Comparison silliness

 Look, of course you can't compare Pete Maravich and Caitlin Clark. The Pistol had cooler hair, for one thing.

And socks?

Please. Those grungy old gray floppies vs. Caitlin's neat, clean whites? Caitlin in a walk, as it were.

As to the rest of the silliness zipping around the interwhatchamacallit the last couple days ... well, it's been a regular misogynist's ball, not to say an interesting exercise in denial. Take all the folks (mostly men, of course) saying Pete is still the alltime leading scorer in NCAA Division I history, because you can't compare the men's game to the women's game, and Clark played x-more games and had the 3-point shot, besides, and blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda.

"Yeah, but she's still scored more points," you're compelled to point out.

"That doesn't matter!" the deniers respond. 

Um, well, yeah it does. In fact it's the only thing that matters.

Everything else is just a poorly veiled attempt to run down Clark because she's a woman and Pete was a man and men are better than women at sports, they just are. You can dress it up any way you like, but that's the underlying sentiment.

What I'll say is this: For all the talk from the run-down-Clark set about how you can't compare the men's game to the women's game, they sure are doing a lot of comparing. 

Yes, Pistol Pete stacked up his points in only three years, because freshman eligibility wasn't a thing yet. And, no, he didn't have the 3-point shot, which undoubtedly would have plumped up his total.

But he also put up a gazillion more shots than Clark, because his coach, daddy Press, let him shoot whenever he felt like it. So he was jacking it 40, 50 times a game a lot of nights.

Also, in the 38 years since the introduction of the three to college buckets, no one, man or woman, managed to catch Pete.

Clark did. And on a lot fewer shots. And with, by the way, more assists.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with anything. It's merely pointing out that you can play the comparison game both ways if you're of a mind to. But the only one that matters is this: In different ways, Pete and Caitlin both lifted their respective games.

Pete gave the men's game genius level inventiveness it had never seen, and you could see its influence in every no-look pass Larry Bird or Magic Johnson threw or Nikola Jokic throws now. What they all did later, Pete did first.

And Caitlin?

She didn't make the women's game, but she's made it must-see viewing. And like Pete, she's done it by injecting something into the game heretofore unseen -- in her case, seemingly unlimited shooting range that expands the area teams will be compelled to defend from this day forward.

The improvisational pass and creative shot were what Pete bequeathed to his game. The logo three is what Caitlin has bequeathed to hers.

There's your comparison, if you're so bent on making one. Me, I'll stop right here: Pete Maravich was a hell of a basketball player, and so is Caitlin Clark.

What else matters?

Old man shouts at clouds. Film at 11.

 Concordia High School plays Delta in an Indiana boys basketball regional Saturday, and why that landed on my radar this morning I haven't the foggiest.

Oh, wait. I do. 

It landed on my radar because the Cadets will be traveling almost 100 miles to play this "regional." And they'll play it not in any metropolitan hub, or even a big-time venue, but in a 3,000-and-change gym in Lapel.

I am familiar with Lapel. I covered a fair number of basketball and football games there back in my Anderson days, which are sufficiently "back" enough that dinosaurs still strode the earth, and we wrote our award-winning accounts on typewriters or laptops so primitive you couldn't really call them laptops. 

So I know Lapel is not what it was then, which was a humble little farming community. I know it's become part of the creeping Indy metroplex, which might or might not explain why it will host a regional game between two schools that aren't remotely regional.

"Oh, here we go," you're saying now. "Old man shouts at clouds. Film at 11."

I know, I know. I'm being silly, not to say out of touch by about 30 years. I realize class basketball (which I've grown to acknowledge hasn't dampened Indiana's March passion an iota) scrambled the structural landscape of the high school tournament. And I know a lot of that scrambling involved largely abandoning major metro venues, which has diluted the sense of occasion that put a lot of the hysteria in the dear departed Hoosier Hysteria.

But sometimes all of it still strikes me as odd. And I never know when it will.

