The Sunday Back Page

A not-so-brief history of the NFL injury report

❓The Question

Before he became a Giants legend, Andy Robustelli started his NFL career with a different franchise. Which team drafted him and gave him his first five pro seasons?

See answers below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The Beautiful Lie

Last week, I was helping a client with a piece that quoted Erling Haaland going to bat for teammate Alexander Sørloth, who took heavy online hate for not passing to Haaland in a critical moment of Norway’s quarterfinal loss to England. Great quote. Also fake — an X post built to farm followers and engagement.

Turns out that’s the theme of the whole tournament. Nieman Lab’s Hanaa’ Tameez spent the summer cataloging it: an Argentine TV host falsely announced on air that Lionel Messi’s father had died, and the resulting backlash cost her and her producers their jobs. A fabricated story claimed Norway’s team was importing food because they didn’t trust what was available in the United States, and more than a quarter of the social accounts pushing it turned out to be fake or bot-driven. Parody accounts putting invented quotes in José Mourinho’s mouth got treated as real by huge numbers of readers, and AI-generated images made the rounds. And community notes flagging them don’t really carry much weight, do they?

Worth remembering the next time a quote feels too perfect to check — same instinct that almost got the Haaland line into my client’s piece.

Ankle Deep in History |

Last week marked 79 years since Bert Bell created the NFL’s injury report, and Moritz used the anniversary to dig into where it actually came from. The report traces back to a 1946 scandal in which two Giants players (go figure) were approached about fixing the NFL championship game against Chicago: they turned down the bribe, but never reported it, which was enough to get them suspended and push Bell toward more transparency around player health. Moritz then went digging through newspaper archives and found the exact phrase “NFL injury report” barely showing up before the late 1960s, then exploding through the 1970s until it was appearing in thousands of newspapers a year by the end of that decade. He also traces how the report’s format itself changed — full paragraph write-ups in the ’60s and ’70s, agate-type listings by player name through the ’80s, and a flip in 1996 to the injury-status-first format still used today.

Good one for anyone who’s ever wondered why midweek practice reports revolve around whether a guy’s ankle is “limited” or “full” — or why Bill Belichick listed Tom Brady on the injury report for what felt like 500 straight weeks. If gamblers were the reason the thing existed in the first place, misdirection was always part of the design.

Sports Media Guy

Last week, a milestone in NFL history quietly passed…

a month ago · 8 likes · Brian Moritz

Mirror, Mirror |

Heindl builds this around a hot-mic moment where Tempo coach Sandy Brondello called Angel Reese a “protected species” during a game against the Dream, drew a one-game suspension, apologized, and, by most accounts, handled the fallout with Reese cleanly. But the incident is really just her entry point into a bigger argument: the WNBA doesn’t actually generate more drama than the NBA, it just gets read that way, because fans take men’s tension at face value — Bam Adebayo swinging on Tyler Herro, the Tatum-Brown rift, any LeBron saga — while nearly every WNBA storyline gets filtered through outside interpretation before anyone lets it just be basketball.

Sharp piece on why the same category of team drama gets treated as sport in one league and spectacle in the other.

BASKETBALL FEELINGS

Women as mirrors, men as absolutes

How many things can be true at once? Two, four, 20? If truth is in the eye of the beholder, then it’s more like 8.3 billion, roughly the current population of earth. And then, can truths change? Better still, how good are we at giving them room to…

a month ago · 39 likes · 1 comment · Katie Heindl

Broad Street Bron |

Sanderson opens in disbelief that the greatest player of his era chose, of his own free will, to sign with a franchise that’s been more meme than contender since Allen Iverson — a team whose best result in that stretch is one first-round series win before getting swept. But once the shock wears off, he lays out why it actually works: a starting five of Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe, Jaylen Brown, LeBron, and Joel Embiid projects as the league’s most talented on paper, LeBron fills the two biggest holes on the roster in rebounding and playmaking, and he brings a level of postseason pedigree the franchise doesn’t have — twelve conference finals appearances and ten wins for LeBron, zero conference finals for the Sixers over that same stretch. All this, he notes, for a minimum contract, in the same offseason the team already flipped Paul George and four picks for Jaylen Brown.

Sanderson writes for RTRS, the longtime Philly Sixers podcast and blog network, so this one comes from inside the fan base, trying to process it in real time. His sign-off says it all: “See you on Broad St.”

The Rights to Ricky Sanchez

LeBron James Is a Sixer and I Still Don't Believe It

HOLY S**T, THE SIXERS ACTUALLY SIGNED LEBRON JAMES…

a month ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Beckett Sanderson

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Pick-Up Game | The Pick Up Podcast

The show is run by comedians Freddie Rivas and Cathryn Naiker, who’ve been putting out a weekly mix of full episodes and shorter “Tempo Check” recaps that track the league news cycle in something closer to real time. Regulars include a Badass Player of the Week segment and Freddie’s Fun Question, a rotating lighthearted closer — this week’s version asks what the All-Star trophy itself should look like.

This particular episode covers meeting A’ja Wilson at a Tempo game, All-Star weekend picks, including the three-point contest, and Sophie Cunningham’s viral pointing-finger meme and her efforts to monetize it. Worth noting: their same-week “Tempo Check” episode also breaks down the Sandy Brondello suspension, so if that story’s got your attention after this week’s Read, that’s a good follow-up listen too.

Thirty-eight minutes, light and quick — good one for a Sunday scroll.

📺 The Watches

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

From Paperclip to Pitch | Justin Leusner

The finale of the trade-up chain we’ve been following. If you missed last week’s setup: Leusner is a Philly-based sports and travel creator who’s turned the old one-red-paperclip trick into a running bit, already pulling it off once for an NBA Finals ticket. This time, the trades ran through Grant Williams, Gary Vee, and Logan Paul on the way to a seat at the actual World Cup final.

The Price of Admission | George Kamal

Kamel is a Ramsey Solutions personal finance host best known for cornering strangers and guessing their debt load on the spot. Here he works the crowd outside the World Cup final — billed as the most expensive soccer match in history — asking fans exactly what they paid for their tickets and tracking down who went from super fan to flat-out broke covering it. Pairs well with the misinformation piece up top, everyone’s got a story this tournament, and not all of them check out.

🗞️ The Pressroom

The Steele move

spent years as one of the most recognizable faces on SportsCenter before jumping to Big Ten Network, and now she's using her own newsletter to get into everything the network gig never had room for — women's sports, the weird interactions, the stuff that never made air. Feels like she's been saving up material for a decade.

Great Scott, he’s on Substack

writes a column for the San Francisco Chronicle, and now he's writing one for himself, too — which just means more Scott Ostler, and I wouldn't change a thing if I could write like him.

📋 The Roster

We want to celebrate as many independent creators on The Sunday Back Page as possible. Here are all the people who submitted their work for consideration, and those we considered independently, this week. Many of these creators deserved a place in this newsletter, and we hope they continue to submit their work. Please keep them on your radar.

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

The Los Angeles Rams. Drafted out of the now-defunct Arnold College in Milford, Connecticut, Robustelli spent 1951 through 1955 in LA before a trade sent him to the Giants in 1956, where he anchored the defense for nine more seasons and made the Hall of Fame in 1971.

🧾 The Scorecard

Sunday Back Page: 90 years of pageantry come down to this afternoon

Ian Powers — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:01:26 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

Kickoff is this afternoon, and I’ve got Argentina going for their fourth title with Messi trying to go back-to-back, against a Ballon d’Or winner chasing his first for a country looking for its second, on a stage FIFA built specifically for the cameras. Somebody’s getting handed a trophy on that stage in a few hours, and that’s basically the whole subject of this week’s lead, so buckle up.

Also in the mix: a married couple who didn’t realize they’d already sat next to each other 26 years before they officially met, South Korea’s entire football federation getting torched by its own president, a G-Leaguer who’s funnier than most actual comedians, and Adam Friedland working the Falklands into a World Cup preview before pitching you extra-time prop bets.

Settle in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

📰 The Lead

At the 1950 World Cup final, FIFA president Jules Rimet had a speech ready, written in Portuguese, for the Brazilian federation and captain. In front of 200,000 fans at the Maracanã, Brazil, up a goal with the crowd already celebrating, somehow lost to Uruguay, 2-1. Rimet and the organizers scrapped the ceremony entirely and got the trophy to Uruguay in the chaos on the field.

Can you imagine President Donald Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino scrapping today’s ceremony? Trump’s already got a track record at this exact stadium. Presenting Chelsea their Club World Cup trophy at ~~MetLife~~ New York/New Jersey Stadium last summer, he was supposed to hand it over and step off stage. He didn’t. Reece James ended up lifting the trophy with the president still standing next to him, because, apparently, nobody told Trump the plan involved leaving.

Whoever wins today, Lionel Messi or Rodri, gets the trophy on a prefab stage at the same building, then carries it to his teammates for the made-for-TV lift. Most of the world is probably hoping the exit goes smoother this time.

The ceremony has always had its share of pomp and improvisation. Host countries especially like to insert their own dignitary into the moment: Benito Mussolini handing off to Italian captain Giampiero Combi in 1934, King Juan Carlos doing the honors in Spain in 1982, Jacques Chirac handing it to captain Didier Deschamps in Paris in 1998, Vladimir Putin taking his turn in Moscow in 2018. The man’s been running Russia since dial-up internet was still a thing, so of course he made time to hand over a trophy.

The trophy lift itself wasn’t even a thing until 1958, when Brazilian captain Hilderaldo Bellini turned around after receiving it and, prompted by photographers wanting a better shot, held it over his head. Every winning captain since has ripped him off.

Staging came later. Bobby Moore led his team through the Wembley Stadium crowd to the Royal Box to get the trophy from Queen Elizabeth II in 1966. It’s the closest thing to a built stage the tournament had for another 40 years, until FIFA finally got around to building one on purpose, in 2006, when Sepp Blatter handed it to Italy’s Fabio Cannavaro.

By 2022, the ceremony had become its own production. The emir of Qatar wrapped Messi in a bisht before he ever touched the trophy, drawing out the moment for the cameras. That’s the version FIFA is running with today, with Coldplay curating an 11-minute halftime show involving Shakira, Madonna, Justin Bieber and BTS, because subtlety left the building sometime around 2006.

Whatever the pageantry, the trophy still goes to the captain first. Hockey gets that right too — the Stanley Cup goes to the team captain before anyone else touches it. Try saying that about the Lombardi Trophy or the Larry O’Brien Trophy, which passes through the owner’s hands before it reaches a single player. The World Cup, for all its dignitaries and staged robes, has never lost sight of who actually won the thing. Someone tell the American sports owners.

— Ian Powers

Baseball Gods are real and this story proves it

❓The Question

Guess the World Cup moment or legend from the emojis. No googling.

🐙🔮⚽
🦷😬🇺🇾
👴🏿⚽🏆🏆🏆
🧥👑🇦🇷

See answers below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Same row, same seats, 26 years before they ever met

and his wife were comparing notes on Braves playoff games they’d each attended in their younger days when she remembered a ticket stub from a 1991 game she’d found while cleaning out her mom’s house. He still had his stub too — same game, Game 4 of the '91 NLCS against the Pirates. Same aisle. Same row. Seats 14 and 15. They wouldn’t meet for another 26 years.

Keeping the Book

I once played golf at a course called “The Farm” in Rocky Face, GA. The 8th hole is a very long 238 yd par 3. I remember reading a plaque next to the tee box that talked about two University of North Carolina collegiate golfers making hole-in-ones on back-to-back shots during a tournament there. The plaque mentioned the odds being something like…

3 months ago · 36 likes · 12 comments · Jeff Howard

What Megan Rapinoe believes is actually hurting women's sports

got pulled from a World Cup ad shoot this month after a brand’s AI flagged her trans-rights advocacy as a liability, which is as good a cold open as you’ll find. From there she digs into Washington’s I-638, a November ballot measure that would make girls, not boys, prove their sex through genital exams or hormone testing to play school sports. Her case: these bills don’t protect anybody, they just hand someone new the power to decide who counts as a girl.

Megan Rapinoe

Anti-Trans Legislation Isn't About "Protecting Girls"—It's About Distracting Us From What Matters

A few months ago, I was packing for a flight and heading out the next day to shoot a World Cup commercial when I got a call from my agent: “They’re pulling you from the spot…

2 months ago · 454 likes · 18 comments · Megan Rapinoe

The World Cup exit that cost South Korea's football chief his job

South Korea crashed out in the group stage, and points out that their reward for landing back in Incheon at 4 AM was a crowd there specifically to boo head coach Hong Myung-bo off the tarmac. The president of the country piled on next, accusing the federation of hiring Hong on connections instead of competence, which turns out to be a real accusation, because the Chung family that runs Hyundai has also been running Korean football for 33 years. Two resignations later, the country is still furious.

Football Politics

The South Korean Football-Political Drama

The South Korean national football team landed in Incheon at 4 AM on June 29, hoping to avoid protests because of the unexpected elimination in the group stage of the World Cup. Yet, a large crowd of fans was there to greet them with boos and chants, especially against head coach…

2 months ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Valerio Moggia

The free bracelet turning World Cup sponsorship into a scavenger hunt

Bank of America gave away 2 million bracelets this tournament, one per host city, and somehow turned free swag into the smartest sponsorship play of the summer. ’s read: most brands pay for eyeballs, this one made people work for it, adding new beads every knockout round so the only way to finish the set was to keep showing up. Free bracelet, paid-for obsession.

The Playbook by Katherine Rowe

Karma Is a Bracelet: Inside Bank of America's Fan Band Playbook

I’ve been seeing people compare wrists from the FIFA Fan Festivals this month the same way I used to watch kids trade Pokémon cards at lunch. That’s Bank of America’s Fan Bands doing exactly what they were built to do…

2 months ago · 3 likes · Katherine Rowe | The Playbook

Kansas beat every other college program to a crypto jersey deal

College jerseys can carry corporate logos starting in August, and the ink wasn’t even dry before the Big 12 landed a $20 million-a-year Monster Energy patch deal. Kansas one-upped it a day later, signing with Ripple to make XRP the official crypto of the entire athletic department — jerseys, arenas, the works. Ripple’s CEO is a KU alum who just finished paying the SEC $125 million to settle whether XRP counts as a security, so the timing isn’t exactly subtle. SMU already beat them to a fan token of its own, which the piece rightly treats with the same skepticism European soccer’s fan-coin experiment earned.

20 years later, the same gates led Josh Liddick back to the All-Star Game

Liddick’s first MLB game, back in 2006, was a Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park. Twenty years later, he walked through the same gates for the 96th All-Star Game, Philadelphia’s first since 1996, watching it from section 308 next to Barret, the childhood neighbor who got him into baseball in the first place and later stood up as a groomsman at his wedding. The game itself gave him almost nothing to root for — the American League blanked the National League 4-0, the 10th shutout in All-Star Game history — but between Jennifer Hudson, Patti LaBelle, and ceremonial first pitches from Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton, he makes the case that the pageantry made the night bigger than the score ever could.

Red Pinstripe Press

Attending the All-Star Game in Philly Was a Childhood Dream Come True

2026 marks the 20th anniversary of my first Major League Baseball game—my first Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park…

2 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Josh Liddick

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

England lost in the semifinal. Adam Friedland found the punchline anyway.

Chris Ryan is in studio for the World Cup final episode, and Friedland doesn’t even finish his intro before riffing on England’s semifinal collapse — working in the Falklands, joking that Argentina just annexed England’s southern border, and landing on “Maggie Thatcher is break dancing in her grave.” They preview the finals-week awards next: best player, young player, winning club, losing club. Then FanDuel gets a live read built entirely around extra-time betting markets, which somehow fits the show’s rhythm better than a normal ad break has any right to.

📺 The Watches

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

He turned a paperclip into an NBA Finals seat. Now he's doing it for the World Cup final.

Justin Leusner traded one paperclip into an NBA Finals ticket back in June, so naturally the next move was doing it again for the World Cup final. He’s working the same trade chain toward a seat for Argentina-Spain, in his own home state, and he’s already up to a Messi jersey by episode one and four figures of memorabilia by episode two. Episode three, the actual verdict, is supposed to land on his channel before kickoff.

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Check Justin’s channel today to find out. https://www.youtube.com/@JustinLeusner

🗞️ The Pressroom

The uniform-obsessed corner of sports media just moved to Substack

already had a Substack in Inconspicuous Consumption, his ongoing love letter to everyday minutiae. Now UniWatch, the uniform-nerd site he built and moved to ESPN and kept running long after ESPN let it go, has moved in next door. Same obsessive eye, new address.

A four-year G-Leaguer is out-writing every Summer League broadcast

Miller Kopp bounced from Northwestern to Indiana to four seasons grinding in the G League, and now he’s spending this year’s Summer League writing a daily diary that’s actually worth your time. It reads like a real journal, not a media-trained athlete’s PR account, self-deprecating in a way that makes it obvious he still loves being in the gym.

📋 The Roster

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Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

🐙🔮⚽ — Paul the Octopus, the psychic mollusk who called Spain’s 2010 title.

🦷😬🇺🇾 — Luis Suárez biting Giorgio Chiellini, 2014.

👴🏿⚽🏆🏆🏆 — Pelé, the only man with three World Cup winner’s medals.

🧥👑🇦🇷 — The bisht. Messi, 2022. It was mentioned in The Lead.

🧾 The Scorecard

The Sunday Back Page: The All-Star Game That Forced Baseball's Bitterest Rivals Onto the Same Team

Ian Powers — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:00:56 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

This week, a bumbling spy in England sent me straight back to 2007 and to a story I covered at the New York Daily News that still doesn’t get enough credit for how petty it was. We’ve also got independent journalists making big moves, a data viz guy who makes Excel look like art, and a podcast that convinced me punk rockers care deeply about the Toronto Raptors.

Settle in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

📰 The Lead

I can still hear the crack and feel the silence right after.

The Yankees’ Roger Clemens beaned the Mets’ Mike Piazza on July 8, 2000, at Yankee Stadium. Nearly 56,000 people rose to their feet in horror, including my best friend Steve-O and me in the second-to-last row of the upper deck, as the Mets’ star catcher lay motionless on the ground.

Clemens looked like he was sending a message. Piazza had owned him in previous meetings, including a grand slam the month before, and the two teams were in the middle of the first day-night, two-stadium Subway Series doubleheader in history — a scheduling quirk from an earlier rainout. Steve-O and I rode the subway between both stadiums to watch it happen. After the beaning, Piazza reportedly refused to accept Clemens’ phone call to apologize.

Then the rivals met again in the World Series that October. In Game 2, Piazza broke his bat on a foul ball, and the barrel helicoptered toward the mound. Clemens picked it up and threw it back in Piazza’s direction as the catcher ran to first. Benches emptied.

Joe Torre spent the next two years steering Clemens away from Shea Stadium to dodge a rematch. The closest brush came when Mets starter Shawn Estes threw a pitch at Clemens that sailed well behind him.

The story caught up to both of them in 2004. Piazza was elected the National League’s starting catcher for the All-Star Game. Clemens, now with the Houston Astros and in the middle of a season that would win him the NL Cy Young, was the obvious choice to start for the NL on Houston’s home field. They were forced onto the same battery.

The headline I wrote for The Journal News, “Assault and battery mates,” won a New York Press Association award.

The AL teed off on Clemens in the first inning like nobody ever had. Ichiro doubled. Pudge Rodriguez tripled. Manny Ramirez and Alfonso Soriano both homered. Six runs, a 9-4 win, and home-field advantage that carried the Red Sox to their first title in 86 years. It’s almost as if Piazza was tipping pitches — the Crash Davis move, straight out of “Bull Durham.”

Torre, who spent years publicly defending Clemens, wasn’t so sure anymore by 2009. Asked on WFAN whether the bat toss was “’roid rage,” Torre said he hadn’t tied the two together at the time. In retrospect, he said, it could very well have been. Clemens’ former trainer, Brian McNamee, had already testified he’d injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone in 2000 and 2001.

Piazza’s been in the Hall of Fame since 2016. Clemens, a 354-game winner, is still waiting on his call. That night in 2000 is a big reason why.

They don’t make All-Star Games like that anymore.

— Ian Powers

How the walk-on became tennis' most valuable marketing moment

❓The Question

Before England's 2026 Round of 16 win over Mexico at the Azteca, how many World Cup matches had the Three Lions played at that stadium?

