The Sucker

On a Thursday evening in September, I excused myself from the family dinner table and slipped into my bedroom. I didn’t want my kids to see what I was about to do.

With the door locked behind me, I pulled out my phone and downloaded the DraftKings betting app. I felt a certain thrill as I typed in my debit-card information and deposited $500. The first game of the NFL season was a few minutes away. Anything seemed possible.

I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead.

A few days later, I sat across from my bishop, explaining the experiment and watching a look of pastoral concern come over his face. After some consideration, he said (a bit tentatively, if I’m being honest), “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.” He grasped the difference between gambling with my own money and using my employer’s for research purposes. But he had also seen too many lives wrecked by vice to let me leave without a warning. He told me stories he’d heard about upstanding family men who had let an initially modest gambling habit ruin them, and a cautionary tale about a churchgoing lawyer who developed an unhealthy curiosity about sex work after handling a prostitution case and wound up devastating his family.

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

Fifteen minutes before kickoff, I scrolled through the available wagers on DraftKings in wide-eyed bewilderment. Struggling to make sense of the terminology—Profit boosts? Alternative spreads?—I punched in bets almost at random. I bet that the Eagles would beat the Cowboys by at least nine points, based on the sophisticated premise that the Eagles had won the previous Super Bowl and the Cowboys had not. I placed a bet that Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts would throw for more than 200 yards, and wagered on something called a “same-game parlay” that would pay out if both Hurts and running back Saquon Barkley scored touchdowns.

Then, after tucking in my kids for the night, I turned on the TV in our bedroom and settled in next to my wife, Annie.

Watching the game was unexpectedly stressful. Toggling among my five different bets—monitoring their progress, weighing live “cash out” options—left me feeling harried and sweaty. Four seconds into the game, I got a taste of the capriciousness of the enterprise when the Eagles’ best defender inexplicably spit on the Cowboys’ quarterback and got himself ejected. Had the Eagles’ chances of beating the spread, and my chances at winning $75, just been expectorated away?

Ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them.

But the experience was also strangely mesmerizing. For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets. Most of my bets ended up losing, but the long-shot Hurts-Barkley parlay hit, and when the game ended, I calculated that I was up $20.

The next morning, I proudly shared the news with Annie, who high-fived me and immediately began to fantasize about how we would spend my winnings for the season. Could we replace our dying KitchenAid mixer? Remodel the kitchen pantry? Like so many wives before her, she had looked upon my foray into sports gambling with a bemused air of exasperation; now she was seeing a potential upside.

I laughed at her sudden enthusiasm—but I was starting to get ideas myself. I had made $20 on my very first night of gambling. Scale up the wager sizes, multiply across all 272 games in the NFL season, throw in some NBA and college football, and I stood to make—what, $10,000? $20,000? More?

I knew, of course, that I wouldn’t win every bet. But I didn’t see the harm in dreaming. As Annie and I traded home-improvement fantasies, I tried my best not to dwell on the last thing the bishop had said to me: “Be careful.” 

Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong? [...]

Week Two

Total gambled: $376.00
Down $58.15

If I was going to do this, I decided, I would need a gambling guru—someone to talk me through the basics of sound sports betting (if such a thing existed) and teach me best practices.

The obvious choice was Nate Silver, America’s most famous statistics nerd. Silver first made a name for himself as the founder of 538, an election-forecasting website that accurately predicted the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 presidential campaign. A few years ago, Silver, citing a midlife crisis and political fatigue, discarded the pundit suits, threw on a baseball cap, and started writing more about gambling. He launched a newsletter full of sophisticated sports-betting models and wrote a book about the psychology of successful gamblers. He estimates that he has netted in the “mid–six figures” over the course of his gambling life. If anyone could turn me into a respectable bettor, I figured, it was him.

Before our first call, I sheepishly sent Silver my week-one bet slips. After that first triumphant game, things had gone downhill. Scrolling through DraftKings’ offerings, I had turned into a little kid at a carnival, emptying my parents’ wallet into any ring toss or high striker that caught my eye. I’d taken fliers on games without doing any research, and placed live bets on whatever ESPN happened to be showing when I turned on the TV. On Saturday afternoon, while casually watching a random college-football game with my brother, I bet $10 that the point total wouldn’t go over 52.5, lost, tried to make my money back with a new bet that it wouldn’t go over 61.5, and lost that one too. Of the 14 wagers I’d placed in my first week, I’d won three.

Silver pulled up my slips when we got on the phone, and began to audibly react as he scrolled:

“Okay …”

“Oh.”

“Oh no.” He started laughing.

Is it possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver? Apparently, yes.

Perhaps sensing my humiliation, he tried to soften his assessment. “Look, the nice way to put it is that you’re betting like a recreational bettor.” I took this as a withering insult.

Silver laid out some basic realities of the sports-betting economy. The books effectively charge you about 4.5 percent for every bet you place, he explained, which means it isn’t enough to win 50.1 percent of the time; you have to win 52.5 percent of your bets just to break even, and that’s before taxes. My most obvious mistake, he said, was that I was using only DraftKings. To find edges, I would need to shop for lines across at least three or four books every week.

He gave me other tips, too: Avoid “prop bets” on individual players (Josh Allen to rush for more than 50 yards) and multi-leg parlays, which pay out only if every outcome hits (the Chiefs cover the spread, the Ravens win, and the Chargers score more than 24 points). Props and parlays are how sportsbooks generate most of their profits. “They’re suckers’ bets,” Silver said, which made sense, given that I had already placed several of them.

Live betting—placing wagers in the middle of games—was also a bad idea, he told me, because it leads to gambling based on emotion more than logic. Also, televised games are broadcast on a delay, which means the sportsbooks can adjust lines before you even see what has happened on the field. You are, in effect, betting against people who live 20 seconds in the future.

To guard against emotional betting, Silver suggested a Tuesday-morning ritual: I should sit in a quiet place, study the lines for that week’s games, gather information on injury reports and weather forecasts, and then place $100 bets on the six or seven games I liked best.

Before we hung up, I asked Silver what kind of profit would make it a successful season for me.

He seemed confused by the question. “If you make one penny, that would be better than 98 percent of people over an entire season,” Silver answered, as if this were obvious.

I was taken aback. Hadn’t Silver himself made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling? Yes, he said, but that was mostly from poker tournaments. Sports betting was a game of razor-thin margins and microscopic edges. NFL football was among the hardest sports to win money on—the lines were too sharp, the teams too evenly matched. Silver told me that, even with his quantish models and prognosticatory brilliance, he would consider it cause to celebrate if he broke even on the season.

by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Tyler Comrie/Getty

[ed. See also: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed (DS).]

12 Revelations About the PGA Tour's (Still Uncertain) Future

Although nothing concrete was announced regarding the future on Wednesday from PGA Tour headquarters, new CEO Brian Rolapp spent the majority of his inaugural Players Championship press conference signaling that the way things are will no longer be how they will be. Perhaps just as importantly, he signaled how. Here are the 12 revelations from Rolapp's remarks and what it means for the tour's future.

The PGA Tour is splitting in two

As Golf Digest reported earlier this year, the tour’s Future Competitions Committee is deep in discussions on creating a two-track competition system. Rolapp said the first track is expected to double the current eight signature events to 16 tournaments, alongside the four majors, the Players and the postseason. Running from late January to early September, the schedule will span 21 to 26 competitions. The second track will function as a promotion-and-relegation tool, with events spread across the calendar year and into the fall. This system does not replace the Korn Ferry Tour and other PGA Tour feeder circuits, which remain intact.

"We are evaluating the role of promotion and relegation across our competitive model," Rolapp said. "We are further strengthening our merit-based system and leaning into what makes professional golf so compelling: players earning their way to the top, with every event having greater meaning."

One of the recurring talking points of Rolapp's tenure has been “scarcity,” widely interpreted in the industry as the elimination of events. As Golf Digest has learned, the endangered events will likely be repositioned to the second track rather than cut entirely. The system essentially formalizes what has effectively been a two-tier structure for years.