That it has this week is no reflection on Lapel or its suitability to play host to a regional tournament, understand. I'm sure the good folks there will do a fine job.

But I still want to know why Concordia is playing a regional there instead of, say, New Haven. Or North Side or Northrop or even Bluffton down in Wells County, just to randomly name a handful of area schools.

All of them, see, have larger venues, as do several other area schools not hosting regionals this weekend. New Haven and North both seat 3,300. Bluffton seats 3,231. And Northrop seats 3,500.

I could go on, but you get the point.

And, sure, I get it, schools have to be willing and able to serve as hosts. And so for whatever reason, no one in our area could, or would, or were even contacted.

But Concordia and Delta winding up at Lapel makes me think the IHSAA just sort of randomly picks sites every year. Maybe they close their eyes and throw darts at a map of Indiana, I don't know.

At any rate, there's my geezer not-quite-rant for today. Damn clouds.

Oh, the continuing mystery

 I don't know what that was Your Indiana Hoosiers trotted out in the second half at Maryland yesterday (A basketball team? Damn, that looks like a basketball team). But I do know it's putting crazy thoughts in my head.

Insane thoughts. Ridiculous thoughts. The kind of thoughts born of prisoner-of-the-moment overreaction, which is inevitably followed by finger-pointing, laughter and "What a maroon!" ridicule.

The main crazy thought the Hoosiers put in my head goes something like this: If they play like that, they could be this year's Penn State in the Big Ten tournament next week.

Remember that? Penn State comes into the 2023 Big Ten show straight from Nowheresville, and then begins beating teams who've slapped them around all winter. Got all the way to the championship game, the Nittany Lions did, before losing to Big Ten champ Purdue.

I'm not saying that's going to be Your Hoosiers this week. I'm not even saying yesterday's 83-78 win was actually real, even though Maryland is terrible and so perhaps it was real. But if you're Indiana's first-round opponent and you were watching them in the second half yesterday, you maybe were thinking "Crap, NOW they decide to play? There goes that walkover."

About that second half: Indiana was down 16 early, and then started doing some distinctly un-Indiana things, like hitting not just the broad side of the barn but every side of the barn. The Hoosiers shot 74 percent (19 of 26) in the second half. Made 12 consecutive shots at one point. Went 10-of-10 from the stripe even though they came into the game as one of the worst free-throw shooting teams in the nation (65 percent).

Shoot. They even splashed seven of 16 attempts from behind the arc, where not even the broad side of the barn has been a reasonable goal most of the season. Mackenzie Mgbako, who scored 18 of his 24 points in the second half, had four of the seven treys.

All of it added up to this: From the time the Hoosiers fell behind 51-35 with just under 18 minutes to play, they outscored Maryland 48-27. 

"The hell was THAT?" people watching said.

And those were just the IU fans.

Everyone else, well ... it occurs now that Indiana has now won two games in a row for the first time since December, and that maybe Mike Woodson continually whining about not having Xavier Johnson at the point most of the season was not just whining. Maybe this really is a different basketball team with him in the lineup.

He has, after all, been on the floor for those two straight Ws,a nd Sunday he scored 13 points and dished half-a-dozen assists. He also hit 5-of-7 from the floor, setting the tone for everyone else. The six dimes and 5-of-7 shooting were season bests for him.

So what does all this mean for the Big Ten tournament this week?

Beats me. Maybe my crazy thought won't be so crazy. Maybe it will look totally batshite if the Hoosiers follow Sunday with another flameout. Raising expectations only to dash them has been their leit motif this season, after all.

What I do know is this: Pinocchio looked like a real boy yesterday. It remains to be seen if that was just magic, or touchable reality.

A spasm of decency

 Well, isn't THIS just the cat's PJs. As if the NCAA doesn't have enough on its plate these days, now it's got Johnny Football on its case.

