Now we know why Days of Our Lives was cast off from its former network treatment on NBC to something called “Peacock”. Can you believe we say that. “I have to watch this game on Peacock.” You can’t make this stuff up.

What’s the best soap opera on TV now? Now more than ever. Now more than ever. Is that John Mellencamp I hear? Nope. Now more than ever in the SEC, IT JUST MEANS MORE… SOAP OPERA. If you can’t win on the field, win off the field. Tune into The Paul Finebaum Show. The SEC is kicking the Big Ten’s arse in football drama.

I wrote a feature on Paul Finebaum a couple years ago. One of the paragraphs went like this:

The 2024 College Football scene was made for Paul Finebaum.  These days one doesn’t have to dig the dirt anymore.  The dirt is everywhere.  On The Paul Finebaum Show the topic of the day is whichever dirt pile we care to talk about.  NIL?  Coaches?  Transfer Portal?  Conference Woes?  Toomer’s Corner?

What a time of SEC Football Drama we have had recently. Don’t you think there is an Emmy Award category coming down the pike soon? And the Emmy for the SEC Coach being the biggest horse’s butt courtesy of the SEC Network is…

As time goes by, the photo above “Just Means More”. Bama was playing in Knoxville on this day in 2016. I was there to enjoy the game, as I was sporting a neutral Ole Miss shirt with a Tide fan to my right and a Vol fan to my left. Call me Switzerland.

Recently, I nearly swallowed my snuff. Blake Toppmeyer, an SEC print pundit and USA Today columnist, wrote syllables no Big Ten Football fan would believe they would ever see. I was reading the Jackson Clarion Ledger online. Toppmeyer wrote about how The Big Ten has supplanted The SEC as the premiere football conference in the land. Indiana is to blame. Calling the Indiana Hoosiers, with their quaint little stadium, the National Champs is most difficult for many I am sure. Forget Paul Finebaum’s mea culpa. How genuine those words were is just more soap opera fodder. Thankfully, Toppmeyer’s cleverness actually shown through when he suggested that had Indiana would still be scoring touchdowns had they played Arkansas or Mississippi State.

No matter how you slice. Regardless of who you root for, the comments of late from Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian thrown in the direction of Ole Miss to put the place down are abhorrent.

Would somebody tell Lane and Sark they look completely stupid, scared, common, and leaderless when they are putting down Ole Miss. I’ve been to Oxford. The place is wonderful. Maybe coaches like Kiffin and Sark are jealous of the place. They don’t have The Grove where they are. I have a painting of The Grove in my office at home here in Indiana. I pause, look at it each day, and wish I was walking through the middle of it. The place helps me.

My wife said it best. “Whiny coaches like them are just ruining the game. They sound more like 8th grade girls in the hallway than they do college football coaches.” She’s right, as usual.

In the meantime, as the SEC plays a soap opera, The Big Ten goes about its business. Maybe that should be the model to aspire to. Go about your business. After all, there are the last three consecutive National Championship trophies to consider. They are in three different Big Ten Football complexes. And one of them is Indiana. That alone has turned college football coaching expectations into dumpster fires in waiting.

LSU didn’t make the CFP last year. Texas didn’t make the CFP last year. Ole Miss played Miami in a semi-final. They pooped out on D at the end. Otherwise, they would have played Indiana and I didn’t want any part of that (wink). Texas and LSU are playing catch up. Their coaches are whining. If it’s so bad, go do something else. I promise football will go on without you. You need college football more than college football needs you. Act like it.

The following is a text exchange I had with a cousin in Mississippi as I was watching, intently, a high school football game. It was a beautiful September evening. Both teams were on the field. The field was synthetic. Fake grass. Anyway, our text messaging went like this:

Me: Sent a picture of players

Cousin: Future Big 10 players

Me: I don’t think so. Every egg in the state of Mississippi would be safe on the field with this bunch (playing).

Cousin: (Laughing emoji)

Me: Seriously. The best pop I heard all night was when a punter kicked a line drive and hit the right guard in the back.

Cousin: Better run some Oklahoma or bull in the ring.

My cousin and I may be more than 600 miles away from each other. We may not remember the last time we saw each other (probably do). Still, we’ve got football to enjoy and the memories and jocularity that can only be produced by guys who were intimately around the game at the same time. My cousin and I share a sense of football “tradition, legacy, and history” as spelled out so eloquently by Keith Jackson as he waxed poetic about what The Rose Bowl means. Imagine what Keith Jackson would have said introducing The Rose Bowl we just had between Alabama and the Indiana Hoosiers.

“We’ve got the Alabama Crimson Tide taking on the favored Hoosiers from INdiana. That just seems to come out kinda funny. But it’s the SEC vs. the Big Ten here in The Rose Bowl. It should be a good one.”

I digress. We started this fun time talking about blocking and shoving, pushing. At the risk of sounding like Joe Namath calling a game on Monday Night Football saying, “Well, back when I used to play…” well, back when I used to play, the offensive line came off the ball popping pads. We couldn’t push. We couldn’t shove. Our arms could not be extended. We looked more like submarines firing off the ball than a modern-day offensive line.

Say in 1984 a high school center, the guy who snaps the ball to the quarterback, has a nose guard head up on him (that means right in front of him). That nose guard has been eating wild onions and his breath stinks. The center yells “Over!” to let the right guard, the chap lined up to the immediate right of the center. The center yelled “Over!” to tell the guard to hit the onion eating nose guard high (above the waist) while I aim for his knees and effectively we both take him out of the play that is being run off tackle to the right in a “Power I” formation. All this truly reads like poetry if you have been there. Not one of us on the offensive line put our arms out to push someone during the play. Hands stayed in. Elbows stayed out. Contact, for better or worse, would be made.

Understand this: The defensive nose guard, the onion eater, was allowed to use his hands to evade the block. He could push. That was legal. It was not legal for onion eater to grab a handful of a different colored jersey and pull or use that kind of leverage to throw an offensive lineman down which happened and was uncalled by refs often compared to an offensive lineman even thinking about trying to pull that knowing it would cost the team fifteen yards in the wrong direction. That football crime also meant that the lineman would be spending extra time the next week with a coach, not of his choosing, counting off the number of hills the player had to run to better himself for next Friday night. At least, uh, my high school had a “Hill”. We also had a walnut tree next to the tennis courts. It is still there. When a player screwed up during practice, it was not uncommon for the coach administering that particular drill or scrimmage to tell the player to “Go kiss the tree”. You ran there and back hoping you did so fast enough to not hear the coach say, “That tree misses you. Go give it some more sugar.”

Last fall, as I sat there in the stands watching that high school game and witnessed at least seven plays in a row where no more than one or two players hit the ground, I started to remember games of two-hand touch that were rougher than what I was watching played out in pads before me. Like the time “Jimmy” tugged on his bottom lip after a play and asked that dreaded question that rarely ends well, “How bad is it?” Four of us looked at each other wondering which one of us was going to tell Jimmy he had just bitten a hole below his lip. I’m saying you could see daylight on the other side. The rest of us kept playing. It wasn’t dark yet.

Oh well. I sound like Joe Willie. Maybe worse. As much as I love the game of football, and I do, know that I am delighted that I played before offensive linemen were allowed to push and shove…by one year. The juniors on that team started pushing and shoving on the line the next year. We old submarines are just a thing left to football lore.

When it was time to swing a leg, I was not a submarine. Not a punt was blocked that year thanks to the line play. I got to watch the ball go, as I followed the guys down the field.