We all have dreams.

We all have things we want to do, and people we want to be with the one shot at life that we have.

Maybe that’s being a successful business owner.

Maybe that’s being wealthy.

But virtually everyone wants to be famous. What we want to be famous for varies from person to person.

Not you? Really? Every play the air guitar? Ever sing in the shower? Ever hit a wiffle ball over the fence in your backyard and jog around the yard to the imaginary roar of 40,000 fans at Wrigley Field? OK, that’s just me, I’ll admit to that.

Harrison Mevis graduated from Warsaw as the best kicker in school history, and that’s saying something because Tiger Football has quite a legacy of sending kickers to college football squads.

But Harrison’s story was different. When he went to the University of Missouri, he was already considered one of the best kickers in the country. His work at summer kicking camps and his performance at high-profile showcases made his name well known among special teams coaches.

At Missouri, he was really good, and he made some big kicks. The more big kicks he made, the more popular he became.

That budding legend morphed into a nickname. Harrison Mevis became known to Tiger Nation as “The Thicker Kicker.”

And being honest, he’s earned that nickname. Harrison is big guy. He is not fat, just big — 6-feet tall and 245 pounds.

And if you know this kid at all, you understand that he leaned into the “Thicker Kicker” thing from Day One, and no one is in the least bit surprised.

Most kickers try to keep a low profile.

Harrison Mevis is not most kickers.

And then the day came that cemented his place in Missouri Tiger athletics history…September 16, 2023.

His team was locked in a 27-27 tie with Kansas State at Memorial Stadium in Columbia.

With :02 left, his coach sent him onto the field to attempt a game-winning field goal.

The snap and hold were right on, and Mevis put his right foot into it. Man, did that ball fly.

It cleared the crossbar, and Mevis sprinted a victory lap around the turf.

It was the longest walk-off field goal in the history of the SEC.

Despite all of that, he wasn’t drafted, and a lot of people were surprised.

Still, Harrison kept himself ready by doing his thing.

And then the call came in mid-season 2025.

The LA Rams were on the line. They were unhappy with their kicker, and they wanted to bring Mevis out for a workout.

And they signed him.

He was as good a kicker for them as anyone in the league, and when he beat the Bears with a 42-yard overtime kick in the NFC Divisional Playoff Game at Soldier Field, “The Thicker Kicker” was now a national brand.

The fame that went with that kind of kick in that kind of setting is instantaneous and spectacular.

This year Mevis was 14-for-14 on extra points this season, but only 5-7 on field goals.

The Rams had been struggling on just about every facet of their special teams units. Coach Sean McVay changed coaches and vowed a change of results, but they still looked very much like 2025.

Then Monday night happened.

At home against a good Buffalo team, Mevis pulled a long field goal to the left in the first half.

Then in overtime, with a chance to win a game the Rams desperately needed, Mevis lined up for a game-winning kick.

The Rams line totally caved in on its left side, and Mevis' kick was blocked. He put such a charge into it, it still almost made it to the cross bar. But it didn’t.

The Bills went back down the field and won the game with their own field goal, and the Rams were 2-3.

McVay expressed after the game how angry he was at losing.

The next day, the Rams cut Harrison Mevis.

As quickly as the spotlight found him, it disappeared and left him in the dark.

It’s the cruelty of professional sports.

It wasn’t fair, and it’s not fair, but you know how I feel about “fair”.

What about the guys on the line who didn’t do their jobs on that last kick? What about the defense who gave up 37 points? Those guys didn’t get cut.

Only the kicker.

The people who had sung his praises were now filling social media with hate. They turned on him like a stranger. The margin of error is almost invisible. The difference between hero and scapegoat is razor thin.

Harrison knows that this is the nature of the business. It’s the beauty and the nightmare of his particular job on a football team. The kickers don’t get paid much and so they are easy to cut.

He signed up for this.

And Harrison Mevis will once again do his work…and wait for his phone to ring.

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I was watching sporting events this weekend, as I often do, and a common word kept coming up during the broadcasts.