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The entrance is now part of the scouting report

traces how Naomi Osaka’s custom entrances, once a novelty, became the blueprint at this year’s Wimbledon. Taylor Fritz showed up in a Boss suit, Frances Tiafoe stripped off a Lululemon tracksuit courtside, and Djokovic’s Lacoste blazer sparked its own debate. Osaka’s walk-on alone produced the most-watched clip in Tennis Channel’s Instagram history. Andre Agassi’s jean shorts were the scandal once. Now the entrance is the marketing plan. (Hard Court)

Hard Court

It wasn’t long ago that Naomi Osaka’s elaborate walk-on looks felt like an outlier. This Wimbledon, they feel like the blueprint…

2 months ago · 23 likes · 1 comment · Jessica Schiffer

A poem for the stadium that already broke England once

Alex Harper marks England's Round of 16 win over Mexico with a poem built on a single image: the Azteca as mountain, standing since it broke England once before, when Maradona's Hand of God ended their 1986 hopes on the same ground. Forty years later, the Three Lions climbed it. (Millington Studios).

Millington Studios

The Mountain of the Azteca: a football love poem by Alex Harper

They said they built a stadium…

2 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Millington Studios

The World Cup someone isn't watching

writes for Karim Zidan's Sports Politika about Suleiman al-Obeid, the former Palestinian national team forward known as "the Palestinian Pele," who scored more than 100 goals before he was killed. The Palestinian Football Association says more than 400 players have died since October 2023, alongside coaches, referees and club officials. Beydoun names several by position and nickname, then asks readers watching the World Cup not to look past what's happening in Gaza. (Editor's note: the piece uses the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" to describe the war.) (Sports Politika)

Sports Politika

The World Cup View From Gaza

Welcome to Sports Politika, a media venture founded by award-winning investigative journalist Karim Zidan that strives to help you understand how sports and politics shape the world around us. My mission is to offer an independent platform for accessible journalism that raises awareness and empowers understanding…

2 months ago · 15 likes · Khaled Beydoun

Best season of their lives. Cut anyway.

lays out what happened to Forest Green Rovers Women, cut days after finishing second in the fifth tier and one point off promotion, then traces the same pattern at Plymouth Argyle, Thornaby FC, Reading, Blackburn and Wolves. Every case follows the same script: the women's side has its best season, the men's side misses its target, and the money moves toward the men. Lewes FC gets held up as the counterexample — equal budgets for both sides, proof it's a choice, not a math problem. (She Can Kick It).

She Can Kick It

Team Expendable

Forest Green Rovers (FGR) have axed their women’s team to support their men’s team…

2 months ago · 21 likes · 17 comments · Clare McEwen

The sketch artist who out-partied the art world

Bud Schmeling traces the career of Neiman, the closest thing sports ever had to an official illustrator, sketching from the sidelines at Super Bowls, Olympics and title fights for decades while somehow also turning up in a 1985 group photo with Warhol, Basquiat and Haring. Shea Stadium fans once chanted for him to start drawing mid-game. Don King’s assessment of his talent involved a paintbrush, a monkey and a peanut, and it wasn’t a compliment to the monkey. ()

Victory Journal

LeRoy Neiman: Through Line

WORDS BY BUD SCHMELING…

2 months ago · 4 likes · Sam Hockley-Smith

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

A World Cup catch-up worth the drive time

Sam Bales, Graeme and James work through the biggest matches and moments from the World Cup's knockout rounds so far, with detours into Trump's sideline involvement and a stray reference to cricket's Snicko technology. Bales also writes on Substack, where the crew runs their World Cup predictions model. ()

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Twenty names for the next four years

With the Belgium wreckage still fresh, 11 Yanks skips the postmortem and goes straight to the next cycle, running through 20 prospects who could shape the U.S. roster in 2030. The argument underneath it: the Pulisic generation never got out of the Round of 16, and the group coming up behind them might be built to actually do it. (11 Yanks)

📋 The Roster

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

C) Twice — Both in 1986, four days apart. England beat Paraguay 3-0 in the Round of 16, then lost 2-1 to Argentina in the quarterfinal, the match everyone actually remembers, for Maradona's Hand of God and the Goal of the Century. Most people guess "Once" because the Paraguay win gets erased by what came four days later.

🧾 The Scorecard

Sunday Back Page: Maverick owners born on the Fourth of July

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 10:02:19 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

Hope your Fourth was a good one. If you’re reading this the morning after — coffee in hand, ears still ringing a little from the fireworks — you’ve got George Steinbrenner and Al Davis waiting for you below: two men born a day apart who ran their franchises like the country’s birthday was a personality trait. One got banned by his own commissioner. The other gave his commissioner headaches by suing his own league and won. Neither would recognize what ownership looks like now.

Also this week: a free kick that might be the best in U.S. World Cup history, David Beckham cashing in on a World Cup he’s not even playing in and 66 hot dogs.

Get in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

📰 The Lead

George Steinbrenner paid a small-time gambler $40,000 to dig up dirt on his own best hitter. That’s the kind of decision that gets you banned from your own team. In 1990, Commissioner Fay Vincent suspended him from running the Yankees’ day-to-day business for going after Dave Winfield through a man named Howard Spira.

He was reinstated in 1993 and went right back to running the Yankees the same way he always had, just minus the shady tactics, and the Yankees won five more World Series before he died in 2010.

Steinbrenner was born July 4, 1930. Raiders owner Al Davis was born a year earlier on the same day.

Both grew up watching self-made fathers claw a real business out of an unglamorous trade — shipping for one, ladies’ garments for the other — and neither man forgot what that kind of will looked like up close.

It showed up in how they ran things.

Davis once drafted a track sprinter, Cliff Branch, in a league where speed alone rarely won jobs. It worked, but the instinct behind it also produced its share of Raiders picks who burned through stopwatches, yet couldn’t play a lick.

Steinbrenner fired and rehired Billy Martin five times between 1975 and 1988. From 1973 to 1990, the Yankees changed managers 19 times.

Those same instincts also produced 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial. Davis’s roster of renegades and rejects won the Raiders’ first Super Bowl that season. The Yankees reached the World Series for the first time in 12 years, then won it back-to-back the next two seasons.

Whatever else you want to say about how these two ran things, it worked when it mattered most.

Davis moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982, then back to Oakland in 1995 (his son Mark moved them to Las Vegas in 2020). Every relocation came with a fight attached. And that bulldog combativeness oozed from both of them.

Davis sued the NFL over the Los Angeles move and won, and that lawsuit is why he could relocate a franchise unilaterally in the first place. His Brooklyn boxer mentality would give him leverage over a league. That abrasiveness is what got General Von Steingrabber, as New York Daily News legend Bill Gallo drew him because he grabbed so much space and so many headlines in the tabloid, into trouble as much as it brought him seven World Series rings and a recurring portrayal by Larry David on “Seinfeld.”

Neither man would recognize the way a team gets bought now: a spreadsheet decision by a hedge fund looking for a stable place to park money. Steinbrenner and Davis ran their teams the way their fathers ran their businesses: personally, stubbornly, and with the conviction that losing was a referendum on who you were.

Or as Davis put it so eloquently and bluntly as an American fighter would on the country’s 250th birthday: Just win, baby.

— Ian Powers

I met a friend in a shady pub. He handed me the script and told me it was a football story…

❓The Question

Joey Chestnut ate 66 hot dogs and buns to win his 18th Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest today. How many hot dogs shy of his own record was that?

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Buffalo built a new stadium and found no room for O.J. Simpson

The Buffalo Bills’ new stadium (Highmark Stadium) quietly writes O.J. Simpson out of the building, even though he was the first running back to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season and was central to the Wall of Fame at the old stadium. It’s a strange kind of erasure, too, since his bust hasn’t gone anywhere — Canton isn’t taking it down at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, just Buffalo. Worth reading for the tension digs into: an organization managing brand risk around a man whose name is still polarizing well beyond football, while the actual accomplishments quietly disappear along with him.

Stop letting bored football fans narrate Caitlin Clark's season

The WNBA’s slowest news period overlaps almost exactly with the point in the calendar when football commentators have nothing else to talk about, and that mismatch is doing real work in how the Caitlin Clark-Alyssa Thomas foul got covered. Maitreyi Anantharaman is not soft on the play itself — the league did retroactively upgrade it to a flagrant and suspend Thomas — but she pushes back on the idea that Clark’s season is a highlight reel of victimhood, pointing out she’s actually having one of her best statistical years.

The Mets fired Carlos Mendoza. He wasn't exactly innocent.

Lindsay Dial’s take on the Carlos Mendoza firing at Citi Field gets at something more useful than the usual “fire the manager” reflex: she’s careful to note how little modern managers actually control on the lineup and analytics side, then builds the case for what she thinks does land on him anyway: a clubhouse that liked Mendoza but stopped listening to him. I don’t think it’s as clean as she frames it, and I’d still put more of this on New York’s front office and analytics setup than she does, but she’s right that he wasn’t just a helpless bystander in his own firing, either.

Mexico just buried a 40-year World Cup curse. Nobody knows what comes next.

opens with an unfinished screenplay about the old Aaron Ramsey death-curse myth, of all things, before landing on the real subject: Mexico hadn’t won a World Cup knockout game since 1986, until the round of 32 against Ecuador broke it. His closing point is the one worth noting before today’s Round of 16 match against England: lifting a curse doesn’t end a story; it just means nobody knows what the next chapter looks like. I mean the Knicks just ended a 53-year drought that was deemed a curse in some corners of Knickerbocker fandom.

Beyond Talent by A.M.

Back from '86

2 months ago · 5 likes · Beyond Talent by A.M.

A Little League bleacher was the best seat in the house for the Jaylen Brown trade

was watching his kid’s Little League All-Star game outside Boston when the Jaylen Brown-for-Paul-George trade broke, and the reactions he catches in real time say more than another hot take could. Then he does the actual work: digging past the incongruent facts to a stat that might explain the deal, buried in a Bobby Marks report: the Celtics have been better with Brown off the floor than on it for the better part of a decade.

The Boston Sunday Sports Section

WTF

We were trying to stay cool in the shade behind the outfield fence while watching Jackson’s District 15 Little League All-Star Tournament game when a kid came over and shared the news that Jaylen Brown had been traded for Paul George, two firsts and two seconds…

2 months ago · 3 likes · Adam Steinmetz

David Beckham hasn't played in a decade and he's still the World Cup's biggest star

Beckham hasn't played in over a decade, yet he's bending it all across Adidas, Lay's, Stella Artois, McDonald's, Lenovo, Home Depot and Bank of America campaigns this tournament — deals analysts peg at around $25 million combined. ’s real point isn't that Beckham is famous; it's that he's become something rarer: a sponsor's risk-free bet, a guy who can move from a fashion campaign to a business conference without the transition feeling forced. Worth reading for the larger shift it points to — retirement used to end an athlete's commercial peak, and Beckham may be the clearest proof that doesn't have to be true anymore.

Culture of Sport

David Beckham Is Everywhere at the World Cup. That's the Point.

Contact here for Advertising & Partnerships // Support the newsletter here…

2 months ago · 35 likes

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Serena's Wimbledon return was real. So is tennis's fake "duration problem."

Tennis & Bagels’ Andre Rolemberg watched Serena Williams play her first singles match in almost four years at Wimbledon and came away convinced she could still do it, even after she ran out of gas late against Maya Joint. Worth noting going in: the knee she tweaked in that very match ended up costing her the doubles reunion with her sister, Venus, she’d been building toward. The second half is an interesting listen: Rolemberg pushes back hard on Djokovic’s suggestion that tennis needs shorter matches. He makes the case that the stat everyone cites doesn’t mean what people think it means.

📺 The Watches

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

England is one Mexico match away from a real crisis

Thomas Tuchel’s England has looked fine against nobody teams and shaky against anybody with a pulse, and James Lawrence Allcott (460K subscribers, a gig hosting the Premier League’s own tactics show) breaks down exactly why. His read: Mexico exposes the same gaps everyone’s been squinting at since the last international window, and Tuchel’s system needs a real fix before this turns into a bigger problem than one bad group game.

Malik Tillman just challenged the greatest free kick in U.S. history

Tillman’s awe-struck kick rivals Eric Wynalda’s legendary strike from 1994 for the best in U.S. World Cup history. Tillman looped it over the wall in the 82nd minute, with the USMNT playing a man down after Folarin Balogun’s red card, to seal a 2-0 win and send the USMNT to their first knockout-round win since 2002. Take a minute for this short from MEDspiration even if you’ve already watched the real-time replay a dozen times.

🗞️ The Pressroom

They laid him off. They couldn't touch three decades of being the best sportswriter in Florida.

Last week we mentioned had landed on Substack after getting laid off from the South Florida Sun Sentinel, where he’d been a columnist since 1990. This week, the NSMA confirmed what more than three decades of that column had already established: he tied Tampa Bay Times columnist Rick Stroud for Florida Sportswriter of the Year, his fifth time taking the honor. Getting laid off doesn’t erase three decades of being the best in your state at this. If anything, it’s proof the layoff was never about the work.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

10. Chestnut's record of 76 hot dogs, set in 2021, still stands.

🧾 The Scorecard

Sunday Back Page: Kicking Like It's Still 2014

Ian Powers — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:02:24 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

This week, Alexi Lalas gets dunked on by everyone who already knew, Serena and Venus head back to Wimbledon doubles with Martina Navratilova’s record still standing, a 36-year newspaper career ends in a cost-cutting memo and a Substack, and the World Cup’s American media landscape looks nothing like it did in 2014.

Grab a cuppa and settle in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Write Sports is a newsletter for sports journalists who want to build something of their own — subscribers, revenue, and a business that doesn't depend on a masthead. Every Tuesday, real strategies for growing your audience, landing sponsorships, and turning your expertise into income. If you've been thinking about making the leap, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

Fifteen months ago, on his State of the Union podcast, Alexi Lalas mentioned the vintage hockey jersey he had on. Cranbrook, he said, is the private school he attended growing up outside Detroit.

Then he got to the part he really wanted to say. Cranbrook, he told co-host David Mosse, is the school Eminem name-drops in his rap battle with Papa Doc, played by Anthony Mackie. Papa Doc was pretending to slum it with everyone in urban Detroit, when he was actually a private school kid from the suburbs the whole time. Lalas and Mosse started quoting the verse back and forth. “This guy’s a gangster. His real name is Clarence.”

“It’s the same Cranbrook that if you watched 9 Mile,” Lalas said.

Anyone under 50 knows the movie is called “8 Mile.” More people know 8 Mile Road itself, the line that’s separated the poorer side of Detroit from the affluent white suburbs for generations — Lalas’s side. He’s referenced the movie correctly on his own social media before. The slip didn’t feel like ignorance. It was the specific, unbothered arrogance of someone from the suburbs looking down at the other side of the tracks without much interest in getting the name of it right.

That arrogance is exactly what made Lalas the leading American soccer pundit for two decades, and why Fox Sports loves that he’s seen as a villain. He’s said himself that the 30-second hot take delivered with total conviction is the skill that got him there. The arrogance shows up in his politics too, in his unapologetic defense of pay-for-play youth soccer, etc. Whether you like him or not, you can’t stop watching. And it’s that air that makes it so easy to dunk on him now, watching him get out-talked, or dare I say, out-classed by Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimović, and Rebecca Lowe on Fox’s lead World Cup desk this summer.

Lalas peaked during ESPN’s coverage of the 2014 World Cup. Fox bought the U.S. World Cup TV rights after that and paid him trunkloads of money to be its lead studio analyst, betting that the same loud, fast certainty that had worked at ESPN would carry over.

He’s more the Tony Romo of soccer television now. Romo shot to fame in his broadcast career by calling out plays before the snap, off the strength of his film room work, until it became clear he no longer put in those hours. Now, even though Romo is still a TV star like Lalas is, Troy Aikman has lapped him entirely, the same way Henry and Ibrahimović have lapped Lalas. Jimmy Conrad, Charlie Davies, and Tony Meola — Lalas’s actual peer group — have spent the years since 2014 earning coaching licenses while their media work gets sharper. Lalas seems content to still be 2014 Lalas.

The American soccer fan is a lot smarter than that now. Years of close-up Premier League coverage, with analysts like former USMNT goalkeeper Tim Howard (and Kyle Martino before him) breaking the game down weekly, raised the baseline for what good analysis sounds like. Dozens of former U.S. players are making real waves in American soccer media as a result. Rog Bennett, an English expat who broke through at that same Brazil World Cup, has spent the years since building a soccer media empire of his own with Men in Blazers. Lalas figured out early that he was good at the studio quips. The build-up has been lacking ever since.

— Ian Powers

This USMNT is a unifying force. It belongs to the people, not this administration

❓The Question

Serena Williams, 44, and her sister Venus, 45, are playing women’s doubles together at this year’s Wimbledon. Who is the oldest player to ever win a title at Wimbledon?

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

This USMNT is a unifying force. It belongs to the people, not this administration |

Lane’s argument starts from a real tension: the current administration has tried to claim this USMNT roster as a “unity” symbol while pursuing immigration policies that would have kept several of its own players out of the country.

He runs through the roster player by player — Balogun, Weah, Wright, Roldan, Zendejas, Pepi, McKenzie — and the immigrant or refugee story behind nearly every one of them, noting that close to half the roster is made up of immigrants or the sons of immigrants.

His point isn’t subtle, but it lands: a team built almost entirely with people who came from somewhere else, or whose parents did, is being used as a backdrop for messaging that treats those same origins as a threat. Lane draws a distinction worth sitting with: unity isn’t the same thing as uniformity, and a team this specifically American in its diversity makes a better case for the country than any slogan could.

ConcaCorner

The USMNT has started this World Cup in historic fashion - winning their first two group-stage games and securing a berth in the knockout round before their third game. They are playing with passion, intensity, and tactics I haven’t seen from the program in quite some time. From coast to coast, from the die-hards to the casuals, so many people are jumpi…

2 months ago · 17 likes · 7 comments · Jon Lane

Dusty May left Michigan for the NBA. That doesn’t mean college basketball is doomed |

May’s exit from Michigan, two months after cutting down the nets for the program’s first title in thirty-seven years, is the kind of move that invites overreaction, and this piece by Craig Meyer resists it. May is only the second men’s college basketball coach to leave for an NBA head-coaching job since 2019, when John Beilein also left Michigan (for Cleveland), and the piece frames his departure less as proof college basketball is broken and more as one coach’s individual read on a sport in the middle of an awkward transition.

The line worth lingering on is the one about how recently this all changed: “long before NIL and the transfer portal were part of the sport’s vocabulary, players had far fewer ways to get paid before turning pro, and that shift is reshaping who stays in college and why, and now apparently who coaches there too.” Worth the full read for how even-keeled it stays about a moment a lot of other coverage treated as a five-alarm fire.

The Front Porch

Dusty May left Michigan for the NBA. That doesn’t mean college basketball is doomed

Dusty May’s One Shining Moment wasn’t exactly that…

2 months ago · 4 likes · Craig Meyer

Soccer Had One Thing American Sports Didn’t. FIFA Just Took It Away. | |

Last week, we shared a story about how much money is being made off the World Cup’s hydration breaks. Weinreb takes a sanctity-of-sport angle.

Weinreb’s setup is a slow burn worth sticking with. He opens on a 2006 Red Sox-Yankees doubleheader that ran over eight and a half hours combined across two games, with twenty pitchers and 782 total pitches between them — the kind of bloat American sports fans have simply made peace with, commercials and all.

Soccer, in his telling, was always the exception: forty-five minutes, stoppage time, halftime, forty-five more, no network breaking in to sell you pizza. For me, unless in a knockout moment, soccer is over in two hours. Bam.

Then this World Cup arrived on American soil for the first time in three decades, FIFA and Fox found religion on “hydration breaks,” and the one sport that didn’t make you wait for the action started making you wait for the action. The piece is paywalled partway through, but the setup alone is sharp enough, and the central bit — FIFA’s hydration break as a commercial break wearing a referee’s jersey — is the kind of line that’s going to stick with you well past this World Cup.

Throwbacks: A Newsletter About Sports History and Culture

Soccer Had One Thing American Sports Didn't. FIFA Just Took It Away.

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together…

2 months ago · 9 likes · 5 comments · Michael Weinreb

What NFL Executives, Coaches Are Really Saying About Brendan Sorsby | Matt Lombardo | Between The Hashmarks

Lombardo went into this admitting his own initial assumption was wrong. He figured no team would touch a quarterback who’d bet on his own games at Indiana, and the early read from six sources, including front office executives and offensive coaches across the league, told him otherwise: Sorsby is getting drafted.

The reasoning is almost uncomfortably simple. He threw for 2,800 yards and 27 touchdowns against just five interceptions last season at Cincinnati, while adding 580 rushing yards and nine more touchdowns on the ground, and that kind of dual-threat production makes front offices willing to look past a lot. One veteran NFC evaluator put it plainly to Lombardo: there’s no doubt someone drafts him, the only question is where his background drops him relative to a strong incoming quarterback class.