The non-answer answer on rollback

At last year’s Tour Championship, Rolapp acknowledged he was still getting up to speed on the USGA and R&A's proposed golf ball rollback. On Wednesday, he made clear neither he nor the tour is ready to take a position.

"I think this is clearly a complex issue," Rolapp said. "From what I can tell, it comes down to two questions: Is distance a problem, and should it be addressed—[that’s] question No. 1. Question No. 2, does the current rule being proposed accomplish that? I've spoken with players, I've spoken with the governing bodies, I've spoken with golf ball manufacturers, I've spoken to fans. What's clear to me is that everybody has an opinion, and those opinions are clearly not consistent on either question.

“As far as our players, I know they're hitting prototypes. I hear all different things. Some are impacted; some that expected to be impacted are not. So as far as the PGA Tour is concerned, we have not taken a position. When we get comfortable with the rule and the data, we'll make a decision."

It's a diplomatic answer—but it's hardly an endorsement of the USGA/R&A proposal. Most of Rolapp's membership, sponsored by OEMs, opposes rollback, and picking that fight while bigger battles loom would be an unusual opening move.

Bigger cities returning to the schedule

As previously reported, the tour is pushing to place events in larger metropolitan areas. "The PGA Tour competes in only four of the top 10 largest U.S. media markets," Rolapp said. "That is an opportunity. We are evaluating markets like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, and many others, places where there is strong fan demand for our sport and a chance to reach new fans." [...]

No more limited fields, no cut events

One of the signature event series’ most persistent criticisms—from fans, media and players alike—has been its small-field, no-cut format, which drew unflattering comparisons to LIV Golf. Rolapp said the new top tier will feature more players and a cut.

"Our best events will have larger fields. Ideally, we are targeting something closer to 120-player fields with a cut," Rolapp said. "That consistently matters. It helps fans know who they will see and showcases who they want to see—the most competitive players. It helps partners know what they're investing in, and it helps players better understand the competitive landscape in their schedules, all while embracing meritocracy."

In a related note …

Sponsor exemptions may be on the outs

Another source of fan frustration—one that cuts against the meritocracy ethos Rolapp keeps invoking—is the sponsor’s exemption system, along with the politics surrounding it. Rolapp appears to recognize the tension.

"It is my opinion we need a better competitive model because we should be delivering fields to the sponsors," he said. "We shouldn't make them work hard to put together a field. We're delivering them something, and they're supporting that. I think we need to be better partners in that. I also have an appreciation for the fact that professional golfers are independent contractors. So their level of job security is in some part tied to the exemptions they have earned. It's a balance. Those are all discussions we're having with the committee—to provide for those things but also deliver the purest competition that fans want."

A strong opener

As Golf Digest reported in January, the Hawaii swing is in danger of being cut. Rolapp said the tour wants to open its season out west with a finish shown on network television in prime time at an iconic venue. Perhaps Kapalua qualifies as "iconic," yet one possibility, sources told Golf Digest, is hosting the season opener at Torrey Pines.

Reunification with LIV is not a priority

Even before Rolapp arrived, the tour had quietly narrowed its reintegration focus to three players: Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka. Koepka has since returned, and DeChambeau's LIV contract expires this year. As for the others, or any broader rapprochement with LIV, Rolapp expressed no interest.

"My brief is to make the PGA Tour better," he said. "I'm open to whatever makes the PGA Tour better—better for fans, better for our members. That's what I'm focused on, and that's where I put all my efforts."

The tour may have a media-rights fight ahead

The tour's current media-rights deal runs until 2030. But it was negotiated in a pre-LIV world with a different competitive picture, and it predates the two-tier structure now being assembled. There is also the not-so-small matter of the NFL, which appears poised to re-enter the market aggressively and early, potentially swallowing up dollars networks might have been ready to spend on golf. Rolapp, who came from the NFL, spoke candidly about what that landscape could mean.

"I've read the same reports you have—that they would like to go to the media market earlier. The U.S. media rights market is $30 billion. The NFL currently accounts for $12 billion of that. They have made their public intentions clear; they would like to double that," Rolapp said. "So if you start doing that math and you're anyone other than the National Football League, you ask yourself: Next time I go to market, how do I make sure I have the most compelling product so that we can compete in what is a very complicated media ecosystem that's changing all the time? You see fans changing their habits—television versus streaming. You see the companies and the economics of the industry changing. So it's a very dynamic time in media.

"If you are in the sports business, it behooves you to put your house in order as much as possible. That is a significant part of the work that the Future Competition Committee is doing, and it's one of the reasons why it's so important."

Thinking outside the U.S.

While the PGA Tour schedule will remain mostly American based, Rolapp said that having an international presence is important as well. He acknowledged the benefits of the strategic alliance with the DP World Tour, and the notion that certain segments of the calendar would provide opportunities for international exposure.

“No, you should not think about this as purely in the confines of the United States. I think the bulk of our events will be, just because of the nature of the tour and the realities of our business. But we do want to do more internationally.

“I think in the fall, in other parts of the calendar, are great places to lean into that. I think you'll see parts of our schedule that will have an international component to it, even in the summer. So it is very much on our mind. We have not gotten to it in our committee work because we're sort of concentrating on the core of our schedule. But it is very much high on the agenda.

Don't expect a new schedule for 2027

There had been hope in the industry that changes would arrive as soon as next year. Last month at the Genesis Invitational, Tiger Woods moved to temper those expectations. Rolapp echoed the sentiment. Expect some adjustments in 2027—not a wholesale transformation.

"Once decisions have been made and finalized, changes will be implemented through a rolling approach," Rolapp said. "As Tiger has said recently, some elements could be addressed sooner for next season, with more significant change likely implemented for the 2028 season, pending the necessary work with our partners and other operational considerations.

"This is a complex process with many constituencies impacted. We will continue to move with urgency, but we are focused on getting it right."

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Orlando Ramirez, Tracy Wilcox

[ed. As a former NFL exec responsible for handling media businesses including digital media, NFL Network, advertising sales, NFL sponsorships, NFL media assets, television contracts, and digital media rights you can probably figure out where this guy is coming from. Might be good for growing the game, but is it good for golf? See also: Players 2026: Behind the scenes of the PGA Tour's renewed pursuit of major status for the Players (this week). ]

The NFL Franchise Tag: What It Is and Isn't

Tuesday morning’s news that the Seahawks are “unlikely” to use the franchise tag on running back Kenneth Walker III might sound ominous for the team’s chances to keep the reigning Super Bowl MVP.

It’s not.

That same report could basically be written about the Seahawks in every year — and increasingly about every NFL team.

The Seahawks have applied the franchise tag on a player only twice since general manager John Schneider arrived in 2010, and they actually used it only once. Just two NFL teams applied the tag last year.

In other words, the news says more about how players don’t like the franchise tag and how it comes with complications and unhappy consequences, compelling teams to avoid using it.

How franchise tags work

That may you leave wondering: just how does a franchise tag work?

At the most basic, it’s a designation (introduced in 1993) that an NFL team can place on one player per year who is set to become an unrestricted free agent, essentially keeping him for the upcoming season at a predetermined salary. Walker can become an unrestricted free agent when the new league year begins March 11.

There is a set period each season when teams can enact the franchise tag before free agency hits.

This year’s period began Tuesday and runs through March 3. If the tag is applied, the sides can continue to negotiate a long-term deal until July 15.

If no deal is reached, the tag takes effect for that season (some negotiating of amounts or incentives is allowed, but the length cannot be changed).

There are two types of franchise tags — exclusive and nonexclusive.

A nonexclusive tag is the most commonly used.

As described on the league’s website, a nonexclusive tag “is a one-year tender of the average of the top five salaries at the player’s position over the last five years, or 120 percent of his previous salary, whichever is greater. The tagged player can negotiate with other teams, but the current club owns the right to match any offer or receive two first-round draft picks as compensation if he signs with another team.”

The exclusive tag differs in that the tender “averages the top five salaries at the player’s position for the current year or 120 percent of his previous salary, whichever is greater,” and prevents the player from negotiation with other teams.

