Unexpected Goodbyes
A couple recent departures from the University of Kansas athletic program that deserve a few words. Silvio First, late last week Silvio De Sousa announced he was leaving the basketball program. KU, like every Power 5 sports program, has a long list of players who were “disappointments.” Silvio might be at the top of KU’s list. During the 2017–18 season, when Billy Preston was ruled ineligible and Udoka Azabuike was injured, De Sousa seemed like a gift from the hoops gods. A top 40 high school recruit with an NBA body who chose to graduate from the IMG Academy in December and enroll at KU for the spring semester. He…
Weekend Notes
It felt like I mostly sat on my ass watching sports this weekend. Turns out a lot went on. Here are some details. HS Football M snagged a ticket at the last minute to the Indy high school game of the year: 5A #1 Cathedral vs 6A #1 Center Grove. Both teams were undefeated, had rolled through their first eight games pretty much unchallenged, and were ranked in the top 25 of the USA Today national poll.[1] They were also ranked 1–2 in the all-class Indiana computer poll, with a large gap between CHS and the #3 team. I figured CG would win fairly easily. Although CHS had played a…
Weekend Notes
It’s time for the weekly Monday sports review! Gale Gale Sayers was waaaaaay before my time. He retired about six months after I was born, and his final two years in the NFL were slowed by a series of serious injuries that robbed him of his breath-taking speed. But there were uncles, and friends of uncles, and other people their age who would get emotional when they talked about watching him play in his prime. I once had a boss who was from Chicago and grew up in the ‘60s. This man was gruff and cold and rarely smiled or laughed. But if you mentioned Gale Sayers to him, he…
Weekend Notes
It was a weekend dominated by watching sports, mostly on the TV. Friday night we went to an (outdoor) fundraiser that a high school friend of S’s was throwing. This is her pal who nearly died of Covid back in April. He brought together a few well-connected friends he has (one is an NBA player) to throw a neighborhood concert that would raise money for families that were struggling with expenses because of Covid-related hospital stays. It was a perfect fall night, the first Friday night this season you had to throw a jacket on to be outside. It would have been great to be at a high school football…
Football!
Football is back! After three weeks of high school action, the college and pro ranks joined in this weekend to give us another nudge towards a sense of normalcy. Let’s run through the weekend’s happenings. High School CHS played arch rival BCHS on Friday. CHS was ranked #1 in 5A, BCHS #1 in 3A. Despite the difference in size (CHS is a natural 4A school, with about 350 more students and draws from a bigger geographic region), this is a pretty even rivalry. Last year was a delightful game with the eventual 3A state champs in control most of the night until CHS made a few huge defensive plays and…
2020 NFL Predictions
Over the weekend I dug into the blog archives a little bit. I would pull up a random month from the past and scroll through the entries, skimming any that jumped out at me. I had thought a good quarantine project would be to re-read through the entire history of the site, but I never got around to that. Maybe that can be a winter project. As I went through Septembers of the past, I realized to keep with precedent, I should throw together some NFL predictions for the upcoming season. Who knows how long the season will last and what it will look like as it progresses. And we…
Of Classes and Sports
Two full weeks into the school year and we’ve had our first major change. Beginning today, and for the foreseeable future, M will be home on Mondays. In Thursday’s normal parent newsletter, the CHS principal announced that the entire student population would be virtual and on a fixed schedule on Mondays. Several reasons were offered, but the one that seems the most compelling is to give all the kids the same experience at least one day per week. A number of fall sport athletes have left school on their own over the past couple weeks. We’ve heard this was organized by coaches in an effort to keep their players healthy…
Super Sunday and Monday
What a couple of days! We had back-to-back record high temperatures here in Indy. Sunday was the overtly nicer of the two: the sun was out and it felt like spring. Monday was actually four or five degrees warmer, but other than a quick peak of sun mid-morning, it was a very cloudy day and didn’t seem as warm as it actually was. Alas, in the hour since I dropped the girls at school we’ve dropped from 60 to 45 with another 10 or so degrees expected to bleed away by late afternoon. Sunday we did some work around and outside the house. But Monday was wide open so I…
Weekend Notes
It’s probably a good thing today is a holiday and most of my Kansas City friends are probably just now going to bed after celebrating the Chiefs’ AFC title overnight. I say that because I didn’t see much of either game yesterday, so I don’t have a ton to say. I saw a decent chunk of the first half of the AFC game, although I was distracted during much of it. Still, I saw enough that when I lost control of the TV at halftime I didn’t sweat missing some epic finish. Whilst I have not conveniently found some latent love for my hometown team, I am happy for all…
CFP Championship Game Notes
I thoroughly enjoyed the CFP national championship game Monday night. Well, I enjoyed everything about it except a certain politician’s appearance before the game (I switched away just as L was yelling at me to get him off the screen) and how the game was an example of the biggest problem with college football today: four hours to play a game is ridiculous. Anyway, the game itself was excellent. To remind you, my pick was LSU 31, Clemson 28. I genuinely thought LSU was better, but I do not like Clemson, mostly because I think their coach is a gigantic douche. Then again I think that of most football coaches,…