The piece is sharpest when it points out the obvious tension nobody in the league office wants to say out loud — a team weighing whether to draft a player for gambling on football is doing so with a sportsbook logo on the wall down the hall.

Amid buzz around Serena Williams’ return, why was Wilson quiet? | and

Schiffer and Rothenberg collaborated on this by noticing something small and ran it all the way down. Serena’s comeback announcement video showed her holding a racquet with no Wilson logo visible, a detail easy to miss except that Wilson had been her racquet sponsor since she was roughly 6 years old.

Nike rolled out a full campaign almost immediately. Wilson, a brand normally active on social media, said nothing. The reporting behind that silence turns out to be more mundane than scandalous: sources on both sides say the two parties simply haven’t finalized a new contract since her old one lapsed during her years away from the tour, with one Wilson source noting her comeback caught the brand off guard too.

A second source teases a Williams-branded racquet and bag line timed to the US Open. A sharp reminder that even the most permanent-seeming sponsorships are still just contracts.

Hard Court

Amid buzz around Serena Williams’ return, why was Wilson quiet?

This post is a collaboration between Hard Court and Bounces at the intersection of two of our respective interests: tennis sponsorships and Serena Williams’ return to professional tennis…

2 months ago · 26 likes · 3 comments · Jessica Schiffer and Ben Rothenberg

Meet the First Ladies of Formula 1 |

Wahdan’s roll call of the women in the F1 paddock makes a sharper point than the listicle format suggests. Her real argument is that the paddock has quietly assembled one of the most accomplished groups of partners in sport — an Olympic-level cyclist, an art historian, a professional golfer, a finance exec — and most of it went unnoticed until Kim Kardashian showed up.

Kelly Piquet studied international relations in New York, worked as a stylist assistant at Vogue Latinoamerica, and built her own following well beyond her famous last name, and that’s before getting to Carmen Montero Mundt, who reportedly draws as many as forty photographers per race weekend.

Her Side of Sport

Meet the First Ladies of Formula 1

Ahead of next weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, I thought it was the perfect time to introduce you to the women who make the F1 paddock one of the most interesting places in sport. Because yes, Kim Kardashian is dating Lewis Hamilton and the internet has absolutely lost its mind. Which, fair enough. But can we talk about the fact that the F1 paddock has be…

2 months ago · 8 likes · Her Side of Sport

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Hanlon Walsh on the American Wimbledon contenders, Serena’s return, and why doubles matters | The Inside-In Tennis Podcast

Forty minutes of solid Wimbledon table-setting from Tennis Tribe’s Hanlon Walsh, who covers a lot of ground without rushing any of it. He runs through the American men heading into the tournament — Ben Shelton and Taylor Fritz up top, with real questions about whether Tommy Paul and Frances Tiafoe can keep producing on grass — before turning to whether Aryna Sabalenka is set up for a bounce-back and why he’s bullish on a deep run from Jessica Pegula.

Serena and Venus both get a segment, tied naturally into the broader doubles conversation, where Walsh makes a real case for why doubles deserves more attention than the average fan gives it, with Katerina Siniakova’s climb up the all-time rankings as the anchor example. Good listen if you want the full Wimbledon picture in one sitting instead of piecing it together across five different previews.

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

2026 US Open Recap | Robert Louis | Rolu Golf

Louis takes a real position here, and it’s not the easy one. His read on Wyndham Clark’s win is two arguments running side by side: Clark deserved it, and Clark also makes it hard to root for him, and neither of those cancels the other out. He pushes back hard on the idea that Clark’s lead came from an easier early draw, pointing out that plenty of players got the same favorable conditions and didn’t come close. The stats back him up — Clark graded out among the tournament’s best in both ball-striking and putting all week, which Louis frames as the real story underneath all the noise about lucky bounces.

Where he gets more interesting is on Clark himself: he argues the heckling and boos weren’t manufactured the way Matt Fitzpatrick’s “USA vs. England” treatment was earlier this season, and that Clark had a real chance to win people over the way Fitzpatrick did by engaging with the crowd, and didn’t take it. He’s also not shy about going after NBC’s broadcast choices, particularly the featured-group coverage that buried Miles Russell and Jackson Koivun in favor of less compelling pairings. Worth a watch for anyone who wants the case against the “Clark got lucky” narrative made well, alongside a fair amount of criticism of Clark’s likability that doesn’t feel like pile-on.

🗞️ The Pressroom

Dave Hyde, sports columnist at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel for thirty-six years, was laid off this month in what the paper called a cost-cutting move. He’s only been laid off once before — as a teenage ice-rink skate guard, also for cost-cutting reasons. Hyde launched a Substack, , on June 22. A venerable columnist forced into independence is exactly the kind of follow this newsletter exists for — worth tracking where he takes it.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

Martina Navratilova, who won the 2003 mixed doubles title with Leander Paes at 46 years, 261 days old — still the oldest Wimbledon champion in the tournament’s history, in any discipline. Timely footnote: Netflix just released Chris & Martina: The Final Set, a documentary on Navratilova’s decades-long rivalry and eventual friendship with Chris Evert, including their parallel battles with cancer.

🧾 The Scorecard

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Sunday Back Page: Dads and the Language of Sports

Ian Powers — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 10:03:23 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

This week, Father’s Day collides with the U.S. Open, the USMNT is through to the knockout round, the Knicks’ first title in 53 years gets a Father’s Day footnote of its own, and a few San Francisco Giants decide on their own messaging on Pride Night.

Grab a cuppa and settle in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

📰 The Lead

My father blamed my birth for ruining his golf game.

He said it like a joke, but it wasn’t really a joke.

I was 5 months old, in a backpack, behind the 10th green at Winged Foot. June 16, 1974. Father’s Day.

The U.S.G.A. had decided to make the field pay for what Johnny Miller did to them the year before, when he shot a final-round 63 at Oakmont.

So the Open in ‘74 became the Massacre at Winged Foot. Narrow fairways. Greens like marble. Miss either one and you were not just punished, you were humiliated. Hale Irwin won at 7 over par.

My father had tickets. He brought me, and I stayed quiet throughout.

Gary Player’s group came through. As he prepared to putt, a woman in the gallery would not stop talking. Player stepped away, looked at her, and told her she could learn something from the baby over there (moi).

After his round, he came over to say something kind to my father about it. It was part of the giddiness of my father’s storytelling.

My father adored Jack Nicklaus, and I vaguely remember him celebrating the Golden Bear’s win at Baltusrol in 1980. And I watched with him in 1982 at Pebble Beach, when Tom Watson chipped in from the rough on 17 to beat Nicklaus by one.

The Open lands on Father’s Day weekend each year, which is either a coincidence or the reason golf became our sport. After my parents split when I was 14, we made it a tradition. Play a round early in the day, then get home in time to watch the leaders come down the back nine.

He coached my soccer teams, too. He took me to major sporting events. Sports was the language he was fluent in, so it became the language we used with each other and later, my life’s work.

My own kids don’t speak it back to me the same way. We’ve gone to a few Mets games at Citi Field on Father’s Day. They care more about the Wiffle ball field, the team store or getting a picture with Mr. and Mrs. Met.

I used to think that meant something was missing. Now I think it just means they’re building their own version of what I built with my father.

I thought about all of this while watching the Knicks win their first NBA championship in 53 years. Jalen Brunson celebrates his title with his dad, Rick, an assistant coach for the Knicks, and his daughter, Jordyn, who hasn’t turned 2 yet. She’ll have the footage. Photos, video, her father lifting the trophy with her on his hip. I only have what my dad told me, which means I have his version, not mine. Hers will be the opposite.

The group-winning USMNT’s roster has its own catalog of father-son stories: Christian and Mark Pulisic, bonded over golf the way we were. Gio Reyna and Sebastian Berhalter, sons of fathers who played in previous World Cups for the U.S. — Gregg Berhalter’s among them, as a coach, and I won’t relitigate what happened between those two families except to say it happened. Alex Freeman, scoring at this World Cup with a father who scored a touchdown in a Super Bowl. Tim Weah, whose father, George, won the Ballon d’Or and became president of Liberia. So much more, if you go looking.

My father is gone now. The U.S. Open is still on every Father’s Day (and Wyndham Clark is chewing up Shinnecock Hills in near-Miller-esque fashion), and I still watch the back nine when I can, and some years that’s the closest I get to him.

— Ian Powers

Thirty Teams. Thirty Birds.

❓The Question

Hale Irwin won the 1974 U.S. Open at Winged Foot — "the Massacre" — at 7-over par. How many U.S. Opens did Irwin win in his career, total?

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Thirty teams, thirty birds

Chris Rodriguez, who writes 9 Inning Nomad, spent his mornings in the backyard with coffee and eleven bird feeders matching all thirty MLB teams to actual birds he watches, scored on the 20-80 scouting scale for fit rather than quality. The Mets get the rock pigeon. The Yankees get a Canada goose that's fully convinced the yard already belongs to it. ()

nomad access

I can’t stop over-analyzing. I’ve accepted this. I’m in my backyard in the a.m. with a coffee and 11 bird feeders, and I’m still doing it: clocking movement, reading body language, deciphering patterns, assigning grades. At some point, the baseball brain and the bird brain merged into one thing, and this is the result…

2 months ago · 17 likes · 15 comments · 9inningnomad

FIFA’s hydration breaks are worth $250 million

breaks down how FIFA's mandatory hydration breaks across all 104 World Cup matches created new advertising inventory, with Fox charging up to $750,000 for 30-second spots in USMNT matches. FIFA frames it as player safety. The numbers tell a cleaner story about who actually benefits. (Huddle Up)

Huddle Up

FIFA's Hydration Breaks At The World Cup Are Worth $250 Million (and likely here to stay)

FIFA’s controversial decision to make three-minute hydration breaks mandatory during all 104 matches at this year’s World Cup — regardless of weather — has created valuable in-game advertising inventory, and Fox is monetizing it hard…

2 months ago · 120 likes · Joe Pompliano

What could the Big 12’s lawsuit have done to college sports? A thought exercise

Neal Ternes and Sam Ehrlich, writing for Matt Brown's Extra Points, dig into the legal fight that almost was, before Brendan Sorsby bailed for the supplemental draft and mooted the whole case. The smartest explainer on a story most outlets only covered as drama. (Extra Points).

Welcome to the post-journalism era of professional sports

Oren Weisfeld, writing for Poynter, traces how teams, leagues, and athletes built their own media operations strong enough that they no longer need journalists. The gap between what powerful people want you to know and what's actually happening has never been bigger, especially in sports. Required reading for anyone covering this beat for a living. (Poynter)

Portugal’s great albatross

takes a hard look at Cristiano Ronaldo's drag on Portugal, tracing it back to Qatar 2022, when Portugal's best performance of that tournament came in the one match Ronaldo didn't start. (Wilson's World (of football))

Wilson's World (of football)

Portugal's Great Albatross

For Cristiano Ronaldo, the stats really don’t make comforting reading. He had 25 touches against DR Congo, which for a modern centre-forward isn’t unusually low. He had three shots, all from around the penalty spot. None were on target. He won two aerial duels. He did not set up a chance for anybody else. He didn’t attempt a dribble. In truth, he didn’t do much at all. For a player who operates centrally, who draws the attention as a black hole draws light, he was weirdly peripheral…

2 months ago · 35 likes · 2 comments · Jonathan Wilson

The Giants are destroying a San Francisco franchise

Wendy Thurm's take, and it's a sharp one. Five Giants players sat out the team's Pride Night activation this year. Strong opinion, clearly argued, worth your Tuesday whether you end up agreeing with her or not. (hanging sliders)

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

USMNT defeat Australia & are into the knockout round!

Caught Offside: USMNT defeat Australia & are into the knockout round!

Andrew Gundling and JJ Devaney break down the USMNT’s 2-0 win over Australia in Seattle. The mood matches the moment. (Caught Offside).

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

How the Arab World Took Over the World Cup

Johnny Harris, through his channel Search Party, breaks down how a record eight Arab nations qualified for this World Cup, double the four that made it in both 2018 and 2022. (Search Party).

🗞️ The Pressroom

Cone joins Substack

— five-time World Series champion, now a respected voice in broadcasting for YES Network and ESPN — has joined Substack. Worth watching what he decides to do with the platform.

Knockout stage bracket, updated in real time

BBC Sport is running a live bracket projection that updates throughout the group stage, showing exactly who your team would face in the round of 32 if the groups ended right now. Useful for tracking how one result shifts the whole picture. (BBC Sport).

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

3. 1974 at Winged Foot, 1979 at Inverness, and 1990 at Medinah, where at age 45 he became the oldest U.S. Open champion ever.)

🧾 The Scorecard

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Sunday Back Page: I've Been Waiting My Entire Life for This

Ian Powers — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 10:01:05 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

They don’t teach you this in journalism school.

Saturday night, with the Knicks one win away from ending a 53-year title drought, I had a finished column sitting in my drafts. Four hundred and thirty words on May 8, 1970, the Hard Hat Riot, Willis Reed, and what it all means for New York in 2026. It was good.

Then Jalen Brunson scored 45 points, the city erupted, and I threw it out.

Some stories write themselves. Some stories make you rewrite everything else.

Settle in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

📰 The Lead

I cannot feel the keys beneath my fingers.

The goosebumps on my arms and the back of my neck won’t subside.

Fireworks are going off outside my window in Harlem.

Hundreds of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers are euphoric in the streets up and down the island of Manhattan, throughout the outer boroughs, and miles into the metropolitan suburbs.

Yet, like the sports writer I am, I am furiously rewriting my column for The Sunday Back Page on deadline.

Because a 6-foot-2, 190-pound sparkplug and an unrelenting team won a championship Saturday night.

All week, I worked on what I thought was a marvelous 430 words on May 8, 1970, the night Willis Reed hobbled out onto the Madison Square Garden court and inspired the New York Knicks to a Game 7 win over the Los Angeles Lakers for their first NBA championship mere hours after a dark day for New York known as the Hard Hat Riot.

But as midnight rolls past, I cannot in good conscience publish a column about darkness. My motivation tonight is simpler: to spread the love, joy, and hope the 2026 Knicks are filling me with after winning their first NBA title in my lifetime.

Something weird is happening inside my chest cavity, a feeling I’ve only experienced when my favorite teams win the ultimate prize, or the equivalent thereof.

The day my twins were born. My wedding day. Those were better.

The reason I’m not out in the streets right now is not only because I’m writing for you, my readers. But my daughter is running her first 5K Sunday morning, and I want to experience watching her do that even more than attending the Knicks’ parade down the Canyon of Heroes on Thursday.

I was born in 1974. The Knicks last won a title in 1973. I have been waiting my entire life for this without knowing it.

For most of my time as an editor at the New York Daily News, outside of a little Melo magic and Linsanity, the Knicks were bad. Horrendously bad. At one point during the Isiah Thomas years, we coined it the “Reign of Error.” Don’t get me started on Phil Jackson.

But then, Jalen Brunson came to New York in the summer of 2022 and changed the franchise forever.

Instead of the Knicks teams I cried over in the 1990s, who couldn’t get over the last hump, Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges, and the rest bulldozed that hump. Again. And Again.

As if his legend couldn’t grow any larger, Brunson scored 45 points in Saturday’s Game 5 clincher, tying Michael Jordan for the most points in an NBA Finals clincher. Michael Jordan.

During Game 3 of the Finals, Derek Jeter and Eli Manning, kings of the last 30 years of New York sports, sat next to each other on Celebrity Row at Madison Square Garden. While they’re already carving out Brunson’s face on the Knicks’ Mount Rushmore, he can pull up a chair to that royal court.

The goosebumps aren’t going anywhere. Neither are the Knicks.

— Ian Powers

Grant Wahl Should Be Covering this World Cup

❓The Question

Who scored the first hat trick in World Cup history?

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The journalist who should be covering this World Cup

died at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar at 49. The 2026 tournament — on American soil, in the country whose soccer culture he did more to shape than almost any journalist — was what 25 years of work had been building toward.

His wife, , is an infectious disease physician who served as an Ebola aid worker in West Africa. She writes on his Substack about the Ebola outbreak now reaching the World Cup’s doorstep, the federal government’s complete absence of public health preparation for the largest mass-gathering event in its history, and the story Grant would have chased if he were here.

One of the most important pieces of sports journalism you’ll read this summer — and a reminder of what the best of this craft looks like..

Fútbol with Grant Wahl

The World Cup kicks off on Wednesday. My husband should be covering it…

3 months ago · 149 likes · Dr. Céline Gounder and Céline Gounder

The team of exiles coming home

Haiti returns to the FIFA World Cup for the first time in 52 years — built from a diaspora spread across France, Belgium, England, Turkey, and beyond.

traces the full arc: Joe Gaetjens scoring the goal that beat England in 1950, Manno Sanon ending Dino Zoff’s 1,142-minute shutout streak at the 1974 World Cup, and a coach who qualified the team without ever setting foot in Haiti because the country is too dangerous to visit. Essential World Cup reading..

Bruv...listen

A Team of Exiles

Last fall, the Haitian national football team qualified for the 2026 FIFA World Cup for the first time in fifty-two years…

3 months ago · 15 likes · 18 comments · Graham Pierre-Louis

The USMNT opened the World Cup looking exactly like Pochettino told them to

As a U.S. Soccer stan, when this one dropped, I read it. breaks down opening night in Los Angeles — a 4-1 dismantling of one of South America's most formidable defensive units, Balogun's two first-half goals, and a team that played exactly as free and uninhibited as Pochettino asked them to.

The Swan Dive with Meg Swanick

USMNT beat Paraguay 4-1 to start their 2026 World Cup journey

“I want them to play free and happy. Don’t worry about the pressure and the consequences. They need to think and play tomorrow like they’re a child. With no pressure or responsibility. Just do what you’ve always done.” — Pochettino in Los Angeles the day before tonight’s game…

3 months ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Megan Swanick

The other World Cup competition nobody is talking about

for MR PORTER makes the case that what players wear to training is now as scrutinized as what they wear on the pitch — and the World Cup is where it all converges. France is the runaway favorite for best-dressed team, Japan's away kit is generating the most buzz, and Haiti's fanbase in the US might be the most stylish in the stands. A fun read with the tournament underway.

MR PORTER

Why Style Will Win The World Cup

There was a time when football formed the subject of manly Monday water-cooler debriefs, but David Beckham aside, fashion wasn’t on the agenda. Fast forward to 2026 and things have changed. Footballers sit front row at fashion shows – and sometimes they are even on the runway. They also create trends off the pitch, with what they wear en route to traini…

3 months ago · 4 likes · How to Wear It with MR PORTER and Lauren Cochrane

Ten great World Cup kits — and one glaring omission

ranks his ten favorite international kits ahead of the World Cup, hitting the Netherlands ‘88, France ‘98, Japan ‘22, and eight others worth debating. A good visual rabbit hole with the tournament underway. Only one problem: the 1994 USMNT denim stars jersey — arguably the most iconic kit in American soccer history, worn on home soil — didn’t make the list.

Luxury Leagues and Looks

The Top 10 Greatest National Kits:

We are just over a week away from the World Cup, and the excitement is reeling in. Who is going to win? which player is going to outshine the rest? And most importantly what kit is going to take the crown as the best…

3 months ago · 12 likes · 12 comments · James Hastilow

When your team loses, at least you still have the Cowboys

Spurs fan on the five stages of grief, emotional apathy, and 38 years of mostly disappointment — with the Cowboys somehow making it worse.

Marcus Musick

Being a Dallas Cowboys Fan Is Rough, but the San Antonio Spurs Almost Broke Me

I’m a big sports fan…

3 months ago · 20 likes · 25 comments · Marcus Musick

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The Hurricanes are one win away. Raleigh is unhinged.

Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio recorded this one live from Lenovo Center immediately after the final horn of Game 5 — and you can hear every bit of it. Jordan Staal’s sixth goal in five Finals games (a feat not accomplished since 1956), Svechnikov’s two power-play goals, Brandon Bussi’s composure in net, and a franchise now 60 minutes away from its first Stanley Cup in 20 years.

OG After Dark is essential listening if you want to know what a city sounds like when it’s on the edge of something.

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

How the Knicks pulled off the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history

A Sunday Back Page playlist staple. Ben Taylor — author of Thinking Basketball, host of the podcast, and the best in the business at merging film study with stats — breaks down the Game 4 second-half adjustments, the coaching decisions, and the three fingertip plays that changed NBA Finals history. If you watched that game and still can’t explain how it happened, start here.

