Every day there are three things, none worth devoting an individual post to, but each worth at least mentioning.
1) Marvin Lewis. In an interview with ESPN, the Bengals Head Coach says that he's not expecting to get a contract extension.
THIS MEANS HE HAS TO WIN A PLAYOFF GAME IN 2017 ORDER TO COME BACK IN 2018!!!
Maybe.
Maybe not.
It could mean a lot of things. Maybe Marvin does have to win a playoff game to get re-upped. Maybe Marvin is planning on walking away at the end of this season, regardless. Maybe there's some sort of impossible-to-define criteria that will earn him another year or three if he satisfies them this season.
We went through this in 2010, and the common assumption as the disastrous 4-12 season came to an end that year was that Marvin wasn't coming back.
That assumption was wrong.
Unless he's dealing with taxpayers, Mike Brown doesn't do ultimatums. And the Bengals have never held their head coach to hard standard of win-or-else. Trying to determine what will happen to Marvin at the end of this coming season is an inexact science, but we'll do it all season anyway.
I'm far more interested in this season, and whether things like the staleness of 2016 and the coach's supposed inability to reach his players last season bleed over into 2017.
And I'm not sure that if he has to win big to keep his job, he'll have the team he needs to earn another contract.
2) Luke Fickell. Dude is absolutely killing it. He got commitment yesterday from a highly-touted, often-targeted local product - Josh Whyle of LaSalle - adding to the incredible momentum UC football has been enjoying since the second Saturday of December.
The night and day difference in the feel and vibe of UC football compared to last fall is staggering. And the way he dived head-first into local recruiting has both re-energized the fan base and made those of us who hated the way Tommy Tuberville ran the program grow further disaffected with the previous regime.
He's also making it apparent that the UC coaching gig is better than anyone made it out to be when it first came open.
3) Don Rickles. Ever since the debut of the Scott Van Pelt midnight edition of SportsCenter, my late-night viewing habits have changed. For the most part, so have late-night talk shows, the highlights of which are packaged for online consumption the next day.
Rare is it that I want to watch Colbert, Fallon, or Kimmel engage with whoever their guests are. Mainly, because most of those "interviews" are just a chance for the host to slobber over their guests, but also because most famous people are pretty uninteresting.
But I was a huge Letterman guy, for the same reasons that most Letterman fans were Letterman fans. In the second half of his career, I loved watching him interact with his guests. He could take people who weren't funny and help them get laughs, he didn't tolerate guests who didn't want to play along, and on the nights when he was truly excited about who he was having on, nothing was better than watching him and another adult have a conversation.
His best guest, although not close to being among his most-frequent, was Don Rickles. Dave would sit there for 12 minutes and be a punching bag, sometimes laughing through the groans of offended audience members, drawing out stories from an entertainment icon, and allowing a guy whose act could not be crafted today, do his thing.
Rickles died yesterday at 90. The first thing I thought of were those Letterman appearances, many of which were accumulated by People Magazine yesterday. Watch them. Laugh. Or at least remember what it was like when we liked to laugh.
Radio Show: Double-duty today. 3:05 on ESPN1530. 6:05 on 700WLW. Sports. We'll talk about them.