A problem with the NBA is that its regular season is nearly inconsequential. The league’s season structure is very good at getting its best teams into the Finals, but it’s also very good at putting ten teams into the playoffs that have no chance at a title, reducing the leverage of individual games to almost always near-zero. The playoffs are exciting—even the games between filler teams—but the regular season is mind-numbing. Especially now that teams are learning the importance of rest.
The NFL does not have the same situation. Individual games retain leverage, nobody is resting stars, most of the teams in the playoff field could believably win the Super Bowl. But did any of the games last week really capture a casual fan? Dolphins vs. Chargers should have been the one, two teams wrestling for playoff slots, but even that fell flat. The teams are good enough that you’ll be able to talk yourself into them come January. Talking yourself into a team isn’t the same as being compelled.
There are two problems here, as I see it, and both stem from the season’s recent restructuring.
The first is that the regular season’s increase in length, even though only a six percent jump, has diluted the leverage of individual games by enough to introduce tedium. Week 14, in the NFL we were used to, was the playoff push. Teams were getting mathematically eliminated. Now…there’s still technically a path for the Packers, even at 5-8.
The second isn’t that the playoff field is larger—the Chargers and Patriots and Jets and Giants and Commanders and Seahawks are all fine as potential playoff underdogs—but that the bye is too rare. Maybe I’ve just not gotten used to it yet, but the absence of a second bye in each conference is throwing me off. The Vikings and Niners should be in a complicated tiebreaker-strewn tug-of-war for the right to a week’s breather. Instead, the Bills are just trying to hold off the Chiefs, with the loser still a hearty favorite to reach the Conference Championship but with a new minor inconvenience of a Wild Card Game tossed into their path.
Again, maybe I’m just having a hard time getting used to it. I’m not saying it’s the worst thing for the sport or anything either, and I understand that this is making everybody more money, which is all well and good. But I’m having a hard time feeling captivated by this NFL season. Even with Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes doing a Federer vs. Nadal bit and Jalen Hurts breaking out and the Bengals ascendant again. Something’s missing, and I think we may have experienced subtraction by addition.
Ok, UCLA’s Really Good
We’d been waiting for UCLA to show us something, and show us something they did. With Kentucky waiting on Saturday at Madison Square Garden and an understandable foe to lose to standing in their way, the Bruins took Maryland’s face and shoved it into a pile of conveniently available fermenting dog poo. Mick Cronin’s team had as many players in double figures last night as they had offensive turnovers. Mick Cronin’s team let Maryland shooting an above-average average 37% from deep and still won by 27. Jaylen Clark made Maryland his son.
Some of this is Maryland. They’ve outperformed expectations by a wide margin, but they’ve looked terrible now three games in a row in the first half of the first half, and this time they couldn’t make it close, or even respectable, by the end. This course correction was probably coming.
Most of it, though, is UCLA. We’d been hesitant on them because they couldn’t get it done against either of Illinois or Baylor back in Las Vegas before Thanksgiving. They answered our question, we think. They showed they can be a dominant force. They showed they can win emphatically in a road environment with a pulse. That was up there as one of the most impressive wins by anyone all season. Welcome to our contender category, UCLA. Win on Saturday and you might be at least the temporary favorite.
Another important thing here? UCLA’s been there in recent years, and they’re well-rounded, and they have no conspicuous major flaw. Houston’s offense disappears at times. UConn’s gotten great in sudden fashion, which might last but often doesn’t last. Tennessee is mediocre at scoring. Purdue is mediocre at defending. Virginia has really bounced back, but there are sustainability questions there (and they Cavaliers are only ninth in KenPom, which is a red flag). Kansas is the closest to UCLA in these areas, but they’ve laid an egg (against Tennessee) which UCLA hasn’t laid, and the Jayhawks’ overall body of work isn’t what the Bruins’ is yet. UCLA checks all the boxes for a believable title contender. It doesn’t mean they’re actually the favorite, but if forced to fill out a bracket today, it’d be hard to find a team which inspires more confidence. The fact this all changed because of one game kind of illustrates how much college basketball’s waiting for a favorite right now.
The Bulls’ Point Differential
Going back to our opening point: This doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter how good the Bulls are. They were a playoff filler team at best, and the way we consume the NBA, titles are all that counts. There is no believable path to a title team with the current Bulls roster.
But, after yet another close loss last night, let’s check their Pythagorean Win-Loss, which with a point differential of only -7, is…13-14. So, they should be two wins better than they are. Checks out.
The Bullpen Build Begins
The Cubs signed Brad Boxberger today, a high-upside, proven veteran reliever. They got him for fewer than three million dollars. It’s exactly the kind of thing they did a ton of last offseason, and it helped them out a lot at the trade deadline as sellers, but it could also help them out if they’re buyers, because guys like Brad Boxberger—if they’re having good years, and a $3M bet is the right-sized bet on that kind of thing—are whom buyers want.
