The Colorado Buffaloes entered the AP Top 25 today, the number of journalists wishing to avoid being called out as haters by Deion Sanders in a press conference outnumbering those who crave that interaction. To be fair, this Colorado team does appear to rock, it is all sorts of fun, these voters are not wrong on that point, and with the top 25 an exercise with an unclear mandate—I still don’t understand if it’s supposed to be the 25 best teams or the 25 most accomplished teams or the 25 teams we most want to watch—it’s fair to have Coach Prime included. We are looking to craft narratives here, after all.
Regardless of the truth behind this, we’re evidently ready to believe that Colorado football is good, and with a game coming up on Saturday that they definitely can lose, we need to get this observation out before it all comes crashing down:
A lot of teams Deion Sanders touched are playing well right now.
There are the Buffaloes.
There are the Braves.
There are the Florida State Seminoles.
If you are a football or a baseball team with a noteworthy connection to Deion Sanders, you had a great weekend, and that sets up a scary inevitability:
This is finally the year the Cowboys are going to be good again.
Michigan Is Goofy
Fans sometimes complain that college athletes aren’t normal college students. To which we reply: Does anyone look more like a Michigan student than JJ McCarthy in his Free Harbaugh getup? It’s like scientists distilled the essence of a child who got straight B+’s at a good public school in the Detroit suburbs and doesn’t know his dad once test-drove a BMW eight times but never bought it because he was too scared to ask his wife for permission. No one has ever looked more Michigan than JJ McCarthy looks in that photograph. I don’t know if this makes Michigan’s branding executives elated or distraught, but the brand is consistent, they must give themselves that.
As though the Free Harbaugh fit wasn’t enough, Michigan performed a “tribute” to their suspended coach by coming out of the huddle at one point on Saturday in the 11-man I-Formation Harbaugh used a couple times in 2016. Thoughts:
- I bet Harbaugh was legitimately moved, watching this transpire from a secret corner of the locker room having called the play himself on an illegal radio.
- I wonder if this made East Carolina’s players feel better or worse about themselves. On the one hand, they got smoked by a team acting as though their coach had been suspended for helping elderly women cross the street. On the other, they were not the ones doing things like this.
What We Learned from Northwestern’s Loss to Rutgers
Look.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing to do.
But it’s rather undeniable, seeing how bad Northwestern football is this year after a significant change before preseason camp.
Hazing works.
DJ Uiagalelei Is NFL-Ready
Pro-style offense? I don’t know. Enough accuracy? No clue. Smart decisionmaker? I have no idea.
Can he win against the color rush? Yes.
The Bears Are Losers
The Bears might beat the Packers on Sunday. I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does. The Packers are beginning what they hope will be a short rebuild. The Bears are coming off ten straight losses and have convinced themselves they’re winning next year’s Super Bowl. It is a Bears–Packers matchup that’s played out a lot throughout recent history, and history doesn’t suggest it will work out well for the Bears, but history isn’t always correct.
To ensure that the loss is maximally embarrassing if it does happen, the Bears have taken to letting the world know how much they hate Green Bay, which was recently named the best place to live in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. Jaquan Brisker, a second-year safety who might be hurt, made some headlines with it this weekend, and I guess it’s been going on all offseason? I don’t know. I checked in with the Bears blogosphere and they’re sprinting around like mice on cocaine talking about not only Brisker’s comments, but something defensive tackle Justin Jones said back in June? Also, evidently Travis Hunter doesn’t want to be drafted by the Packers in 2025. The Bears blogosphere is having a day.
The Brisker comments weren’t actually all that inflammatory. He just said he hates Green Bay, which is fair, the Carthaginians probably weren’t big fans of the Roman Empire. Jones’s were evidently more brash, but it was three months ago, who cares. I think the weirder thing here is how much Bears fans are prioritizing their players disliking the Packers over what their players might do on the field. The Packers have broken Bears fan brains, to the point where for the Bears, beating the Packers for the first time since 2018 would be lifechanging, and even a few isolated comments acknowledging it’s a rivalry are apparently a victory themselves.
God Struck Down the Reds
Justin Steele takes the mound every start to God’s Gonna Cut You Down, by Johnny Cash, and Justin Steele is stacking victories this year, with Cincinnati beset by Covid late last week. It didn’t stop the Reds from splitting the four games this weekend, or from beating the Mariners yesterday, but dang it, having three starters and a reliever on the Covid IL is going to catch up with them soon!
They can’t get away with this forever.
Please don’t let the Reds get away with this forever.
Luis Rubiales Isn’t the Coach?
We’ve been messing this up. My apologies. I guess Luis Rubiales wasn’t the coach of the Spanish women’s national soccer team. It was someone named Jorge Vilda. Rubiales is the president of the RFEF, Spain’s national soccer organization. Vilda got fired today. Rubiales is still evidently impossible to fire. Spain has laws about firing the RFEF president, and Rubiales has evidently not qualified for firing yet according to those laws.