🗞️ The Pressroom

A Substack bestseller explains why he’s moving to Beehiiv

Arif Hasan of Wide Left — one of the top sports newsletters on Substack — is out, and his explanation goes deeper than features and fees.

The biggest concern: Andreessen Horowitz, likely Substack’s largest institutional investor, whose co-founder Marc Andreessen has openly cited Italian fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and techno-feudalist Curtis Yarvin as intellectual influences. Hasan is also honest about the economics — roughly 25% of Wide Left’s paying subscribers came through Substack’s recommendation network — which makes the move a real financial risk, not just a values statement. Worth reading if you publish anywhere.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

American forward Bert Patenaude, who scored all three goals in the United States' 3-0 win against Paraguay at the inaugural 1930 tournament in Uruguay. The twist: FIFA didn't officially recognize it until November 10, 2006 — 76 years after the match — after soccer historian Colin Jose gathered South American newspaper accounts, testimony from Patenaude's former teammates, and the original U.S. manager's match report to make the case. Full circle moment: 96 years later, the USMNT opened the 2026 World Cup against the same opponent. Folarin Balogun had two goals at the half.

🧾 The Scorecard

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The Sunday Back Page: The World Cup Always Finds a New Hero

Ian Powers — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:01:04 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

The World Cup is here, the Knicks are up 2-0 on the Spurs, and Roland-Garros just crowned a champion nobody had in their bracket a week ago and one more today. We’ve got a column on the 18-year-old who might own the next six weeks of your soccer-watching life, reads on a hockey coach who burned every job he ever had before getting this one exactly right, and a tennis newsletter that made me angrier about a two-centimeter line call than I expected.

Grab a cuppa and settle in.

What’s inside

📰 The Lead

The stories of the World Cup capture something immeasurable within us.

The scarcity of every four years puts every storyline and character into hyperbolic overdrive. Our sense of belonging as we root for our national team.

There is an incessant need for a protagonist, a hero to drive the narrative. This summer, I’m going to watch every minute of Lamine Yamal.

He’s 18. He turns 19 on July 13 — six days before the World Cup final. Three days before his 17th birthday, he curled a shot from 25 yards past the French goalkeeper in a Euro semifinal — the youngest goal in men’s European Championship history. Spain won the whole thing.

This season at Barcelona, he ranked just inside the top 10 in all of Europe’s top leagues for non-penalty goals and assists per 90. CIES Football Observatory rates him the most valuable player on earth — ahead of Erling Haaland, ahead of Mbappé.

The World Cup has, at times, given us a teenager who made you stop what you were doing.

Pelé was 17 in Sweden in 1958 — hat trick against France, two goals in the final, first of three Jules Rimet Trophies.
Diego Maradona was a 17-year-old star in 1978, and the biggest story is that he didn’t even make the Argentine squad for a World Cup on home soil. (They still won)
Giuseppe Bergomi was an 18-year-old surprise call-up in 1982 who was mature beyond his years on the back line in helping Italy through a second group stage that included Brazil and Argentina in the same pool.
Michael Owen’s one run against Argentina in 1998.
Lionel Messi’s debut at 18 in 2006.
Kylian Mbappé at 19 in 2018, four goals, a title.

Last World Cup, Messi finally filled the protagonist role everyone had been waiting decades to hand him. So while eyes will be on him again, and on Mbappé, Haaland, Kane and old-man CR7 — I know where I’m looking.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Spain. The golden generation — Xavi, Iniesta, Villa, Casillas, and my personal favorite, Fernando Torres — won the 2008 Euros, the 2010 World Cup, and the 2012 Euros. That era is over. What replaced it may be better.

Spain arrives as reigning European and Olympic champion, chasing something no men’s national team has ever done: hold the World Cup, the Euros, and Olympic gold simultaneously. Every World Cup held in the Americas had been won by a South American country — until Germany dismantled host nation Brazil 7-1 in the 2014 semifinal and took the title.

I’m USMNT first. Full stop. But I know what I’m watching for.

— Ian Powers

Welcome to the Round of Superstars—the Stage Legends Were Built For

❓The Question

Pelé scored 6 goals in his first World Cup in 1958. How many total goals did he score across his World Cup career?

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The coach who burns it down — and why it worked this time

The Golden Knights let Pete DeBoer go with six games remaining in the regular season and handed the bench to John Tortorella — the most combustible personality in hockey, a coach whose abrasive style and demand for grinding, suffocating play has worn out its welcome at virtually every stop he’s made. Never mind that he coached the Lightning to a Stanley Cup and took the Rangers on deep playoff runs. The pattern isn’t losing. It’s burning the place down on the way out.

And yet. Tortorella was exactly right for this group, at this moment, and Vegas just swept the Colorado Avalanche, the Stanley Cup favorites, to reach the Final.

of skips past the vindication and goes straight to the film room: what Carolina’s forecheck will demand of Mitch Marner and Jack Eichel, how Carter Hart sustained a .944 save percentage against the best team in hockey, and what standing four wins from a championship actually requires. Good hockey writing for people who want to understand what they’re watching.

What a Knight!

A week ago, it seemed impossible…

3 months ago · 1 like · Daniel Christian Gagné

I've been a Knicks fan my whole life. I still don't understand this team.

For my entire life, the Knicks have found ways to lose the most important games. Charles Smith and the non-layups against Chicago in 1993. Reggie Miller and the choke sign. Beloved John Starks went 2-for-18 in Game 7 of the 1994 Finals, including 0-for-11 from beyond the arc. This franchise has a gift for turning its fans into people who brace for impact.

has done the math on why this team is different. Entering the Finals, the Knicks had the best playoff scoring margin in NBA history at +19.4 points per game. Better than Jordan’s Bulls. Better than Shaq and Kobe. The defense went from 14th in the league last year to the best in basketball through these playoffs. Mike Brown unlocked Karl-Anthony Towns as a point forward, his assist rate roughly doubled, and the offense became something no one had a clean answer for. Silver is honest about the shooting luck. Even accounting for it, the number still holds up.

What the numbers don’t fully capture is the fourth quarter. My friend Peter Botte of the New York Post put it simply on X and 1.6 million people agreed: “Best closers in NY sports history: 1. Mariano Rivera. 2. Jalen Brunson. There’s not a close third.”

They’re up, 2-0, with both wins on the road in San Antonio. I’m in awe. I don’t fully understand it. Read Silver’s piece.

Silver Bulletin

The Knicks might actually be great?

With San Antonio finishing off Oklahoma City, the Spurs and New York Knicks are set to face one another in a rematch of the 1999 NBA Finals that could be the most fun matchup in years. This is the first of our two-part NBA Finals preview; I’m making the case for the Knicks, while…

3 months ago · 206 likes · 20 comments · Nate Silver

The substitute who decided the World Cup

On the eve of the 2026 World Cup, of Pattern of Play goes back to the 2014 final. Germany and Argentina are scoreless through 90 minutes. Joachim Löw pulls Götze aside and tells him: Show the world you are better than Messi and can decide the World Cup. Twenty-five minutes later, Götze controlled a cross on his chest and volleyed it past Romero with his left foot. Germany wins. First substitute in history to score the winning goal in a World Cup final. He was 22 years old, and he hadn’t even started the game.

Kwame uses that moment to examine something most sports writing skips past — the specific skill of entering a living system you didn’t build. The game has been running for 80 minutes without you. The patterns are set, the rhythms established, the understandings unspoken. The substitute has to read all of it from the outside and act on it the moment they step in. He takes it further, into Roger Milla at 38, into the new hire joining a team mid-project, the interim leader handed a mess already in motion. The one who waits isn’t disadvantaged. Sometimes they’re the only ones who can see what the system can no longer see from within itself. Good World Cup week reading.

Pattern of Play

The One Who Waits

In the 88th minute of the 2014 World Cup final, with the score still level at 0-0 after extra time approached, Joachim Löw turned to Mario Götze on the Germany bench. What he said has become one of the most quoted instructions in football history: “Show the world you are better than Messi and can decide the World Cup…

3 months ago · 15 likes · 6 comments · Kwame Twumasi-Ankrah

The voice behind the microphone

of interned at New York City sports radio station WFAN in the summer of 1989 alongside Ian Eagle — back when Howie Rose was doing Mets Extra and Mike Breen was reading updates for Imus in the Morning, and two guys named Francesa and Russo were about to start an afternoon drive show together.

Eagle has been one of the best in the business ever since. Nets voice for more than 30 years, NFL on CBS, the Final Four, now the NBA on Amazon Prime. Tratner caught up with him by text ahead of the Knicks-Spurs Finals — Eagle on what makes Wembanyama a defensive problem without a clean answer, what a Knicks title would mean for Jalen Brunson’s legacy, what Mike Breen calling this series means to a New Yorker who’s done it his whole life, and what he remembers about the day the Mets traded Lenny Dykstra and it all clicked that this was the business he wanted to be in. Light, fun, and worth it for the last answer alone: asked for a Finals pick, Eagle declined. Turns out he’s never eaten a condiment in his life. Never had a cherry.

The Through Line

Ian Eagle on the NBA Finals, Mike Breen, his start at WFAN, and more

In 1989, I was part of WFAN’s first summer intern group. That class also included Ian Eagle. I was the big fish in the little pond at Lehigh University, asked to kick-start student broadcasts for football and basketball when I came back for my senior year. Ian was, well, Ian Eagle at Syracuse. Future Bob Costas Award winner…

3 months ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · David Tratner

The last Grand Slam still trusting the human eye

João Fonseca hit a forehand down the line at 8-7 in the second-set tiebreak against Casper Ruud in the Round of 16. The linesman called it good. The chair umpire agreed. Ruud called for the supervisor. The clay mark was inconclusive. Hawk-Eye, available to broadcast but carrying no official authority at Roland Garros, had the ball out by two centimetres. Fonseca took the set. The post-match press conference was entirely about a ball.

The Tour Van breaks down why Roland Garros is the last Grand Slam standing on this — the Australian Open went fully electronic in 2021, the US Open in 2022, Wimbledon retired its line judges before 2025. The French federation’s arguments aren’t nothing: clay geometry creates tracking complications that hardcourt doesn’t, and the French federation has an employment commitment to more than 700 trained officials it hasn’t been willing to walk away from. But the piece also cites a 2024 study from Roland Garros’s own statisticians showing that top-10 seeds received favorable overrules at a measurably higher rate than players ranked 50 and below. The human eye has a bias. The French Open is the only major still depending on it. Good wide-angle tennis writing with a real argument at its center.

https://www.tourvantennis.com/p/linesmen

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Six weeks of soccer. Here's what to follow.

David Gass and the crew at Kickback Soccer Media have spent the past year building toward this tournament — capsules on every competing nation, tactical breakdowns, qualifying drama, the whole run-up. Episode 16 of First Touch is the payoff: Gass and his guests sit down before the opening whistle and go through the storylines they can’t wait to watch unfold. Less of a prediction show, more curiosity inventory — the narratives, the characters, the subplots worth tracking across six weeks of soccer. Good company for a commute this week.

Fourteen years ago, nestled in a press seat at Suzanne-Lenglen on a gray day at the 2012 edition of Roland Garros, Rafael Nadal administered one of the most merciless beatings I’ve ever witnessed, so bad that those Parisian ambulances that encircle the 16th…

📺 The Watches

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The World Cup is also a $10 billion business

of The Long Play breaks down how FIFA built the World Cup into the most lucrative four-year cash cycle in sports — and how 2026, with its expanded 48-team field and North American footprint, represents the biggest money grab yet. Good context for understanding what’s happening around the soccer.

The case for the USMNT

Filippo Silva of Tactical Manager makes the case that the USMNT is the dark horse to watch at this World Cup — a team with the talent, the home crowd, and a bracket that could carry them to the semifinals if things break right. He maps out the pathway. Good pre-tournament viewing before the Americans kick off, and a useful counterweight to the column you’ve already read about Yamal and Spain.

🗞️ The Pressroom

Howard Bryant finally has somewhere to put his thoughts

He had his reasons for waiting — an ESPN contract that prohibited outside writing, genuine skepticism about the subscription economy, discomfort with the whole journalist-as-brand apparatus. But after leaving ESPN last year, found himself with too many thoughts and nowhere to put them except a Threads post. He’s done with that. The launch piece opens at Roland Garros in 2012 — Nadal dismantling Juan Monaco 6-2, 6-0, 6-0 — before explaining why a writer of Bryant’s range needs a daily landing space again. It’s a good read. His ESPN column was called “The Truth.” He’s thinking that name might need to come back.

Howard Bryant

What Am I Doing Here?

3 months ago · 27 likes · 13 comments · Howard Bryant

Two sportswriters, one ring, a cobblestone street in Philadelphia

My friend and former colleague — New York Times bestselling author, one of the best storytellers in the business — has a daughter, Alex, who is an award-winning features sports reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She just got engaged to Rich Hofmann, who runs the Broad St. Bulletin, a daily independent newsletter covering Philly sports. If you care at all about the Eagles, Phillies, Sixers or Flyers, it should already be in your inbox.

Wayne wrote about the proposal — it happened Friday night on Delancey Street in Old City Philadelphia, the cobblestones and colonial-era rowhouses and all of it — and it’s a beautiful piece. The origin story alone: Alex and Rich were both at The Athletic during COVID, connected through a Slack channel discussion on a story, and the rest took three years to work itself out. Two sportswriters, two press box families — Rich’s father was a longtime columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News — and a ring on a historic street in the city they both cover. Read it.

Coffey Grounds

Diamonds on Delancey Street

This is Coffey Grounds, a newsletter by me, Wayne Coffey — New York Times bestselling author and longtime journalist — about the people and stories that don’t make the highlight reel but probably should. More than 10,000 readers get a fresh post every Saturday, on me…

3 months ago · 23 likes · 8 comments · Wayne Coffey

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

12 goals. 6 in 1958; 1 in 1962; 1 in 1966; 4 in 1970.

🧾 The Scorecard

The Sunday Back Page: 53

Ian Powers — Sun, 31 May 2026 10:02:00 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

This week, the Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, the World Cup is dressed and ready before a ball is kicked, Lisa Leslie tells the story nobody told at the time, and Sports Illustrated loses more good journalists.

Settle in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Sport Stackers is a growing community of Substack sports writers helping each other stack wins, subscribers, and income — with real feedback, shared strategies, and creator-to-creator accountability. Members get access to a network of sports journalists and newsletter operators who are building independently, just like you. If you’re serious about turning your sports writing into a sustainable business, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

The number that keeps coming back to me is 53.

In March 2014, I wrote about Madison Square Garden hosting the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 53 years. The drought traced directly to the 1951 point-shaving scandal that swallowed seven players from CCNY’s Grand Slam championship team — sons of immigrants, descendants of slaves, the best basketball the city had ever produced — and humbled New York’s hold on the game it invented.

That reporting earned me a first prize from the Associated Press Sports Editors. I was proud of it. Still am.

Now the number is back.

The Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years. Atlanta took a 2-1 series lead in Round 1. The Knicks have won 11 straight since. Sweep Philly. Sweep Cleveland. Win 11 straight after going down 2-1. The East wasn’t strong enough is a hard case to make from those box scores.

I was a Knicks fan long before I was a journalist. Bernard King in the mid-80s. The entire Patrick Ewing era. Jordan breaking my heart more than once. The 1994 Finals loss in seven to Houston still sits wrong. But 1999 had something else. Allan Houston’s off-balance jumper against Miami in the first round, eliminating the top seed. Larry Johnson’s four-point play against Indiana in the Eastern Conference Finals. That team was a No. 8 seed playing like it had nothing to lose. They lost to San Antonio in five, but nobody who watched felt robbed. It was enough just to be there.

Twenty-seven years later, this team is back.

The Garden is 53 years removed from the last Knicks championship. Fifty-three years since the city rebuilt its basketball identity after the scandal gutted it — sending its best players out of New York and into programs across the country. Frank McGuire took a team of mostly city kids to North Carolina and beat Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain for the 1957 NCAA title. The Knicks of 1970 and 1973 gave it back. Then nothing.

This city has been waiting a long time. The gear is flying off the racks. You can feel it everywhere.

I hope they finish it.

— Ian Powers

Headers and Volleys Fanzine

❓The Question

Iga Swiatek is still alive at this year’s French Open. If she wins the title, how many Roland Garros crowns would she have — and where would that put her on the all-time Open Era list?

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Before a ball is kicked, Nike has already won | SoccerBible

The tournament hasn’t started, and Nike has already lapped the field — not with kits, but with collaborators.

Palace with England. Jacquemus with France. Slawn with Nigeria. NOCTA with Canada. G-Dragon’s PEACEMINUSONE with South Korea. Virgil Abloh Archive with the USA. Tayler Willson maps how Nike paired each partner to a country’s specific cultural frequency rather than just slapping heat on a crest.

The World Cup is being fought on Instagram before a ball is kicked, and Nike knows it.

The paper trail MLB didn't want anyone to find | eyeblack

Bradford William Davis has been doing the kind of work on MLB’s domestic violence investigations that the league would rather nobody do.

Here, he uses FOIA requests to obtain emails between MLB’s Department of Investigations and local police departments — including correspondence from the 2015-16 José Reyes case — to show exactly how thorough the league can be when it wants to build a case.

The contrast with how the league handled Mike Clevinger’s accusers is the whole story. Essential independent sports reporting.

Every World Cup ball, every era, one contract |

Adidas has supplied every World Cup ball since 1970. Fifty-six years, 14 tournaments, one contract nobody else has ever seriously competed for.

Woz traces the first half of that run, from the Telstar’s black-and-white panels built for television sets in Mexico to the Tricolore Zidane headed twice past the Brazilian keeper in the 1998 final, and finds a history of the sport hiding inside the equipment.

The Hand of God happened with the Azteca under Maradona’s feet. Baggio’s missed penalty in the Rose Bowl sent the Questra into the upper tier. Ronaldo was there in 1998, too, even if France 98 is not his tournament to own.

Part 2, covering the era when the match ball stopped being equipment and became a product line — and when Messi’s story begins — is coming. Start here.

A History of the World Cup Ball: The Tango Years

Last week I watched Brazil versus Czechoslovakia from the 1970 World Cup. Brazil ran out 4-1 winners, and although the Czech team played well, they didn't press Pelé and company. The pitches weren't anywhere near the standard of today, and I had to ask myself why FIFA referees were running around in long black sleeved tops. One thing that was a constant…

3 months ago · 5 likes · 6 comments · Woz

The roster reveal is now a brand statement |

The World Cup roster reveal used to be a list of names. Now it’s a brand manifesto.

ranks the best announcement videos so far: Scotland with Ewan McGregor’s voice over local pubs and landscapes, the Czech Republic with kids in Nedvěd haircuts dreaming in their bedrooms, England opening on John Lennon and closing with four players striking the Help! album cover pose to announce Harry Kane. England wins.

The formula she identifies for what separates the ones that land from the ones that don’t is worth the read on its own. Part 2 is coming.

Off Ball Logic

The Rebranding of Squad Announcements

Hi everyone! I’m Carla, and this is Off-Ball Logic, the weekly newsletter where we step away from the 90 minutes on the pitch to dissect the business strategies, marketing mechanics, and economic engines that are really driving the modern sports world…

3 months ago · 21 likes · 18 comments · Carla Bilche

Outside the Garden when the city came apart |

covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. She was outside Madison Square Garden when the Knicks clinched, microphone in hand, watching the city come apart.

This isn’t a game recap, it’s a dispatch from the street, from the people who have been waiting 27 years for this. She writes about the ones who closed their eyes and thought of someone gone. The ones who weren’t alive the last time. Worth reading alongside whatever highlights you already watched.

Moll Don't Lie

Live from New York, it's the NBA Finals

A figure in a Spider-Man costume kneels atop a streetlight, waving a Knicks flag over a sea of euphoric fans who point toward the sky and roar. The Empire State Building smiles down in orange and blue…

3 months ago · 45 likes · 6 comments · Molly Morrison

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Lisa Leslie reveals what it cost her to be a mom and a WNBA star | ANDMOM with Skylar Diggins and Cassidy Hubbarth

Three-time MVP, four-time Olympic gold medalist, first player to dunk in WNBA history — and she felt compelled to publicly apologize to fans for missing a season to give birth. Skylar Diggins and Cassidy Hubbarth’s new podcast is built around the specific experience of being a mother in professional sports, and this second episode is a strong early statement.

Leslie talks about what it took to bring her daughter on the road when no infrastructure existed for it, the financial and logistical realities that nobody was talking about then, and what real support for player-moms could actually look like. Worth your hour.

