andrew Luck "weak" because he had the good sense to walk away from the game before he turned 30, cue up that 341-pounder running 4.87 again. And then imagine what it must feel like to get hit by a dude like that, and imagine how many times Andrew Luck kept getting up from it despite busted ribs and a lacerated kidney and a smashed shoulder and various wrenched knee and ankle joints.

Then imagine how many times you'd get up.

I'm guessing zero.

Goodbye to all that

 I suppose this was inevitable, like the man himself so often has been. Sooner or later the Blob had to say something about Mike Krzyzewski -- about this being his farewell tango with winter, and with the weight of numbers that have themselves become inevitable.

Which is to say, Coach K has won and won and won so often he's turned Duke basketball into a natural phenomenon of sorts. The sun rises in the east; Duke wins a national title every six or seven years. And, lord, how everyone outside Durham, N.C., has grown sick to death of the Blue Devils because of it.

The Blob, too, I must admit. But today is K's last home game, and so the inevitable must be observed.

First off, Mike Krzyzewski is the most successful coach in men's college basketball history, a Rushmore guy, right up there with Wooden and Knight and Smith and probably bigger than all of them.

He's done it the way you're supposed to do it most of the time -- Christian Laettner's chest stomp, Grayson Allen's incorrigible goonery and the flagrant purchase of Zion Williamson being obvious exceptions.

Because of that, a certain amount of sanctimony (again: inevitable) has attached itself to K's program. To his credit, Krzyzewski himself has never invited it. But it's there, and most of the loathing for Duke outside Durham springs from it.

It's one thing to be too good for your own good, after all. But when you're both that and too goody two-shoes for your own good ...

Well. No one likes a snob, and Duke often gives off a whiff of snobbery that likely has as much to so with its status as an elite academic institution as it does with the entitled snots on its basketball team. The fact the entitled snots seem to get every break, always, only enhances that.

Almost all of that is perception, mind you. Duke's basketball players, most of them, come from backgrounds that could hardly be described as "entitled." But, dammit, why did Gordon Hayward's desperate heave rim out, back in 2010? How come Laettner wasn't ejected for the chest stomp in the '92 regional final, which would have meant we wouldn't have to watch his winning shot over and over and over ad nauseam?

 And why do the Dukies have to get EVERY DAMN CALL, particularly in Cameron Indoor?

This evening that will no doubt happen again, or at least we'll think it  does. Duke will beat North Carolina, its fiercest rival. K will wave goodbye through a prism of tears. The Cameron Crazies will press pause on their usual obnoxiousness to swipe away a few tears themselves.

Goodbye to all that, and all that.

And you know what?

It will all be perfection. Because of course it will. 

The march of March

Epiphanies come in odd packages sometimes. Mine came in my car.

Mine came in my car, in a left-turn lane on U.S. 24, seven years ago (I think) this month. I sat in that left-turn lane for a long time, on that Saturday afternoon. The stoplight cycled  three, four, five times before I finally got turned and drove on down to Huntington North High School, where I could barely find a parking spot.

The occasion was a couple of semistate basketball games, 18 (I think) years after the IHSAA put a shiv in what we used to call Hoosier Hysteria.

The gym was fire-marshals-looking-the-other-way packed.

The atmosphere was full of body heat and exposed nerve endings and a claustrophobic electricity that felt as old as laces on a basketball, and as fresh as tomorrow.

And that's when it dawned on me.

That's when this old sportswriter realized you can kill "Hoosier Hysteria," but you can't kill March in Indiana. Its fundamentals are eternal, no matter how many ways you slice them. One class or four, it's all of a piece, and it's been that way since John Wooden played at Martinsville and Dave Dejernett broke the state title color line at Washington, and since Plump and Oscar and Mount and McGinnis and Damon and on and on and on.

 I was there for the last gasp of Hoosier Hysteria, a term I'll always reserve for the old single-class tournament. It was 25 years ago in the old RCA Dome, and LaPorte and Delta and Bloomington North and Kokomo were the final Final Four. The favorite, Bloomington North, beat Delta 75-54 in the title game to finish 28-1 and win the last single-class title. A North player named Adam Hawley scored the last single-class bucket.