Official figures won’t be set until the NFL releases the final salary-cap number for 2026 (that number arrived last year on March 1).

The website OvertheCap.com, which tracks NFL financial issues, estimates that the tag number for running backs will be $14.536 million.

That would be a hefty raise for Walker, who made $8.4 million total over the past four seasons on his original rookie contract.

But the tag presents a few issues:

The player

Though the above number would be a good one-year salary for Walker, it doesn’t give him long-term security and means he would again face the same situation next year along with uncertainty all season about his future.

If there was already a lot of conjecture about his future this season, there would be even more in 2026 given Walker’s higher visibility as a Super Bowl MVP.

The one-year nature of the tag also has led to players feeling as if they are walking a tightrope through that season to avoid injury, or to avoid simply having a down season, before they can hit free agency again.

The tag can be rescinded at any time before the player signs it, putting both sides back at square one, and it could mean the player missed his best window to negotiate with other teams.

The team

One drawback for the team is that the entire salary counts toward the cap for that season. A tag for Walker would take up almost a quarter of the roughly $60 million in effective cap space that Seattle has, via OvertheCap.com.

A more amenable conclusion for each side is something along the lines of what Pro Football Focus recently estimated as his value — a three-year deal worth up to $27 million with $20 million guaranteed.

Such a deal would surely be structured to have a far lower cap hit than the overall $9 million average — say $6 million or so — and then increase steadily the final two years when the cap itself will also increase.

That would create more room for the Seahawks as they navigate what will be a challenging offseason.

While Seattle has ample cap space, there are also plenty of objectives on the to-do list. Other potential unrestricted free agents include cornerbacks Josh Jobe and Riq Woolen, safety Coby Bryant, receiver Rashid Shaheed and edge rusher Boye Mafe.

The Seahawks also can now offer extensions to every member of the 2023 draft class, which includes receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, cornerback Devon Witherspoon and edge rusher Derick Hall.

The Seahawks are likely to try to lock up JSN and Witherspoon for the long haul and avoid them entering the final year of their rookie contracts with some uncertainty about their future.

But both will likely command deals at the top of their positional wage scale, potentially taking a large chunk of cap space (and immediate cash in the form of big bonuses, as well).

The drawbacks of the tag are why they are often viewed as a “lose-lose” scenario. [...]

There is also what’s called a transition tag, which is a one-year tender for the average of the top 10 salaries at the position as opposed to the top five, which for Walker this year is estimated at $11.72 million.

But that tag guarantees teams only the right to match any offer the player receives and no potential compensation if he signs elsewhere. It’s been used only six times in the past 10 years throughout the league.

To be sure, Seattle faces a challenge in re-signing Walker. He’s rightfully going to want to get the best deal possible at a time when his market is the most heated — PFF rates him as the No. 6 free agent available overall and the top running back...

But Tuesday’s news does nothing to change the basics of the situation — that Seattle hopes to re-sign Walker to a long-term deal, and that Walker hopes to get life-changing security.

by Bob Condotta, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Nick Wagner/Seattle Times
[ed. I've never understood the franchise tag, just figured it was a way to keep a valuable player from being lost to free agency. Obviously it's a lot more complicated than that, but still not sure I understand all the finer details (and don't even start with cap space decisions).]

$180 LX Hammer Burger

Super Bowl LX isn’t just about football, it’s about excess. And this year, nothing captures that better than the LX Hammer Burger.

Yes, it costs $180.
No, that’s not a typo.

Created by Levy Restaurants, the LX Hammer Burger is the most over-the-top menu item at Super Bowl LX, and only 200 of them are being made for the entire day.

If you manage to get one, you’re not just buying a burger — you’re buying a Super Bowl flex.

What’s on the LX Hammer Burger?

This isn’t your standard stadium cheeseburger.

The LX Hammer Burger features:

• A juicy cheeseburger patty
• Braised bone-in beef shank, slow-cooked for maximum richness
• Roasted mirepoix demi-glace, adding deep, savory flavor
• Point Reyes bleu cheese fondue, melted and dripping down the sides
• All served on a freshly baked brioche bun

Oh — and the bone stays in. Because subtlety is not the goal here...

Why Is It $180?

Three reasons:

• Scarcity – Only 200 burgers are being made
• Ingredients – Bone-in beef shank, premium bleu cheese, and demi-glace aren’t cheap
• Super Bowl Tax – This is the biggest sporting event on the planet, and exclusivity sells

At Super Bowl LX, the LX Hammer Burger isn’t about value. It’s about the experience — and the bragging rights.

The Ultimate Super Bowl Food Flex

Every Super Bowl has its viral food item. Some years it’s gold-leaf steaks. Other years it’s absurd cocktails or luxury desserts.

This year, it’s a $180 burger with a bone sticking out of it.

by Don Drysdale, Detroit Sports Nation | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Man, that is one ugly burger. Probably a good idea to notify hospital Emergency ahead of time - incoming! No reports on how many were sold. Just stick with any old regular one, which (I'm guessing) would still probably run you $50.]

Bad Bunny Goes to the Super Bowl

Bad Bunny, Super Bowl LX
Image: ABC via (more)

[ed. What a show. Awesome (and I'm not especially a Bad Bunny fan). What did it all mean? All explained here. Meanwhile, in an effort to infuse politics into absolutely everything, there was that other competing, half-assed, halftime show:]

***

“Wear the mission. Text merch to 71776 for official TPUSA merch.”

Those were the first words greeting thousands of viewers as they joined Turning Point’s YouTube channel for the 15-minute countdown before their alternate All-American Halftime Show, as a chyron ran nonstop at the bottom of the screen, hawking merchandise and begging for text signups...

Unfortunately, the All-American Halftime Show was unable to evoke much more than a shrug, with halfhearted pop-country performances that showed the limitations of booking a big show with minimal talent. (...)

It’s jarring to remember that, prior to MAGA, Kid Rock’s biggest political affiliation was stumping for Mitt Romney’s milquetoast 2012 presidential campaign. Yet in 2016 — the year after his singles last hit the Billboard Hot 100 — he rode hard for the loud-mouthed Trump. Since then, he’s been riding that wave of partisan relevancy, popping up at random functions to rap at puzzled congressmen and sing mawkish ballads to wealthy donors. Hey, the Trump family is making money off of this MAGA thing — why can’t other grifters with merch stores full of American flag gear jump on the train?

Meanwhile, while the Turning Point show screamed about patriotism, Bad Bunny’s official show was filled with highlight after highlight of things that are exciting about America: a nation full of people who came here with talent and differences worth embracing. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, the visual storytelling evoked so many people living the American dream, from the workers in the opening segment, to elderly folks, female friendships, dancing, drinks, and unabashed jubilation and unity.

Ignore the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a few guys grinding on each other, and there was even plenty that the MAGA crowd would enjoy if they bothered to watch it: A real-life wedding! Beautiful women dancing! A great, big declaration of “God Bless America”!

But there was never going to be a good-faith effort to meet Bad Bunny’s show halfway. Like clockwork, Trump sent out a long message on Truth Social minutes after it ended, slamming it as quickly as possible. (Note to Trump: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying” … he sings in Spanish, dude! Better take that cognitive test again.)

In the end, the final words shown during Bad Bunny’s performance were seen on a massive video screen: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

The final words on the Turning Point broadcast? “Get involved,” next to a QR code begging for more money.

by William Earl, Variety |  Read more:

Savor Super Bowl LX, Seattle. Seahawks Fans Know It Can Be Fleeting

These games aren’t guaranteed.

But once, Pete Carroll spoke and everything seemed possible — infinite confetti, a perpetual parade. It was Feb. 5, 2014, three days after the Seahawks dominated the Denver Broncos 43-8 in Super Bowl 48. The franchise’s first championship parade started near the Space Needle, before sashaying along Fourth Avenue, past an estimated 700,000 bystanders bundled in green and blue. Running back Marshawn Lynch manned the hood of a duck boat, beating a drum and firing Skittles to his hungry fans.

