Weekend winners
This one is clear High School Football won the weekend friends. The Red Bank-Soddy-Daisy game got one-sided quickly. No matter. Vast majority wore masks. Most socially distanced - the Sodddy-Daisy side was more full but it also was the smaller visitor side - and in so many ways, that's the most normal I've felt in a sports realm since early March. Truly.
Dustin Johnson. Wowser, 30 under is a month, not a weekend. It just adds longs logs to the Johnson fire in the conversation of "If everyone showed up with their A game, who on the PGA Tour wins?" It's a fun conversation, and there was a time it was Tiger and then an Everest-like drop to everyone else. (That was in large part because of the intimidation too.) But if every golfer on the planet showed up playing lights out, well, DJ and Rory feel like the last two standing. Friends, 30-under - and an 11-shot win - is off the charts good whether you're on the PGA Tour or playing the Saturday 4-ball at Creeks Bend.
Luka Doni. Holy Buckets of buckets. Lots and lots of buckets. Dude is a top-five player in the game. Not in the coming years. Not next season. Now. His step-back 3 game-winner capped an unimaginably great 43-17-13 triple-double. Is there anyone on the planet the Mavs would trade Doni for I'll wait? Dude is 21, and looked the part of complete stud - on and off the floor considering he completely shrugged off Montrez Harrell's "(Bleep)-(bleep) white boy" (sounds like Witchy Glass White Boy) and the racial overtones of it with the best answer possible - 43-17-13. You know who else would have answered 'White Boy' chatter with a triple-double and buzzer-beating game-winner? Basketball Jesus, Larry Legend, the Hick from French Lick Larry Bird. Luka Buckets. The Young Don.
The Dodgers. Goodness, there is hot, there is James Brown in the hot tub hot, there is the Yellowstone 'Y' brand hot, there is launched into the sun hot and there is L.A. Dodgers hot. OK, try this on for size: The Padres have won seven straight, and still lost two games in the standings to the Dodgers over the last 10. Seriously. There are eight teams with a scoring differential between plus-20-to-plus-40. Those eight teams are 57 games over .500 combined. The Dodgers are 22-8 and are plus-79 in scoring margin.
Weekend losers
Braves starting pitchers. Other than Max Fried's brilliance on Friday, the bullpen and a never-say-bye offensive approached allowed Atlanta to split Saturday and Sunday with the Phillies. In Sunday's 5-4 loss, starter Josh Tomlin and former starter Toussaint allowed five earned in 4.1 innings. In Saturday's come-from-behiond 6-5 win, the Braves allowed two more first-inning runs and rallied from a 4-0 hole.
Folks with more money than sense. Sorry, but how can anyone spend more than $3.9 million for a baseball card, even if it is a mint autographed rookie of Mike Trout?
Philadelphia 76ers. So The Process is to stink for a decade so they can assemble a team that has $120-million tied into Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons, Tobias Harris and Al Horford for next year alone and get swept in the first round? Yeah, thanks but no thanks.
TV stations and cable providers. Press Row alum Richard Deitsch in an interesting story on The Athletic that examined the NBA TV numbers. The ratings are woeful - TV ratings expert Anthony Crupi said it's noticeably down, and of course Donald Trump blames the low numbers on social commentary - and the reasons and talking points are numerous and debatable. But Crupi also dropped these scary drops in TV viewing as a whole, be it cord-cutting or just watching broadcast TV in general: TV viewing is down 8 percent overall compared to last year (despite the pandemic, which did not produce the huge boost in TV numbers that most expected); it's down 19 percent for broadcast TV; in the last four years, as Crupi said, "TV as a whole has lost 52 percent of its target audience." Wow.
The GOP convention line-up. Sweet family reunions, half of the names of the 12 speakers announced over the weekend start with T and sound like 'Bump.' Man, there are a lot of smart, young and creative Republican voices that are being left on the sideline when conservatives need to hear them the most.
Getting worse by the day
With each passing day, the Big Ten's decision to bag the season less than a week after releasing the revamped 2020 schedule appears more and more troubling.
Again, we do not know if there will be football or not this season on the college level. Not in the SEC or anywhere else.
But we know that high school football has started. With fans.
We know almost assuredly that there will be NFL games. Heck, if 77 false positive tests barely slow the NFL train down, then it's hard to see much of anything this side of a full-blown legit outbreak.
Again, college football may be called. But again, the Big Ten is getting cooked about the details and the timing of the decision more than the decision itself.
Everyone is looking to do whatever is safest for the players - at all levels.
But every new storyline is bad.
The Big Ten's decision to only poll presidents and ignore the ADs, who apparently were unanimous in favor of trying to find a way to play, is rightly getting blasted.
Commissioner Kevin Warren's tone deaf letter via the Big Ten website has rightly been blasted.
The league ignoring parents protesting - including a group of Nebraska parents threatening lawsuits - is a terrible look in the now and for the future. (Imagine how the SEC coaches and Dabo and Lincoln are going to spin this in living rooms when recruiting against THE Ohio State or Coach Khaki or anyone else in the Big Ten.)
Side note: Hyperbole like this column in the Notre Dame student newspaper simply does not help anything in these difficult decisions.
Again, the Big Ten's decision may just be one pen swipe of a completely cancelled college football season. But the SEC and the ACC and the Big 12 have done everything possible to give it a chance to happen, and that screams volumes when compared to the Big Ten's pull-the-plug approach.
In fact, the best-case scenario for the Big Ten is that the entire season gets called, which means the Big Ten's decision and positioning has left its leadership actually cheering for Corona.
Think about that.
This and that
- Yes, DJ ran away and hid - and made the golf broadcast downright unwatchable - but Baylor School alum Harris English finished second, which came with a tidy little check of $1.035,500. Seriously. Fellow Baylor alum Keith Mitchell went 70-72 and finished tied for 61st at 5 under. (He made $20,995.) As for Harris, he now has a smidge under $15.9 million in career earnings.
- You know the rules, here's Paschall on a couple of college football topics such as Tennessee getting ready for limited crowds and Georgia's defense embracing the high expectations that come with that much talent.
- Buckets, the season finale of Yellowstone was intense. Going to be a long, Long, LONG hiatus until the gang gets back together and we see who is still standing after a fiery finish that had several twists. (No spoilers here today. Tomorrow? Can't make any promises.)
Today's questions
Weekend winners and losers. Go.
As for multiple choice Monday, let's do this:
Sunday was the 35th anniversary of Teen Wolf. If we take Hoosiers out of the equation, what's the best basketball movie?
- Teen Wolf
- Coach Carter
- Space Jam
- Semi Pro
(Side note: Other than Hoosiers, the rest of the basketball movies are pretty stinky and include some real duds like Air Bud, Jowanna Mann, the Sixth Man and Eddie.)
As for today, Aug. 24, lots of folks are saying it's Kobe Day - 8/24 - since those were his two numbers.
Rushmore of worst draft-day trades in sports history, because Kobe for Vlade Divac looks to be right there with them. (And Luka for Trae Young and Cam Reddish feels like something the Hawks are going to regret for a long, Long, LONG time.)