@dailywsports If you missed out on the Gainesville Super Regional this weekend then you missed good drama. Like REALLY good drama. To quote a man on the bird app, the softball was good and the blood was bad. What did you make of the Texas Tech vs Florida series over the weekend? #ncaasoftball #wcws #ufsoftball

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Hit five times. Still hit a homer. Florida still wouldn't shake hands. | The Daily W Sports

Texas Tech transfer Mia Williams came back to Gainesville last weekend to face her former Florida team in the NCAA Softball Super Regional. Florida pitcher Keagan Rothrock had hit 20 batters all season. She hit Williams four times in three games (Williams was hit 5 times overall).

A Florida fan was ejected after striking Mia’s younger sister with a handheld fan, an altercation that also briefly pulled Jason Williams — White Chocolate, former Florida Gator, NBA champion — out of the stands before he returned. Williams answered the chaos the only way that matters: a two-run homer in Game 1, and a 16-7 Texas Tech rout in the series clincher.

Florida refused to shake hands after. Sarah Chovnick breaks it all down. If you aren’t following The Daily W Sports, fix that.

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🗞️ The Pressroom

How to destroy a literary reputation in one move |

, one of Substack’s biggest voices at 291,000-plus subscribers, pins Sports Illustrated’s collapse on the moment it published AI-generated content under fake bylines.

He’s not wrong that it was a self-inflicted wound. But the AI scandal was a cherry on top of a decades-long decline: the same slow retreat from ambition that has hollowed out legacy sports media across the board.

SI was already a shell before the fake bylines. The magazine that once published Faulkner on hockey and convinced a president-elect to write a freelance piece had been dying in slow motion long before anyone heard of a large language model. Friday’s layoffs took more good journalists with it. Read Gioia’s piece. Just know the story is longer than he tells it.

The Honest Broker

How to Destroy a Literary Reputation in One Move

This would typically be behind a paywall. But I’m making it available to everybody. So enjoy…

3 months ago · 503 likes · 99 comments · Ted Gioia

📋 The Roster

Here are some tennis follows for the French Open (Roland Garros):

| | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

Five titles, which would move Swiatek into sole possession of third place on the all-time Open Era list, behind Steffi Graf (six) and Chris Evert (seven).

🧾 The Scorecard

The Sunday Back Page: The Real World

Sun, 24 May 2026 10:02:54 GMT

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

This week, the World Cup roster leaks before the party, North London has its best and worst season in years, a developer builds a newsletter overnight and gets 5,000 subscribers in six days, and Kyle Busch is gone too soon.

Grab a cuppa and settle in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

📰 The Lead

The World Cup is less than three weeks away.

On Tuesday, the U.S. men’s national team is having a party to announce arguably the most talented roster the Yanks have ever assembled for the world’s biggest sporting event.

Of course, the roster was leaked to The Guardian on Saturday—the Sunday Back Page thinks this was calculated after most countries announced their rosters late last week—so Tuesday will be more of a love-in at South Street Seaport in New York City. I’ll be there as a card-carrying U.S. Soccer Insider.

South Street Seaport is 12.5 miles from MetLife Stadium, the site of the World Cup final. Barring a near-miracle, American fans know Tuesday will be as close as the USMNT will get to MetLife this summer. If you’ve seen the prices for the final, then you know I won’t be there either. Get-in prices are roughly $11,000 per seat.

The USMNT’s World Cup path is West Coast- and Central U.S.-based. According to Kalshi, the U.S. is the slight favorite (41%) to win Group D and has 82% odds to advance from the group.

Pulisic at AC Milan, Balogun at Monaco, McKennie at Juventus, Antonee Robinson returning to full fitness at Fulham after a knee injury that cost him a large chunk of the season, Chris Richards at Crystal Palace, Weah at Marseille and Tyler Adams at Bournemouth. This is a roster of players at top-flight clubs doing real things in Europe every week. For several of them, this is the moment they’ve spent their careers building toward.

The biggest omissions — Tanner Tessmann and Diego Luna — were due to injury. The Gio Reyna stans are psyched he made the roster under Mauricio Pochettino. This isn’t Jurgen Klinsmann leaving Landon Donovan at home in 2014 with an agenda behind it. This is a coach making hard calls on players who weren’t fully healthy.

England announced on Friday and owned the weekend conversation. The U.S. leak dropped Saturday. Make of that timing what you will.

June 12. SoFi. Paraguay. It’s here.

— Ian Powers

Lane Kiffin and America’s Blindness to Racism in Sports

❓The Question

Which player holds the all-time World Cup scoring record?

A) Eusébio
B) Miroslav Klose
C) Gerd Müller
D) Lionel Messi

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The overnight newsletter

Yahoo Sports! newsletter guru Kendall Baker posted on X, wondering what it would look like if someone delivered every MLB box score to your inbox every morning. Dense. Complete. No editorial. Just the data, the way the agate used to run in the back of the sports section.

Jeff Blankenburg read it, started building that night, and had 5,000 subscribers six days later. The list is growing by roughly 1,000 a day. It’s free. It arrives at 5 a.m.

Subscribe to get your baseball agate page delivered to your inbox: boxscore.email

Better late than never, Lane

doesn’t let Lane Kiffin take a bow for leaving Ole Miss. When Kiffin told Vanity Fair that top Black recruits were being steered away from Oxford by their families because of the school’s racial history, Phillips pointed out the obvious: Kiffin spent years there as the state’s highest-paid employee and never used that platform to change anything. Now he’s at LSU, whose nickname traces back to a Confederate military unit, accepting credit for leaving a place he helped sustain.

The timing matters. The Louisiana legislature is currently considering a redistricting bill that would likely eliminate a majority Black congressional district. That would be in Baton Rouge — the same city where Kiffin is now coaching, recruiting Black athletes, and telling the world how much better it feels there.

The Contrarian

By Carron J. Phillips…

4 months ago · 86 likes · 10 comments

The shirt at the back of the wardrobe

’s piece on Arsenal winning the Premier League title is the kind of writing that earns its length. He opens with a shirt at the back of a wardrobe — a Bergkamp, maybe a Henry (the answer should be Tony Adams) — and what it means to finally pull it out again after 22 years.

As a Liverpool fan, I’ll admit this made me feel meh. But one of the reasons this newsletter exists is to push past the echo chamber. Read things that challenge you. Machon did the work here, and Arsenal fans deserve this one.

Hunter Machon | The Press Box

The Weight of Almost

Somewhere at the back of a wardrobe, or tucked in a box in a garage, or folded inside a drawer that doesn’t get opened much anymore, there is a red-and-white Arsenal shirt. It might be a Bergkamp shirt. It might say Henry across the back. It might still carry the faint outline of a White Hart Lane afternoon, creased and faded from the wash that followed…

3 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Hunter Machon

How Tottenham lost the plot

While Arsenal fans dust off their Henry shirts, their neighbors at Spurs are staring down the final day of the season, hoping to avoid relegation.

and trace exactly how a club that reached the Champions League final in 2019 got here: the managerial carousel, the Kane departure, the stadium debt, the loss of identity.

The “Dare is to Do” motto has never felt more hollow. I mean, even Daniel Levy is no longer there to blame. Sunday’s final day could determine whether this is a temporary decline or something more permanent.

Sportsclusive

From Madrid to the Brink: The Tragic Deconstruction of Tottenham Hotspur

Dare is to Do? How Spurs Forfeited Their Soul and Identity by Asher Lewis…

3 months ago · 2 likes · Sportsclusive and Asher Lewis

The date night guy

The Sunday Back Page submission cutoff is Thursday at midnight. This piece was published Friday. I’m running it anyway.

When of the wrote about Kyle Busch’s death, she didn’t write a career retrospective. She wrote about date nights. After races, Busch would come into the studio and hang out with Lang while the crew chief picked out a sappy song. NASCAR would come looking for him and be told: he’s in with Claire doing “Date Night.” That detail tells you more about who Kyle Busch actually was than any win total could.

We do what NASCAR does in tragedy. We lean on each other. We hold on to the good memories. We do not fall apart but fall together. It’s hard - and it is going to be sad.

He died of sepsis caused by acute pneumonia. Not a crash. Not something the sport had prepared us for. That’s what made Thursday so disorienting — NASCAR fans carry the knowledge that any weekend could bring the worst. This wasn’t that. This was something else entirely.

Dialed In Journal

The Passing Of Kyle Busch.

I finished the Dialed In Journal newsletter Thursday before the passing of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch. I decided I could neither send it nor trash it. So I have posted the newsletter on the web site if you’d like to read it. I’m sending this note to let you know that and the fact that I won’t be emailing out the newsletter this week because of the sad new…

3 months ago · 44 likes · 16 comments · Claire B. Lang

🎧 The Listens

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Poulin. Of course it was Poulin.

The IX Sports Podcast is one of the better women’s sports outlets working right now. Host Maya Smith brings in Montréal Victoire beat writer Dylan Nazareth to break down how the Victoire swept the Ottawa Charge in four games to win the first Walter Cup in franchise history, and how Marie-Philip Poulin, because of course it was Poulin, walked away with playoff MVP.

They also get into the PWHL’s expansion to San Jose and what that means for Montréal’s roster heading into next season. Thirty-five minutes, well spent.

22 down. Overtime. MSG. Yeah.

Knicks Film School sits in an interesting place: t’s fan-first, but has built something that serious journalists show up for. Dexter Henry of the New York Post is in this episode. That’s not an accident.

When the Knicks came back from 22 down to beat the Cavs in overtime in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals at MSG, Macri did what he does best: relived every moment of it with the energy of someone who couldn’t sleep after. GMAC (Andrew Claudio) joins later, too. An hour and 19 minutes of people who care deeply about this team making sense of something that probably shouldn’t have happened.

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The southpaw problem

Former MLB pitcher has been putting out smart, watchable baseball content on YouTube, and this one is worth your time.

He goes into why left-handed players are excluded from certain positions and skills: no lefty catchers, no lefty shortstops, and the reason southpaws essentially can’t throw a splitter.

May has the credibility to explain the mechanical and structural reasons behind it all, and he does so without making you feel like you’re watching a clinic. Good baseball nerd content for a World Cup buildup week when you still want your baseball fix.

And please don’t hate me for featuring another former Met in The Watch this week.

🗞️ The Pressroom

Another one leaves

Mike Tanier is moving Too Deep Zone from Substack to Ghost. The reason is familiar by now: Substack’s platforming policies (Andrew Tate chief among the concerns) don’t align with his values or the environment he wants for his readers.

Tanier notes that Matt Lombardo made a similar move, taking Between the Hashmarks to Beehiiv around the same time, though they landed on different platforms because of different needs.

The podcast with Matt continues. Worth watching as more sports writers make the same calculation. The two even have a discount subscription package together.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Here are some soccer follows as we ramp up for the World Cup. This is just a small portion of the list I will be sharing each week leading up to the World Cup:

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

B) Miroslav Klose. The German striker scored 16 goals across four World Cups (2002, 2006, 2010, 2014).

🧾 The Scorecard

The Sunday Back Page: Spy Games

Ian Powers — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:02:19 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition XI of The Sunday Back Page. I reworked the format. Let me know what you think.

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

Settle in.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Sport Stackers is a growing community of Substack sports writers helping each other stack wins, subscribers, and income — with real feedback, shared strategies, and creator-to-creator accountability. Members get access to a network of sports journalists and newsletter operators who are building independently, just like you. If you're serious about turning your sports writing into a sustainable business, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

An intern for Southampton Football Club tried to spy on Middlesbrough’s training session last week before a Championship playoff match. He hid behind a tree. He was photographed. He fled through a golf club bathroom. His credit card receipt placed him at the scene.

Sky Sports even had a reporter do a kind of reenactment. Middlesbrough is calling for Southampton to be thrown out of next weekend’s playoff final, the game known as the Richest Game in Football. A hearing is set for on or before Tuesday. The final at Wembley is scheduled for next Saturday — though the EFL has confirmed that date could change. Middlesbrough won’t even be allowed in the hearing room.

This is what spying has come to.

Marcelo Bielsa did it better. When Leeds United got caught surveilling opposing practices during their 2019 Championship campaign, Bielsa held a 70-minute press conference and said: Yes, I did it, I’ve done it my whole career, and by the way, I already knew everything about you anyway. The English soccer world decided he was a genius. Connor Stallions at Michigan at least had operational discipline — buying tickets to opposing games under fake names, filming signals from the stands.

Bill Belichick just told a cameraman where to stand.

I was at the New York Daily News when Spygate broke in September 2007. The Patriots got caught filming the Jets’ defensive signals from the sideline. Commissioner Roger Goodell fined Belichick $500,000, fined the club $250,000, stripped the club of a first-round pick, and then destroyed the tapes before anyone outside league offices could see them. Our cartoonist Ed Murwainski drew Belichick in his hoodie with a video camera. We plastered that thing everywhere.

Here’s what made it personal. When Eric Mangini — Belichick’s defensive coordinator — took the Jets job that offseason, Belichick told him not to. Mangini took it anyway. Belichick had his belongings boxed and shipped. Changed the locks.

So when the 2007 season opened, and Mangini’s Jets caught the Patriots’ cameraman on the sideline, Mangini reported it. He knew exactly what Belichick was doing because he’d been inside the operation. He probably lets it go if Belichick doesn’t make it so clear how he felt about people who leave.

Belichick left the Patriots after the 2023 season, second on the all-time wins list, behind Don Shula — a record he’ll have a hard time breaking now. He became eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame this year, and didn’t get in on the first ballot.

But Spygate is in that room. So is the man who put it there by changing the locks on a door.

— Ian Powers

The WNBA season is underway, and to get you acquainted with who is taking the court I’ve put together a visual guide to every team’s opening day starting lineup. I’ve noted some of my observations, but let me know in the comments what jumps out to you…

❓The Question

In Marcelo Bielsa’s famous Spygate season at Leeds United, the club was caught spying on a Championship rival’s training session — yet that same club later knocked Leeds out of the promotion play-offs. Which club was it, and at what stage?

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The WNBA, every roster, charted

I’m a sucker for a good visual, and I don’t highlight them enough in this newsletter. builds data visualizations out of Excel — yes, Excel — and his breakdown of every WNBA starting lineup to open the 2026 season is the kind of work that makes you stop scrolling.

The new CBA made nearly every player in the league a free agent this offseason. Gunther maps what that churn actually looks like, team by team — who stayed, who landed where, who’s getting paid. The Las Vegas Aces starting five will make a combined $5.2 million this season. The Seattle Storm’s starters average $620,000. That gap tells a story.

Charting Hoops

Mapping The WNBA

a year ago · 22 likes · Chris Gunther

The collapse at the Bernabéu, explained simply

I’m not losing sleep over a bad season at the Bernabéu. But put in real work trying to explain how the whole thing came apart, and the answer is simpler than the piece’s length suggests: Ancelotti and Zidane knew how to manage people. Xabi Alonso knows tactics. At Real Madrid, those are not the same job.

The newsletter is called Kroos Control for a reason. Toni Kroos is all over the foundation section — and once you understand what he actually provided, the rest of the collapse makes sense. Nobody replaced him. Nobody replaced Benzema either. You can’t stack elite talent on top of a missing structure and expect it to hold.

Kroos Control

The Ecosystem They Broke

On a Tuesday night in Manchester, Real Madrid looked like themselves again. Vinícius Júnior scored twice, the second from a Tchouaméni assist in the 93rd minute. Kylian Mbappé came on in the 69th minute as the tie was already under control. Los Blancos were through to the quarter finals, and for the first time in a long time, they had looked fluid and c…

4 months ago · 4 likes · Rohan Ajit

What it took to make Atlanta a baseball town

Ted Turner and Bobby Cox died within three days of each other earlier this month. Wendy Parker writes the Sports Biblio Reader, a newsletter devoted to sports books and history, and she grew up in Atlanta watching all of it. Her piece on what those two men built — and what it actually took to turn a punchline into a baseball city — is worth your time.

I’ll be honest: as a Mets fan who watched the Braves own the NL East for what felt like my entire adult life, it is genuinely difficult to fathom. But one of the reasons this newsletter exists is to push past the echo chamber. Read things that challenge you. Sit with a perspective you didn’t choose. Parker’s piece did that for me, and it might do it for you, too.

Sports Biblio Reader

What it takes to make a good sports town

When the forlorn baseball franchise known as the Atlanta Braves was drawing crowds in the three figures—you read that right—in the early 1970s, rumors were rampant that they may leave town…

4 months ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Wendy Parker

The best soccer illustrator you're not following yet

has been on my radar for a while. He’s an illustrator who covers soccer with a level of conception and detail that stops you mid-scroll. He used to produce work for the late when Substack was Wahl’s home. With the World Cup less than a month away, there is no better time to find him.

This piece breaks down what Leydon calls “Haaland Hang Time” — the specific mid-air contortion Erling Haaland uses to turn uncatchable crosses into goals. The illustration alone is worth the click. While you’re there, check his Notes too. His color wheel is the kind of thing you save and come back to.

Dan Leydon

Artefact: Haaland Hang Time

Name: Haaland Hang Time…

4 months ago · 9 likes · Dan Leydon

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Basketball talk with people who make records

I stumbled onto Indie Basketball this week, and I’m glad I did. Host Corban Ford has a simple and kind of perfect premise: talk basketball with musicians. This episode brings in Chris Cresswell of The Flatliners to discuss Raptors heartbreak, which is a very specific kind of pain that apparently crosses over into punk rock circles.

It’s different. It’s niche in the best way. If you’ve ever wanted proof that the sports and music worlds overlap more than you’d think, start here.

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The pitch that changed baseball

Joon Lee makes some of the best sports video journalism on YouTube, and I’ve featured him in these pages before. The SBP one-a-month rule applies, so I’m using my slot wisely. This conversation with former MLB pitcher Adam Ottavino on why 100 mph has become the baseline rather than exceptional won’t rewrite what you know about the game — but it’ll sharpen it.

You may remember Ottavino as the guy who once said he’d strike out Babe Ruth every time. He’s thought more carefully about the game since then.

🗞️ The Pressroom

Gleeman goes home

Aaron Gleeman has been writing about the Minnesota Twins longer than most Twins fans can remember. The Athletic hired him to do exactly that. But since the New York Times acquired The Athletic, the platform has drifted toward bigger personalities and broader regional coverage — beat writers who aren’t driving enough traffic find themselves exposed. Gleeman saw it coming and got out on his own terms.

Twins fans are better for it. And so is independent sports media.

Off the wire, one week before the 500

spent years covering motorsports for the Associated Press, including the Indy 500. She took a voluntary buyout and launched her own Substack. The wire isn’t what it was, and writers who built real audiences on their beats are figuring that out.

The timing is something. The Indy 500 is next week, and for the first time in a long time, Fryer will be covering it for herself.

Lombardo draws a line

Matt Lombardo has been featured in these pages before. His insider NFL coverage is the real thing. He’s moving Between the Hashmarks to Beehiiv, citing the same reasons others have — Substack’s tolerance for certain figures and its Polymarket partnership among them. Making a platform decision based on principle, knowing it costs you something, takes conviction. We wish him well. It also raises a question worth sitting with: how far does a free speech credo go before it becomes something else?

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

Derby County. They beat Leeds in the play-off semi-finals, sending Bielsa’s side home despite the controversy surrounding his scouting methods all season.

🧾 The Scorecard

The Sunday Back Page: Voice of the Bronx

Ian Powers — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:02:48 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition X of The Sunday Back Page.

This is your Sunday morning sports section — built for the inbox and made for independent creators. Every week, the best sports writing, podcasting, and storytelling from people who own what they build. No institutions. No legacy outlets. No algorithms deciding what you see. Just great work. Every Sunday morning.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Sport Stackers is a growing community of Substack sports writers helping each other stack wins, subscribers, and income — with real feedback, shared strategies, and creator-to-creator accountability. Members get access to a network of sports journalists and newsletter operators who are building independently, just like you. If you're serious about turning your sports writing into a sustainable business, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

A microphone was dropped in the Bronx this week.

If you are a New Yorker, whether you are a Yankees fan, a Mets fan or a fan of another club, John Sterling evoked something special in you.

Since the mid-1990s, the Yankees have been the show of shows in New York City, and Sterling was their brash emcee. This was Broadway, and Sterling announced the best show in town. Every night. And he didn’t miss a night. He called 5,060 straight games from 1989 to 2019.

His home-run calls (It is high… it is far… it is gone…). His bombacity. He understood the spectacle, and he helped make you a part of it.

The rule in broadcasting school is balance. Sterling never went to that school. He was a homer, and homerism was at the top of the job description — and nobody did it better.