At the parade’s end point, CenturyLink Field, Carroll stood on a crowded stage and saw the future.

“This is an extraordinary group of young men that have come together,” he said to 50,000 euphoric fans, with his team behind him and the Lombardi Trophy to his left. “They have come together to do something very special, and it’s not just one year. We’re just getting warmed up, if you know what I’m talking about.”

That was 12 years ago. Twelve frustrating football Februaries ago. One dynasty-denying end-zone interception ago. One Legion of Boom and one Beast Mode ago. Seven playoff losses ago. One hard, lasting lesson ago.

These games aren’t guaranteed. That’s why they matter.

That 12-year winter makes Super Bowl LX, between the Seahawks and New England Patriots at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., matter even more.

It matters for Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold, who found a home here, doubted and discarded but somehow undeterred. And for second-year coach Mike Macdonald, who was a 26-year-old soon-to-be intern with the Baltimore Ravens when Carroll stood on that stage.

It matters for general manager John Schneider, the NFL’s Executive of the Year, who took the keys from Carroll two years ago and built a juggernaut. (...)

Maybe it doesn’t matter for you, specifically. I won’t argue otherwise. Football, a violent and unforgiving sport, is not for everyone.

But broadly? It matters, maybe more than ever. In an increasingly fractured society, where halftime performer Bad Bunny is boycotted by some and beloved by so many more, sports are a gallon of glue — a unifying force.

It matters for a sports city where the Sonics were stolen. Where parades are precious and these games aren’t guaranteed. Where it often rains, but only rains Skittles once...

For the 12s who waited through a 12-year winter. When it comes to traffic or titles, in this town, waits are nothing new.

So, eat the nachos. Wear the jerseys. Fly the 12 flags. Believe that better weather is coming by kickoff.

Long winters make for satisfying springs, if you know what I’m talking about.

It took a while, but the Seahawks may be warming up.

by Mike Vorel, Seattle Times |  Read more:
Image: Nick Wagner

[ed. Yay! Here we go... (rooting for my favorite corporation!). UPDATE: Well, they did it; but otherwise, a pretty boring game (except for Mr. Bunny!), and an anticlimactic ending to the season. Oh well, whatever... we'll take it. Love this quote: "The Seahawks and the Patriots did their part by offering up a game of punishing defense and attritional offense that had all the carefree charm of a medieval torture procedure. Can football be normal again? That remains unclear, but on this evidence it can certainly be boring, which is maybe a form of progress."]

The Play That Killed a Dynasty

For Marshawn Lynch, the Super Bowl’s most infamous choice felt like a broken pact.

When it happened, as tens of millions of viewers let out yelps of indignation, elation or anguish, Marshawn Lynch laughed.

You probably weren’t aware of the mystified running back’s exact reaction, but you surely know the play that provoked it. Eleven years ago, the Seattle Seahawks were on the verge of securing a second consecutive Super Bowl victory, a yard away from a triumphant touchdown that was set up to be Lynch’s. Like everyone else, the powerful running back was shocked that coach Pete Carroll went with a different call: a Russell Wilson slant that was intercepted by Malcolm Butler, then a rookie cornerback for the New England Patriots.

Suddenly, it was over. The Seahawks had squandered a chance to win Super Bowl XLIX and, it would turn out, a shot at creating a dynasty. As Lynch looked over to the Seattle sideline and saw the tortured look on teammate Richard Sherman’s face, his own mouth dropped, and he did what came naturally.

“I could hear the emptiness, and I saw Sherm with a traumatic-ass face, like, ‘What the f— just happened? Like, God, are you serious?’” Lynch would recall years later. “And then at that moment, all I could do was laugh. Literally, like a dramatic-ass laugh. Mouth wide open — one of them kind of laughs.”

With the Seahawks and Patriots set to face off in Super Bowl LX on Sunday in Santa Clara, Calif., there has been renewed focus on what probably ranks as the most infamous play in the Ultimate Game’s six-decade history. It’s a subject I’ve explored in depth, beginning in the immediate aftermath — when Carroll attempted to explain his decision in a late-night text exchange — and throughout the years that followed. (...)

To Lynch, Carroll choosing to green-light offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell’s play call on second-and-goal from the 1 while trailing by 4 points with 26 seconds remaining wasn’t merely a perplexing move. In its aftermath, it also came to represent — for him and other players — a broken pact between the coaches and the men in uniform.

“It took confidence (away from) what the coaching staff and what the organization was preaching,” Lynch explained. “(Carroll) preaches, ‘We’re gonna run the ball down your throat,’ and all that type of s— like that. I think it took a lot of respect from them, ’cause they weren’t standing on s—. They weren’t ‘10 toes’ on what the f— they were preaching.” (...)

By 2013 the Seahawks, with a relentless, punishing and explosive defense that mirrored Lynch’s playing style, were the class of the NFL. They made it official with a 43-8 blowout of the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII.

The next season, the Seahawks’ stirring rally in the final minutes of regulation produced an epic NFC Championship Game victory over the Green Bay Packers. After that wild comeback, Lynch was convinced a second consecutive Lombardi Trophy would be theirs for the hoisting.

And after Jermaine Kearse’s amazing, four-bobble catch gave the Seahawks a first-and-goal at the 5 late in Super Bowl XLIX, Lynch had no doubt that he and his teammates would finish the job. He came close to doing it on the first-down carry, getting stopped just inside the 1, and was sure he’d score on the next play — until the call came in.

Carroll had his strategic reasons for passing, given that Seattle had one timeout, didn’t want to be boxed into throwing on third down and was facing a Patriots defense designed to stop a short-yardage run. Yet none of that resonated at the time.

“You could just see when the play call came in, motherf—–s are just looking around, like, ‘What the f—?’” Lynch said. “I don’t even think it really probably registered to a lot of individuals. I know for sure it didn’t register to me at first, ’cause I think I lined up on the opposite side.”

Butler’s interception was hard to process in a locker room full of proud, headstrong players who were mystified by the fact that the ball — and Seattle’s fate — hadn’t been in Lynch’s hands. Instead Wilson, considered a teacher’s pet by many of his edgier teammates, had been asked to throw the potential game-winning pass, with disastrous results.

After the game, the anger was palpable. Following his initial fit of laughter, Lynch’s next thought was, “S—, I got a bottle of Pure White Hennessy in the locker room, and it’s time to go get loaded.”...

“When does it go away? I’ll let you know.”

In Lynch’s eyes, it never really did. Once he and other players felt as though Carroll and his assistants had gone against what they’d claimed to stand for in that pivotal moment, trust was broken and suspicions were high.

“Hell yeah, it felt different,” Lynch recalled. “It felt like we had to go to work. Before, work didn’t feel like work; it was basically like a hangout. (But) just like with anything, if you deal with an unsolid individual — once they show you their hand — then you deal with them accordingly. And motherf—–s started dealing with the motherf—–s accordingly.

“Then, you know, it just became a s—show. It was a friction between what the players stood on and what they saw the coaches standing on. They weren’t standing on their word.” 

by Michael Silver, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Christian Petersen and Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
[ed. Still hurts. Probably a safe bet the Seahawks will never throw a pass on the one yard line in a Super Bowl again. But then, that would be the last thing anyone would expect. Right? See also: A hated pair of cleats and a near-benching that led to Malcolm Butler’s Super Bowl interception (Athletic).]

Wasted Management Open

[ed. So now they're calling it "The People's Tournament". Which, you know what that means. More stupid, drunken frat-boy idiocy at another Waste Management tournament (as if the Ryder Cup wasn't enough). Nothing against the players or the course, which are always spectacular. But the PGA is probably not interested in showcasing another weekend of famously boorish behavior (*scheduling it on Super Bowl Sunday is actually pretty funny). Interestingly, WM has a commercial out now promoting "green collar jobs" ie., jobs that require a green vest (over collared shirt, or not), of which WM has quite a few. Haven't seen that one before but expect it'll become a major theme for more companies as AI starts destroying more white collar jobs.]

The Questionable Science Behind the Odd-Looking Football Helmets

The N.F.L. claims Guardian Caps reduce the risk of concussions. The company that makes them says, “It has nothing to do with concussions.”

