**The AFC North: Where Civilization Goes to Die (and Somehow Be Reborn)** *Dispatch from the Rust Belt’s Gladiator Circus* International observers often ask me to explain American football’s peculiar appeal. I tell them to imagine if the Roman Colosseum had beer commercials, and the lions occasionally unionized. Nowhere is this more apparent than the AFC…
In a week when global food prices ticked up again and the Red Sea resembled a floating parking lot for rocket-propelled insurance claims, the planet’s most-watched gridiron league decided the real crisis worth solving was whether a man could kick a leather bladder 66 yards between two yellow posts. On Sunday, Baltimore’s Justin Tucker—who looks…
The Ravens vs Lions Showdown: A Global Metaphor for Our Collective Descent Dakar, Senegal – As the Baltimore Ravens prepare to face the Detroit Lions in a contest that will be beamed into 197 countries this Sunday, the world watches with the peculiar intensity usually reserved for nuclear negotiations or celebrity divorces. Here in West…
**The Global Offside: How Jawaan Taylor Became Football’s Reluctant Diplomat** In the grand theater of American football—where grown men in spandex ritualistically collide for the entertainment of millions—few stories capture the absurd ballet of globalization quite like that of Jawaan Taylor. The Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive tackle has unwittingly become an international symbol of something…
Zack Baun and the Global Theater of American Football: A Small Linebacker, a Large Stage By the time Zack Baun’s name appeared on NFL draft boards in 2020, the world had already endured a pandemic preview, watched Australia burn on live stream, and discovered that the most coveted commodity on earth was not oil or…
**The Beautiful Ballet of Broken Bones: How America’s NFL Injury Report Became the World’s Guilty Pleasure** While the planet grapples with climate change, economic instability, and the occasional attempted coup, roughly 4% of humanity finds itself transfixed by the weekly medical melodrama known as the NFL Injury Report—a document that reads like a medieval torture…
Idaho’s capital is not, by any stretch, a geopolitical choke point. Yet on a crisp Saturday evening in late November, the Boise State Broncos and the Air Force Falcons will square off on a rectangle of blue plastic so garish it can be seen from the International Space Station—an orbital fact proudly cited by locals…
Urban Meyer, American Football’s Own Icarus, Tests Whether the World Still Buys the Fall-and-Rise Shtick By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic If you missed the latest Urban Meyer kerfuffle, congratulations: you’ve been living under a less algorithmic rock than the rest of us. The former Florida, Ohio State and Jacksonville…
The Strange Afterlife of Greg Schiano, or How One American Football Coach Became the World’s Accidental Diplomat By Our Man in the Neutral Zone Somewhere between the hash marks of a soggy Rutgers practice field and the marble corridors of FIFA’s Zurich bunker, Greg Schiano has quietly become the planet’s most improbable export. To the…
Wendell Smallwood and the End of the American Century By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS — Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and the 24-hour döner kebab stand that now passes for French cuisine, the name “Wendell Smallwood” flickered across a sports ticker. It was 03:42 local time, the hour when insomniacs, night-shift nurses, and futures traders in…
When the Berlin Wall finally crumbled, a few East German teenagers celebrated by hurling bricks like wide-outs, shouting “Jerr-ry! Jerr-ry!” even though most had never seen a single 49ers highlight. They’d only heard the shortwave whispers: somewhere across an ocean, a man in gold and crimson was re-writing the geometry of a very American game,…
Sean McVay: How a 38-Year-Old Kid from Dayton Became the NFL’s Last Great Export By the time the rest of the planet was trying to recall whether the Super Bowl is the one with the oval ball or the round one, Sean McVay had already franchised himself. From Berlin bars that open at 3 a.m….
