A good, old fashioned notes dump like the old days.

CHS Lockdown

There was a lockdown for about an hour at Cathedral yesterday. Apparently someone called 911 claiming to be inside the school with a gun. About a million cops showed up and no person with a gun was ever found. We live in wonderful times, friends.

Our girls seemed more annoyed that they had to stay and finish the day after the all-clear than worried/scared by the threat.

Visitor/College Break

M’s roommate from UC came for a quick visit Monday and Tuesday. She lives in Toledo and M visited her last summer for a weekend. Because of her holiday schedule she was only able to come down for about 24 hours. But M showed her around our area and introduced her to a few high school friends, although they mostly hung around with other UC kids.

A funny thing about M’s friend group at school is one of her best guy friends grew up less than a mile from our house. He went to the rival high school and never knew each other, but they had mutual friends. The past several days their local group has been gathering either at his house or ours.

It was a little weird getting M home last week. My first thought was, “OK, it’s Christmas break!” Then I realized her sister had almost THREE full weeks of class left before they were done for the semester. M did a lot of sitting around that first week, but most of her friends are back in town now and her social activity has started to pick back up. She’s also done some babysitting and has several days blocked off to watch either nephews or other kids between now and her return to school next month.

Holidays

M’s arrival has messed up my mind regarding the holidays in more ways than one. I was a little surprised to realize Monday we were two weeks from Christmas. The first half of the Christmas season seems to have raced by. I think a lot of that is because of L’s game schedule, which has kept us very busy the past two weeks.

Anyway, it was a bit of an alarm to make sure I am focused over the next two weeks to get all my holiday movies and shows knocked out. I haven’t watched Elf or Christmas Vacation nearly enough (one full time each, several partial viewings thrown in as well).

Sports Illustrated

Man, what a mess. An American icon that has been crumbling for years likely had its final downfall a week ago when it was discovered that the magazine was using AI to both write articles and labelling those articles with AI-generated writer names and headshots.

SI was an integral part of my childhood, and then remained essential deep into adulthood. The arrival of each week’s new volume on Thursday was one of the biggest moments of your kid week. My copy remained in the folder I carried to class until it was dog-eared and nearly memorized, not replaced until the next one came.

Magazines everywhere are dying. It feels like SI could have survived as it was generally more of a high-level view of sports, one which can still be relevant in the Internet age. The magazine, and its publishers, have made about a million bad choices in the past 20 years, though, and it was already an insignificant blip on the sports journalism map before this scandal.

And then they gave the Sportsman of the Year award to Deion Sanders, which seems absolutely asinine on every level. Given how ultra-commercial his whole deal is, my first thought was that he, or his publicists, paid for the honor. Or exchanged it for access. Something classic SI would not have engaged in.

Should he have been in the issue somewhere? Absolutely. But whatever waves he made this year were more because of the work his handlers did to create his story and image than anything he actually did. Many people had a bigger impact on the sports world than Deion.

As one college football expert said recently on a podcast, Deion deserves immense credit for what he’s already done at CU. But the fact is that team got worse each week of the season, there was all kinds of internal turmoil in the program, and Deion proved that if he really wants to deliver on all the promises he’s made, he has a lot to learn about coaching and running a power conference program. That expert has confidence that Deion is capable of making those jumps. But you can’t give a student an A+ for a project that was turned in incomplete missing required elements.

Memorial Stadium

The first phase of demolition at KU’s Memorial Stadium started on Monday. I loved all the people who made comments long the lines of “It was a dump, I watched a ton of bad football there, but I also have a lot of great memories there.” Very true.

In my first game there in 1980 I saw Dan Marino. I was there for the Tony Sands game. For Monte Cozzens. For Eric Vann’s 99-yard touchdown run.[1] Two wins over Oklahoma. I also sat through ice storms, bitter cold, blazing heat, and gusty winds while the Jayhawks were getting housed by Nebraska, OU, and others. When I lived in Lawrence, I was there damn near every home game.

The rumors last week that KU is looking to play some of their home games at Arrowhead in Kansas City next year are interesting. I think they realize the team has a chance to be even better next year, and don’t want to play games in front of 20,000 in a stadium that is under active renovation. Sell a bunch more tickets to bring more money in. Maybe rope in some new fans, or re-energize KC-area fans who stopped making the drive to Lawrence at some point during the Lost Decade. And potentially get the stadium renovations in Lawrence done faster than expected and be ready for the 2025 season. I don’t think you move all the games to Arrowhead, but it makes sense to play a few of them there if the Chiefs are open to the idea.

Andre Braugher

Such sad news that Andre Braugher has died. What an amazing career. His two biggest roles, as Frank Pembleton on Homicide and Raymond Holt on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, were two wildly different characters. It was shocking to see the same actor who portrayed the hyper-intense Pembleton make amazing comedy as Holt. He made it work.

  1. Never understood why these announcers called it a 98-yard run.  ↩