The first time Jared Wilson, a New England Patriots offensive lineman, is seen on the Super Bowl broadcast on Sunday, some viewers may wonder why he has such a big helmet.

It’s called a Guardian Cap, and Mr. Wilson is among about two dozen National Football League players who have worn the helmet covering in games this season. Not for comfort or style. Even the company that makes the cap acknowledges that it’s bulky and ugly. Rather, Wilson and others have worn it for its purported safety benefits.

The N.F.L. claims the cartoonish caps reduce the risk of getting a concussion, convincing some players that they are worth wearing. The company that designed and manufactures Guardian Caps, though, makes no such claim.

“No helmet, headgear or chin strap can prevent or eliminate the risk of concussions or other serious head injuries while playing sports or otherwise,” the product’s disclaimer warns. Instead, the company says its caps blunt the impact of smaller hits to the head that are linked to long-term brain damage.

“It has nothing to do with concussions,” said Erin Hanson, a co-founder of Guardian Sports, the Atlanta-area company that makes the cap. “We call concussions ‘the C word.’ This is about reducing the impact of all those hits every time. That’s all that was.”

The disconnect between the N.F.L.’s claims about the Guardian Caps and what the company promises is emblematic of the messy line between promotion and protection, and the power of the N.F.L. to sway football coaches and players trying to insulate themselves from the dangers of the sport.

An endorsement by the N.F.L., the country’s most visible and powerful sports league, can generate millions of dollars in sales for equipment makers, including Guardian Sports. The N.F.L.’s embrace of the caps, beginning in 2022, has led to a surge in orders from youth leagues to pro teams. About half a million players at all levels now wear them, Guardian Sports said.

“Anything I can do to save my brain, save my head,” said Kevin Dotson, an offensive lineman on the Los Angeles Rams who has worn the cap in games since last season.

The league claimed that the Guardian Cap had helped reduce concussions by more than 50 percent, which has put the company in the awkward position of embracing the spirit of the endorsement while distancing itself from the facts of it. Further complicating the situation: The model worn by pro and college players, the NXT, is not the same as the company’s mass-market product, the XT, which retails for $75. That model has less padding than the NXT, and may be less effective at limiting the impact of hits to the head, studies have shown.

Ms. Hanson said the company had struggled with whether to promote the N.F.L.’s claims about concussions. It decided to do so because the N.F.L.’s boasts might persuade young players to use the product, even if the benefits are not comparable. (...)

Guardian Caps are the latest in a wave of products that have emerged since researchers linked the sport to the progressive brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E. Scores of companies have introduced equipment that purports to prevent head injuries, from a silicone collar worn around a player’s neck, known as the Q-Collar, which is promoted as a way to give the brain an extra layer of cushioning, to G8RSkin Shiesty, a head covering that is worn under helmets and promises to significantly reduce concussion risk.

Independent neurologists are generally skeptical, if not outright dismissive, of the benefits of any product claiming to reduce concussions because few rigorous studies have been done to demonstrate their effectiveness.

Few products have received as much publicity as the Guardian Cap, though. Sales of the caps, which were introduced in 2012, took off after the company won the N.F.L.’s HeadHealthTECH Challenge in 2017 — two years after the league settled a lawsuit brought by more than 5,000 former players who accused the N.F.L. of hiding from them the dangers of concussions.

Guardian Sports received $20,000 from the league for additional testing, but the N.F.L.’s endorsement was priceless.

Orders for the caps from colleges, high schools and youth teams poured in. Nearly every college team in the top ranks practices with the caps. In 2021, researchers, including some affiliated with the N.F.L. and its players’ union, published a paper that said Guardian Caps reduced “head impact severity” by 9 percent.

That year, Guardian Sports introduced its NXT model, with an extra layer of padding for bigger, stronger players. The N.F.L. required linemen, tight ends and linebackers to wear them in training camp. In 2023, the mandate expanded to all contact practices, and running backs and fullbacks were added. Starting in 2024, wide receivers and defensive backs had to wear them in practices, and players could wear them in games. (...)

Researchers at Virginia Tech, which runs a well-regarded helmet-testing laboratory, found that players who wore the NXT version of the Guardian Cap experienced a 14 percent decline in rotational accelerations — basically, the turning of the head — and that their concussion risk was 34 percent lower than for players who wore only helmets.

The benefits were significantly lower for players who wore the XT, the model worn in youth leagues and high schools. Rotational acceleration was only 5 percent lower, and the concussion risk was reduced by 15 percent.

Stefan Duma, who leads the lab, said the smaller reductions, combined with better helmets and fewer full contact practices, suggested that the benefits of wearing the XT were negligible.

“We tested it thoroughly, and the benefits are just not there,” Dr. Duma said. “It’s all noise, no statistical difference in youth.”

Most parents and coaches, though, do not read research reports from testing labs, and there is little information on the Guardian Sports website that explains the difference in performance between the XT and NXT models. But looking at the testimonials on the website from Mr. Goodell and other N.F.L. luminaries, parents and coaches might believe they were buying the cap worn by the pros.

by Ken Belson, NY Times |  Read more:
Images: Audra Melton, NYT; Cooper Neill/Getty

Football Won’t Be Forever

Football occupies a strange place in American life. It’s the most popular sport in the country by an absurd margin, but it’s also the most controversial. It’s treated as a civic ritual in some places, a primitive distraction in others, and a kind of background noise almost everywhere.

For millions of people, football Sundays (and Saturdays) structure the week. For millions more, football represents everything that feels excessive, violent, or backward about American culture.

What makes football so hard to talk about is that none of these interpretations feels fully wrong or right. The game is violent, but also beautiful. It’s deeply commercial, yet genuinely communal. It’s hyper-engineered, obsessively optimized, ruthlessly controlled, while also delivering moments of genuine unpredictability that no scripted entertainment can match.

The writer Chuck Klosterman has spent much of his career thinking about how mass culture works, why certain things take hold, and what they reveal about the people who love them. In his new book, Football, he turns that lens on the most dominant cultural object in American life.

Klosterman is especially interested in football as a mediated experience. After all, it’s a game that most fans have never played, can’t meaningfully simulate, and only encounter through television. And yet we can’t get enough of it. Why is that? And why is it that football, of all things, continues to function as one of the last true monocultural rituals in a fragmented media landscape? (...)

You’re a football fan, but this book isn’t a love letter to the game. What were you trying to do?

I say it’s not a love letter because I think when people write about something they love, especially something they’ve loved for a long time, there’s an impulse to justify that love. To persuade the reader that this thing deserves the emotional weight the writer has given it. That’s not really what I’m interested in doing.

I approach football the same way I approach music or movies or any other subject I write about. It’s just criticism. I’m trying to understand what the thing is doing, how it works, and why it exists the way it does.

I’ve been thinking about football unconsciously for 40 years and more deliberately for at least 20. At some point it occurred to me that football is going to matter less in the future than it does now. That’s not a judgment. That’s just what happens to large cultural objects. Everything eventually recedes.

And when that happens, people are going to try to explain retroactively why football mattered so much. They’ll tell neat stories about violence or capitalism or distraction or American decline. And I think those explanations will mostly be wrong, or at least incomplete.

So what I wanted to do was describe what football means while we’re still living inside it. While it still feels normal and necessary rather than strange and historical. It’s almost like writing an obituary before the subject has died. (...)

Why football, though? Why does it dominate culture so completely?

A lot of it comes down to historical timing and structural compatibility.

Football emerges in the late 19th century, right after the Civil War, and it carries a metaphorical relationship to organized conflict. It’s a simulation of war, without all the death and geopolitical consequences. That metaphor is baked into the game at a very deep level.

Then television arrives, and football turns out to be perfectly suited for it. The stoppages, the structure, the anticipation between plays, the way action unfolds in short bursts, all translate beautifully to broadcast.

You describe the game as generating a sensation of chaotic freedom inside an environment of total control. How does that happen?