Yes, Johnny Football, aka Johnny Manziel, brief college football legend turned epic screwup. Washed out in the NFL. Briefly played in the CFL. Accused of beating up his girlfriend. Perpetrator of multiple shenanigans, including gaming the system in college in a way that wouldn't be gaming the system now, but was then.

Last seen playing in some weird league where the fans call the plays. Or something like that.

But the world is a strange old place, which means that sometimes even epic screwups are stricken with spasms of decency. And so the other day Manziel, the 2012 Heisman Trophy winner, announced he would be boycotting the annual Heisman ceremony until the NCAA returned Reggie Bush's Heisman.

"Like they'll miss him?" you're saying now, snidely. 

Please. Be nice.

See, Bush won the gnarled little stiff-arming guy in 2005, but the NCAA made him give it back after it came out that Bush's family accepted cash, travel expenses and a house from agents hoping to sign the USC star. 

Bush was also ordered to disassociate himself from his alma mater for 10 years.

This didn't seem quite so excessive then as it does now, the passage of time providing perspective as it tends to do. Now it all just seems petty, especially given that Bush was punished for stuff his family did, and which the NCAA would no longer consider heinous in the new frontier of NIL deals.  

Also, Bush has served his time, his exile from USC having expired four years ago.

Also-also, he was demonstrably the best player in college football in 2005, and richly deserved the trophy that went with it.

But the NCAA apparently considers this a life sentence. Yet another wrongheaded judgment from an organization that's busily piling up an Everest of them these days.

So says Johnny Football, anyway.

"After careful thought and consideration I will be humbly removing myself from the Heisman Trophy ceremony until Reggie Bush gets his trophy back," his statement read. "Doesn't sit right with my morals and values that he can't be on that stage with us every year."

And, yes, I know, this is the part where you say, "Johnny Manziel has morals and values? Who knew?"

I get that. Even chuckled a bit myself when I read it.

But then I had a second thought: If for little else, maybe Manziel should get some credit for standing by one of the other members of the Heisman club. Because even screwups can behave honorably sometimes, hard as that is to believe.

And speaking of screwups, now it's the NCAA's turn to do the honorable thing. And maybe it will eventually.

Hard as that is to believe.

Hockeytown Indiana

 My town is known for a few things. Just like yours, I suppose.

My town, Fort Wayne, is known for That Street With Three Names Thing, in which one of the main north-south arteries through town goes by three different names depending on where you're driving on it. It's a byproduct of one of our other civic mottoes, Fort Wayne: Just Messin' With Ya.

My town is a purplish oasis in a red sea of Trumpers, which is why our congressional representative is the always lovely Jim Banks, R-Certified Loon. But we're also known for having one of the best minor-league ballparks in the U.S. ... and a growth-spurt downtown dining and arts scene ... and a rich historical tapestry that includes not only the city's namesake, Mad Anthony Wayne, but the guy he shoved aside: The great Miami chief Little Turtle, patriarch of the major Northwest Territories trading hub named Kekionga that was Fort Wayne before Wayne showed up.

Philo Farnsworth, inventor of television, once lived here. And the very first National League baseball game was played here between the Fort Wayne Kekiongas and the Cleveland Forest Citys. 

Oh, yeah: And this is a hockey town, too.

The Fort Wayne Komets of the ECHL, after all, are in their 72nd season, making them one of the oldest minor-league hockey franchises in the U.S. And from their example has spread an immense youth hockey network that feeds the best high school hockey in the state.

That latter's not just a brag, by the way. It's fact.

Maybe you missed, because high school hockey in Indiana is not an IHSAA sanctioned sport and therefore doesn't get the pub football and boys and girls basketball and every sanctioned sport does, but this weekend they held the Indiana hockey state championships. And the Fort whupped everyone.

Three Fort Wayne-area teams won state titles in three different classes. And did it the hardest way possible, in sudden-death overtime.

Homestead beat Westfield 2-1 in  one overtime in1A.

Leo beat Lakeshore St. Joe 3-2 in extras in 3A, rallying from an early 2-0 deficit.