The word was “confidence.”

The dictionary definition of “confidence” is a feeling of trust, a firm belief in your own abilities, or a certainty that someone or something is reliable.

You don’t have to be an expert on sports to understand how confidence plays into the success or failure of any participant or team.

It’s at the core of it.

Now, we should pause here and point out that confidence plays into every person in every state in every country in the world.

We think of it a lot when related to business, politics and leadership.

In sports, a player who is confident is more likely to perform well.

Here’s how this plays out.

A player works hard in the offseason. They understand what the team will expect of them in the coming season and they train their body and brain to meet that challenge.

The coaches see the results of that hard work and their confidence in that player executing that role well.

That leads to more playing time.

Their teammates see the same thing, and their confidence grows in that player, too.

Feeling that positivity coming from the people around them makes them feel good and makes them work even harder in practice.

That makes the whole team work harder in practice.

That makes the whole team better prepared for games.

A team that is better prepared for games plays better in those games.

The original player is now ready to do more and be more. They are ready to be asked for a larger role, and they not only make simple plays but also are making bigger plays—plays that have the potential to be game-changing and season-defining plays.

When you have enough of those kinds of players on your roster, you have the ingredients for a special season.

The key to all of it goes all the way back to where we started.

How does a player take that first step toward building supreme confidence?

Let me start by saying that there must be a level of that built into the person from the start. The foundation of it comes from within.

Maybe they’re born to confident parents who displayed that every day themselves.

Maybe it’s passed along in the gene pool.

Either way, the truth about confidence is that the more you have at a younger age, the more it can be fostered as you get older.

Next, a player needs to be around other players who are at the same level or are at a higher level of confidence than their own.

This will ensure they are challenged.

Too many parents either fall into the category of being “helicopter parents” or “lawnmower parents”.

“Helicopter parents” hover over their children in sports and in other aspects of their lives. They are overactive in their children’s lives, and they hinder their development. Their kids are constantly looking over their shoulders, waiting for their parents to intervene when apparent conflicts arise.

“Lawnmower parents” go ahead of their children and clear out any obstacles their children might face. Their goal is to make their kids’ path to success as easy as possible, so they eliminate anything and anyone that gets in the way.

And, on the surface, the success those kids get from that sort of upbringing does give kids confidence. But that confidence is short-lived. It won’t last, and it actually will be detrimental to them as they get to adulthood.

Kids need to be challenged, and parents are wise to put them in situations that challenge them.

Kids should lose sometimes. Kids should fail sometimes. It’s good for them!

Not all the time, but they need to appreciate what it takes to succeed and what it’s like when you don’t.

I know it seems weird, but failing occasionally will help build their confidence later.

The last part of this process is repetition.

No matter the sport, good habits lead to good results.

Now, this process applies outside of sports, too. You could remove the word “player” and plug in “musician”, “tradesman”, “real estate agent,” or any sector of life, and it works.

As adults, we should be actively seeking out young people to help build confidence in.

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By Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw

We have several things to discuss, so we will put them on our plates like we would at a tailgate party at a football game — with heaping portions.

Purdue Football Coach Barry Odom was addressing the media last week and admitted that playing Notre Dame as a non-conference opponent is not his idea of a good time.

Odom drew a lot of criticism from his own fans and the general college football population by saying that he doesn’t think scheduling the Irish helps what he’s trying to do to build the Boilermakers.

Those who voiced opposition wondered what playing Indiana State and Southern Illinois is doing to make them better, and that’s a fair question.

But Odom is right. He should be in the athletic director’s office when they both have a free minute and say, “ya know, Notre Dame is top 5 in the country right now and how am I supposed to get us back to being competitive and fun to play for if I am getting clobbered by Notre Dame?”

I understand that comes across as weak. But Purdue IS weak! They aren’t good and, in the era of “professional college football”, the Boilers are naturally going to suffer because they don’t have the obvious revenue streams that other Big 10 teams do.

Purdue’s game against Wake Forest was a competitive game, and that’s the caliber of non-conference opponent they should be scheduling until they can get back to where guys like Rondale Moore show up on campus and make others want to join them.