Football is one of the most engineered experiences people routinely engage with, even if they don’t think about it that way. Every play is designed in advance. It’s encoded into a language that only a small group of people fully understands. It’s transmitted through headsets, wristbands, and signals. It’s rehearsed endlessly during practice. And it has to be executed within very strict time constraints.

Behind every snap, there’s all this hierarchy. Coaches, coordinators, analysts, trainers, medical staff, league officials, rules committees. It’s a deeply bureaucratic system. In a lot of ways, it’s almost corporate. Everything is planned, regulated, and optimized.

And then the ball is snapped, and all of that structure suddenly recedes. For a few seconds, what you see feels spontaneous. Twenty-two people collide, react, adjust, and improvise in real time. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, even though you know it’s happening inside a very rigid framework.

That contrast is where the power comes from. You get unpredictability without existential risk. You get chaos that’s bounded. The play might fail or succeed, but the system itself is stable. There’s a beginning and an end. The whistle will blow. The next play will come.

I think that mirrors how a lot of people want to experience the world more generally. Most people don’t actually want true chaos. They want the feeling of danger without real danger, the feeling of freedom without losing the structure that makes life manageable.

Would football be as entertaining if there wasn’t this continual possibility that someone will get hurt?

I don’t think people want to see anyone get hurt. Football isn’t a blood sport in that sense. But risk matters. Meaning requires stakes.

It’s like climbing Everest. People don’t climb it because they want to die. But the fact that death is possible gives the act significance. If football eliminated serious risk entirely, it would become something else.

That’s why safety rule changes provoke such strong reactions. On the surface, those reactions sound crude. But they’re pointing at a real tension between safety and meaning.

by Sean Illing with Chuck Kloserman, Vox | Read more:
Image: Dean Rutz/Seattle Times
[ed. With rising interest and fan support for flag football these days, will it ever be a viable alternative given that (controlled) violence and risk are such fundamental elements of the game? Maybe, if we start to see participation at younger ages start to decline.]

Seahawks Win NFC Championship - In Pictures

Seahawks Win NFC Championship and the Super Bowl Might Be Easier

[ed. What a game. Something I'd like to highlight here are staff photographers for the Seattle Times who consistently produce amazing photos each week, especially Jennifer Buchanan and Dean Rutz. For another 70 or so pictures see: Photos: Seahawks beat Rams in NFC Championship thriller (there's a small paywall/subscription notice but you can get around it just by clicking on the photo behind the msg).

Bills Move On

Sean McDermott has been fired as head coach of the Buffalo Bills, the team announced Monday.

The 51-year-old McDermott was hired in 2017 and led the Bills to five AFC East division titles and eight playoff appearances in nine seasons.

While McDermott will exit the franchise, general manager Brandon Beane got a promotion, and will now be President of Football Operations. He'll lead the search for a new coach.

"Sean has done an admiral [sic] job of leading our football team for the past 9 seasons," owner Terry Pegula said in a statement. "But I feel we are in need of a new structure within our leadership to give this organization the best opportunity to take our team to the next level."

by Sean Leahy, Yahoo Sports |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. The NFL is becoming North Korea (produce quickly or be banished). I don't know anything about McDermott but that's not a bad record.]

How NIL is Failing College Sports

Editor’s Note (September 2025): This article was first published in May 2025. Since then, NIL controversies have only grown—lawsuits over transfers, new collective rules, and court rulings are fueling even more debate. The problems outlined below remain at the heart of the chaos.

When the NCAA implemented its interim policy on Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) in July 2021, it was heralded as a long-overdue victory for student-athletes. Finally, college athletes could monetize their personal brands while maintaining eligibility. But three years in, the reality of NIL has exposed deep, structural problems that threaten the very foundation of college sports.

Far from the fair, equitable system its proponents envisioned, NIL has morphed into a thinly veiled pay-for-play scheme dominated by wealthy donors, corporate interests, and an increasingly professionalized amateur sports landscape that’s leaving many athletes and institutions behind.

NIL Is Bad in Its Current Form, But the Concept Isn’t

Let’s be clear: this is not to say NIL is all bad. The core principle—that athletes deserve compensation for the use of their name, image, and likeness—remains valid and important. Student-athletes absolutely deserve to get paid. But this implementation ain’t it.

The problem is the execution. NIL went from zero to 200 MPH overnight with no guardrails. It’s like giving someone a supercar capable of high speeds and letting them drive it through downtown at rush hour. Just because a car can go that fast doesn’t mean it should outside of a sanctioned and governed NASCAR race. Similarly, NIL needed careful implementation with proper rules and oversight—not the free-for-all we’re currently witnessing.

NIL Is Bad for Creating the Collective Problem: Pay-for-Play in Disguise

The most troubling development in the NIL era has been the rise of “collectives” – donor-organized groups that pool money to facilitate NIL deals for athletes at specific schools. These collectives have quickly evolved from their original purpose into recruitment vehicles that effectively function as booster-funded payrolls.

College football’s biggest donors have orchestrated business ventures distributing five-, six- and seven-figure payments to athletes under the guise of endorsement opportunities and appearance fees. While technically legal within vague NCAA guidelines, these arrangements clearly violate the spirit of what NIL was supposed to be.

Consider the case of quarterback Nico Iamaleava, whose story perfectly illustrates the chaos. After signing with Tennessee on a lucrative NIL deal, he later tried to renegotiate his contract during the 2025 offseason. When Tennessee refused both because his performance didn’t warrant the increase and the amount was too high, Iamaleava explored other options. After other schools balked at his demands, he eventually landed at UCLA for significantly less money than he was seeking. Meanwhile, Texas will spend an astounding $40 million on its football roster in 2025-26. But that’s not the issue—why wouldn’t they if they can? The problem is that if another team wants to compete, there’s only one way forward: pay up.

This isn’t about athletes receiving fair compensation for actual marketing value – it’s about wealthy boosters creating slush funds to buy talent. And as long as deals include some nominal “deliverable” from the athlete and are signed after their national letter of intent, there’s little the NCAA can do to stop it. (SportsEpreneur Update as of September 2025: read more about the NIL Clearinghouse and the first NIL deal report.)

NIL Is Bad for Boosting Egos Instead of Programs

A particularly troubling aspect that’s emerged is how NIL has become an ego-driven playground for wealthy boosters. For many donors, it’s no longer about supporting their alma mater—it’s about directly influencing outcomes and claiming credit for wins.

These boosters are essentially treating college teams like fantasy sports with real money. They get a dopamine hit from watching “their” players succeed, knowing their financial contribution made it possible. It’s an addiction—the thrill of buying talent and then basking in reflected glory when that talent performs well.

This creates a dangerous dynamic where the interests of boosters, rather than educational or developmental goals, drive decisions. Coaches find themselves answering not just to athletic directors, but to the whims of deep-pocketed collectives who can control the talent pipeline.

[ed. ...and much more:]

NIL Is Bad for Widening the Gap: Competitive Balance Destroyed

NIL Is Bad for Creating Transfer Portal Chaos: The Free Agency Problem

NIL Is Bad for Athletes Making Short-Term Decisions

NIL Is Bad for the Athlete-Fan Relationship

NIL Is Bad for Corruption and Exploitation: The Dark Side

NIL Is Bad for College Sports’ Identity Crisis

NIL Is Bad for International Student-Athletes

NIL Is Bad, But Reform Is Possible

by SportsEMedia |  Read more:

Image: Tyler Kaufman/Getty
[ed. Money is killing sports (and most everything else), and nobody is even paying lip service to educational opportunities anymore. Should athletes get compensated for their contributions? Sure. But the current system is insane and needs more thought. See also: Limbo Field (HCB); and,  The college football spending cap is brand new, and here’s how schools already are ignoring it (The Athletic).]

The Real Charley (Hull)

Charley Hull’s Instagram tells a story. A trip to her English home told the real one (The Athletic)

Image: Sarah Stier/Getty Images/Getty Images

[ed. No BS free spirit.]

What Happens When an NFL Ball Goes Into the Stands?

