What Ben Shelton Just Did at 3:33 in the Morning

The ace was clocked at 146 miles an hour, out wide, unreturnable, and Ben Shelton turned and grinned at his box before the ball had even landed. It was 3:33 on Wednesday morning at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the latest a match has ever finished at the US Open, and the people who’d stuck around were […]

2026 NFL Predictions: Division by Division

Tonight’s season opener is a Super Bowl LX rematch, Patriots at Seahawks, and neither team is my pick to win its own division this year. That tells you most of what you need to know about where 2026 stands. Ten teams changed head coaches this offseason, tying the most turnover the league has seen in […]

Who Actually Failed J.J. McCarthy?

Kevin O’Connell had a nice, tidy piece of quarterback philosophy that he liked to reach for back in September of 2024: organizations fail young quarterbacks before young quarterbacks fail organizations. It’s a good line. It’s exactly the kind of thing a head coach says to protect a rookie who just tore his meniscus in the […]

Matchweek 3: Two Teams Are Playing a Different Sport Than Everyone Else

Three games into the season, and the Premier League has already sorted itself into two piles. Pile one: Manchester City and Arsenal, both perfect, both on nine points, treating the rest of the division like a formality. Pile two: everybody else, who spent the weekend trading two-goal leads back and forth like a grenade nobody […]

Week One Was Mostly Honest (Except About the Time); A Week 1 College Football Review

Every year, college football’s opening weekend hands you a stack of information you’re contractually required to overreact to and then quietly disown by October. A team beats a bad opponent by 40 and you decide they’re back. A team loses to a worse opponent and you decide the coach should be fired by Tuesday. Sometimes […]

The NFL Is Doing the One Thing It Loves Most: Making You Watch the Rematch

Eleven years ago, Tom Brady beat Russell Wilson in a Super Bowl that turned on a goal-line interception nobody in Seattle has fully forgiven. Next Wednesday, the Patriots and Seahawks open the 2026 season by playing each other again, seven months removed from the Seahawks winning this Super Bowl too, 29-13, at Levi’s Stadium, on […]

College Football’s Real Season Starts This Weekend. Week 0 Already Raised the Stakes.

Trent Mosley had played zero college football games in his life heading into Saturday. By the fourth quarter, USC was up 32 points and Mosley had turned into the best story of opening weekend: seven catches, 118 yards, a touchdown, and a 41-yard punt return on his very first career touch in the return game. […]