I was in the grocery store last week and someone said to me “it feels like you are becoming a grumpy old man.”
My response was a look of alarm when I said “I don’t think I am. Why do you say that?”
“Because all you write about are bad things in sports.”
Totally fair.
So, let’s spend this week going over some good things about sports, shall we?
Baseball’s new rules seem to be working well.
The average time of a major league game in 2023, in the first year of the new pitch clock and other speed up rules, was 2 hours and 36 minutes. That compares to 3 hours and 6 minutes in 2022. So far this year, the average time of a game is 2 hours 37 minutes.
I feel confident in saying that no one is going to quibble about 60 seconds.
If this was a “grumpy old man” kind of an article, I would insert here that the biggest thing that slows down games now is complaining about balls and strikes and umpires yelling at batters and dugouts—all of which could be fixed with a challenge system for pitches—but I won’t because this is a positive article.
I think Caitlin Clark has been to the WNBA and the franchise based in Indianapolis exactly what we thought she would be.
Yes, it took a few games for her to get going. Of course it did. Remember, she had just a few days between the national championship game and the start of Fever training camp.
Now, the Fever are a playoff team, Clark is a multiple record-breaking rookie who has taken her midwestern roots and transplanted them in the Hoosier State and she is loved here.
You see her everywhere around Indianapolis. She’s embracing her role as an ambassador for the team and for women’s sports. She’s attractive, her smile makes other people smile and people want to be around her.
And, despite “haters” trying to create conflict with her and her teammates, her teammates love her too. They get her and, like her teammates at Iowa, they are happy to follow her lead. They understand that she likes passing them the ball so they can score as much as does shooting herself.
This may sound funny, and you probably could not disagree more, but I love all of the long field goals in the NFL games in the first two weeks of the season.
That’s a former soccer player who always had a dream of being a football kicker saying that, by the way.
People want touchdowns. But because the quality of play in the league for the first two weeks felt more like preseason games than real games, a lot of promising drives shut down between the 30 and 40 yard lines, which means field goals of 50 yards or more have been common occurrences. Kickers attempted almost 40 kicks of 50+ yards in the first two weeks, and they missed less than five
I’m totally good with it—which puts me in a people group with the kickers’ families and their agents.
Did you see what IU’s football team did Saturday?
They went to Los Angeles and smoked UCLA 42-13 in a game that had people scratching their heads as to why it was a prime-time game on national TV.
UCLA isn’t Georgia, to be clear, but the Hoosiers show signs of life that we have not seen for a while…and that’s a good thing.
And let me share this message with Purdue fans: don’t be discouraged.
Purdue was in about as bad of a spot as you could have imagined Saturday against the Irish. They faced a team who was embarrassed about the way they went about their business the week before and lost. They were challenged to do something about it. They accepted that challenge.
What happened at Ross-Ade Stadium Saturday was hard for you, but it shouldn’t change Purdue’s outlook on the 10 games they have left on their schedule.
Tippecanoe Valley’s football team got worked over pretty good at Knox Friday.
“What’s good about that”, you ask?
Well, this is exactly why Tippecanoe Valley got into this new conference, isn’t it? They wanted to play better competition in their regular season so they’d be more ready come playoff time in October. What happened Friday at Knox was part of that process.
Should Valley be happy about losing? Of course not. But when you consider Valley had basically played the same teams every year for over 40 years, adjusting to new opponents, new road trips and new styles is going to take years to settle in to.
True progress must include pain. This is their first step toward that.