I’m not into motorsports of any sort. I blame that time in high school when my friends and I were doing our own late night time trials on my friend Jon’s younger sister’s moped. Complete a loop from his house – down the street, up a hill, another straightaway, then back down the hill.
I was clearly on track for the fastest lap — at least in my head — until I wiped out in turn 4, going down the hill. I still have a scar on my knee from it. Jon’s sister’s moped was none the worse for wear though. Which was a good thing, since she wasn’t home and had no idea that her brother and his friends had commandeered it.
But this past weekend, I had the chance to go to the Indy 500. I’d been to “Carburetion Day” before, but never the actual 500. It was a bucket list thing, and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience. Especially the pageantry leading up to the race. They had Indy legends like AJ Foyt, Al Unser Jr., and my personal fave, Mario Andretti, taking a lap around the track, only this time in the back of pickups, not behind the wheel. Then they brought out classic Indy cars from all eras of the race. The National Anthem and “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Navy flyovers. The Purdue marching band. Caitlin Clark as the honorary grand marshal. Brendan Fraser as the honorary starter. “Racers, start your engines.”
I was there with 3 other “rookies” so we did our best to take it all in. The pure chaos of the infield, and especially the “Snake Pit.” Imagine the largest football tailgate party you’ve ever attended, then take that times a thousand. You can bring in your own coolers – where else can you do that?
350,000 people – the largest single-day sporting event in the world. What are the chances that a former co-worker would be seated in the same section?
Actually, in addition to Rob (above), another former co-worker of ours also was in our section, a few rows in front of us, with her dad, husband, and two kids.
It’s not lost on the tree hugger in me that hundreds of thousands of cars were stuck in traffic while waiting to get into the track so they could see 33 drivers waste a lot more gas… when the Strait of Hormuz is closed and gas is $5 a gallon. The concept seems anachronistic. Maybe 10 years from now the race will feature battery pack changes instead of refueling. A boy can dream, can’t he?
And yes, it’s “four left turns” as Indy/NASCAR disparagers like to point out. But there were 70 lead changes (a record) and it also was the closest finish in Indy 500 history. Not bad for a bucket list bonus.
I can honestly say I have zero desire to see a race at any other track. But I’d go back to Indy for sure.
UConn and Michigan face off tonight for the NCAA D-1 Championship in men’s hoops. But in the NIL era, it’s really tough for alums to thump their chest if “their” team wins, because most of the players are just stopping by for “one shining moment” or two.
Michigan’s starting five features only one player who was with the program last year. In fact, Nimari Burnett has been with the program for a whopping 3 years… after playing a year each at Texas Tech and Alabama. The other starters did stints at Illinois, UCLA, UNC, UAB, and even Michigan’s dreaded archrival Ohio State. (Money talks a lot louder than some “O-H” chant, apparently.)
Starter Yaxel Lendeborg left UAB after last season, and it was less about Michigan’s “maize and blue” colors and more about good old gold.
UConn’s starting squad fares a bit better in the loyalty department. Solo Ball is solo on schools – he’s been at UConn for 3 years. Braylon Mullins is a freshman, so he’s a “lifer” too – because he’ll likely depart for the NBA at the end of the season. Their starting center, Tarris Reed Jr., spent 2 years at Michigan before heading to greener pastures. (And I’m not talking about the dairy farm next to UConn’s campus.)
Alex Karaban is the outlier – he’s been with the Huskies his entire four-year career.
He’s not just an outlier on his school’s roster, he’s an outlier on ANY major college basketball roster:
Players are getting paid. Good for them. At least in the short run. But what happens when they run out of eligibility and the money train doesn’t stop at their house anymore?
The entire current system is horrible for “college” basketball. (I have to put “college” in quotation marks because how much time are these kids spending in the classroom? And how hard is it to get a degree when you change schools every year?) As a fan, you can’t get too attached to particular players, because every single one of them is a free agent, available to the highest bidder.
Michigan’s investment in their players has paid off. The Wolverines are favored to bring home the hardware this evening. But as soon as the confetti hits the hardwood, other schools will be trying to lure their best players away, with the siren song of cold, hard cash.
