The Air Force Can't Fly Over This Defense, and Leo Reyes Has a Flag
Cleveland State34
Air Force24
- Game
- 2025 Week 2
- Date
- 2025-08-30
- Site
- Home
- Result
- Win
- Record
- 2-0
Two and oh, my people.
Air Force came to town with that offense that makes you dizzy, all those fakes and pitches, and the Vikings beat them 34-24. A ten-point win against a team that makes every defensive coordinator in America lose sleep in August. I slept like a baby. A baby who’d eaten a Bazelak, so not great, but happy.
Big news on my street: Leo Reyes is seven now, and Saturday morning he played his first game with the Little Lakers, our flag-football squad for the youngest kids at Our Lady of the Lake. He pulled one flag all morning. One! He ran it over to me like he’d found treasure. “COACH MICKEY. I GOT ONE.” Jess filmed it. Marco cried. I cried. The other team’s coach cried, and he wasn’t even involved.
That’s what this season feels like, friends. Every week, we pull a flag. Every week, somebody runs it over to show us.
Three pierogi. Leo gets one too, cut into fours.
The Vikings are 2-0, which is the fourth-most dangerous record in college football. The first three are three and oh, four and oh, and “bowl-eligible.”
Here’s my concern, and you knew I’d have one: the defense gave up twenty-four to an option offense at home. Not a crisis. Not nothing. The option is a test of discipline, and the Vikings passed it with a B-minus. B-minuses add up.
I went to Spin Cycle Records in Lakewood on Sunday and stood in the jazz section for forty minutes, which is how I process good news. I didn’t buy the sad record. I didn’t buy the happy one either. I bought a “cautiously optimistic” one: a trumpet record that keeps almost resolving and then doesn’t. The clerk said, “That’s a weird pick.” I said, “It’s a weird time.”
The Doom Model is calm. Too calm. I’ve asked it to check its inputs.
Back and forth
Leo pulled a flag, Kenny! One flag!
That’s a better defensive performance than the second quarter.
You’re happy and you don’t know what to do with it.
I bought a trumpet record that refuses to resolve. I’m handling it.
Two wins, one flag pulled, and a jazz record that perfectly captures Ken’s refusal to enjoy anything.
Split Decision is fiction. Mickey Bridges, Ken Hogmanes and The Lakefront Ledger are invented; the games and scores are not.