Sterling wasn’t the best baseball play-by-play man. No one mistook him for Vin Scully. He was a showman. And that was exactly what the 1990s Yankees dynasty and the sustained success the team enjoyed for the subsequent decades needed as its voice.

He was Ed McMahon — the warm-up man, the sidekick, the laugh — while the Yankees played Johnny Carson every night. The nightly guests were the opposing teams.

Sterling was so ingrained in Yankee culture that every time a rookie hitter got the call-up, or a veteran was acquired via free agency or trade, countless hours were spent on sports talk radio guessing what the player’s personalized home-run call would be.

Close your eyes and take in some of my favorites:

Bernie (Williams) goes boom! Bern, baby, Bern!
The Bam-Tino!
An A-bomb! From A-Rod!
Robbie Cano. Dontcha know!
It’s a Thrilla! By Godzilla!
El Cap-i-tan!
All Rise! Here Comes the Judge!

The best may have been where there were back-to-back home runs: “Back-to-Back and (down an octave) belly-to-belly!”

Covering the Yankees as a reporter or columnist also meant that you were part of the clique that included Sterling. You could tell over the years what his friendship meant to anyone who touched the press box or anywhere else close to Yankeedom.

His calls hit them high. Hit them far. The booth is empty now. And his calls are now gone.

— Ian Powers

The Joy Series: Hometown Announcers

❓The Question

Who was the first player to dunk in a WNBA game?

A) Sylvia Fowles
B) Candace Parker
C) Lisa Leslie
D) Brittney Griner

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The Joy Series: Hometown Announcers | By |

JoeBlogs

John Sterling was both an exceptionally nice man … and the bane of my very existence. This was exactly as it should have been. He lived his life enthusiastically. As a man, he’d greet you always with a smile, with a joke, with a question about your life. How’s your family? Do you have kids? You gonna catch a show while you’re in New York…

4 months ago · 153 likes · 123 comments · Joe Posnanski

Our take: Joe Posnanski is one of the best baseball writers alive, and if you need proof of concept for what an independent sports writer can build, look no further — he runs one of the top five sports Substacks. He isn't a Yankees fan. He'll tell you that upfront. But Sterling's death sent him back to something true about hometown announcers, that their style was never the point. He grew up with Herb Score in Cleveland, a man who forgot to give the score for five or six innings at a stretch. Didn't matter. He was theirs. Posnanski uses that lens to get at why Sterling meant what he meant, even to people who spent decades rooting against him.

How Twitter made insiders the stars of sports journalism | By |

Sports Media Guy

How Twitter made insiders the stars of sports journalism

Let’s start with a quote from Michael Wilbon…

4 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Brian Moritz

Our take: Moritz is a former sports writer turned college professor who researches the industry with the rigor of an academic and the instincts of someone who actually worked the beat. This piece traces how Twitter didn't just change sports journalism — it reordered its entire hierarchy. The insider replaced the columnist as the star, and Moritz makes the case that it was never really about talent. It was about technology. Required reading for anyone trying to understand how the business got here.

Ted Turner: 3 Stories You Won’t Find in the Obituary | by

DAVID TRATNER

Ted Turner: 3 Stories You Won’t Find in the Obituary

Ted Turner died on Wednesday. He was 87 years old…

4 months ago · 6 likes · David Tratner

Our take: Tratner digs into the sports associations that got less ink in the Turner obituaries: the America's Cup win, the Goodwill Games, the one game he managed the Braves. Turner skippered Courageous to the 1977 America's Cup title — the same year he benched his own manager and took over the dugout himself. The man contained multitudes.

From an after-dinner game invented by upper-class Victorians in England to China’s national sport, ping-pong has come a long way | By |

Zeus Files

From an after-dinner game invented by upper-class Victorians in England to China’s national sport, ping-pong has come a long way

“When the French look at a dining table, they saw an opportunity to eat. When the English look at a dining table, they saw an opportunity for whiff-whaff” - Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson…

4 months ago · Duncan Mackay

Our take: It started as an after-dinner game for Victorian aristocrats who used champagne corks as balls. The sound they made when paddled around gave the game its first name — whiff-whaff. Then came celluloid balls, a new sound, and eventually ping-pong. Then a trademark dispute with a board game company forced the sport to call itself something else entirely. MacKay traces the full arc — from English drawing rooms to Nixon's China trip to 850 million fans worldwide — and makes you realize the game hiding in your basement rec room has one of the stranger origin stories in sports history.

How Japan Fell in Love With Baseball |

Our take: Baseball arrived in Japan in 1872, carried there by an American English teacher named Horace Wilson. Twenty-four years later, a Tokyo high school team beat a squad of American and British residents 29-4 — then beat a U.S. Navy team assembled for a rematch by nearly the same margin. The piece traces the full arc from that moment through Babe Ruth's 1934 tour, when half a million people lined the streets of Tokyo to catch a glimpse of him, to the Shohei Ohtani era, when Japan averaged nearly as many viewers per World Series game as the United States. The sport crossed an ocean and became something Japan made entirely its own.

2026 WNBA PREDICTIONS POD

🎧 The Listens

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Q&A: Which LIV Players Could Return to PGA Tour, LPGA Pro-Am Winner, Money in the Women’s Game | Any Given Monday

Our take: Ryan French built Monday Q Info into the definitive home for Monday qualifier coverage — the grind of the mini-tours, the bubble players, the guys one good week from a Tour card. This Q&A episode has a different wrinkle: French just won an LPGA Pro-Am, which gives him an excuse to answer listener questions about LIV players the PGA Tour would actually want back, Saudi money moving into the women's game, and how course conditions separate a field in ways the box score never shows. Thirty-two minutes, no filler.

2026 WNBA PREDICTIONS |

WNBAnow

On this episode of Inside the Cylinder, James pulls out his crystal ball and lays down predictions for the entire 2026 season! From playoff seedings, to playoff matchups, to champion to awards, this is your one-stop shop for everything WNBA predictions 2026. Plus, more details on our brand new website that will take your fantasy basketball game to a who…

4 months ago · 2 likes · WNBAnow

Our take: The WNBA's 30th season tips this weekend — 15 teams, two expansion clubs in Toronto and Portland, and a league that has spent the last few years becoming impossible to ignore. James at WNBAnow runs through the full slate of predictions: playoff seedings, award races, champion. If you've been meaning to get more familiar with the league before the season gets away from you, this is the most efficient way to get up to speed — one episode, every major storyline covered.

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Forget What You Knew About These Pitchers | Lance Brozdowski

Our take: Brozdowski is a player development analyst for Marquee Sports Network — the Cubs' RSN — and one of the sharpest independent baseball video analysts working today. His channel is built on original scripted essays: pitching mechanics, swing trends, MLB data. No repurposed podcast audio, no reaction content. Just someone who has clearly watched more Baseball Savant footage than most people in the industry and knows how to show you what he found. Bookmark the channel. You'll keep coming back.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | |

It’s the first weekend of the WNBA season, so here are some WNBA follows to bookmark:

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

C) Lisa Leslie | Leslie's 2002 dunk with the Los Angeles Sparks was a watershed moment. At a time when many fans doubted whether dunks were even possible in the women's game, she delivered the kind of high-flying play people had only associated with the men's side. That one jam became a permanent reference point — in highlight reels, in debates about the evolution of women's basketball, in how players, coaches, and fans came to see what was possible.

The Sunday Back Page: The Billionaire Game

Ian Powers — Sun, 03 May 2026 10:02:27 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition IX of The Sunday Back Page.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Sport Stackers is a growing community of Substack sports writers helping each other stack wins, subscribers, and income — with real feedback, shared strategies, and creator-to-creator accountability. Members get access to a network of sports journalists and newsletter operators who are building independently, just like you. If you're serious about turning your sports writing into a sustainable business, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

Major League Soccer is having a moment. Just not the one you think.

Born out of the deal with FIFA to host the 1994 World Cup, Major League Soccer has shown plenty of warts and successes through its 31 seasons, and, in less than two months, the world’s biggest sporting event is back on the continent for the first time since then.

According to The Economist, soccer has eclipsed baseball as the third most popular sport in the United States behind American football and basketball. That popularity likely has more to do with European soccer leagues than it does with MLS, but MLS is gaining traction in its own right.

There are 30 teams with imminent plans to expand to 32. There’s also the specter of that larger-than-life little fella playing for defending champion Inter Miami.

But what truly indicates how much MLS has arrived is the number of billionaires buying into the league and the billionaire games they play.

Some compare the MLS ownership model to a Ponzi scheme. Each new franchise must pony up an escalating franchise fee to join the league, and the current franchises, whether they are struggling financially or not, get to share the revenue from those fees. No wonder the league has added 11 clubs since the beginning of the 2015 season.

Supporters groups and the culture surrounding them are arguably the best in sports. The fans who built that culture are the ones who pay when billionaires start moving the pieces around.

That’s what happened in Vancouver this week. The owners want to sell the Whitecaps, who reached both the MLS Cup and CONCACAF Champions League finals last season. The lease at BC Place is up, and the league is allegedly angling to move the club to Las Vegas.

The last time this played out, Anthony Precourt bought the Columbus Crew and tried to relocate them to Austin, Texas. The city fought back using the Art Modell Law — enacted after Modell notoriously moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore — and kept the club under new ownership. Precourt later ponied up for his own franchise, Austin FC.

Vancouver doesn’t have that law. FIFA’s congress met there this week and was greeted by protesters. BC Place will host multiple World Cup games this summer.

The league was born from a World Cup. Thirty-one years later, the Cup is back — and the fans are in the street.

— Ian Powers

Cricket in North America: The Biggest Delta in Global Sport

❓The Question

Which NBA team was the lowest-seeded team to win the NBA championship?

A. 1969 Celtics
B. 1973 Knicks
C. 1977 Trail Blazers
D. 1995 Rockets

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Save the Caps and the soul of MLS | Jason Davis | Soccer Eagle

Our take: Davis, a big voice in MLS and U.S. soccer circles, has been tracking the Vancouver situation and puts the Whitecaps crisis in its proper context: MLS isn't trying to save a struggling market, it's looking to open a new one. The piece traces how the league spent years selling soccer's supporter culture as its identity — then built an ownership model that treats that culture as disposable. Required reading if The Column left you wanting more.

The MLS Ponzi scheme shakedown expands to Vancouver | Michael Arace | The Disrespected

Our take: Arace covered the Columbus Crew saga from inside Ohio and watched Don Garber describe Columbus — the spiritual home of the USMNT — as "inconsequential." Now he's watching the same playbook run in Vancouver, right down to the language. "Structural challenges." "Stadium economics." "No viable offer." He knows what those words mean. So do the fans in the street.

Cricket in North America: The biggest delta in global sport |

Edward Fitzgibbon

In 2015, I landed in New York with a slightly uncomfortable question in my head…

5 months ago · 11 likes · Edward Fitzgibbon

Our take: Fitzgibbon helped make Cricket All-Stars happen in 2015, watched 74,000 people show up across three MLB stadiums, and has been building around the North American cricket market ever since. His read: this has never been a demand problem. The Pakistan v India match at the 2024 T20 World Cup in Long Island was oversubscribed by more than 200 times for the ticket ballot. The problem is coordination — governance collapses, infrastructure gaps, and institutions that keep resetting the clock just as momentum builds. One of the more clear-eyed pieces you'll read on where the sport actually stands heading into LA28.

Cultural relevance through collaboration |

Perspectives on Sport Brands

#3 - How sport and fashion create brand value

Fashion and sport share a long history and are inextricably linked. Sport provides a context for fashion and can thereby imbue it with emotional resonance. Fashion, on the other hand, makes what happens on the pitch visible, wearable and culturally relevant through clothing. There are various approaches to culturally linking sport and fashion – and the …

4 months ago · 3 likes · Perspectives on Sport Brands

Our take: Three case studies on what happens when sport and fashion get the fit right: BOSS taking over the Australian Open's official outfitter role from Ralph Lauren in 2027, LaLiga staging a retro matchday at Madrid Fashion Week, and Belgium's World Cup away kit built around René Magritte — collar and all. Sharp framing for anyone thinking about sponsorship strategy heading into a World Cup summer.

Exiled to Excel |

The Hard Yards

Exiled to Excel...

Sportspeople that excel are forged in the place where they first experience their chosen discipline. They graduate from academies, systems, clubs and even national cultures that shape and mould them into the players they become and they are often expected to complete their careers within those same borders…

4 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · The Hard Yards

Our take: Harry Kane left Tottenham with every scoring record Spurs had and zero trophies. By April 2026, he had 51 goals for Bayern in a single season. Murray uses Kane as the entry point for a broader argument: change the environment, reset the narrative, and the performance follows. Jokić, Kevin Pietersen, Johnny Sexton — the pattern holds across sports. Worth the read heading into a World Cup summer.

Never apologize for having taste | |

House of Strauss

Never Apologize for Having Taste

I’ve got a recommendation for all of you. Don’t be bullied out of your own taste, especially by someone who evades a counterargument for why it’s wrong…

4 months ago · 72 likes · 28 comments · Ethan Strauss

Our take: Strauss tweeted that sports team accounts doing Gen Z lingo are cringe. People told him he was too old to judge. The actual piece is about something bigger: the cultural fear of sounding old has become a mechanism for suppressing legitimate taste. Nobody personally defends the Chargers saying "mf fr" — they just insist some younger, cooler person must love it. Rick Rubin makes an appearance. So does a Nike ad campaign history that aged exactly the way Strauss said it would.

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Chayka Changeup | The Steve Dangle Podcast

Our take: The Oilers played their best game of the playoffs. The Penguins and Bruins are both somehow still alive. Montreal and Tampa went at it. Vegas tied it up with Utah. Steve Dangle and the crew cover the full first-round landscape here, but the anchor is the news that John Chayka and Mats Sundin are taking over hockey operations in Toronto — which, if you know anything about the Leafs, lands about the way you'd expect.

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

1 Thing We Learned About Every 2026 NBA Playoff Team | The Deep 3

Our take: Sixteen teams. One thing learned about each. The Deep 3 is an independent NBA trio — no network, no affiliation, no corporate cushion — and this is them at their best: moving fast, being funny, and actually saying something about every first-round series. Good playoff viewing if you want analysis that doesn't sound like it was cleared by a PR department.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

D. 1995 Rockets Houston entered the playoffs as the 6 seed in the Western Conference — the lowest seed ever to win an NBA championship. They had won the title the year before as the top seed, but nobody remembers that run. They remember Hakeem, Drexler — his college teammate at Houston and a midseason trade acquisition — and the upset of the Shaq-Penny Magic.

The Sunday Back Page: The Sack Race

Ian Powers — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:01:46 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition VIII of The Sunday Back Page.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Sport Stackers is a growing community of Substack sports writers helping each other stack wins, subscribers, and income — with real feedback, shared strategies, and creator-to-creator accountability. Members get access to a network of sports journalists and newsletter operators who are building independently, just like you. If you're serious about turning your sports writing into a sustainable business, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

Alex Cora won the sack race on Saturday.

This isn’t a medal to wear proudly like the winners of the Boston Marathon did earlier this week.

The Boston Red Sox stuck with Cora after he was suspended the entirety of the 2020 season for his role in the Houston Astros’ garbage can sign-stealing scandal.

Saturday morning, he was thrown under the bus for the failings of John Henry, Tom Werner, Fenway Sports Group, Sam Kennedy and Craig Breslow.

In England, the Premier League sack race is treated as a sport in its own right. Managers live and die by the table. A bad October can end a career. The back pages track each dismissal with the same energy American sports media reserves for playoff races. We don’t do that here, but The Sunday Back Page can appreciate the concept.

Cora was not even the most obvious candidate. The Mets, with the second-highest payroll in baseball, had just finished a 12-game losing streak under Carlos Mendoza, a year after they crumbled in the second half and just missed the playoffs. Joe Espada’s seat was warming in Houston. The betting markets had the Yankees’ Aaron Boone as the leading candidate for a pink slip to start the season. Boston moved first.

He’s not close to the all-time leaders.

Cal Ripken Sr. lost the Orioles job in 1987 after six games, all losses. What makes that one strange in retrospect is who was in the clubhouse. His son Cal Jr. was the franchise player, not yet the Iron Man icon he would become. The elder Ripken never managed another game in the majors.

Phil Garner lost the Detroit Tigers job in April 2002, also after six games. Most people don’t remember it. Garner died earlier this month, and the obituaries focused on his playing career and his time managing the Astros to the 2005 World Series. The quick Detroit exit was a footnote, if that. Some firings just disappear.

This one won’t. Cora managed the 2018 World Series champions. He is now the most visible casualty of an ownership group that let Mookie Betts go, watched Xander Bogaerts walk, and eventually lost Rafael Devers, too. The manager paid Saturday morning for decisions that were never his to make.

— Ian Powers

Overcoming Inertia to Stop NBA Tanking

❓The Question

Who was the first Mr. Irrelevant of the NFL Draft?

A) Michael Reed
B) Brock Purdy
C) Tim Washington
D) Kelvin Kirk

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Overcoming Inertia to Stop NBA Tanking |

T.J. Highley

NBA tanking has a solution, but the NBA might not want that solution…

4 months ago · 4 likes · T.J. Highley

Our take: T.J. Highley is a mathematics and computer science professor at La Salle University who has spent years working on a specific problem: is there actually a way to fix NBA tanking, or is the league just rearranging deck chairs every few years? His answer is COLA — Carry-Over Lottery Allocation — a draft reform framework he and two students developed and submitted for peer review. The NBA votes on draft reform at the end of May. Highley has been on podcasts, talked to people in front offices, watched a Reddit thread on COLA rack up thousands of upvotes, and gotten ghosted by more media than he cares to count. The piece makes a serious case that the league has a working solution sitting in front of it and keeps looking away. Worth your time before the vote happens.

April is Bleeding |

The Parquet Poet

April Is for Bleeding

April 21, 2026…

4 months ago · 5 likes · The Parquet Poet

Our take: The Parquet Poet covers the NBA for people who think too much about the NBA. This first-round dispatch moves through VJ Edgecombe silencing TD Garden as a rookie, Victor Wembanyama face-first on the hardwood in San Antonio, LeBron James refusing once again to accept the premise that he should be diminishing, and the full chaos map of a first round that has already delivered an eight-seed beating a one-seed at home. The writing is more literary than analytical, and that's exactly the point. Good playoff reading.

A collection of pre-draft thoughts | |

Stealing Signals

A collection of pre-draft thoughts

The draft has come quick, feeling early this year with an April 23 start. In my head, it’s always the final days of the month, and then May 1 is like Monday after the draft and all our rookie drafts start and we’re off and running. This year, May 1 falls on a Friday, and that will be a full week after Day 2 of the draft…

4 months ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · Ben Gretch

Our take: Ben Gretch has been interpreting signals in the statistical and fantasy niche for a long time. He writes about the NFL draft the way a good analyst talks to you at a bar — digressive, self-aware, willing to follow a tangent about Alvin Kamara all the way to its logical end. This pre-draft essay covers the compressed timeline of a draft that felt like it arrived too early, what it actually means when the consensus says a rookie class is weak, and a genuine case for why athleticism at tight end deserves a longer look than usual this year. He's also honest about what he doesn't know, which is rarer than it should be in draft coverage. This one is behind a paywall after a generous free section, but what's available earns the click.

April will make fools of us all | The Bandwagon | Zach Crizer

Our take: Zach Crizer writes baseball for people who want to fan smarter, and this is him doing what he does best — moving through the early-season noise with a light touch and actual data. The Twins are somehow winning without their best player hitting. The Pirates have Oneil Cruz playing center field, the way your Labradoodle is a guard dog. Mason Miller is striking out 76.7% of the batters he faces this season. The Mets had lost eight straight, and their offense has been historically bad — and Crizer takes the time to build a spreadsheet to show you how bad April weeks actually predict the rest of the season, which turns out to be: not much. Smart, funny, and a good reminder that the sport is built to make you overreact.

Nick Underhill’s all-in sports bet on himself |

Peter Finney Jr.

Nick Underhill's all-in sports bet on himself

It’s two days before the 2026 NFL Draft, and Nick Underhill, 41, hasn’t had a haircut since January…

4 months ago · 7 likes · 8 comments · Peter Finney Jr.