Three thoughts about the Cubs discourse as a whole these days:
The Long Term Exists
A lot of Cubs voices seem to want to win in 2023, everything else be damned. This feels like the opposite of what Jed Hoyer wants, which is probably where a lot of the anger is arising. There are tradeoffs, and titles are the goal (though in baseball, with every playoff team a believable champion thanks to the nature of the game, the playoff chase matters and so there are more gradient levels of success than in the NBA or possibly now the NFL), and people are going to be really pissed in 2026 if going balls out for 2023 won the Cubs 90 games but made that their ceiling in 2025.
Top-Six vs. Top-One
Going off of that: I’ve been getting at this, but there are reasonable things to ask from an owner and there are unreasonable things to ask when it comes to payroll. Idealistically, yes, every owner would want to win so badly that they’d be willing to spend through the roof. But we aren’t in that world right now, and I don’t know, it feels weird for me to ask owners to actually throw out money that way. It’s not my money.
In the real world, you just can’t bank on having Steve Cohen own your team, and if you do, you run the risk of becoming the late-George Steinbrenner Yankees, the team trying to win with money and money alone when it takes a lot more than money to win. Again, you can get idealistic and say you want your team to spend the most on free agents and invest the most resources into the farm system, but it’s the latter one that’s the better investment (we will come back to this).
Where I land, then, is that you do want your owner to be willing to spend, and to spend proportionally to the size of the team’s revenue. That’s a fair thing to ask. Forbes has the Cubs as a top-five franchise in terms of value? The Mets aren’t in that top five? It’s reasonable to ask the Cubs to have a top-six payroll. But. Top-one? That’s asking a lot, and the tie between payroll and wins is loose enough to say that spending that much money can be a colossal waste. It shouldn’t hurt winning. Saying it hurts winning is a stretch. But it might not really help that much.
Ricketts has been deceitful. He’s possibly been a little stingy. But don’t ask the guy to spend like Cohen. That’s silly.
How to Win
The ultimate question is how to win baseball games. Jed Hoyer is under fire right now for, in a private but not off-the-record conversation with notorious pot-stirrer Jesse Rogers, observing that the Rays’ approach seems to be very successful. Rogers said you need stars to win, and Hoyer, possibly also remembering that Drew Smyly was the fourth-highest paid player on the 2021 World Series Champions’ payroll, said something like, “Do you?”
You win by putting the best players on the field. This is simple. But the best players tend to be between 27 and 30 years in age, and at the front end of that, they’re yet to reach free agency, so they’re almost always some variation of homegrown. You can chase free agents to your heart’s content, but unless they’re old enough or bold enough to accept real short-term deals, they’re going to be good for a few years and then turn into budget-cloggers (and field-cloggers, because they’re often still too productive to be cut).
There’s a difference between saying, “The Rays win and therefore we should emulate them by having one of the lowest payrolls in the sport,” and saying, “The Rays win and therefore we should emulate them by spending every resource necessary to be the best in the game at drafting and player development and scouting for trades and in-game strategy.” The Cubs might never spend like Steve Cohen, but they’re also not going to spend like the Rays. If they can build a franchise that’s 90% as efficient as the Rays and spends 250% of what the Rays spend, that franchise is going to win a ton of games. But running a franchise like, let’s say, the White Sox—who spend 250% of what the Rays spend but are far more inefficient—leads to losing, and specifically to losing in a very frustrating way.
So, yes, I’m glad the Cubs didn’t even make Carlos Correa a formal offer. The price tag—mostly the years necessary—was nuts, and it was probably wrong. I don’t want Jed Hoyer to try to be Farhan Zaidi. I want Jed Hoyer to try to be Andrew Friedman with better luck.
One more thing: Nick Madrigal was one of the most valuable players in the game two summers ago, when the Cubs acquired him. Get that man healthy and you probably have a pretty damn good second baseman to go with your pretty damn good shortstop. Yes, Dansby Swanson would make the infield deeper and better, but Madrigal isn’t worthless, so stop being idiots and treating him as an afterthought. Behind Justin Steele, Seiya Suzuki, and Nico Hoerner, he’s the fourth-most important person on the 2025 Cubs right now, and that isn’t a knock on the 2025 Cubs. No, he isn’t what he was, but there’s a lot still there.
**
Viewing schedule tonight, second screen rotation in italics (no college basketball of note, so we’re living in Brock Purdy-land, friends):
NFL (the only game)
- 8:15 PM EST: San Francisco @ Seattle (Prime)
NBA (the best game)
- 8:00 PM EST: Milwaukee @ Memphis (NBA TV)
NHL (the best game)’
- 7:00 PM EST: Toronto @ New York Rangers (ESPN+)