Yes, the Cubs' playoff games are late this week.

Blame that on the Cubs themselves.

If the Cubs had won three more games this season, they would have the home field advantage in this best-of-3 series.

There is no way that games at Wrigley Field would be scheduled for 9 p.m., Chicago time.

That being true, it’s still a little baffling that the Cubs and Padres are at 10 p.m. Eastern and the White Sox and Astros are playing at 5 p.m. Eastern in Houston.

We all understand that any team from New England (like the Yankees and Red Sox) will get the prime spot.

But Cubs fans are conditioned for day baseball, and having games at 5 p.m. ET (2 p.m. PT) is far better for ratings than 10 p.m.

After three weeks of the NFL season, we normally have a pretty good line on each team in the league and what they are good at, and what they are not.

But I think this season might break that mold.

As is often the case, there are a lot of 2-1 and 1-2 teams, but because of injuries, we just don’t really know how good most of the teams in the league are.

The Rams are an example of this. They are 1-2, but they have injuries that make that record make sense.

The problem is those injuries could impact the team’s roster over the next month.

We’ll just have to wait three more weeks before we try to draw any conclusions.

Can I circle back to baseball for a second?

I think Major League Baseball’s challenge system for balls and strikes is pretty good and I love it.

One thing I was mistaken about is that I thought it would virtually snuff out arguments with players and managers about pitches.

It has not.

It has only delayed those arguments until the later innings. Why? Because teams burn up their two unsuccessful challenges too early in the game.

Once their challenges run out, they can only complain to the umpire about a pitch or series of pitches, and that gets them tossed from the game.

That said, I think it’s clear that not all umpires have been receptive to the criticism that comes with the results of the ABS challenges.

I think the younger umps who came up through the minors with the ABS System handle it better than the older guys. Veteran umpires are clearly embarrassed by having 30,000 fans watching a video showing that the pitch they just called a strike was two full inches outside the strike zone. You can hear it in their voices when they announce, “the call of a strike is overturned…Chicago (for example) has two challenges remaining”.

There is a little “Eeyore” in their tone.

That makes them testy, and we have seen umps react poorly to even the most basic ‘chirping’ from the dugouts.

Can we do one more thing in sports?

Can we just admit that college football’s ranking system is useless?

I mean, for some teams they can lose and not drop in the polls because the voters still believe they should be highly ranked. And maybe they aren’t as good as they were forecasted to be, but it doesn’t matter—they will still be right up there in the end.

Can someone please pass the buffalo sauce?

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I was watching Saturday’s slate of college football games, and something that was said started me thinking about the future of what we know as college football.

Todd Blackledge was working as the analyst for NBC Sports on the Notre Dame-Michigan State game Saturday night, and he mentioned that one of the Spartan quarterbacks was playing in his sixth season of college ball.

Sixth!

Cam Fincher is playing at his fourth school in those six seasons.

He started at Marshall and played three seasons there. He then played one season each at Florida Atlantic and Central Florida.

Now he’s playing at Michigan State.

I understand that the NCAA granted players who had to endure COVID during their college football careers an extra season of eligibility. I am pretty gracious when it comes to things related to COVID, so…whatever.

But it’s 2026 and the landscape of major college sports has changed in massive ways since March of 2020.

And it got me thinking, and it brought to mind a question: Why should a college athlete ever leave college?

The two biggest reasons in the past were because athletes had run out of eligibility or because they wanted to go to the professional league in their sport and make money.

Well, players are getting paid to play in college right now. The farce of “NIL” money is just a cover for writing players checks, and the cash is free-flowing.

I have brought this up before, but when was the last time you watched a college football game and the broadcasters mentioned what a player’s major is, what their field of study is or what their GPA is?

You don’t and you won’t.

The NCAA still claims there are standards that must be met in order for a college athlete to play in their team’s games. According to the NCAA website, athletes must maintain a 2.3 Grade Point Average (GPA) in “core courses” like English, math and science to be eligible.