Our take: In 2020, Nick Underhill left The Athletic's Patriots beat — one of the most coveted jobs in sports media — and returned to New Orleans to build an independent Saints website from scratch with no financial safety net. NewOrleans.Football is now six-plus seasons old, staffed, and by most measures the most analytically serious team-specific site covering any NFL franchise. Peter Finney Jr. profiles him here, and the details are worth your time: the Saints fan who co-signed a $50,000 line of credit with no conditions and no ownership stake, the months Underhill spent tracking down VHS tapes and Reddit DVDs to chart all 8,742 passes Drew Brees threw as a Saint, and the wife who kept telling him his crazy ideas would work. A story about what it actually looks like to go all in on independent sports journalism.

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

“The NHL Rulebook Is Wrong, 38 Special Was Right” | Scouting the Refs, Todd Lewis (Apr. 17)

Our take: A niche but essential listen for anyone who wants to understand what's actually happening on the ice during the playoffs. Todd Lewis runs scoutingtherefs.com independently and brings a level of officiating analysis to hockey that almost nobody else is doing. This episode covers how NHL officials are selected for the postseason, breaks down a high-sticking review that became a non-call — right call, wrong rule, Lewis argues — and eulogizes the career of retiring linesman Steve Barton. You don't know what you're missing on the ice until someone like Lewis shows you.

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

T he Playoff Crucible Outlook 2026 | Dunc’d On, YouTube

Our take: John Hollinger and Nate Duncan built one of the more analytically serious NBA podcasts going, and this is them at their most useful — 81 minutes, series-by-series, before a single playoff game had been played. No reactive takes, no recapping what just happened. Just two people who have thought carefully about these teams walking through what they expect to see and why. If you want a framework for watching the first round rather than just watching it, start here.

🗞️ The Pressroom

The Bowtie is on Substack. Ken Rosenthal has been one of the most plugged-in baseball reporters in the business for decades — the Baltimore Sun, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, Fox Sports, MLB Network, The Athletic — and a fixture on Fox's television baseball coverage. He announced his arrival here and has so far shared two pieces from The Athletic. Nothing original yet. What he actually builds when he starts writing independently is one of the more interesting open questions in sports media right now. Worth following before the first pitch lands.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

D) Kelvin Kirk, a wide receiver out of Dayton, was the last pick of the 1976 NFL Draft, selected by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Kirk is the first player recognized as Mr. Irrelevant, a tradition begun by former NFL receiver, businessman and philanthropist Paul Salata.

The Sunday Back Page: The Easter Epic

Ian Powers — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:03:18 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition VII of The Sunday Back Page.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Sport Stackers is a growing community of Substack sports writers helping each other stack wins, subscribers, and income — with real feedback, shared strategies, and creator-to-creator accountability. Members get access to a network of sports journalists and newsletter operators who are building independently, just like you. If you're serious about turning your sports writing into a sustainable business, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

I remember the car ride home, but not where it was from.

It was the Saturday night before Easter, 1987, and my father and I searched for something to listen to on the radio. The New York Islanders and the Washington Capitals were playing a Game 7 in the Patrick Division semifinals of the NHL playoffs, so that sufficed.

The game went to overtime and reached the intermission before the second OT by the time he pulled the car into the driveway, and my father agreed to let me stay up and watch until it ended.

My father wasn’t a big hockey fan. Before I was born, my father joined a group of coworkers to attend a New York Rangers game at Madison Square Garden.

The puck dropped at 7:30, but my father returned home to the apartment he shared with my mother before 9.

My mother asked him, “Why are you home so soon?”

He replied, “There was too much fighting.”

Mom retorted, “Don’t the players always fight?”

He answered, “No, the fans were fighting.”

They call that ’87 Islanders-Capitals game “The Easter Epic.” Pat LaFontaine scored the series-clinching goal for the Isles 8 minutes, 47 seconds into the fourth overtime at 2 in the morning.

At the time, it was the fifth-longest game in NHL history. They played more overtime hockey than regulation hockey. More than 74 minutes passed between goals. Islanders goalie Kelly Hrudey made 73 saves!

The game didn’t make my father a bigger hockey fan, but it got me hooked. Hooked on overtime playoff hockey, that is.

In hockey games that go that deep into OT, no one wants to make a mistake that leads to a power play or odd-man rush. Goalies are required to stand on their heads.

I later became a Rangers fan, and for years, if a non-Rangers NHL hockey playoff game went into a second overtime, I would tune in. If it made the third OT, I called my friends. In college dorms, we started knocking on doors because you knew the others would be pissed if you let them sleep through it.

Don’t even get me started on the advent of social media chatter and smartphone alerts.

The rebuilding Rangers didn’t make the playoffs, but that hasn’t stopped me from praying to the hockey gods for at least one game worth a late-night text to my buddies.

— Ian Powers

A Defense of the NBA Play-In Tournament

❓The Question

Who made the first 3-point basket in NBA history?

Chris Ford
Rick Barry
Kevin Grevey
Pete Maravich

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

LIV Fast, Die Young | Sports! with Rodger Sherman

Our take: Rodger Sherman does what he does best: takes a sprawling sports story and bullet-points it into submission. The Saudi government is pulling its funding from LIV Golf, and Sherman walks through the whole expensive disaster — the hundred-million-dollar contracts, the $590 million in losses in 2025 alone, the TV ratings that lost to a Hallmark movie, and the golfers who somehow got worse after joining. Sharp, funny, and thorough. Worth your time even if you haven’t thought about LIV since Brooks Koepka won a major.

A defense of the NBA play-in tournament | |

Neil’s Substack

Like many in the NBA mediasphere, I’m usually quick to nitpick things I don’t like about the league’s current state of being. The regular season is way too long, the nerds have rui…

5 months ago · 20 likes · Neil Paine

Our take: Neil Paine has been one of the sharpest statistical voices in sports media for years, and he brings that to his Substack. Here he makes the case that the play-in tournament — the kind of Adam Silver initiative you’re supposed to reflexively dismiss — has actually done what it was supposed to do. More teams competing deeper into the regular season. The right amount of Cinderella stories without too many undeserving teams advancing. Better results in the first round for the teams that come through it. He backs all of it with data. Worth your time before the bracket gets going.

NFL scouts on the most polarizing prospects in the 2026 NFL Draft | |

Go Long

NFL scouts on the most polarizing prospects in the 2026 NFL Draft

Good morning, readers…

5 months ago · 20 likes

Our take: Bob McGinn has been talking to NFL scouts for 42 years, and the result is always the same: unfiltered, unattributed, occasionally brutal. This piece pulls the most divided prospects from his full draft series — Jordyn Tyson, Ty Simpson, Kadyn Proctor, Rueben Bain — and lets scouts argue with each other in print. One evaluator on Tyson: a starter, has it all. Another: nothing exceptional about him, not a first-rounder. That gap is the whole story of draft season. Start here.

The hidden metric linking Mo Salah and Harry Potter | | The Jerky Loudspeaker

Our take: I don’t know that I agree with where this lands, but I read the whole thing, and that’s the job. Shubi Arun uses Salah’s Liverpool departure and the backlash to the new Harry Potter trailer as entry points into a piece about nostalgia as a closed door — the reason Gary Neville and company wouldn’t even entertain the idea that Salah might belong above Thierry Henry, despite the numbers being nearly identical. The argument isn’t airtight, but the hook is irresistible, and the connective tissue between Salah and Harry Potter holds together better than it has any right to. Side note: I’m a Liverpool fan, and I’m currently reading Prisoner of Azkaban with my 8-year-old twins.

How worried should Red Sox fans be? | | The Long Game

The Long Game

How worried should Red Sox fans be?

Join our Friday night game chat in here…

5 months ago · 49 likes · 13 comments · Molly Knight

Our take: Molly Knight is one of the better baseball writers on Substack, and this is her at her most enjoyable — equal parts reporting and therapy session. The hook is Roman Anthony’s throwing suddenly going sideways in ways that don’t quite match the mechanical explanation the Red Sox are offering publicly. Knight works through the yip possibility, the offense that lost Bregman and Devers and didn’t adequately replace either, and a starting rotation that is 24th in ERA through the first two weeks. She’s not panicking. She’s not not-panicking. That tension is what makes it worth reading even if you couldn’t care less about Boston. As a Mets fan, Molly’s take on the Mess of a season thus far was published too late for consideration this week. Darn.

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

“The Masters Reaction Pod — 2026 Edition” | Please Let Us Golf

Our take: Self-described as “100% Independent, 100% Organic.” Goldy and Adam react to Rory McIlroy’s back-to-back Masters win with the kind of fan-first, unfiltered golf energy no broadcast outlet can replicate. No hot takes dressed up as analysis — just three people who love the game processing one of the best stories in recent major championship history. A nice contrast to the more analytical reads on the golf story this week.

📺 The Watches

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our 2026 draft crushes + NFL voicemails | Heed the Call NFL Podcast

Our take: Marc Sessler and Dan Hanzus helped build Around the NFL into one of the defining pro football podcasts of its era before the NFL Network quietly ended it. Both are founders of Heed the Call, though Hanzus doesn’t appear in this episode. Sessler is here with Conor Orr for draft crushes and the bit where they try to leave voicemails for NFL figures — which is exactly the kind of thing that made Around the NFL worth listening to in the first place.

Will Boys trade up for Downs? | | SturmStack

SturmStack

Live with Bob Sturm

5 months ago · 19 likes · 8 comments · Bob Sturm

Our take: Bob Sturm has been one of the more respected independent sports voices in the country for years, and he now publishes entirely on Substack. This April 11 live session is draft prep from the inside out — how teams talk to each other in the weeks before the draft, how agents work the process, and Sturm’s own film evaluations on the prospects he’s been watching. If you want to understand what’s actually happening behind the combine numbers and mock drafts, this is worth an hour of your time.

🗞️ The Pressroom

Two-time World Cup champion. Olympic gold medalist. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. Megan Rapinoe built one of the most visible careers in American sports history on the principle that what happens off the field matters as much as what happens on it. Now she’s on Substack — her newsletter, With Love and Curiosity, asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to live in the same world, but differently? She has 540 subscribers as of this writing and has barely started. The floor on where this goes is high. Worth following now, before it’s obvious ... Cole Nevins works in sports creator partnerships at Yahoo Sports! and spends considerable time doing something most people in that world don’t bother with — actually studying how sports content creation works. His Substack, Sports Creator Economy, deconstructs the creator side of sports media from the inside out. He’s been at it for a while, quietly, and the work shows. If you want to understand where sports media money and attention are moving and why, he’s one of the sharper observers doing it in public. Follow him.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

1) Chris Ford. Ford of the Boston Celtics, on October 12, 1979. Ford had a 10-year NBA playing career and won the 1981 title with Boston. He is probably better known today for his coaching career, which included head coaching stints with the Celtics, the Milwaukee Bucks, the Los Angeles Clippers, and an interim role with the Philadelphia 76ers.

The Sunday Back Page: RedBud

Ian Powers — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:01:16 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition VI of The Sunday Back Page.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Sport Stackers is a growing community of Substack sports writers helping each other stack wins, subscribers, and income — with real feedback, shared strategies, and creator-to-creator accountability. Members get access to a network of sports journalists and newsletter operators who are building independently, just like you. If you're serious about turning your sports writing into a sustainable business, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

At 8:15 a.m. ET today, Augusta National Golf Club will make an announcement I’ve been waiting all week (OK, all year) for: The pin placements for Sunday’s final round of The Masters.

But I only care about one of them: The 16th hole, also known as Redbud.

No. 16’s pin placement on Sunday traditionally is located on the back left side of the green of this 170-yard hole, with a long water hazard leading up to a kidney-shaped green that begins on the right side and narrows as it shapes the back left.

That pin placement makes it the most dramatic hole in golf (Fight me).

Every player on Sunday will step up to the tee and target the right side of the green. They’ll hope to catch the slope at just the right elevation, so that the ball can take the obligatory left turn toward the hole. When the ball begins rolling, it looks like it’s going to go into the hole every time. And the crowd never fails to ride the emotion of that ball’s trajectory.

Growing up, I would watch The Masters’ final round with my father. All we cared about was what Jack was doing and what happened on No. 16. Years later, it turned to Tiger and No. 16.

You were at the whim of CBS’ telecast to see live shots other than the leaders at 16. If someone not in contention made a hole-in-one, you saw it on replay.

Now, instead of stealing more than a few moments on Redbud, we can watch Hole Nos. 15 and 16 on one feed on Masters.com.

Last year, to honor the 50th anniversary of Jack Nicklaus’ 1975 Masters win, they placed the pin toward the back and to the right. In a duel with Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller, Nicklaus drained a long birdie putt that started way below the hole on 16, and he famously ran around the green celebrating with his hands (and putter) above his head.

In 2005, Tiger Woods’ fist pump capped a chip-in for birdie on his way to winning.

The tee shot and the rolling ball are as integral as the magnolias, the Butler Cabin and the theme music.

Augusta National is tight-lipped as usual on this year’s placement. Will it return to its traditional spot and allow for the drama we all crave?

I’m setting my alert for 8:10. What about you?

— Ian Powers

"Don't blame me if you miss open looks"

❓The Question

Who hit the shot heard round the world at the 1935 Masters?

Craig Wood
Gene Sarazen
Walter Hagen
Byron Nelson

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Don’t blame me if you miss open looks | John Gasaway |

Now and Again

On Monday night Michigan and UConn combined for the worst three-point shooting in a men’s national championship game since the 2011 UConn-Butler rock fight. This week Now and Again caught up with Lucas Oil Stadium to talk about perceptions, shooting backgrounds, and basketball in NFL venues…

5 months ago · 4 likes · John Gasaway

Our take: Gasaway helped build the vocabulary of basketball statistics and teaches the subject at Columbia. So when he takes the numbers out of it entirely and makes the case — via mock Q&A with Lucas Oil Stadium — that shooting in football venues is fine, actually, it lands differently than if anyone else wrote it.

The Masters, up close: My surreal day as a Par 3 caddie | | MacDuff Golf

MacDuff Golf Purist Newsletter

The Masters, Up Close: My Surreal Day as a Par 3 Caddie

I have a personal Wednesday tradition during Masters week. Every year, I post a photo on Instagram of me caddying for two-time Ryder Cup team member Per-Ulrik Johansson in the Par 3 Tournament. The photo was taken in 1998 on an actual camera, which means it’s grainy and imperfectly perfect. I remember taking the film to a drugstore, handing it over the …

5 months ago · 14 likes · NICK GREEN

Our take: Former player agent Nick Green caddied for his client Per-Ulrik Johansson in the Par 3 Tournament in 1998. He had me at the moment three strangers asked if the table next to them was free, sat down, and said good morning. The three strangers were Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player.

Duke Basketball & the Ruling Class Mirror | By Omar Zahran |

Deep Cover

Duke Basketball & the Ruling Class Mirror

It was a moment that lasted an eternity. In unexpected twist of fate, UConn guard Braylon Mullins found the ball in his hands and shot a deep three as time was expiring. As the ball traveled in the air for what felt like an eternity, thousands of basketball fans held their collective breaths. When the shot dropped, they jumped for joy. Why? Because UCon…

5 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Omar Zahran

Our take: A piece in The Athletic recently argued that the hatred for Duke men’s basketball is fading. This is the counter-argument — and it goes further, connecting that hatred to something larger about class and culture. I don’t buy all of it. It also ignores how early the Duke-UNC-NC State triangle shaped the sport, well before the 1980s the author leans on. Read it anyway.

The loss of mysticism in my sports fandom | | Grev’s Gazette

Grev's Gazette

The Loss of Mysticism in my Sports Fandom

I have been enamored with the sports world since I was 5 years old. I was definitely introduced to it before that, but I lack memory of those days. 2010 was the first year that I can remember in detail the events of those seasons. I remember watching Kobe versus Nash in the Western Conference Finals as my dad instructed that the Lakers were an eternal e…

5 months ago · 15 likes · Jack Greven

Our take: Jack grew up watching Kobe-Nash in the Western Conference Finals, Ubaldo Jimenez dominating in the summer, Patriots games as a Sunday ritual. Now he knows too much — about the athletes, the machinery, the business — and something has gone quiet. Part of me wants to tell him it comes back. Part of me wants to say welcome to the job.

The PWHL deserves a big girl audience | | Cherry Pick

CherryPick

The PWHL Deserves a Big Girl Audience

During the 2026 Olympics in Milan, the gold medal game between Team USA and Canada reached a peak viewership of 7.7 million, with an average of 5.3 million viewers on USA Network and Peacock. (I broke down the game if u wanna read it…

5 months ago · 17 likes · Madailein Olin

Our take: The gold medal game between Team USA and Canada at the Milan Olympics averaged 5.3 million viewers and peaked at 7.7 million. Olin’s argument is simple: the PWHL has those fans’ attention now, and YouTube is not where you keep it. She uses the NWSL’s jump from streaming to a $240 million TV deal — and a 61% viewership spike on ESPN alone — as the model. The voice is younger than what usually runs in this space. That’s the point.

On the media hierarchy in WBB coverage | Terrika Foster-Brasby | @SheKnowsSports

Our take: Foster-Brasby is the Connecticut Sun sideline reporter, and this thread is a straight-to-camera breakdown of how sports media actually works — specifically in the women's basketball space. Four points, no hedging: not all reporters break news, social following has replaced relationships as the currency agencies care about, off-the-record means off the record, and if you want independent WBB journalists to survive, you have to actually support them financially. The last point lands hardest. She's not venting. She's explaining a structural problem that applies well beyond women's basketball.

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Saturday Recap: Rory, Cam, and a final round at Augusta | The Shotgun Start

Our take: This is the Fried Egg’s recap of a Saturday that nobody expected — Rory McIlroy entered the third round with a six-shot lead, doubled the 11th, bogeyed 12, and by the time Cameron Young posted a 65 and walked off the course, the lead was gone. They tied at 11 under heading into Sunday. The Fried Egg crew breaks down how it happened and what Augusta does to a lead.

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The Solution Doesn’t Address the Problem | Thinking Basketball

Our take: Ben Taylor's Thinking Basketball channel looks at whether the NBA's 65-game minimum for awards eligibility is actually working — and concludes the league treated load management as the disease when it's a symptom. The real culprits, he argues, are the things the NBA doesn't want to touch: the length of the schedule and back-to-backs on the road. I don't agree with everything Taylor does on this channel — there are moments where the metrics bend to make today's players look like a different species compared to previous generations, and I'll take facing the Bad Boys or the physical Knicks 10 times a season over a stop-and-start pivot metric any day. But this is the kind of intelligent, counterintuitive framing that makes the channel worth your time.

🗞️ The Pressroom

The Pressroom doesn't usually spotlight athletes. earns the exception — and he's not alone. Professional athletes are arriving on Substack with increasing regularity, using it to build business identities separate from their playing careers. Most don't last. Courtois launched his to share the thinking behind his investment portfolio — not the highlights, not the press conferences, but how elite athletes think about money, ownership, and long-term positioning. He co-founded NXTPLAY Capital, has stakes in an E1 electric powerboat racing team and a French football club. What makes this worth watching is what he's not doing: 17.8 million Instagram followers, untouched for nearly two years. This is a deliberate rebuild from scratch — a goalkeeper rebranding himself for whatever comes after football.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Some golf creators to follow:

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

B) Gene Sarazen. In the final round of the 1935 Masters, Sarazen holed a 235-yard 4-wood double eagle on the par-5 15th hole to tie Craig Wood. He won the playoff the following day by five strokes.

The Sunday Back Page: The Code

Ian Powers — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:02:58 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition V of The Sunday Back Page.

What’s inside

— in partnership with —

Sport Stackers is a growing community of Substack sports writers helping each other stack wins, subscribers, and income — with real feedback, shared strategies, and creator-to-creator accountability. Members get access to a network of sports journalists and newsletter operators who are building independently, just like you. If you're serious about turning your sports writing into a sustainable business, this is where you start.

📰 The Lead

The handshake is one of the cleanest moments in sports.

Not the win. Not the trophy. The handshake.

It is the ritual that separates competition from war.

Every sport has its version.

In hockey, it’s the playoff handshake line — a procession of men who spent weeks hitting, even fighting, each other, lining up single-file to look the other guy in the eye. Tennis players meet at the net.

The handshake says: we are competitors, not enemies. Whatever happened out there stays out there.

Some of the great ones, even the notoriously sour ones, have understood this instinctively.

In the 1976 Rose Bowl, Woody Hayes watched as Ohio State, playing for a national championship, fell apart against what was supposed to be an inferior UCLA. With 8 seconds left and the game long decided, Hayes crossed the field and shook hands with and hugged the much younger Dick Vermeil.

In 2016, after Kris Jenkins hit the buzzer-beater to win the national championship for Villanova, the whole arena exploded. Nova coach Jay Wright stood still, collected himself, and walked along the sideline to shake North Carolina coach Roy Williams’ hand.

Bill Belichick became infamous for his quick and cold version.