And the Fort Wayne Vipers held off Columbus in two OTs, 4-3, for the 2A title.

Three teams, three state titles. And you wonder why they call this Hockeytown, Indiana.

OK. So maybe it's just me who calls Fort Wayne that.

But it sings, doesn't it? It sings. 

An impact of some description

 Sometime a couple days from now, Caitlin Clark will splash another galactic three-ball for the Iowa Hawkeyes, and suddenly Pete Maravich will be No. 2 on college basketball's alltime scoring list, men or women.

No. 1 will be Clark.

Old men shouting at clouds will shout at clouds over this, saying she had four years and Pete only got three, and, anyway, there was no 3-point line then so the numbers don't track. Also, you can't compare the men's and women's games because they're not the same, and they never will be.

None of this will keep Caitlin Clark and Iowa from selling out whatever arena they play in next.

None of it will keep her chunky sponsorship deals with State Farm and others from following her to the WNBA.

None of it will keep the Indiana Fever from making her the first pick in the upcoming WNBA draft, now that Clark has announced she's forgoing her last season at Iowa to turn pro. Nor will it keep her from being the biggest thing to hit Indianapolis since the Colts landed in town 40 years ago.

She's a bonafide phenomenon, Clark is, and we can debate forever whether she's also the greatest player in women's college history. Hell, the way freshmen Juju Watkins at USC and Hannah Hidalgo up at Notre Dame are going, her scoring records may not last more than four years. It happens. It's why the most naive thing you can say in Sportsball World is "We'll never see another (insert name here)."

News flash: There's always another (insert name here). All you gotta do is stick around and wait.

However.

However, Caitlin Mania is real, and until it gets supplanted by (Insert Name Here) Mania,  it's unlike anything we've ever seen. The women's college game didn't need much lifting; successful programs in basketball-centric places like Tennessee or UConn or Indiana now routinely draw crowds in the double-digit thousands for their games. But Caitlin Mania has taken the women's game, and America's awareness of it, into an entirely different stratosphere.

Or maybe you missed what happened in Bloomington last week, when Iowa came to play the superb Indiana women's team and the line to get in stretched all the way around Assembly Hall.

This being the Basketball State, they were partly queuing up to see if Indiana could take down the No 5 Hawkeyes (which Indiana did, and convincingly). But they were queuing up to see if Indiana could take down Caitlin Clark. No Clark, no line stretching around the Hall.

I don't know if the same thing will happen in Indy this summer. I suspect it will.

I also don't know if Clark will have the same impact on the WNBA she did on the college game. That's a lot to put on the slender shoulders of a 22-year-old who's yet to play a professional game. And the truth is, she's not likely to step right in and start lighting up, say, the New York Liberty the way she lit up Minnesota or Michigan or Illinois.

The pros will body her. They'll take away her favorite spots. They'll be quicker and stronger and more savvy than the Gophers or Wolverines or Illini she's used to schooling.

In other words, the chances of her stepping in and taking over the WNBA the way she's taken over college buckets are slim and none. She'll have a target on her back you can see from space, for one thing. And if the pro game for women is not quite as radically different as the pro game is for men, it's still different.

However.

However, she'll be really, really good, and she'll be really, really good from the jump. And she'll be huge in Indy, because, again, this is the Basketball State. And if the WNBA, like the women's college game, doesn't need lifting, she'll still have an impact of some description -- and already has.

See what happened yesterday, mere hours after Clark announced she would enter the WNBA draft?

Ticket prices for what will now be Clark's final game at Iowa jumped to an average of $557 according to TickPick,com. 

Meanwhile, web searches for "Indiana Fever" immediately spiked after Clark's announcement.

Stay tuned, on other words. Stay tuned.

Creeping irrelevance

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

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

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

Possibly.

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

Might be a factor.

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

Ah. Now you're onto something.

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

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

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

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

"You got eyes, doncha?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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