But when was the last time you heard an announcer say that a player was not available for the game that was about to be played because of academic issues?

You don’t and you won’t.

So that begs the question: “Why would college players ever leave college?”

The NCAA set out to address this, sort of, with their “five in five rule”. That would allow any athlete to compete for the five years after their high school years are complete.

It would eliminate the “redshirt year” to allow freshmen to sit out a year for development purposes, and also the “medical redshirt year,” which allows a player who misses a year because of injury to add a year at the end to replace the year that was missed.

Let me lay out for you the foundation of the scenario I see coming.

A college football player at the University of Texas (as an example. It could be any college) has had a really good year or a really good career. He thinks he can play in the NFL, but the reviews he is getting from NFL scouts are mixed and inconclusive.

What’s to keep that player from going back to college for another year to improve their draft status and get paid while doing it?

Well, years of eligibility — that’s what.

Up until now, if you used up your eligibility, you had to move on.

But this is 2026, so what’s to keep a judge in Austin, Texas, from ruling that the Longhorns’ player in question can go back to play at Texas for the next year or as many years as he wants?

Nothing.

So only a judge’s signature stands between the scenario I painted being potential and being reality.

I am not ok with that.

Unless we now are declaring, officially, that what we know as college sports are now going to be the minor leagues for professional sports. If we are willing to do that, then that makes this make sense, and it’s the only thing that makes this make sense.

Now, the reason why you and I don’t want this to happen is because what we know currently as minor league sports will go away.

No more South Bend Cubs. No more Fort Wayne Tin Caps.

Baseball wouldn’t need them, because players could make more money and live in better conditions playing for colleges than they could in the minor leagues. They would still need a AAA franchise to move players up to replace injured major league players. But they wouldn’t need any level below that.

And baseball owners would be fine reducing their payroll and overhead by eliminating the bulk of their minor league structure.

And no matter what the sport, if you haven’t figured it out by now, it’s all about the money.

The post A question from columnist Roger Grossman: Why Leave College? appeared first on News Now Warsaw.

If you think about every relationship you’ve ever had, they all have one thing in common — the first impression.

That applies to romantic relationships.

That applies to friendships.

That applies to coworkers.

That applies to business contacts.

It applies to everyone everywhere.

A good first impression can get your foot in the door and start a positive relationship.

A bad first impression can crush any chance of growth.

With the NFL, Week 1 is the first impression for fans of their teams.

The supporters of a team love that team, but they understand full well that every season is different and every team supplies its own first impression each year.

The Bears and Colts offered their fan bases two very different feelings after their first games of the 2026 season.

For Chicago, Coach Ben Johnson very boldly announced that he had set a goal for the Bears offense to score more points than any team in the history of the National Football League.

Well, 59 points is a heck of a start, isn’t it?

They racked up over 500 yards of offense and 26 first downs in the process of winning at Carolina.

They ran the ball. They passed the ball. Quarterback Caleb Williams passed it when he should have and ran it when he should have.

He was tremendous.

When someone makes a promise at the beginning of a relationship, and then delivers on that promise, it’s a huge confidence booster for the other half of that partnership. That confidence builds trust, and it’s trust that forms the foundation of all good relationships.

Why? Because the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Good or bad, what you’ve done in the past is going to define you for others moving forward.

Does it mean that the Bears will go undefeated and score a touchdown every time they get the ball? Of course not. But, just like our friendships, marriages, and partnerships, the mistakes and missteps don’t seem as bad when you know what the reputation of the person or business is.

The Bears gave us a perfect picture of what we expect them to be this season.

The Colts picture was not nearly as pretty.

The Colts offense showed up with flowers on their opening drive, cruising down the field and scoring the first time they had the ball Sunday against the Ravens.

And then they coughed on them for the next three hours without covering their mouth once.

The Colts were uncompetitive from that point forward. They fell behind by two scores pretty early in the game, which immediately shut down Indy’s running game featuring one of the premier running backs in the league.