When IHSAA commissioner Robert Gardner presented the winner's trophy that night, the crowd booed him. He was, after all, Hoosier Hysteria's executioner.

And now a quarter century has flown by, and it's sectional week again, and the 1997 state finals seem so ... old timey. As if that night were rendered in sepia tones, and people came to the RCA Dome by horse and buggy, and don't forget to leave a note for the milkman.

Hell. Even the RCA Dome itself is long gone.

Which is to say, March marches on, and if what it means in Indiana never changes, everything else does. Going back to one class today would be like trading in your  Apple Music app for a Victrola. The demographics of school systems have changed that radically since 1997, and even more so since 1954, when Milan beat Muncie Central and launched a mythology that would animate the supporters of Hoosier Hysteria for the next 43 years.

Then, Muncie Central was the "big school," with just over 2,000 students. Today, the biggest school in Indiana is Carmel, which has 5,400 students in four grades and looks more like a small-college campus than a high school.

Now imagine a school that size or close to it playing, say, Shakamak (enrollment 334) in the first round of the sectional. It would be beyond farcical.

Look. No one was more opposed than I was in 1997 to breaking Hoosier Hysteria into four pieces. I had a whole pile of carefully reasoned arguments against it: Tradition, the fact it was still by far the most successful high school basketball tournament in America ... tradition. Why fix what wasn't broken?

What I missed was that if it wasn't broken, it soon would be. Attendance was already dwindling in dribs and drabs. The big schools were getting bigger and the small schools were still small. And the most important thing I missed?

That the love match between Hoosiers and high school basketball wasn't going to change no matter what happened. 

Crowds might be smaller, the infrastructure more diffuse, but certain truths would remain truths. Communities would still hang their hopes on the slender shoulders of teenagers. They would still scrawl SEMISTATE BOUND or GOOD LUCK (INSERT NICKNAME HERE) on their car windows. They would celebrate with their boys or girls as they cut down the nets, or swear the refs got paid under the table if they lost.

All of that is happening again this week. And all of that has been happening in this state for 111 years now.

I could be wrong, of course. But I think it's here to stay.

A brief pause for provincialism

 The hottest D-I basketball team in Indiana plays tonight, at home, and you're probably not going to guess who it is.

No, it's not Notre Dame, although the unranked Irish have won seven of their last nine games, are 21-10, and perhaps represent the best coaching job ever for Mike Brey, longtime ND coach and one of the best people in the business.

No, it's not No. 8 Purdue, who lost Tuesday to Wisconsin on a buzzer-beating three and likely surrendered the Big Ten title in the process.

And, no, it's certainly not unranked Indiana, which lost Wednesday to Rutgers on senior night, also on a buzzer-beating three, and as usual couldn't find the basket with search planes and a topo map.  

So who is it, then?

It's Purdue-Fort Wayne. And please excuse the Blob's brief foray into provincialism.

Right here in the Fort, see, the Mastodons have quietly won nine straight games. Unlike Purdue, they win key games on the road. Unlike Indiana, they can find the basket, and they don't need enhanced assistance to do it.

Want to know what the Dons did last week to lock up the co-championship of the Horizon League in just their second season in the conference?

They beat 20-win Oakland and Detroit Mercy, both on the road.

They beat the former by making 32-of-59 shots (54.2 percent) and sticking a mind-numbing 16 threes in 34 attempts, a 47.1 percent clip.

They handed the latter its only home loss of the season by making 29-of-50 shots (58 percent), and hitting 11 more threes in 22 tries, an even 50 percent clip.

Five players scored in double figures for the Dons in that one, led by 18 off the pine from Deonte Billups, the Horizon's sixth-man of the year. First-team all-conference pick Jarred Godfrey added 16 for Jon Coffman, the Horizon's coach of the year.

Tonight, the 20-10 Dons host 14-15 Illinois-Chicago  -- which itself has won six of its last eight games -- in a Horizon League tournament quarterfinal. If they win that, they'll be two Ws away from the school's first NCAA Tournament appearance.

So, go Dons.