Which brings us to Friday night in Phoenix.

Geno Auriemma felt he was snubbed by South Carolina’s Dawn Staley during pregame introductions, when he stood alone in front of the scorer’s table at halfcourt for several moments. Still, Staley had thought an earlier exchange had sufficed.

That festered through 40 minutes of basketball. When the buzzer sounded, Auriemma walked toward Staley and shook her hand, and then used it as an opportunity to berate her. Coaches from both teams had to step in. When it was over, Auriemma walked to the tunnel alone, skipping the line his own players were standing in.

He has since apologized.

The story of Friday night should have been South Carolina’s dominant second half that ended UConn’s 54-game winning streak and sent Staley’s Gamecocks to Sunday’s championship game. Geno turned the handshake into the headline instead.

Woody Hayes was no choir boy during his career, but he understood something that Geno forgot. The handshake isn’t a courtesy. It’s the last act of the game. And turning it into a confrontation isn’t a statement about the other person.

It’s a statement about you.

— Ian Powers

The Death of Domestic Dynasties? Part Five - Recruitment Strategies deep dive.

❓The Question

Dawn Staley coaches South Carolina in today’s national championship game. A win would give her four titles — moving her into a tie for third on the all-time wins list among women’s coaches, behind Geno Auriemma (12) and Pat Summitt (8). Who currently holds that third spot alone?

Sylvia Hatchell
Muffet McGraw
Kim Mulkey
Tara VanDerveer

See answer below 👇

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Grant Holloway: life after winning Olympic gold | By Shelby Hickman | Grandstand Magazine

Our take: He won the gold in 12.99 seconds. The hard part came after. Shelby Hickman traces what happened when the most dominant hurdler in the world finally checked the last box — and found nothing waiting on the other side. Holloway’s collapse at the 2025 World Championships is the evidence. Good reporting, well-told, from the University of Florida’s student magazine.

Super moms | By Hannah Taylor | Milliat Press

Our take: Hannah Taylor tore her ACL the day after she found out she was pregnant. She delayed surgery for seven months, delivered with a torn knee, then rehabbed while caring for a newborn. That’s the door into a piece that traces how far athlete maternity rights have come — from Allyson Felix breaking an NDA to call out Nike to the WTA’s new paid maternity fund — and how far they still have to go. Personal entry point, thorough reporting, a subject the mainstream sports press still undercovers.

The death of domestic dynasties? Part five | |

Hidden Football

It’s time to continue our analysis of five disruptors and five dynasties, in five European leagues outside the ‘Big Five’. In this article I’ll look at trend analysis to get a deeper look at disruptors’ recruitment models vs their moneyed counterparts…

5 months ago · 6 likes

Our take: Five installments into a data-driven series on whether smaller clubs can topple entrenched European powers. This entry covers recruitment trends across Belgium, Austria, Bulgaria, Scotland and Croatia. The Scotland section alone is worth it: Hearts five points clear of Celtic, one year into a Tony Bloom rebuild, while Celtic have cycled through four managers and quietly stopped signing players they actually own. Start from Part One.

What MLS clubs are most likely to enter the Mo Salah sweepstakes? | By Jason Anderson | The Transfer Flow

Our take: Mo Salah is leaving Liverpool this summer as a free agent. Jason Anderson at The Transfer Flow does the actual work of figuring out which MLS clubs could realistically make an offer — not which ones will get linked in tabloid rumor mills — and walks through the roster rules, salary cap mechanics and ownership dynamics that would make it possible. San Diego has the ownership connection and the roster opening if they can move Lozano. NYCFC has the market. D.C. United just loves signing aging Premier League forwards and letting the front office sort it out later. Good soccer business reporting.

The art of buying at rock bottom | |

Business of Speed

The Art of Buying at Rock Bottom

Every Monday, we publish a series called CAPITAL MOVES, a look into the off-track investments of individuals involved in the world of racing. Be sure to check out previous editions…

5 months ago · 27 likes · 4 comments · Lali Michelsen

Our take: Lali Michelsen traces the investment career of Lawrence Stroll — the man behind Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, the Aston Martin F1 team, and now the Aston Martin car company — through one consistent lens: he buys distressed assets at the moment of maximum pain and then waits. The F1 team he bought out of administration for $120 million in 2018 is now valued at $3.2 billion. The car company is losing $323 million a year. The piece ends with the right question: is Aston Martin the same kind of bet as the others, or is it structurally different in ways that patience alone can't fix?

Baseball Scoops: Konnor Griffin is Coming!!

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Baseball Scoops: Konnor Griffin is coming | By Tommy Bennett |

Baseball Scoops

Welcome back to Baseball Scoops! Konnor Griffin is coming and we talk about what that means. The Yankees have the best pitching and are the Astros back? Lets talk ball…

5 months ago · 2 likes · Baseball Scoops

Our take: Tommy Bennett recorded this one a day early. The Pirates called up Griffin — baseball's consensus No. 1 overall prospect — ahead of their home opener against Baltimore. Still a teenager for three more weeks, Griffin became MLB's first teenage position player since Juan Soto debuted in 2018. He hit an RBI double in his first major-league at-bat. Bennett also covers the Yankees' pitching and the Astros. Good episode to queue up now that the arrival is no longer coming — it's here.

Live with Henry Abbott and David Thorpe

📺 The Watch

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Live with Henry Abbott and David Thorpe | | True Hoop

TrueHoop

5 months ago · 31 likes · 5 comments · Henry Abbott and CoachThorpe

Our take: Henry Abbott and basketball guru David Thorpe cover a lot of ground in this video conversation, but they keep coming back to the same question: who can beat Oklahoma City in the NBA, and how do they do it? Good basketball thinking from two people who have been doing this a long time.

🗞️ The Pressroom

Matthew Doyle spent years as one of the defining voices in Major League Soccer coverage. In February, he moved his independent newsletter, Tactics Free Zone, off Substack entirely — migrating his subscriber list to Ghost, citing the platform's open-source model, cleaner infrastructure, and a growing community of soccer writers who'd already made the jump. His reason for leaving was plain: he didn't want to be dependent on a tech company when the incentives shifted. The move is a Pressroom story because Doyle isn't a fringe operator. He's an established voice making a deliberate call about where he builds — and the soccer creator community on Ghost is substantial enough that it factored into his decision.

📋 The Roster

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

❓The Answer

Kim Mulkey is third on the all-time list with four national championships. She won three with Baylor (2005, 2012, 2019) and one at LSU (2023).

The Sunday Back Page: The Manager, the Mustache, and the Reporter He Never Wanted to See Again

Ian Powers — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:02:07 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition IV of The Sunday Back Page.

What’s inside

📰 The Lead

In August 1999, my sports editor at the Connecticut Post, Gary Rogo, sent me to cover the last three games of a four-game set between the Dodgers and the Mets at Shea Stadium.

Our baseball writer, Mike Puma, must’ve been on vacation.

I had covered a few Mets and Yankees games before, but this would be the first time I got to cover the Mets while my friend Anthony Valentine served as their bullpen catcher. You may have heard of his Uncle Bobby, the Mets’ manager.

The first day, I spent at least half an hour talking with Anthony on one of the leather couches in the clubhouse. All the players asked him later why he was talking to that reporter.

Growing up in Stamford, Connecticut, I knew Bobby peripherally, but Anthony formalized it that weekend. A couple of Stamfordites chumming behind the cage during batting practice.

Earlier that season, Bobby made what would’ve been a viral moment on social media.

After being ejected from the game, he snuck back into the dugout, disguised in sunglasses and eye black stickers for a mustache. The Mets won that game in a walkoff, and Bobby was celebrating on the field.

My August weekend didn’t have that kind of happy ending for the Mets, who were in the heat of an NL East race with Atlanta. They lost all three games I covered, the last two by a combined 23-5.

After I finished my interviews in the clubhouse, I was talking with Anthony at his locker. Bobby is fuming. He yells from his office door: “Anthony! Don’t talk to him! We haven’t won since he’s been here!” And he slammed his office door.

When I told my friend and supervisor, Bogey Joe Erwin, he replied, “The next time the Mets are in town, you have to show up to the clubhouse wearing sunglasses and a fake mustache.”

Although I had the gear prepared, Bobby got his wish. That was the last time I covered a Mets game.

Years later, at Anthony’s wedding, I shared that planned coda with Bobby. We had a good laugh about it over a glass of champagne.

— Ian Powers

94 million photographs: Inside the London warehouse holding the FIFA World Cup's history

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

94 million photographs: Inside the London warehouse holding the FIFA World Cup’s history | | The Sports Marketeer

The Sports Marketeer

I spent the formative years of my working life as a newspaper journalist. These were the days of newsrooms that smelled of coffee and a particular sort of energy, which I can only describe as ‘deadline panic’, filled the air…

5 months ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Amar Singh

Our take: Getty Images opened its Hulton Archive to Amar Singh — a former newspaper journalist who hadn't forgotten what that world felt like. What he found was 94 million physical photographs, World Cup history stretching back to Uruguay 1930, and frames still being pulled from analogue files for the first time in decades. The writing matches the subject. Rich visuals, strong voice.

How Soccer Set Dr. Seuss Free | Club Eleven

Our take: Before The Cat in the Hat, a teacher was scolding the teenage Theodor Geisel for drawing upside down and breaking the rules. He walked out of that art class and signed up to manage the high school soccer team. What he said about it years later is the whole piece. This newsletter provides a good roundup — this lead is the reason to subscribe.

| You Know Jack!

Our take: Forty-plus years in sports PR will leave you with stories. Jack Carnefix has more than most, and he's one of the few people who can land one in a social media post. This week: a locked exit, a construction zone, total darkness, and a flashlight in a briefcase. Worth the thirty seconds.

Football & Forensics: Part 20 (Baiting — Not Just for Fishing) | A Neff is a Neff

A Neff is a Neff

Football & Forensics: Part 20 (Baiting -- Not Just for Fishing)

I was never much of a fisherman. The idea appealed to me – a lazy afternoon on a riverbank or in a boat with someone I’m close to. Talking. Resting. Passively enjoying the beauty and wonder of God’s creation. “Hunting” my dinner…

5 months ago · 3 likes · Steven S. Neff

Our take: Steven Neff played cornerback in college and spent 30 years as a trial attorney. In this one, he threads baiting a hook, baiting a quarterback, and baiting a defendant into one clean argument — and the fishing story that opens it earns its place.

More Than a Stadium | and

Any Given Monday

More Than A Stadium

Welcome to Any Given Monday, the newsletter covering the business, politics, and culture of sport…

5 months ago · 20 likes · 8 comments · Will Colahan and Carla Bilche

Our take: Will Colahan and Carla Bilche take five stadiums across five countries and use each one to answer the same question: how do you turn a football ground into a financial asset? Tottenham generated €64 million from non-football events in a single year — concerts, NFL games, boxing — across just 16 permitted dates. That's the ceiling. The floor is an Argentine club building identity in a collapsing currency. The range between those two is where the piece lives.

The Game is Ours | | Between Innings

Between Innings: Stories from Life & the Ballpark

The Game Is Ours

“Here’s what I want to know…

5 months ago · 12 likes · Michael King

Our take: Michael King is driving home from his son's baseball tournament when his kid starts breaking down the opposing coach's defensive positioning — unprompted, entirely on his own. That's when it hit him: his son didn't need him to teach him baseball anymore. Now they just get to share it. If you've ever sat in the cold watching your kid play, this one finds you.

🎧 The Listen

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

How NFL Free Agency is Shaping Way Too Early Power Rankings | and | Between the Hashmarks

Between The Hashmarks

How NFL Free Agency is Shaping Way Too Early Power Rankings [PODCAST]

The ink has long dried on the big-money contracts signed in NFL free agency’s first wave, but there are still several veterans available, several players whose situations remain unresolved, and the moves that have been made impact how contenders are perceived as much as those still to come…

5 months ago · 1 like · Matt Lombardo and Mike Tanier

Our take: Matt Lombardo and Mike Tanier take stock of where the teams stand after free agency's first wave — who's in good shape, who's not, and why fans of at least one NFC North team should probably calm down. Two reporters who've covered this league for a long time, which means the takes come with receipts.

🗞️ The Pressroom

Mike Hlas spent four decades covering Iowa sports for the Cedar Rapids Gazette and just brought that career to Substack — with Iowa men’s and women’s basketball both in the spotlight this week, the timing couldn’t be better. A regional voice with a real résumé. ... Ben Golliver spent years covering the NBA for the Washington Post and didn’t waste much time figuring out his next move. The pivot to Substack done right. Follow both.

The Roster

We want to celebrate as many independent creators on The Sunday Back Page as possible. Here are all the people who submitted their work for consideration this week. Many of these creators deserved a place in this newsletter, and we hope they continue to submit their work. Please keep them on your radar.

| | |

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

The Sunday Back Page: The Madness that New York City built

Ian Powers — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:02:38 GMT

Welcome to Volume I, Edition III of The Sunday Back Page.

What’s inside

📰 The Lead

I’ve lived in and around New York City my whole life. When I think of March Madness, I think of New York’s role in creating it.

Then, I lament how the city that gave the country college basketball spent the next 75 years watching everyone else play it.

Before Lew Alcindor went to UCLA, before the best players in New York started catching buses out of town, this city didn’t just produce college basketball. It owned it.

Teams came from everywhere to play in New York, which meant playing against New York — against kids who learned the game on asphalt, in gyms with no air, before crowds who’d tell you exactly what they thought of you.

For every Kansas, there was a St. John’s. For every Kentucky, a City College. For every Indiana, an NYU.

City College was the purest version of the city game and what it meant for college hoops. Free tuition. Sons of immigrants, descendants of slaves, a coaching staff that treated fundamentals as a moral position. In 1950, the Beavers won the NIT and the NCAA in the same season — the only team ever to do it.

On the night of Feb. 18, 1951, police met a train pulling into Penn Station and arrested three City College players. The corruption was nationwide — LIU, Manhattan, NYU, Kentucky, Bradley. The fallout landed hardest on New York.

Seventy-five years ago this spring, New York City lost college basketball. Not the games. The game.

St. John’s was the only major program that survived the purge.

The NCAA relocated the tournament from the Garden. First-round games limped along until 1961, then stopped entirely. CCNY eventually dropped its program. The playground and high school stars who once stayed home — who made the Holman way, the New York way, the only way — started going anywhere but here. North Carolina won the 1957 national title with mostly NYC kids. Duke then copied that approach. UCLA.

The Garden got March Madness back in 2014. Then 2017. Then 2023. It’s coming again in 2027.

The city that built the game will settle for hosting it.

— Ian Powers

The women’s football match decided by “style points” (Oslo, 1928)

📖 The Reads

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The women’s football match decided by “style points” (Oslo, 1928) | Clare McEwen | She Can Kick It

She Can Kick It

I recently posted a Reel about a women’s football match in Norway being decided on style points…

6 months ago · 4 likes · Clare McEwen

Our take: This one breaks some of the rules of The Sunday Pack Page for its publish date, but it moved us nonetheless. Clare McEwen posted a reel on She Can Kick It about a women’s football match in Norway settled by style points, and it didn’t land the way she hoped. Then a reader asked who the judges were and what they were actually scoring. That question sent her back into Norwegian newspaper archives from 1928 — and the story she came back with is worth the detour.

Great Sports Photography - A Matter of Perspective | Beauty of a Game

Beauty Of A Game

Great Sports Photography - A Matter of Perspective

Intro Recently, I posted an article on sports photography and “punctums” - a term coined by French theorist Roland Barthes to describe small, perhaps unassuming details in photographs that break through to the viewer…

5 months ago · 22 likes · 6 comments · Beauty Of A Game

Our take: You know Neil Leifer’s photograph of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston. What Beauty of a Game wants you to know is that the senior Sports Illustrated photographer on site that night had first pick of positions — and chose wrong, leaving Leifer with the other side of the ring and what many consider the greatest sports photograph ever taken. That origin story opens a piece about what happens when multiple photographers capture the same moment from different angles: the Mantle-Aaron World Series shoot, Willie Mays on picture day with the Mets, Dr. J punishing the Bulls from two directions at once. Worth your time if you care about the images as much as the games.

The life of Lauri | SportsYarn | Between the Sidelines

SportsYarn

The life of Lauri

Most basketball players take training camp pretty seriously…

5 months ago · 21 likes · 4 comments · Jesse Gerritsen and Sophia Prieto

Our take: In 2023, Lauri Markkanen accepted the NBA’s Most Improved Player award at 2 a.m. via video link from an army barracks in Finland, where mandatory conscription had him training as a reconnaissance soldier. Jesse Gerritsen of SportsYarn and Sophia Prieto of Between the Sidelines team up to trace what that says about the man — the Finnish concept of sisu, the quiet efficiency he brought back to Utah, and the season that followed, in which he became the only player in NBA history to record 100 dunks and 200 three-pointers in the same year. A good profile is one where the athlete makes more sense at the end than at the beginning. This one qualifies.

Maryland is the poster child for college basketball’s volatility era | Eben Novy-Williams and Jacob Feldman | Club Sportico

Club Sportico

Maryland is the poster child for college basketball’s volatility era

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with extra humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about turtles 🐢…

6 months ago · 6 likes · Eben Novy-Williams and Jacob Feldman

Our take: Maryland went to the Sweet 16 last year. This year they lost more than 20 games for the first time since the 1940s. Club Sportico sat down five Terps fans across four decades and let them process it — the transfer portal strangers wearing their colors, the coach who admitted in February he didn’t fully understand the program’s history, the Big Ten move that traded Duke and UVA for Oregon and UCLA. The complaints are Maryland-specific and also completely universal. Every fan base with a long memory and a bad season sounds exactly like this right now. If you watched the unauthorized documentary on Ed Cooley leaving Providence for Georgetown, you already know the feeling. The details change. The grief is the same.

Football, With Feeling: The Opponent You Secretly Respected | Kitcyclopedia

The Kit Room

Football, With Feeling (Part 6)

‘Football, With Feeling’ explores the emotional side of the game that sits beyond results and narratives. No hot takes, no outrage, just honest writing about how the game feels…

6 months ago · 4 likes · 8 comments · Kitcyclopedia

Our take: The Kit Room has a series called Football, With Feeling — no hot takes, no outrage, just honest writing about how the game feels. This installment is about the opponent you secretly respected: the rival player who refused to be a villain because he was simply too good at what he did. Didier Drogba for Arsenal fans. Roy Keane for everyone else. The piece argues that those players don’t diminish a rivalry — they’re what makes it matter. Worth reading slowly, especially during a week when half the country is watching teams they don’t care about and finding reasons to anyway.

🎧 The Listen

NBA Draft Show: What you need to know and who you need to watch in the 2026 NCAA Tournament

Sam Vecenie and Bryce Simon | Game Theory w/ Sam Vecenie

Game Theory w/ Sam Vecenie

NBA Draft Show: What you need to know and who you need to watch in the 2026 NCAA Tournament

The NBA Draft Show this week is coming to you early, where Bryce Simon joins Sam Vecenie to break down the NCAA Tournament bracket and all of the things you need to know about it from an NBA perspective…

6 months ago · 14 likes · Sam Vecenie

Our take: Most people watch March Madness and see a bracket. Sam Vecenie watches it and sees next June’s draft board. Vecenie, who covers the NBA Draft for The Athletic, teams with Bryce Simon for Game Theory to go region by region through the tournament field — and then keeps going, breaking down individual performances as the games happen and updating their evaluations in real time. If you want a second layer running underneath every game this weekend and beyond, subscribe now and follow along through the whole tournament.

📺 The Watch

How a Football Transfer is Put Together

Jordan Macauley | The Long Play

Our take: Premier League clubs pay more than £400 million a year in agent fees. Jordan Macaulay of The Long Play spent seven minutes explaining why — and it’s the clearest breakdown of how football agents actually make money, how super agents like Jorge Mendes became embedded in club recruitment, and why the sport’s governing bodies are now scrambling to regulate the whole thing. If a £50 million transfer always seemed too clean a number, this is the video that explains what you weren’t seeing.

🗞️ The Pressroom

Jesse Dougherty didn’t start his Substack because the Washington Post eliminated its sports section. He started it in December 2024 — before that happened — which is a different thing entirely. When the Post made its move, Dougherty already had somewhere to go. This week, with the bracket set and March Madness back in full noise, he went somewhere personal: a decade-old road trip he and a couple of his Daily Orange colleagues took when Syracuse made its last unexpected run to the Final Four, stretching their writing, driving and sleeping arrangements to their limits. It’s the kind of story a staff job rarely makes room for. His Substack does.

The Roster

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