They fell behind because Baltimore’s offense came ready to rock-and-roll at Lucas Oil Stadium Sunday, and the Colts defense looked like they had another week of preseason practice.

Baltimore ran it and threw it like the Colts were two or three defenders short of a full squad.

Remember, the Colts front office went out and made a few moves on that side of the ball. But their personnel, specifically their linebacking corps, didn’t do anything on Sunday to make you feel confident that they will improve from last weekend to this coming one.

Colts fans let the team know what they were feeling about it all. They booed, and it was a loud chorus of boos. Booing sends a message, and the Colts fans’ collective boos Sunday carried the message “we have seen this before and we are not going to put up with it anymore.”

And they are right about that.

The Colts have started the year 0-1 in 11 of the last 13 Septembers. In a 17-game season, that means your margin for error shrinks significantly. To get above .500, the Colts have to win at Kansas City this weekend and then beat the Texans at home the following week. It’s quite possible the Colts start 0-3, and if that happens, organizational changes will be necessary, and fans will be reserving time slots with their therapists.

Colts fans will have one foot out the door of their next home game if this continues, and when they stop booing it will be because they will have given up.

And when one side gives up on a relationship, it’s a relationship that needs change.

The next two games will tell us a lot about where these two relationships are headed.

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Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw

The news broke last week that Manchester University was going to make a jump to join the Crossroads League.

This is good news all the way around.

Immediately after hearing this, my mind raced ahead of the story with questions — it’s an occupational hazard.

I wondered if someone was dropping out and Manchester was going to replace them.

There has been smoke from the south side of Marion that Indiana Wesleyan was outgrowing the conference and might be looking to move up to a small NCAA division.

The money generated by IWU from athletics is pretty powerful, and when they added football, that only heaped the piles of money higher.

But they are staying.

From a financial standpoint, I don’t see how being in the Crossroads League does a school like Mount Vernon Nazarene any good. It’s over two-and-a-half hours of driving from the nearest conference member, and people from Indiana are not driving to the northeast side of Columbus, Ohio to watch their favorite small college play. And, of course, their athletes are logging a lot of miles to Indiana and southern Michigan to play in contests on a regular basis. And those driving miles cost money.

I don’t see how the money works out for them.

But they are staying.

And then there is Goshen.

Goshen’s approach to athletics is so different than the other nine members of the conference that it’s a struggle for me to see why they stay in the conference. And they make no bones about athletics’ role in their campus life model. Sports don’t matter to them as much, and that’s their choice to make, and it’s ok for them to think that. Their facilities are decent, but they don’t put a lot of energy into it.

Again, that’s not a huge secret. You sign up to play at Goshen knowing what it’s going to be like.

I don’t see them ever dropping athletics, but I thought they might want to drop down a level so that their teams are more competitive.

But they are staying.

Manchester University will become the 11th member of the Crossroads League and will begin playing in the league next fall.

What does Manchester get from this?

A whole heck of a lot!

First of all, it will give their athletic teams an identity.

Manchester is currently an NCAA Division III school. Division III bylaws strictly prohibit financial aid packages that consider athletic participation, leadership, performance, or ability.

No scholarships.

Any money students get comes from admissions, not the athletic department, and can’t be based on anything related to athletics. Those standards are the exact same standards that any other student at MU would be held to.

That makes it really tough to bring in quality athletes.

Being an NAIA school will change that.

Also consider what the opposition looks like in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference. Yes, there are a lot of Indiana schools in that league, but not that really move the needle of interest here in our area. We’re talking about Anderson, Earlham, Franklin and other schools that size. They are less than 100 miles away but might as well be 5,000 miles away in perception for sports fans here.

By joining the CL, they will see attendance at home sporting events grow, and visiting fans will also be more likely to buy tickets at MU.

Their road games will be closer to North Manchester than ever before.

And something else to consider: athletics are free advertising. Every time a college score is published or read on TV or radio, it’s a free commercial for those schools.

And while academic types hate the thought, Manchester will grow because the awareness of people in the community will grow based solely on their new approach to athletics. It’s a proven truth: athletic success is the best promotion of an overall university. Ask Butler what happened after going to the Final Four two years in a row.