This does clear up why the complaints about travel and playing conditions came back to Rubiales back when this all started, way before the kiss. We had thought those complaints were not about Rubiales and were directed at RFEF instead. Little did we know that Rubiales was RFEF, as far as the situation was concerned. As is so often the case in life, the lesson in this incident for me is that it is difficult to haphazardly blog about an incident in a foreign country within a sport I don’t follow closely. I will try to heed that warning going forward.
Is Major League Soccer Rigged?
The Dutch men’s national coach, Louis van Gaal, heavily implied this weekend that FIFA rigged the Qatar World Cup so Messi would win it. Honestly, checks out. Not that the Netherlands would have beaten Argentina in a fair competition, but rather: If there is something out there that can be rigged, my impression is that FIFA will try to rig it. FIFA loves rigging. FIFA adores rigging.
This does open the door to a great opportunity for MLS officials. “Ah, yes, rigging games so Messi will dominate them. We do that too! It’s not that our players are terrible and we are the 20th-best soccer league in the world, worse than three whole leagues on one European island. We are rigging the games for Messi!”
In other MLS news, Austin FC tied this weekend. Don’t know who they played, don’t know how that result compared to expectations, not even positive that they tied, but I think they tied. In other soccer news, Burnley might stink. We are keeping tabs on the situation. They are allowing a whole bunch of goals. Far more goals than it is advisable to allow. You’re not playing Messi, Burnley! You don’t have to allow all those goals!
US Open Fans Are Wild
So far this US Open, fans have:
1. Smoked a lot of weed.
2. Trolled one of the Russian guys so thoroughly that he started shouting at them.
3. Started singing a Nazi anthem in support or opposition to a German guy?
Have you ever been riffing on a joke in a group of people only to see one person take the joke in a completely different direction than everyone else, and a vile direction at that? For example: Perhaps you are talking about how much you like watching sports on television but it is annoying that you have to go to the bathroom when the commercial breaks are so short, and someone jokes that toilets should come with televisions, and then a third person yells, “YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE IS COOL? PEDOPHILIA!” (RW and JB, if you are reading this, I am picturing DL saying this thing.)
That is what happened with the fan singing the Hitler song. You misread the room, buddy, and now we’re gonna tell the cops about you.
Credit to Alexander Zverev, the German man in question, for making clear that he is not proud of the genocide his country carried out in the 1930s and 40s. I don’t think he needed to make it clear, I think we could all give Alexander Zverev the benefit of the doubt on this, but it’s good to err on the side of taking it seriously, and by getting the fan kicked out and then also managing to say, Hey guys, the Holocaust wasn’t cool, in an offhanded way, Zverev threaded the needle. I don’t know how you do that last part. The offhanded dismissal of the Holocaust part. I am impressed. Here’s the quote, taken from The Athletic:
“I love when fans are loud. I love when fans are emotional. But I think me being German and not really proud of that history, it’s not really a great thing to do, and I think him sitting in one of the front rows, I think a lot of people heard it. So if I just don’t react, I think it’s bad from my side.”
An F1 Driver Chased Down a Guy Who Stole His Watch
Carlos Sainz had his watch stolen in Italy this weekend after the F1 race, but he and some friends and some bystanders managed to run the thief or thieves down and get it back. I’m a little disappointed in how this happened, to be honest. I think it was on foot. I was hoping, when I saw the headline, that he had chased the guy down in an F1 car. You think you’re slick, Pickpocket Rick? Wait ‘til Carlos Sainz uses DRS on you.
Outback Steakhouse Is Proud of Its Servers
Stephen Mallozzi, an Outback Steakhouse server and professional racecar driver, got his sometimes employer to sponsor his truck in his other job. Behold the beauty of the Bloomin’ Onion, NASCAR fans.
In other NASCAR news, the Southern 500 was this weekend and Darlington was having a problem with some of the lights on the track, and when they struggled to fix it NASCAR asked the drivers if they could just drive in a little bit of darkness, and when the drivers said “absolutely not” NASCAR had to wave a red flag for a bit. I love how much NASCAR decision is by consensus. You guys cool with this? No? Whoops. Oh yeah, of course we were joking, of course we wouldn’t make you drive in an environment where it’s hard to tell where the wall is. Yeah, yep, yes. We’ll get it fixed right now.
Álex Palou: IndyCar Champion (Again)
Álex Palou won his second IndyCar title, and I can’t remember if that’s consecutive or not, and I also understand the race this weekend was not IndyCar’s best. Hate to see it for our guys. We need to get together with IndyCar this offseason and do some branding. I know of another once-dominant sporting competition that’s got a big spring coming up in Indianapolis. Maybe we could help one another. (I’m suggesting that Hélio Castroneves donate a ton of milk to the NIT.)
Joe Kelly vs. Anonymous Minor Leaguers
Big (simulated) game for our hero Joe Kelly today, if everything’s still going according to plan. As of Friday, it was. Good bullpen on Friday, say the reports. Am I scared? Yes. But I am always fearful before the might of Joe Kelly.