It was Dec. 11, 2022, and Philadelphia Eagles third-year quarterback Jalen Hurts was building a campaign that would earn him MVP runner-up and his first Super Bowl nod.

In a Week 14 win against the New York Giants at MetLife Stadium, Hurts found a coverage gap and darted for a 10-yard touchdown run in the third quarter. It made him the first quarterback to post back-to-back seasons with at least 10 rushing touchdowns. The Pro Football Hall of Fame later announced that Hurts’ jersey and pants worn in that game would be put on display.

The broadcast showed Hurts running through the end zone and handing the ball to an Eagles fan in the first row. Paul Hamilton, the fan at the receiving end of that celebration, won’t forget that moment. But it’s not because he shook hands with the star player of his favorite team. Instead, it marked the beginning of the end of his Eagles and NFL fandom.

One year later, Hamilton filed a lawsuit against the NFL, MetLife Stadium, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and New Jersey State Police, claiming false arrest, false imprisonment, assault and battery, abuse of process and negligence. The NFL and Eagles were dismissed as defendants earlier this year, but the lawsuit remains unresolved against the other parties and is expected to extend into 2026.

Hamilton’s lawsuit says he was approached by stadium employees after Hurts handed him the ball, and “they misrepresented and lied to Mr. Hamilton claiming the football was not his property, and that he was violating law if he kept it and demanded that the football be returned.”

The lawsuit claims that an alternative gift was offered, but Hamilton did not want to give up the game ball. When he tried to leave, the lawsuit says Hamilton “was then thrown into a gate and forcibly held against it.” The lawsuit also claims that approximately 10 New Jersey State Police officers swarmed Hamilton and threatened arrest if he didn’t turn the ball over. Hamilton eventually exited with the ball and still has it in his possession...

Hamilton, now 34, hasn’t been back to an NFL game since the incident, nor does he plan to. He says he is “absolutely not” an Eagles fan anymore, nor a fan of the NFL.

“It’s any sports fan’s all-time high, followed by an all-time low. It’s emotionally very hard to comprehend how that feeling started and how that feeling ended,” Hamilton said. “I still struggle with it every day; it’s not like it’s gone away. It’s 2025, and it still feels like it was yesterday that they destroyed something for me.

by Jayna Bardahl, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Demetrius Robinson/The Athletic; Photo: G Fiume/Getty Images

Nazaré, Portugal

via:

The NFL’s Most Anonymous Men Are Also the Happiest: ‘My Life’s Not Real’

To be a professional long snapper is to have your worth measured by maybe a half-dozen plays every week. A pass-fail exam each time for a brotherhood of perfectionists. But the job is also a quest. Do it well enough, and there is stability and longevity in a game not noted for either. There is general health, or better odds for it. There are multimillion-dollar contracts that buy a lot of freedom when you’re done. So maybe you get a beer named after you, or maybe you close a Tony Robbins seminar at midnight, or maybe you just drop your kid at school and hit golf balls in paradise.

At a position more or less immune to the bloodthirst of the sport — to the idea of earning a living by inflicting pain — a snapping career can be a rapture. Thirty-two lightning bolts waiting for a bottle. “We’re always working to be better so we can stay and hang out with the cool kids,” says Tennessee Titans snapper Morgan Cox, now in his 16th season. “The joke has always been that we’re all the same guy, basically. We’re just fired up to be out here.”

Show up, work hard. Sling a ball through your legs. Lastly — in the not-so-refined words of the Prince of Pittsburgh — don’t be an a–hole.

And, lo, the gates swing open to football nirvana. (...)

Beyond the self-deprecation — seems it was a collectively transcendent moment when EA Sports put long snappers into its “Madden 26” video game — lies the truth that the job matters. The most common margin of victory in NFL regular-season games for the past quarter century? Three points. A reliable kicking operation, especially given the increasingly superpowered legs of the kickers themselves, is a weapon. A faulty one opens black holes.

So these men take the trade seriously. “I don’t know if people understand how much of an art snapping is, and how much detail goes into it,” Buffalo Bills snapper Reid Ferguson says. They work by the fraction of an inch. Aim small, miss small, and hit your spot, is how a college coach long ago explained it to former Bears snapper Patrick Mannelly, who put his name on an award annually given to the nation’s best college player at the position. On field goal attempts, the laces must hit the holder’s hands such that he simply puts the ball down before the kick. What looks like a fine effort might turn a snapper salty for a week. And never mind the catastrophe of an actual bad snap.

“It’s like you’re a professional dart thrower and you’ve got seven plays a game,” says Clint Gresham, the snapper for the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl XLVIII winners. “And if one of them is not perfect, then you’re kind of a failure.”

Thanks to a rule change in 2006, teams cannot set rushers up directly over the long snapper. It’s better, but only incrementally so: The metahumans to block are now less than a foot to the right and left. Imagine hunching over, throwing a ball perfectly and then contending with, say, former No. 1 overall pick and All-Pro linebacker Mario Williams in the A-gap. “I felt like he slapped me in the head twice before I even realized the play was happening,” says Cox, a five-time Pro Bowler.

“Everyone watches us Monday through Saturday and goes, ‘That looks like an easy job,’” says J.J. Jansen, who holds the Carolina Panthers career record for most games played, at 271 and counting. “Because Monday through Saturday, it is. But on Sunday at 4:15 p.m., when you gotta hit a game-winning field goal, everyone’s on the sideline praying.”

Still, the line at the door keeps getting longer.

That a line exists, at all, isn’t new. The list of participants at long snapping guru Chris Rubio’s camps who then went on to play in college dates back two decades. What’s wild is the current starting point. San Francisco 49ers snapper Jon Weeks first attended the Rubio camp in 2004, out of high school. By the time he was a senior at Baylor, revisiting as a counselor, morning sessions began with attendees in sixth grade. Ferguson remembers coaching a fourth-grader at the camp. And that fourth-grader, Quentin Skinner, went on to snap at LSU and Troy.

“It’s something that opens doors,” Weeks says. “Parents have realized, at least at the college level, you don’t have to be this 6-foot-3 monster to get your school paid for and play football.”

The depth of training is certainly an evolution from a Duke assistant coach telling Mannelly to hone the craft by hitting a goal post, stripped of padding, 10 times in a row after practice. This is more like building bent-over androids. “I’m addicted to snapping,” says Chris Stoll, who won the Mannelly Award in 2022 and signed a three-year contract with the Seahawks out of Penn State. “We can get so much better by just moving your thumb position or, like, keeping your weight on your insteps more.”

The math is daunting: hundreds of college spots bottlenecking into 32 NFL jobs. It doesn’t stop anyone from trying to squeeze through, given what’s on the other side.

A long snapper’s value, in short, is not being a problem. In one interpretation, that is tending to business and being a good dude. (...)

Disaster prevention and peace of mind, though, are mostly what the money is for. Scoring in the NFL in 2025 is tied for the second-highest rate ever. Every point is immense. Thus, per Over the Cap, 15 long snappers are signed for more than $1 million guaranteed. “You don’t realize how important they are until you don’t got one,” says longtime Steelers special teams coach Danny Smith. It’s not avant-garde personnel management; multiyear contracts for snappers date back decades. The outlay is minimal in a sport featuring 23 players with more than $100 million in guarantees. But it’s a reasonable price for one less thing to worry about.

“If I was the (coach) at the podium, it’s something I would never want to be thinking about,” Packers kicker Brandon McManus says. “When you feel like you have someone and you’re comfortable and can turn a blind eye to it, it’s a great feeling.” (...)

This golden ratio of trust and money, both hard-earned, creates enviable stability. “Most NFL players and most athletes in general have access to a ton of money, a ton of fame,“ Jansen says, “but they’re sort of nomads.” An NFL long snapper career, on average, lasts 7.5 years. The rate for all other positions is less than half that. How refreshing, in a game where tenure can be a punch line, to establish roots. To make a plan. Jansen has lived in three houses in one city while buying a small stake in the AHL Charlotte Checkers. Ferguson, who signed a four-year, $6.5 million extension in March, has invested in a restaurant and a soccer franchise in Buffalo. No, it is not the $250 million in guarantees Josh Allen received to quarterback the Bills, but any apples-to-apples comparison sort of misses the point.