All that means more money coming into Manchester University, and into the town of North Manchester for that matter.

Now, it’s going to take a few years to bring MU up to speed on a lot of things. Their facilities will fit the CL quite nicely, but they are going to need to ramp up their game when it comes to getting the word out about Spartan Athletics — in recruiting and publicity.

Manchester University athletics have been in hiding for about 20 years, but last week’s announcement means that time is over.

This is a mile-marker moment for Manchester University, and I am excited for them and for all of us, as we get reacquainted with them again.

Manchester Spartan athletics are back!

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Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw

As we begin to transition from summer to back-to-school, I want to spend some time talking about an aspect of sports that no one talks about or teaches anymore.

Today, we’re going to discuss the concepts of winning and losing.

To be more specific, I’m not interested in explaining how you win and why you don’t. I want to help parents, coaches and players with how to handle success and how to deal with failing.

Unfortunately, we hear of more and more instances of family members, coaches and players behaving badly at sporting events.

And in 2026, we don’t just hear stories about these things, we can see them with our own eyes. We can do this because every game in every park and every gym is recorded by someone in attendance.

What happened, what was said, what the response was—all of it—is captured and posted on some social media site like YouTube for people like me to view and digest.

A big part of this is because we, collectively, have lost perspective on what these leagues are supposed to be about. And, as often is the case with the downfall of things, money is at the core of the problem.

Youth sports is big business, and those who profit from it are not interested in losing money. And families spend a lot of money to tap into what these teams promise, which is the road to scholarships and greatness.

Families spend thousands of dollars to put their kids on these teams, and they understandably look at it as an investment in their child’s future.

So when an umpire misses a call or when a referee has to make a block/charge call in a close game, the tension naturally rises.

When that moment seems to make a difference in the result of the game, people lose their cool.

And what used to be just yelling and screaming has gone much farther. It’s now getting physical.

Coaches are pushing umpires. Parents and grandparents run onto the basketball court and knock down officials who never see them coming.

Let’s remember the first and most important role of athletics in life and society—to teach us life lessons that will benefit us into adulthood.

At the head of the list of those lessons should be that the whole point of what they are doing is having fun while they are doing it.

The subpoints to that are learning the fundamentals of the sport and learning to be part of a team.

No matter what the skills you are trying to master, taking shortcuts never works.

And there aren’t too many people in life who will live out their days in complete solitude. Sports team show us how to build relationships. They teach us to sacrifice our own objectives for the good of the collective group. They put our lives into perspective.

Well…they are supposed to, anyway.

Too often, on too many levels, those noble goals of sports have been trampled on in the name of winning above all else.

“What’s the big deal?” you ask.

Well, because winning is not the only outcome possible in a sporting event, or in life.

We don’t teach kids how to lose with grace and class because we don’t want them to consider “losing” as an option.

Our collective ego is often disguised as a “quest for excellence”. People whose actions offend us will almost certainly defend themselves by saying “I’m just trying to make them into winners.”

Let me introduce an idea to you that I think is a better what to get kids to where you want to get them.

I think you will get a lot farther by teaching kids the fundamentals of the sport and then couple that with the joy of competition.

I’d like to see more youth league coaches and parents focus on the thrill and fun that comes from competing and the quest to get better than the outcome of the games.

When that happens, it diffuses a lot of the tension from the scenarios we painted earlier. The ump may miss a call or the ref may miss a travel, but when you have the right mindset before it happens, it doesn’t matter.

I most certainly am not suggesting that sports don’t matter, nor am I trying to draw you into the “everyone should get a trophy” camp.

But things are not going to go perfectly in people’s lives.

They are going to get laid off.

Their spouse or kids are going to get seriously ill.

They are going to have a conflict with a neighbor.

We are not teaching kids what to do when that happens.

The message they are getting from too many of their leaders is that their response includes rage and blame.

That will not benefit them when they get older and helping them grow up to become solid adults should be everyone’s objective.

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