The Miami Redhawks men’s basketball team takes on Tennessee in the NCAA tourney this afternoon. A #11 seed vs. a #6 seed. Miami has already won – literally and figuratively. They won their “play-in” game Wednesday night in Dayton against SMU. I was there. It felt like a Miami home game with most of the crowd cheering for the school that’s a mere 46 miles from Dayton.
But they’ve also already won because they are, as my friend Joe says, “the best story in college basketball.” Undefeated in the regular season. 31-0. With a homegrown roster of mostly midwestern kids. And a coach (Travis Steele) seeking redemption after being fired by a school (Xavier) just down the road in Cincinnati.
Critics — and they are legion — sneered. “They haven’t played anybody.” “The MAC is a weak conference.”
But they beat everyone who was on their schedule.
Yes, they pay their players – all D1 schools do in the NIL era. But their “salary cap” (it feels weird typing that for college sports) is much smaller than the Floridas, the Dukes, the Tennessees. They’re not getting the blue chippers, they’re getting the blue collars. But they are a great team – offensively, defensively, shooting, passing — because their starters all played together at Miami last year. In the transfer portal era, that’s unheard of. And frankly, refreshing.
A lot of their regular season games were nail-biters. They won because they’d been there, done that. Muscle memory and belief in their teammates.
“Oh, we more than belong,” Steele said, with his entire team behind him. “We can advance deep into this tournament. Our group’s fully confident in that.”
Miami’s Cinderella season will end. Maybe this afternoon (although I think they can beat Tennessee – especially if it’s close in crunch time). But teams like the Redhawks are what make March Madness so much fun. The High Points are the high points. Yes, a “power conference” team will wind up hoisting the trophy. And then most of their roster will immediately seek a bigger payday. Good for them. But I miss the days when the players were less mercenary.
Miami University’s motto is “Love and Honor.”
Their basketball team embodies that. And we need more Miami U. in college sports.
The Indiana Hoosiers are national champs… in football!
(photo credit: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
They were so bad for so long. Historically bad.
Before November, Indiana had the most losses in college football history. Across 125 seasons before Curt Cignetti was hired in December 2023, none of its 23 coaches left the program with a winning conference record. Only twice had the Hoosiers claimed at least a share of the Big Ten title, most recently a three-way tie in 1967. Generations of administrative dysfunction, low football revenue, poor recruiting and a department premium on basketball turned Indiana football into a wasteland.
They changed the coach. And the coach changed the culture. He came across as overly cocky in his introductory press conference:
But, as the saying goes, “it ain’t bragging if you can back it up.” And “Coach Cig” did just that.
(BTW, he admitted later that some of his braggadocio was just trying to wake up the fanbase, and the team. See this clip for more.)
Our youngest goes to IU, so he’s thrilled, and our whole family is fully on board the bandwagon.
“Let me tell ya: We won the national championship at Indiana University. It can be done.”
But to me, the best part of the Cinderella story is that it’s not really a Cinderella story. It’s about how a leader can change the culture of an organization. That takes a lot of hard work.
“You’re rebuilding the house, so to speak, and you start with the foundation and build it up,” Cignetti said. “It’s more process oriented. It’s standards, expectations, consistency, performance and accountability.”
And yes, it also requires a leader who is so strong in his beliefs that others are willing to follow, despite evidence to the contrary.
“It starts with belief. Sometimes the belief has to be a little irrational, right?” said guard Pat Coogan, the Rose Bowl MVP who transferred from Notre Dame to Indiana this season.
“I love to tell you, two years ago, I thought this was going to happen. I’d be lying,” linebacker Aiden Fisher said. “Coach Cig 100 percent believed it, and this is just unbelievable.”
Standards. Expectations. Consistency. Performance. Accountability. And belief. You may not win a national championship with those attributes. But you’ll win at life.
“I think we sent a message, first of all, to society that if you keep your nose to the grindstone and work hard and you’ve got the right people, anything’s possible,” Cignetti said.
It’s hard for an average high school student who lives in the state of Ohio to get into Ohio State University. Heck, it’s tough for an above-average kid to get in. But if you’re from California, or Texas, or Delaware, or any other state, and you can throw/catch/run with a pigskin, not only will they roll out the red scarlet carpet for you and offer you a full ride, but you’ll also get paid six, maybe even seven figures, every year, to be there. What a country!
