In Indiana, Madison, Indiana to be exact (you may recall a movie about a hydroplane racing boat by the same name), there is a sign I always chuckle at when I pass by.

The sign, as the picture indicates, informs interested motorists that these two towns are in the direction after the next right turn.

Kent Austin is the name of the Hamilton Tiger Cats’ head coach.  The TiCats, as they are often called,  play in the Canadian Football League.  I watched part of a game last night.  Calgary was playing British Columbia.  It was an entertaining game…but the 10 pm kickoff made it too late for me to hang in there.  Wish I could have seen it all.  No…I don’t have a device to tape whatever I want on TV.  BC won by one point.  Calgary lost its first game.  They are now 4 and 1.

Kent Austin played quarterback at Ole Miss when I was in high school in Indiana.  I rarely got to see him play.  Thirty years ago we did not get to choose to watch what teams we wanted to.  We watched the couple of games that showed up on the television and one of them was narrated by Keith Jackson.

Still…I did my best to keep up with how the Ole Miss Rebs were doing by reading the newspaper and getting out a pencil and paper and figuring up statistics like the maniac I was about those sorts of things.

I can to this day recite the NFL’s quarterback rating formula that I am not sure they even use anymore.  In 1981, Ken Anderson’s qb rating was 98.5.  He led the league and was 10 points ahead of the NFC’s leader that year.  That quarterback was named Joe Montana.  He was in his third year.

1981 was the NFL’s greatest season.  The Super Bowl was truly the Cinderella Bowl that January 24, 1982. The Cincinnati Bengals played the San Francisco 49ers in Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome.

Both  Anderson’s Cincinnati Bengals and Montana’s San Francisco 49ers had records of 6 wins and 10 losses the season before in 1980.  In 1981,  the Bengals were 12 wins and 4 losses.  That same year, the 49ers were 13 wins and 3 losses.  The Bengals were Bungles in the first half of the Super Bowl.  Turnovers led to a 20-0 halftime deficit.  I was a Bengals fan.  I was very sad at the half.

The 49ers held on to win Super Bowl XVI by a score of 26-21.  It was the first time in Super Bowl history….and probably still holds…that the losing team, the Bengals, scored more touchdowns and had more offensive yards and still lost.

In fact the MVP, Joe Montana,  threw for 157 yards and Ken Anderson threw for 300 yards and broke the completion percentage record for the game after he completed 25 of the 34 throws he made.  A few years later Phil Simms would do better leading the Giants.  You can look it up.

So there…just to help you get warmed up for football season…you get a NFL history lesson even though all I sat down here to do was to share a picture of an Indiana highway sign I think to be amusing.

Just goes to show you.  Anything is possible…when you speak the rights.

Danny Johnson