DAILY DIRT: All football fans owe a debt of gratitude to this guy

Rest in peace, Homer Jones … Welcome to today’s three thoughts that make up Vol. 643 of The Daily Dirt.

1. Thank you, Homer Jones.

Former New York Giants and Cleveland Browns wide receiver Homer Jones, the first player to spike the football after a touchdown, died earlier this month after a battle with lung cancer. He was 82.The “spike” went to become the signature post-touchdown move at all levels of football, but few remember it was Jones who introduced it, albeit somewhat by accident. Jones first spiked the football after an 89-yard touchdown catch against the Philadelphia Eagles on Oct. 17, 1965, for his first career score.

“I had always said that when I made my first touchdown, I was gonna throw the ball in the stands,” Jones later recalled. “They changed the rules in the offseason to I think a $500 fine for throwing the ball into the stands. And as I crossed the goal line my intention had always been to throw that ball into the stands, but I thought about that $500 and I threw it on the ground. So that was the original spike right there.”

Jones led the league with 13 touchdown catches in 1967 to earn the first of two straight Pro Bowl selections. Jones also owns another spot in NFL history. With Cleveland on Sept. 21, 1970, he returned a kickoff 94 yards for a touchdown against the New York Jets  on the debut of “Monday Night Football.”

The big play wideout is still the NFL’s all-time leader with a career average of 22.3 yards per catch. Jones caught 224 passes for 4,986 yards and 36 touchdowns in 87 games (59 starts) with the Giants (1964-69) and Browns (1970).

2. File this one under “hard to believe” or “strange, but true.”

The year was 2000 and Blockbuster (remember those guys?) was offered the chance to buy a young, up-and-coming DVD rental business called Netflix for as little as $50 million. Blockbuster CEO John Antioco refused. In fact, he reportedly laughed Netflix representatives out of his office and called them a “niche” business that would never compete with Blockbuster.

In 2010, Blockbuster declared bankruptcy with more than $900 million in debt. A few years later, Netflix had soared to more than 180 million subscribers around the world, and is now worth more than $170 billion. This another classic example of a company being stuck in the present and unable to comprehend the future (like most newspapers).

3. Next time you need (or simply want) to win some sort of trivia bet, drop this little nugget on your opponent.

According to expert vexillologists (people who study flags), there is only one national flag in the world that contains the color purple —  and that belongs to the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica.

The flag, adopted in 1978 after the country gained independence from Great Britain, features a green field representing the island’s forests, accompanied by yellow, white and black crosses. At its center is a red disk with 10 stars (for the 10 parishes on the island) — all encircling the purple plumage of the sisserou parrot, Dominica’s national bird.

For you amateur vexillologists reading this, Nicaragua and El Salvador do feature rainbows on their flags, but purple technically isn’t found in a spectral rainbow, so the flag of Dominica stands alone in its purple splendor.

Steve Thought O’ The Day — No, the Dominican Republic is not the same as Dominica. They are two separate countries. Dominica is a tiny island with 74,000 inhabitants, while the Dominican Republic, with more than 9 million inhabitants, is one of the largest countries in the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic is also home to a plethora of MLB stars past and present, including David Ortiz, Juan Soto, Sandy Alcantara and Rafael Devers.

Steve Eighinger writes daily for Muddy River News. He is also a substitute geography teacher.