At 31, the team’s most anonymous player already has steady footing for decades. “Whenever it does end, we’ve provided ourselves enough financial security to where I don’t immediately have to look for a job to support the family,” Ferguson says. “Honestly, it’s the best.”

by Brian Hamilton, The Athletic |  Read more:
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[ed. My friend Vic was one of the best snappers ever - fast, laser-like zips. Back then coaches mostly expected consistency, but he threw bullets.]

The Bookie at the Center of the Ohtani Betting Scandal

It was a round of poker, fittingly, that upended Mathew Bowyer’s life in spectacular fashion. While he preferred to sate his appetite for risk by playing baccarat, poker had served as his formative introduction to the pleasures and possibilities of gambling. Back in the early Nineties, as an enterprising high school student in Orange County, California, Bowyer ran a regular game out of his childhood home that provided a template for what he later organized his adult life around on a dizzying scale: the thrill of the wager, the intoxicant of fast money, and the ability to shimmy into worlds inaccessible to most. Unlike so many of Orange County’s native sons, for example, Bowyer wasn’t raised with access to bottomless funds. But his adolescent poker winnings netted him enough to buy a pickup, which he tricked out with a thunderous subwoofer that ensured that his presence was felt even when he wasn’t seen.

Thirty years later, on Sept. 8, 2021, Bowyer was behind the wheel of a very different vehicle, his white Bentley GT Continental, driving to a very different poker game. Held in a hotel conference room in San Diego, it was hosted by some players and staff of the L.A. Angels, who were in town for two games against the Padres. For Bowyer, then a 46-year-old father of five who could be mistaken for a retired slugger — confident gait, hulking arms mosaicked in tribal tattoos — attending was a no-brainer. These were the back rooms where he cultivated new clients to expand what he referred to, cryptically, as “my business.”

During the poker game, Bowyer and one of his friends, a stocky guy named Michael Greenberg who had been a fixture at those long-ago high school poker games, began talking to a man seated at the card table. Japanese, slight in build, sporting a gray T-shirt, with inky hair cut into a modish bowl, neither Greenberg nor Bowyer yet knew the man’s name — Ippei Mizuhara. But both were aware that he was the interpreter and close friend of a player being heralded as the most extraordinary in baseball history: Shohei Ohtani, the two-way phenomenon who was then in his third year with the Angels, and finishing up a transcendent season in which he would hit 46 home runs, strike out 156 batters, and be named the American League Most Valuable Player. This connection, however, was not the reason Bowyer was keen to talk to Mizuhara. Between hands at the poker table, the interpreter was obsessively placing bets on sports through his phone.

Bowyer sidled up for a brief conversation — one he’d later come to spend many sleepless nights replaying in his mind.

“What are you betting on?”

“Soccer,” replied the interpreter.

“I run my own site,” said Bowyer, speaking as he always did: polite tone, penetrating eye contact. “We do soccer — we do it all. And with me, you don’t need to use your credit card. I’ll give you credit.” He extended his hand. “My name’s Matt.”

“I’m Ippei.”

“Ippei, if you’re interested, hit me up.”

And that was that, an exchange of the sort that Bowyer had been finessing for the better part of two decades in constructing one of the largest and most audacious illegal bookmaking operations in the United States. He’d had versions of this talk on manicured golf courses, over $5,000 bottles of Macallan 30 scotch, while flying 41,000 feet above the Earth in private jets comped by casinos, and lounging poolside at his palatial Orange County home. He’d had the talk with celebrities, doctors, day traders, trial lawyers, trust-fund scions. Often nothing came of it. But sometimes it led to a new customer — or “player,” in his industry’s parlance — adding to a stable of nearly 1,000 bettors who placed millions in weekly wagers through Bowyer. He used the bulk of his earnings to fuel his own ferocious thirst for gambling and the attendant lifestyle, escaping often to villas at Las Vegas casinos for lavish sprees that earned him a reputation as one of the Strip’s more notorious whales — a high roller with an icy demeanor doted on by the top brass of numerous casinos.

In this case, however, the exchange with Mizuhara sent Bowyer down a different path. Shortly after the poker game, he set up Mizuhara with an account at AnyActionSports.com, the site Bowyer used for his operation, run through servers in Costa Rica. It was the start of a relationship that, while surreal in its bounty, would eventually come to attract the unwanted attention of the Department of Homeland Security, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service, Major League Baseball, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and, as Bowyer’s illicit empire crumbled, the world at large.

‘Victim A’

Two years later, in December 2023, Shohei Ohtani signed what was then the largest contract in professional sports history with the Los Angeles Dodgers: 10 years, $700 million. The deal for “Shotime” dominated the sports media for months. But on March 20, 2024, news broke that threatened to derail the show just as it was beginning.

The revelation that millions of dollars had been transferred from Ohtani’s bank account to an illegal bookmaker surfaced in dueling reports from ESPN and the Los Angeles Times. Both centering on his then-39-year-old interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, the dispatches were as confounding as they were explosive. In an interview with ESPN, Mizuhara initially presented himself as a problem gambler, declared that Ohtani was not involved in any betting, and explained the payments as Ohtani bailing out a friend, going so far as to describe the two of them sitting at Ohtani’s computer and wiring the money.

But the following morning, before ESPN went live, Mizuhara disavowed his earlier statements. The Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara; investigations were launched by MLB and the IRS; and five days later, Ohtani issued a statement denying any role in a scandal that echoed unsavory chapters of the sport’s past. “I never bet on sports or have willfully sent money to the bookmaker,” Ohtani said. “I’m just beyond shocked.”

Given the whiplash of shifting narratives, the speculation that followed was inevitable. Flip on talk radio, or venture into a conspiratorial corner of the internet, and you were treated to bro-inflected theorizing as to what really happened, what Ohtani really knew. Equally intriguing was the timing. The scandal erupted at a moment when the longtime stigma surrounding sports betting had, following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for wider legalization, given way to a previously unfathomable landscape where pro athletes had become spokespeople for entities like DraftKings and FanDuel; where ESPN operated its own multimillion-dollar sportsbook; and where Las Vegas, a town historically shunned by professional sports leagues, had just celebrated its reinvention as a sporting mecca by hosting the Super Bowl. But if such factors tempered the public’s instinct to rush to the harshest judgments, the ordeal also revealed how the corporatization of sports betting had done little to snuff out a secretive underworld estimated to be responsible for $64 billion in illicit wagers annually. (California is one of 11 states where sports betting remains illegal.)

Yet perhaps most remarkable was the speed at which the matter was seemingly resolved. Acting with uncharacteristic swiftness, the federal government issued a scathing criminal complaint against Mizuhara just three weeks later — on April 11 — that supported Ohtani’s narrative. The numbers were vertigo-inducing. Over roughly 24 months, Mizuhara had placed more than $300 million in bets, running up a debt of $40.6 million to an illegal bookmaking operation. To service it, the government alleged, Mizuhara himself became a criminal, taking control of one of Ohtani’s bank accounts and ­siphoning almost $17 million from the superstar. In June, Mizuhara pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud.

One person who was not shocked by any twist in this saga was a central character who, throughout, remained an enigma: Mathew Bowyer. Since meeting Mizuhara at that poker game in San Diego, he had received at least $16.25 million in wires directly from Ohtani’s account, had poured most of it into conspicuous escapades in Vegas, and had been braced for a reckoning since the previous October, when dozens of armed federal agents raided his home. While the raid inadvertently unearthed the Ohtani-Mizuhara ordeal, the mushrooming scandal obscured a more complex, far-reaching, and ongoing drama. The agents who descended upon Bowyer’s home were not interested in the private misfortunes of a baseball superstar, but rather in exposing something Bowyer understood more intimately than most: how Las Vegas casinos skirted laws — and reaped profits — by allowing major bookies to launder millions by gambling on the city’s supposedly cleaned-up Strip.

by David Amsden, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Philip Cheung/Kyodo AP/Matthew Bowyer