THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: When your mind wanders from gutting a moose to other bizarre things

Sometimes you have a day when your mind just wanders.

It can start in Alaska and wind up in Arizona.

Or Sheffield, England, where they make steel.

Tons of it.

It’s pleasant — no, not thinking about all that steel — but drifting from one location to another, maybe stopping to ponder what’s going on with a chap who’s doing something interesting.

You don’t really move while you’re pondering, not physically.

Yet you might visit anyplace on Earth.

HMMM.

So, what exactly got my mind on this trek.

Actually, it was an ESPN story about a dispute during the Iditarod, a massive sporting event for everyone who lives happily with snow piled up to their navels.

It turns out that a veteran musher … wait, the story itself is the tale here.

Best to share some of that.

“Iditarod officials have imposed a two-hour time penalty on musher Dallas Seavey for not properly gutting the moose he killed during the race earlier this week.”

Yep, that’s correct.

I’m trying to picture this.

"It fell on my sled; it was sprawled on the trail," Seavey told an Iditarod Insider television crew at the Finger Lake checkpoint, where he urged race officials to get the moose off the trail.

"I gutted it the best I could, but it was ugly," he said.

OK, now I don’t want to picture the incident.

Mushers who compete in the thousand-mile Iditarod have my respect, but I won’t be in the crowd anytime soon.

HMMM.

The baseball reporters at Fox News presumably weren’t at the Iditarod, either, but you might make the case that their brains are frozen.

Fox is releasing lists of the top 10 players at each position as we lead up to the 2024 season.

They just unveiled their catchers, and — maybe this was a printing error — Cal Raleigh did NOT make the list.
This just proves again that we are in a corner of the nation that is cut off from the rest of civilization.

There's no way, none at all, that the Big Dumper is not among baseball’s elite catchers.

I could make the argument that he belongs in the top three or four.

In fact, maybe I will.

Watch this space.

HMMM.

I love it when NFL draft experts start cheating.

Basically, they creep away from their own reports and instead, change to follow the herd on evaluation of a player.

Plenty of these services cost money, too, so you kind of feel like you got done paying to see the Borneo Man at the county fair if you take some of these personnel “experts” at their words.

We have a classic case this year with Washington QB Michael Penix Jr.

Just a few weeks ago, there was almost a unanimous opinion among scouts and evaluators that Penix struggled whenever he didn’t have a clean pocket.

The UW gunner couldn’t throw accurate when forced out of the pocket.

Oops.

Penix then appeared to make a lot of personnel people look bad by putting on a show at the NFL combine.

Suddenly, the lightweight reporters all had to jump on the train.

Meanwhile, a few legit evaluators who had held their fire originally, gave Penix high marks for accuracy but also noted his potential weaknesses.

But that army of talking heads simply repeated rumors from the combine and turned them into facts.

Note to all: Penix Jr. remains a gamble.

He’s going to be that mystery QB at the draft, with everyone wondering if a team will pull the trigger.

HMMM.

Who will make it further in the NCAA tournament, Gonzaga or Wazzu?

It’s been a long time since that was a legitimate question.

This time around, the teams (and coaches) are very, very different — with the Zags leaning almost entirely on a top five playing the same style that’s taken them to eight straight Sweet 16s, the longest streak in the country.

This team needs Ryan Nembhard pounding the ball inside to Graham Ike (one of most underrated big men in the country).

Don’t laugh, the Zags can keep that streak going.

Meanwhile, Kyle Smith’s Cougs are a chameleon sort of team, able to adapt to different styles and force some changes themselves.

Myles Rice, the freshman cancer survivor who orchestrates things at point, is also the leading scorer — as the Cougs, unlike Gonzaga, don’t have a cinch go-to scorer like Ike.

Instead, they spread it around and they do have one thing that Zags would love to borrow — 3-point sniper Jaylen Wells (44.5 percent), who beat Arizona on the road with a last-minute 3-pointer as he was being knocked into the crowd.

Gonzaga has played a much tougher schedule than Wazzu, and would seem more prepared for Big Dance.

But there’s something kind of special about these Cougs — and Wells would terrify anyone.

HMMM.

Oh, yeah, I mentioned Sheffield, England, at the beginning of this walk in the park.

You’re going to say this just gives me a chance to mention Arsenal, my live-and-die soccer team (which is true).

Besides the fact that the Arse have won seven straight in the Premier League and outscored the opposition 31-3 in that stretch, my point was going to be that British journalists have a lot more fun in their reporting.

For instance, Arsenal whipped Sheffield United 6-0 on the road Monday night.

The writer handling the game story for The Guardian in London tossed in a phrase I think I’ll save for future use.

He wrote: “Martin Odegaard (Arsenal midfielder) conducted a live autopsy on the Sheffield defense.”

I want to write stuff like that when I grow up.

Email: [email protected]

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press four times each week, normally Tuesday through Friday unless, you know, stuff happens.

Steve suggests you take his opinions in the spirit of a Jimmy Buffett song: “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On.”