It’s not just Ohio State. Every “power conference” school across the nation is shelling out big bucks for big ballers, in hoops as well as football, thanks to the NIL (name, image, and likeness) ruling and the transfer portal that’s busier than the Atlanta airport on Thanksgiving Eve.
If you can’t make ends meet as a teenage millionaire at one school, or you don’t like the new coach, or the cafeteria food, you can leave at the end of the school year season for greener pastures. Four (or five) schools in as many years is becoming commonplace. A degree? Who needs that? It’s all about grabbing that cash.
It’s not just the players… er, excuse me “student athletes” either. Lane Kiffin just left Ole Miss to become the head football coach at LSU. He owes Ole Miss $4 million for breaking his contract. That’s chump change – his new LSU deal pays him $13 million a year for seven years. (LSU fired their former coach, Brian Kelly, midway through his fourth season, sending him on his merry way with a parting gift of $53 million.) Kiffin’s $13 mill a year makes him only the second highest paid coach in that conference.
At Indiana, where our youngest goes to school, three sports coaches and one former coach make more than the Dean of the med school and the school president.
The full list is here. IU head football coach Curt Cignetti makes $6.5 million and typically looks like he’s having about as much fun as a guy who has been stuck in a dentist’s lobby for two hours while awaiting his root canal. Having to coddle 18-year-olds who can jilt you at the end of the year will do that to you.
Indiana and Ohio State play each other this Saturday in the Big 10 conference championship. The game means nothing. Both teams are a lock to make the 12-team tourney in the College Football Playoff. There’s a chance the national champ will wind up playing 16 games. For Ohio State and Indiana, these playoff games come at the end of a 12-game regular season that involved at least one road trip to a West Coast campus.
(The Big 10 has 18 schools… maybe they need to spend more on their math departments.)
How much studying do you think these student-athletes manage to squeeze into their busy spring practice/regular season/postseason schedule? They’re not getting paid for their grades – their YAC (yards after catch) matters a lot more than their GPA.
Yes, it’s capitalism. Get while the getting is good. But maybe it’s time to unmoor the sports teams from the universities. Because the players are pros, pure and simple. And perennial free agent pros at that. They have about as much in common with the regular students as Jeff Bezos has with the average Amazon shopper.
I hope they DO get while the getting is good – and save their NIL windfall. Because when their eligibility is up (or when they blow out their knee), so is the gravy train for 99% of them. If they can’t go pro (and statistically, they’re more likely to get hit by lightning), where can they get paid $1 million to be an offensive lineman? I don’t see too many of those roles listed on LinkedIn.
What Nevada head basketball coach Steve Alford said nearly a year ago still holds true. “The NCAA and college athletics should be about teaching life lessons. Period.”
This past weekend, my wife and my son Peter flew to Hilton Head, SC to run a half-marathon.
Meanwhile, I drove 278 miles to Nashville on Saturday to see The Beths in concert.
Oh, and then I drove another 88 miles to Lexington, KY on Sunday to see Kathleen Edwards in concert.
The thought of running around the block, much less 13.1 miles, doesn’t appeal to me at all. Yet I’m fine standing for two hours at a show. I don’t know about a “runner’s high” but I do know that hearing a great song live sends my spirits soaring.
Tina and Peter got a finisher’s medal after the race.
I got a setlist after Kathleen Edwards’ show.
My wife’s trying to run a race in every state. I think South Carolina was #26 or #27.
I don’t have a goal to see a concert in every state. But maybe I should.
They’re different kinds of miles, but they’re totally worth it if they bring you joy, and you’re making memories in the process.
Live music is my marathon. I’ll never stop running.
Damian on Uno, dos, tres, cuatro…: “That’s where my head was for the title as well, Chuck! Great musical minds…” Jun 2, 21:36
Chuck Wiggins on Uno, dos, tres, cuatro…: “The extent of my high school Spanish memory is being able to to the count off at the beginning of…” Jun 2, 11:19
Thomas Kuhl on M.P.G. the M.V.P.: “I see the resemblance especially with the facial features?!?” May 19, 03:19
Chuck Wiggins on M.P.G. the M.V.P.: ““I Can’t Make You Love Me” is a fabulous song – I love the clip above, so will go searching…” May 18, 13:19
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