We’re fully engulfed in football season, so today I was planning on giving you a cornucopia of thoughts and reflections on the season so far.
It starts with the email sent out by Tippecanoe Valley High School Athletic Director Duane Burkhart Monday afternoon, announcing that varsity football coach Steve Moriarty had been suspended indefinitely for what Burkhart described as “conduct unbecoming a coach.”
The email also says that current assistant coach and former head coach Jeff Shriver is taking over operation of the program for the time being.
I don’t know what happened or what should happen next since it has not been made public what allegedly happened.
But how disappointing this must be to the “Valley Family,” who claimed a moment of healing two Fridays ago with the unveiling of the new sign declaring the name of the football field to be “Smith-Bibler Memorial Field … Home of Death Valley Football.”
I hope the matter gets cleared up soon.
And now some other thoughts.
The Chicago Bears have decided that the Mitchell Trubisky Era should start Monday night when they take on the Minnesota Vikings.
The Bears shredded their original plan of letting the No. 2 overall pick sit and learn and grow under a veteran like Mike Glennon when they discovered that it only took four weeks for Glennon to teach the kid everything he knows about the position.
Remember, the Bears went out and spent a bunch of money on Glennon in the offseason, and then a few weeks later traded away draft picks to move up one spot to get Trubisky. It made the organization look like it didn’t know what it was doing – and four weeks into the season we can now confirm that suspicion.
And by the way, speculation is running rampant that Bill Cowher is going to leave his seat on the CBS pregame and postgame set to take over the Bears. Can we just stop with that?
Guys like Cowher and Jon Gruden have figured out that they can have more fun and can be just as involved in football for really good money doing TV minus the headaches of being a coach in the NFL. And the longer they stay out, the wiser they get and the more likely they are to keep their headsets plugged to a control truck instead of coordinators a few doors down in the press box.
After a Week 2 home loss to Georgia, Notre Dame fans and beat reporters were speculating on when the search would begin for a new coach.
Let me be 100 percent clear here, I am not a fan of Brian Kelly as a person or a coach. However, looking back on the Irish season so far, no one can claim that the Irish are not better so far this year compared to last season. As a matter of fact, they are a lot better.
They lost to Georgia by a single point, and had the ball with a chance to go down and kick a game-winning field goal. That same Bulldog bunch is now ranked No. 5 in the AP College Football poll, is the favorite to win the SEC East and seems poised to challenge Alabama in the conference championship game.
Will Notre Dame make the playoffs? Probably not. But if that is the only standard for success or failure of Irish teams, present and future, then that is not a Notre Dame Football problem … that’s a Notre Dame fan base problem.
You need to get over yourself.
It was great to see so many kids wearing pink shirts to the Warsaw/Wawasee football game Friday in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. They did their schools proud. However, can I just suggest (in jest of course) that the pinkish-red colored hair mountain that assistant principal Geoff Walmer was sporting … well, can we rethink letting him out in public looking like that in the future?
One final thought: the answer to the annual trivia question is September 29. The question: “What is the first date that someone asks me how many games the Warsaw boys basketball team is going to win this year?”
Ironically, that question was posed to me on my Facebook page during the third quarter of the “W” football game.