This concludes today's Provincialism Moment.

Playin' dumb, per usual

 Well, of course, playin' chicken wasn't enough for the amoeba brains who run baseball. Once again they wind up at the bottom of the cliff like Jimmy Dean's rival in "Rebel Without A Cause."*

(* Gratuitous film nerd reference. Bonus points if you can name the actor who played the kid who went over the cliff in the game of chicken)

(Wrong. It was Corey Allen)

Anyway ... the two sides talked and talked yesterday, and then the deadline after the deadline-that-wasn't-really-a-deadline ran out, and now MLB has canceled Opening Day and the first series of the season. Unholster blunderbuss, shoot foot right the hell off.

One of the major sticking points, of course, is the owners' insisting on expanding the postseason to14 teams, because of course they are. This brings out the shouting-at-clouds geezer in the Blob, who agrees with the players on this one.

Which is to say, 14 teams in the playoffs is absurd. There are already 10 teams in the playoffs, and that's too many. The postseason is supposed to be a reward for proving one's mettle over a 162-game, six-month slog, not another month-long slog. 

The playoffs already run into November. At this rate, the October Classic will be the Thanksgiving Classic, and everyone will make the playoffs except the Blob's Pittsburgh Cruds, who frankly should be relegated to Triple A until their owners decide they want to behave like major-league owners.

But just for the sake of argument, let's look at who would have been added to the postseason in 2021 if it had been 14 teams instead of 10.

That's two teams per league, one would assume. In the American League, that means the Blue Jays (91-71) and A's (90-72) would have gotten in. OK, so two 90-win teams. Fine, but how often are there going to be seven 90-win teams in one league?

More representative is the National League, in this case.

Two additional teams would have meant the Phillies (82-80) and Reds (83-79) got in last fall. So, after 162 games, two barely-over .500 teams get rewarded with playoff berths?

Um, no. Sorry. And the thing is, how long before the owners would be pushing for a 16-team postseason?

ESPN is already offering to kick in an additional $100 mill for a 14-team postseason, which of course is what's driving this. After all, when have baseball's owners ever chosen the welfare of their players over a loftier pile of cash?

One hundred fifty years of players just answered "Never."

Playin' chicken, per usual

 I hear the chirping of birds outside my window this morning, as gray light comes up on the day.

The piles of snow outside the same window have withered to narrow scraps of white where the plows have moved them aside.

According to my weather app, it's supposed to hit 63 here this weekend. Sixty-freaking-three.

I guess the calendar ain't lyin', in other words.

It's March.

It's March, first week of, which here in Indiana means basketball sectional week. A million trace memories attend it: The rhythmic whack-whack of ball on hardwood; the  adolescent shriek of cheerleaders; the rich aroma of popcorn overlaying everything. In the very words "sectional week," you can hear the snarl of a buzzer and the bleat of an official's whistle, and see shreds of nylon in the fists of teenagers at the end of it all on Saturday night.

I'll tell you something you can see, here in the first week of March: Bullstuff walking.

Remember last week, when Major League Baseball declared if a new collective bargaining agreement couldn't be reached by end of business Monday, they'd start canceling regular-season games?

Well, that was exactly what almost everyone thought it was: MLB playin' chicken with the players.

Because here it is Tuesday morning, and, gee, they're still talkin'. Opening Day, and any subsequent Days, are still on. Apparently, there has been "movement" in the talks, which is another way of saying everyone's quit screwing around and decided to get serious.

This happens so often in these deals a lot of us just shrugged when MLB laid down its ultimatum last week. You knew, instinctively, that it wasn't really an ultimatum. It was just more off-Broadway theater, a little chest-thumping pantomime before everyone inevitably settled down and said "OK, let's do this."

As of now, apparently, both sides are still talking. The sense here is they won't stop talking until they have a deal. Even with baseball's legendary brain-cell deficit, it's hard to believe the principals would be so witless as to submarine the start of a season in an era when the game is struggling as it is to maintain relevance.

I mean, what if they canceled Opening Day, and nobody noticed?

Because that could happen. And that's got to be a lot scarier for both sides than talking to one another.